Shows
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIYing Qian, "Revolutionary Becomings Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China," (Columbia University Press, 2024)From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings¸ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements.With meticulous historical excavation and attention to intermedial practices and transnational linkages, Qian discusses how early media practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century intermingled with rival politicians and warlords as well as civic and business organizati...2024-12-2522 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIDavid Brophy, "Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier," (Harvard University Press, 2016)The meeting of the Russian and Qing empires in the nineteenth century had dramatic consequences for Central Asia’s Muslim communities. Along this frontier, a new political space emerged, shaped by competing imperial and spiritual loyalties, cross-border economic and social ties, and the revolutions that engulfed Russia and China in the early twentieth century. David Brophy explores how a community of Central Asian Muslims responded to these historic changes by reinventing themselves as the modern Uyghur nation. As exiles and émigrés, traders and seasonal laborers, a diverse diaspora of Muslims from China’s northwest province of Xinjiang spread to Rus...2024-11-1019 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJacob P. Dalton, "The Taming of the Demons: Violence and Liberation in Tibetan Buddhism," (Yale University Press, 2011)The Taming of the Demons examines mythic and ritual themes of violence, demon taming, and blood sacrifice in Tibetan Buddhism. Taking as its starting point Tibet’s so-called age of fragmentation (842 to 986 C.E.), the book draws on previously unstudied manuscripts discovered in the “library cave” near Dunhuang, on the old Silk Road. These ancient documents, it argues, demonstrate how this purportedly inactive period in Tibetan history was in fact crucial to the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism, and particularly to the spread of violent themes from tantric Buddhism into Tibet at the local and the popular levels. Having shed light...2024-11-1034 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIClare E. Harris, "The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics, and the Representation of Tibet," (University of Chicago Press, 2012)For millions of people around the world, Tibet is a domain of undisturbed tradition, the Dalai Lama a spiritual guide. By contrast, the Tibet Museum opened in Lhasa by the Chinese in 1999 was designed to reclassify Tibetan objects as cultural relics and the Dalai Lama as obsolete. Suggesting that both these views are suspect, Clare E. Harris argues inThe Museum on the Roof of the Worldthat for the past one hundred and fifty years, British and Chinese collectors and curators have tried to convert Tibet itself into a museum, an image some Tibetans have begun to contest. This book...2024-11-1011 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIUnlocking East Asian Studies with Generative AI: Insights from Harvard's WorkshopsIn this episode, we delve into the groundbreaking workshops hosted by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, where Kwok-leong Tang, Managing Director of the Digital China Initiative, leads a series focused on integrating Generative AI (GenAI) into the study of Literary Sinitic Studies. These workshops are designed for researchers of all levels, providing hands-on experience with the latest AI tools to enhance academic research, digital collections, and reference formatting.
Join us as we explore how Generative AI is transforming the field of East Asian studies, with insights into the workshop's structure, which ranges from...2024-11-0817 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIDigital Dharma: Geshe Lobsang Monlam, PhD on Tibetan Knowledge, Monlam AI, and the Future of Tibetan Information TechnologyThe two sources are transcripts of a talk given by Geshe Lobsang Monlam, founder of the mLam Institute, about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to preserve Tibetan knowledge. Monlam’s work centers on digitizing Tibetan texts and resources, and he has developed numerous software programs and the mLam Tibetan Dictionary, which is currently 223 volumes and growing. Monlam sees AI as a key tool for creating a global digital Tibetan library, allowing for greater access to Tibetan knowledge, especially for younger generations. He is also concerned about the ethical implications of AI and believes that Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which em...2024-11-0718 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPeter C. Perdue, "China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia," (Harvard University Press, 2005)From about 1600 to 1800, the Qing empire of China expanded to unprecedented size. Through astute diplomacy, economic investment, and a series of ambitious military campaigns into the heart of Central Eurasia, the Manchu rulers defeated the Zunghar Mongols, and brought all of modern Xinjiang and Mongolia under their control, while gaining dominant influence in Tibet. The China we know is a product of these vast conquests.
Peter C. Perdue chronicles this little-known story of China's expansion into the northwestern frontier. Unlike previous Chinese dynasties, the Qing achieved lasting domination over the eastern half of the Eurasian continent. Rulers...2024-11-0724 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPing Foong, "The Efficacious Landscape: On the Authorities of Painting at the Northern Song Court," (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015)Ink landscape painting is a distinctive feature of the Northern Song, and painters of this era produced some of the most celebrated artworks in Chinese history. The Efficacious Landscape addresses how landmark works of this pivotal period first came to be identified as potent symbols of imperial authority and later became objects through which exiled scholars expressed disaffection and dissent. In fulfilling these diverse roles, landscape demonstrated its efficacy in communicating through embodiment and in transcending the limitations of the concrete.Building on decades of monographic writings on Song painting, this carefully researched study presents a syncretic vision of ho...2024-11-0713 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AILara Blanchard, "Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire: Gender and Interiority in Chinese Painting and Poetry," (Brill, 2018)This book is the winner of the 2020 Joseph Levenson Pre-1900 Book Prize, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies.In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard analyzes images of women in painting and poetry of China’s middle imperial period, focusing on works that represent female figures as preoccupied with romance. She discusses examples of visual and literary culture in regard to their authorship and audience, examining the role of interiority in constructions of gender, exploring the rhetorical functions of romantic images, and considering connections between subjectivity and representation. The paintings in particular have sometimes bee...2024-11-0720 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIStephen Owen, "Just a Song: Chinese Lyrics from the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries," (Harvard University Asia Center, 2019)"Song Lyric," ci, remains one of the most loved forms of Chinese poetry. From the early eleventh century through the first quarter of the twelfth century, song lyric evolved from an impromptu contribution in a performance practice to a full literary genre, in which the text might be read more often than performed. Young women singers, either indentured or private entrepreneurs, were at the heart of song practice throughout the period; the authors of the lyrics were notionally mostly male. A strange gender dynamic arose, in which men often wrote in the voice of a woman and her imagined f...2024-11-0628 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIRuth Mostern, "The Yellow River: A Natural and Unnatural History," (Yale University Press, 2022)A three-thousand-year history of China’s Yellow River and the legacy of interactions between humans and the natural landscape “No other scholar has produced such a systematic, comprehensive account of the long-term changes in the river’s function and structure. I consider it to be the definitive work on the topic of the Yellow River to date.”—Peter C. Perdue, author of China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia From Neolithic times to the present day, the Yellow River and its watershed have both shaped and been shaped by human society. Using the Yellow River...2024-11-0619 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIRobert Hymes, "Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-Chou Chiang-Hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung," (Cambridge University Press, 1987)Statesmen and Gentlemen is an important study of the way in which, during the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries, China's ruling meritocracy was transformed into a locally rooted elite whose principal aim was the consolidation of their power, wealth and influence on a local as opposed to a national and dynastic basis. Professor Hymes offers a remarkable picture of the institutional and social changes this process entailed, but he also examines in detail the subtle ways in which the elite's perception of itself and its social role changed and it came to offer powerful support to local self-defence, social welfare, religious...2024-11-0621 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIAndrew G. Walder, "Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry," (University of California Press, 1988)Based on official Chinese sources as well as intensive interviews with Hong Kong residents formerly employed in mainland factories, Andrew Walder's neo-traditional image of communist society in China will be of interest not only to those concerned with China and other communist countries, but also to students of industrial relations and comparative social science.
Neo-traditional Communist Society in China
Andrew Walder, Chinese Industrial Relations
Hong Kong Workers in Mainland China
Comparative Social Science and China
Communist Society Structure in China
Chinese Factory Labor Insights
Chinese Industrial Relations History
Communist China Social Structure
Interviews with Hong...2024-11-0612 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISherman Cochran, "Chinese Medicine Men: Consumer Culture in China and Southeast Asia,"(Harvard University Press, 2006)In this book, Sherman Cochran reconsiders the nature and role of consumer culture in the spread of cultural globalization. He moves beyond traditional debates over Western influence on non-Western cultures to examine the points where Chinese entrepreneurs and Chinese-owned businesses interacted with consumers. Focusing on the marketing of medicine, he shows how Chinese constructed consumer culture in China and Southeast Asia and extended it to local, national, and transnational levels. Through the use of advertisements, photographs, and maps, he illustrates the visual forms that Chinese enterprises adopted and the far-flung markets they reached.Cochran brings to light enduring...2024-11-0625 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJohn Fitzgerald, "Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution," (Stanford University Press, 1996)This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as a historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyzes the link between the awakening of China as a historical narrative and the awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we say that China "woke up" in this century.
Awakening of Modern China
Rise of Modern China History
...2024-11-0614 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIR. Keith Schoppa, "Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China," (University of California Press, 2023)This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as a historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyzes the link between the awakening of China as a historical narrative and the awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we say that China "woke up" in this century.
Awakening of China as Historical Problem
Rise of Modern...2024-11-0612 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMichael Dutton, Rey Chow, and Harry Harootunian, "Policing Chinese Politics: A History," (Duke University Press Books, 2005)Beginning with the bloody communist purges of the Jiangxi era of the late 1920s and early 1930s and moving forward to the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Policing Chinese Politics explores the question of revolutionary violence and the political passion that propels it. “Who are our enemies, who are our friends, that is a question germane to the revolution,” wrote Mao Zedong in 1926. Michael Dutton shows just how powerful this one line was to become. It would establish the binary division of life in revolutionary China and lead to both passionate commitment and revolutionary excess. The political history of rev...2024-11-0616 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIHaiyan Lee, "Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950," (Stanford University Press, 2022)This book is an engagingly written critical genealogy of the idea of "love" in modern Chinese literature, thought, and popular culture. It examines a wide range of texts, including literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, and popular cultural genres from the late imperial period to the beginning of the socialist era. It traces the process by which love became an all-pervasive subject of representation and discourse, as well as a common language in which modern notions of self, gender, family, sexuality, and nation were imagined and contested. Winner of the Association for Asian Studies 2009 Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the best...2024-11-0612 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIYomi Braester, "Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract," (Duke University Press, 2010)Painting the City Red illuminates the dynamic relationship between the visual media, particularly film and theater, and the planning and development of cities in China and Taiwan, from the emergence of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the staging of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Yomi Braester argues that the transformation of Chinese cities in recent decades is a result not only of China’s abandonment of Maoist economic planning in favor of capitalist globalization but also of a shift in visual practices. Rather than simply reflect urban culture, movies and stage dramas have facilitated the development of new perceptions of sp...2024-11-0629 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIVincent Goossaert and David A Palmer, "The religious question in modern China," (University of Chicago Press, 2011)Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present.
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at diff...2024-11-0624 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJoseph R Allen, "Taipei: city of displacements," (University of Washington Press, 2014)This cultural study of public space examines the cityscape of Taipei, Taiwan, in rich descriptive prose. Contemplating a series of seemingly banal subjects―maps, public art, parks―Joseph Allen peels back layers of obscured history to reveal forces that caused cultural objects to be celebrated, despised, destroyed, or transformed as Taipei experienced successive regime changes and waves of displacement. In this thoughtful stroll through the city, we learn to look beyond surface ephemera, moving from the general to the particular to see sociocultural phenomena in their historical and contemporary contexts.
Public Space in Taipei Taiwan
Joseph...2024-11-0615 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIWinnie Won Yin Wong, "Van Gogh on Demand: China and the Readymade," (University of Chicago Press, 2014)In a manufacturing metropolis in south China lies Dafen, an urban village that famously houses thousands of workers who paint van Goghs, Da Vincis, Warhols, and other Western masterpieces for the world market, producing an astonishing five million paintings a year. To write about work and life in Dafen, Winnie Wong infiltrated this world, first investigating the work of conceptual artists who made projects there; then working as a dealer; apprenticing as a painter; surveying wholesalers and retailers in Europe, East Asia and North America; establishing relationships with local leaders; and organizing a conceptual art exhibition for the Shanghai...2024-11-0629 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AILuigi Tomba, "The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China," (Cornell University Press, 2014)Chinese residential communities are places of intense governing and an arena of active political engagement between state and society. In The Government Next Door, Luigi Tomba investigates how the goals of a government consolidated in a distant authority materialize in citizens' everyday lives. Chinese neighborhoods reveal much about the changing nature of governing practices in the country. Government action is driven by the need to preserve social and political stability, but such priorities must adapt to the progressive privatization of urban residential space and an increasingly complex set of societal forces. Tomba’s vivid ethnographic accounts of neighborhood life an...2024-11-0620 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIChristopher Rea, "The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China," (University of California Press, 2015)The Age of Irreverence tells the story of why China’s entry into the modern age was not just traumatic, but uproarious. As the Qing dynasty slumped toward extinction, prominent writers compiled jokes into collections they called "histories of laughter." In the first years of the Republic, novelists, essayists and illustrators alike used humorous allegories to make veiled critiques of the new government. But, again and again, political and cultural discussion erupted into invective, as critics gleefully jeered and derided rivals in public. Farceurs drew followings in the popular press, promoting a culture of practical joking and buffoonery. Eventually, th...2024-11-0529 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJoel Andreas, "Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China," (Oxford University Press,2019)In Disenfranchised, Joel Andreas recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped industrial relations in China over the past seven decades. Through interviews with workers and managers, Andreas provides a shop-floor perspective of the transformation of hired hands into permanent work unit members, the all-encompassing control of factory party committees, the battles of the Cultural Revolution, and the disenfranchisement of workers through industrial restructuring. Andreas introduces a general theoretical framework to analyze workplace authority relations and closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe, chronicling the rise and fall of an era of industrial citizenship.
2024-11-0513 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISilvia M Lindtner, "Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation," (Princeton University Press, 2020)A vivid look at China's shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China's mass manufacturing and "copycat" production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China's governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007-8, shap...2024-11-0412 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJoshua Goldstein, "Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing," (University of California Press, 2020)Remains of the Everyday traces the changing material culture and industrial ecology of China through the lens of recycling. Over the last century, waste recovery and secondhand goods markets have been integral to Beijing’s economic functioning and cultural identity, and acts of recycling have figured centrally in the ideological imagination of modernity and citizenship. On the one hand, the Chinese state has repeatedly promoted acts of voluntary recycling as exemplary of conscientious citizenship. On the other, informal recycling networks—from the night soil carriers of the Republican era to the collectors of plastic and cardboard in Beijing’s neighbo...2024-11-0415 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJoseph W. Esherick, "Accidental Holy Land: The Communist Revolution in Northwest China," (University of California Press, 2022)Yan’an is China’s “revolutionary holy land,” the heart of Mao Zedong’s Communist movement from 1937 to 1947. Based on thirty years of archival and documentary research and numerous field trips to the region, Joseph W. Esherick’s book examines the origins of the Communist revolution in Northwest China, from the political, social, and demographic changes of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), to the intellectual ferment of the early Republic, the guerrilla movement of the 1930s, and the replacement of the local revolutionary leadership after Mao and the Center arrived in 1935. In Accidental Holy Land, Esherick compels us to consider the Chinese Revolut...2024-11-0225 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPhilip Huang, "The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China," (Stanford University Press, 1985)The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980.Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the...2024-11-0225 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIGray Tuttle, "Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China," (Columbia University Press, 2005)Over the past century and with varying degrees of success, China has tried to integrate Tibet into the modern Chinese nation-state. In this groundbreaking work, Gray Tuttle reveals the surprising role Buddhism and Buddhist leaders played in the development of the modern Chinese state and in fostering relations between Tibet and China from the Republican period (1912-1949) to the early years of Communist rule. Beyond exploring interactions between Buddhists and politicians in Tibet and China, Tuttle offers new insights on the impact of modern ideas of nationalism, race, and religion in East Asia.After the fall of the Qing...2024-11-0210 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISheldon Garon, "The State and Labor in Modern Japan," (University of California Press, 1990)In this meticulously researched study, Sheldon Garon examines the evolution of Japan's governmental policies toward labor from the late nineteenth century to the present day, and he substantially revises prevailing views which depict relations between the Japanese state and labor simply in terms of suppression and mutual antagonism.
Sheldon Garon, Japanese Labor Policies
Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan
Japan State and Labor History
Japanese Government Labor Policies
Labor Relations in Modern Japan
Japanese State and Worker Dynamics
Historical Analysis of Japan Labor Policy
Japan Labor and Government Cooperation
Revising Japanese Labor Suppression Views
Labor...2024-11-0217 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMiriam Rom Silverberg, "Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu," (Princeton University Press, 1990)Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979), leading twentieth-century Japanese poet and social critic, transformed the revolutionary culture movement of the 1920s. Positioning Nakano's thought within the very history of Japanese Marxism, Miriam Silverberg applies textual analyses to his pre-war writings to form a new perspective on the history of the politics and culture of the Japanese left. Her book relates Nakano to the Western Marxist tradition, recognizes the existence of a Japanese Marxist theory of commodity culture, and uses this theory to illuminate the era. In particular, Silverberg addresses how Nakano, like his European contemporaries, worked toward a critique of mass culture...2024-11-0213 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIAndrew Gordon, "Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan," (University of California Press, 1992)Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan examines the political role played by working men and women in prewar Tokyo and offers a reinterpretation of the broader dynamics of Japan's prewar political history. Gordon argues that such phenomena as riots, labor disputes, and union organizing can best be understood as part of an early twentieth-century movement for "imperial democracy" shaped by the nineteenth-century drive to promote capitalism and build a modern nation and empire. When the propertied, educated leaders of this movement gained a share of power in the 1920s, they disagreed on how far to go toward incorporating w...2024-11-0218 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIKathryn Bernhardt, "Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950," (Stanford University Press, 1992)Throughout China's long imperial history, the political-economic system was supported mainly by the rents and taxes collected from the peasantry. The survival of the system depended on orderly relations between landlords and tenants and between the state and landowners. In the century before the Communist triumph in 1949, both sets of relations were profoundly changed. How did this transformation come about? With the commercially advanced lower Yangzi region as its focus, this book provides the most comprehensive treatment to date of rents and taxes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. It demonstrates that the tax burden on landlords, relative to price...2024-11-0225 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIElizabeth Perry, "Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor," (Stanford University Press, 1995)This work is an important addition to the rather limited literature on the social history of China during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on abundant sources and studies which have appeared in the People's Republic of China since the early 1980s and which have not been systematically used in Western historiography. China has undergone a series of fundamental political transformations: from the 1911 Revolution that toppled the imperial system to the victory of the communists, all of which were greatly affected by labor unrest. This work places the politics of Chinese workers in comparative perspective and...2024-11-0221 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPeter Zinoman, "The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862-1940," (University of California Press, 2001)Peter Zinoman's original and insightful study focuses on the colonial prison system in French Indochina and its role in fostering modern political consciousness among the Vietnamese. Using prison memoirs, newspaper articles, and extensive archival records, Zinoman presents a wealth of significant new information to document how colonial prisons, rather than quelling political dissent and maintaining order, instead became institutions that promoted nationalism and revolutionary education.
Colonial Prisons in French Indochina
Vietnamese Political Consciousness
Peter Zinoman, colonial prison study
Nationalism in Vietnamese Prisons
Revolutionary Education in Prisons
French Indochina Prison System
Political Dissent...2024-11-0124 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIDavid G. Marr, "Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power," (University of California Press, 1996 reprint 2023)1945: the most significant year in the modern history of Vietnam. One thousand years of dynastic politics and monarchist ideology came to an end. Eight decades of French rule lay shattered. Five years of Japanese military occupation ceased. Allied leaders determined that Chinese troops in the north of Indochina and British troops in the South would receive the Japanese surrender. Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president.Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews, and an examination of published memoirs and documents, David G. Marr has written a richly detailed and descriptive analysis of this...2024-11-0119 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJohn W. Dower, "Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II," (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the 1999 National Book Award for Nonfiction, finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Embracing Defeat is John W. Dower's brilliant examination of Japan in the immediate, shattering aftermath of World War II.Drawing on a vast range of Japanese sources and illustrated with dozens of astonishing documentary photographs, Embracing Defeat is the fullest and most important history of the more than six years of American occupation, which affected every level of Japanese society, often in ways neither side could anticipate. Dower, whom Stephen E. Ambrose has called "America's...2024-11-0123 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJulia Adeney Thomas, "Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology," (University of California Press, 2002)Julia Adeney Thomas turns the concept of nature into a powerful analytical lens through which to view Japanese modernity, bringing the study of both Japanese history and political modernity to a new level of clarity. She shows that nature necessarily functions as a political concept and that changing ideas of nature's political authority were central during Japan's transformation from a semifeudal world to an industrializing colonial empire. In political documents from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, nature was redefined, moving from the universal, spatial concept of the Tokugawa period, through temporal, social Darwinian ideas of inevitable progress...2024-11-0119 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIRuth Rogaski, "Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China," (University of California Press, 2004)Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng―which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"―as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted fro...2024-11-0125 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMadeleine Zelin ,"The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China," (Columbia University Press, 2005)At the periphery of the Chinese empire, a group of innovative entrepreneurs built companies that dominated the Chinese salt trade and created thousands of jobs in the Sichuan region. From its dramatic expansion in the early nineteenth century to its decline on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, salt production in Zigong was one of the largest and one of the only indigenous large-scale industries in China. Madeleine Zelin recounts the history of the salt industry to reveal a fascinating chapter in China's history and provide new insight into the forces and institutions that shaped...2024-11-0115 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIEugenia Lean ,"Public passions: the trial of Shi Jianqiao and the rise of popular sympathy in Republican China," (University of California Press, 2007)In 1935, a Chinese woman by the name of Shi Jianqiao murdered the notorious warlord Sun Chuanfang as he prayed in a Buddhist temple. This riveting work of history examines this well-publicized crime and the highly sensationalized trial of the killer. In a fascinating investigation of the media, political, and judicial records surrounding this cause célèbre, Eugenia Lean shows how Shi Jianqiao planned not only to avenge the death of her father, but also to attract media attention and galvanize public support. Lean traces the rise of a new sentiment—"public sympathy"—in early twentieth-century China, a sentiment that ult...2024-11-0112 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISusan Mann, "The Talented Women of the Zhang Family," (University of California Press, 2007)The history of China in the nineteenth century usually features men as the dominant figures in a chronicle of warfare, rebellion, and dynastic decline. This book challenges that model and provides a different account of the era, history as seen through the eyes of women. Basing her remarkable study on the poetry and memoirs of three generations of literary women of the Zhang family—Tang Yaoqing, her eldest daughter, and her eldest granddaughter—Susan Mann illuminates a China that has been largely invisible. Drawing on a stunning array of primary materials—published poetry, gazetteer articles, memorabilia—as well as a variet...2024-11-0124 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIBarbara Mittler, "A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture," (Harvard University Press, 2013)Cultural Revolution Culture, often denigrated as mere propaganda, not only was liked in its heyday but continues to be enjoyed today. Considering Cultural Revolution propaganda art from the point of view of its longue duree, Mittler suggests that it built on a tradition of earlier art works, which allowed for its sedimentation in cultural memory.
Cultural Revolution Culture and Propaganda Art
Barbara Mittler on Chinese Cultural Memory
Art and Propaganda in the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Longue Duree of Cultural Revolution Art
Influence of Chinese Propaganda Art
Cultural Revolution Art Tradition and Legacy
Continuity in Chinese...2024-11-0120 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIKlaus Muhlhahn, "Criminal Justice in China: A History," (Harvard University Press, 2009)In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Mühlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture.In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions o...2024-11-0120 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJames C. Scott, "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia," (Yale University Press, 2022)For two thousand years the disparate groups that now reside in Zomia (a mountainous region the size of Europe that consists of portions of seven Asian countries) have fled the projects of the organized state societies that surround them—slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare. This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic...2024-11-0112 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AICarol Benedict, "Golden-Silk Smoke: A History of Tobacco in China, 1550-2010," ( University of California Press, 2011)From the long-stemmed pipe to snuff, the water pipe, hand-rolled cigarettes, and finally, manufactured cigarettes, the history of tobacco in China is the fascinating story of a commodity that became a hallmark of modern mass consumerism. Carol Benedict follows the spread of Chinese tobacco use from the sixteenth century, when it was introduced to China from the New World, through the development of commercialized tobacco cultivation, and to the present day. Along the way, she analyzes the factors that have shaped China's highly gendered tobacco cultures, and shows how they have evolved within a broad, comparative world-historical framework. Drawing...2024-11-0110 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIRian Thum, "The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History," (Harvard University Press, 2014)For 250 years, the Turkic Muslims of Altishahr―the vast desert region to the northwest of Tibet―have led an uneasy existence under Chinese rule. Today they call themselves Uyghurs, and they have cultivated a sense of history and identity that challenges Beijing’s official national narrative. Rian Thum argues that the roots of this history run deeper than recent conflicts, to a time when manuscripts and pilgrimage dominated understandings of the past. Beyond broadening our knowledge of tensions between the Uyghurs and the Chinese government, this meditation on the very concept of history probes the limits of human interaction with t...2024-11-0124 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIBarak Kushner, "Men to Devils, Devils to Men: Japanese War Crimes and Chinese Justice," (Harvard University Press, 2015)The Japanese Army committed numerous atrocities during its pitiless campaigns in China from 1931 to 1945. When the Chinese emerged victorious with the Allies at the end of World War II, many seemed ready to exact retribution for these crimes. Rather than resort to violence, however, they chose to deal with their former enemy through legal and diplomatic means. Focusing on the trials of, and policies toward, Japanese war criminals in the postwar period, Men to Devils, Devils to Men analyzes the complex political maneuvering between China and Japan that shaped East Asian realpolitik during the Cold War.
...2024-11-0113 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIThomas S. Mullaney, "The Chinese Typewriter: A History," (The MIT Press, 2017)Chinese writing is character based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Through the years, the Chinese written language encountered presumed alphabetic universalism in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, and other systems developed with the Latin alphabet in mind. This book is about those encounters—in particular thousands of Chinese characters versus the typewriter and its QWERTY keyboard. Thomas Mullaney describes a fascinating series of experiments, prototypes, failures, and successes in the century-long quest for a workable Chinese typewriter. The earliest Chinese typewriters, Mullaney tells us, were figments of...2024-11-0119 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIChris Courtney, "The Nature of Disaster in China: The 1931 Yangzi River Flood," (Cambridge University Press, 2018)In 1931, China suffered a catastrophic flood that claimed millions of lives. This was neither a natural nor human-made disaster. Rather, it was created by an interaction between the environment and society. Regular inundation had long been an integral feature of the ecology and culture of the middle Yangzi, yet by the modern era floods had become humanitarian catastrophes. Courtney describes how the ecological and economic effects of the 1931 flood pulse caused widespread famine and epidemics. He takes readers into the inundated streets of Wuhan, describing the terrifying and disorientating sensory environment. He explains why locals believed that an angry...2024-11-0117 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIEric Schluessel, "Land of Strangers: The Civilizing Project in Qing Central Asia," (Columbia University Press, 2020)At the close of the nineteenth century, near the end of the Qing empire, Confucian revivalists from central China gained control of the Muslim-majority region of Xinjiang, or East Turkestan. There they undertook a program to transform Turkic-speaking Muslims into Chinese-speaking Confucians, seeking to bind this population and their homeland to the Chinese cultural and political realm. Instead of assimilation, divisions between communities only deepened, resulting in a profound estrangement that continues to this day.In Land of Strangers, Eric Schluessel explores this encounter between Chinese power and a Muslim society through the struggles of ordinary people in the o...2024-11-0119 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIEiichiro Azuma, "In Search of Our Frontier: Japanese America and Settler Colonialism in the Construction of Japan’s Borderless Empire," (University of California Press, 2022)In Search of Our Frontier explores the complex transnational history of Japanese immigrant settler colonialism, which linked Japanese America with Japan’s colonial empire through the exchange of migrant bodies, expansionist ideas, colonial expertise, and capital in the Asia-Pacific basin before World War II. The trajectories of Japanese transpacific migrants exemplified a prevalent national structure of thought and practice that not only functioned to shore up the backbone of Japan’s empire building but also promoted the borderless quest for Japanese overseas development. Eiichiro Azuma offers new interpretive perspectives that will allow readers to understand Japanese settler colonialism’s capaci...2024-11-0116 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIHwasook Nam, "Women in the Sky: Gender and Labor in the Making of Modern Korea," (Cornell University Press, 2021)Women in the Sky examines Korean women factory workers' century-long activism, from the 1920s to the present, with a focus on gender politics both in the labor movement and in the larger society. It highlights several key moments in colonial and postcolonial Korean history when factory women commanded the attention of the wider public, including the early-1930s rubber shoe workers' general strike in Pyongyang, the early-1950s textile workers' struggle in South Korea, the 1970s democratic union movement led by female factory workers, and women workers' activism against neoliberal restructuring in recent decades.
Hwasook Nam asks wh...2024-11-0120 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIH. Yumi Kim, "Madness in the Family: Women, Care, and Illness in Japan," (Oxford University Press, 2022)To fend off American and European imperialism in the nineteenth century, Japan strove to strengthen itself by drawing on the most updated ideas and practices from around the world. By the 1880s, this included the introduction of Western-derived psychiatry and its ideas about mental illness. The first Japanese psychiatrists claimed that mental illnesses required medical treatment in specialized institutions rather than confinement at home, as had been common practice. Yet the state implemented no social welfare policies to make new medical services more accessible and affordable to the public. The family, especially women, thus continued to carry the burden...2024-11-0115 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AITristan G. Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China," (Princeton University Press, 2023)A groundbreaking history of fengshui’s roles in public life and law during China’s last imperial dynasty Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912). Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chi...2024-11-0113 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISatoko Shimazaki， “Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost，“ (Columbia University Press, 2020)Satoko Shimazaki revisits three centuries of kabuki theater, reframing it as a key player in the formation of an early modern urban identity in Edo Japan and exploring the process that resulted in its re-creation in Tokyo as a national theatrical tradition. Challenging the prevailing understanding of early modern kabuki as a subversive entertainment and a threat to shogunal authority, Shimazaki argues that kabuki instilled a sense of shared history in the inhabitants of Edo (present-day Tokyo) by invoking "worlds," or sekai, derived from earlier military tales, and overlaying them onto the present. She then analyzes the profound changes t...2024-10-3024 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AITom Cliff, "Oil and Water: Being Han in Xinjiang," (University of Chicago Press, 2016)For decades, China’s Xinjiang region has been the site of clashes between long-residing Uyghur and Han settlers. Up until now, much scholarly attention has been paid to state actions and the Uyghur’s efforts to resist cultural and economic repression. This has left the other half of the puzzle—the motivations and ambitions of Han settlers themselves—sorely understudied. With Oil and Water, anthropologist Tom Cliff offers the first ethnographic study of Han in Xinjiang, using in-depth vignettes, oral histories, and more than fifty original photographs to explore how and why they became the people they are now. B...2024-10-3014 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISigrid Schmalzer, "Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China," (The University of Chicago Press, 2016)In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over...2024-10-3014 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AILi Chen, "Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University)," (Columbia University press, 2015)How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium W...2024-10-3017 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIDoreen Lee, "Activist Archives: Youth Culture and the Political Past in Indonesia," (Duke University Press, 2016)In Activist Archives Doreen Lee tells the origins, experiences, and legacy of the radical Indonesian student movement that helped end the thirty-two-year dictatorship in May 1998. Lee situates the revolt as the most recent manifestation of student activists claiming a political and historical inheritance passed down by earlier generations of politicized youth. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis of "Generation 98," Lee offers rich depictions of the generational structures, nationalist sentiments, and organizational and private spaces that bound these activists together. She examines the ways the movement shaped new and youthful ways of looking, seeing, and being—found in archival documents from the...2024-10-3017 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIBryan D. Lowe, "Ritualized Writing: Buddhist Practice and Scriptural Cultures in Ancient Japan," (University of Hawaii Press, 2017)Ritualized Writing takes readers into the fascinating world of Japanese Buddhist manuscript cultures. Using archival sources that have received scant attention in English, primarily documents from an eighth-century Japanese scriptorium and colophons from sutra manuscripts, Bryan D. Lowe uncovers the ways in which the transcription of Buddhist scripture was a highly ritualized endeavor. He takes a ground-level approach by emphasizing the activities and beliefs of a wide range of individuals, including scribes, provincial patrons, and royals, to reassess the meaning of scripture and reevaluate scholarly narratives of Japanese Buddhist history.Copying scripture is a central Buddhist practice and o...2024-10-3027 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIChing Kwan Lee, "The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa," (University of Chicago Press, 2018)China has recently emerged as one of Africa’s top business partners, aggressively pursuing its raw materials and establishing a mighty presence in the continent’s booming construction market. Among major foreign investors in Africa, China has stirred the most fear, hope, and controversy. For many, the specter of a Chinese neocolonial scramble is looming, while for others China is Africa’s best chance at economic renewal. Yet, global debates about China in Africa have been based more on rhetoric than on empirical evidence. Ching Kwan Lee’s The Specter of Global China is the first comparative ethnographic study that addre...2024-10-3024 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJonathan Schlesinger, "A World Trimmed with Fur: Wild Things, Pristine Places, and the Natural Fringes of Qing Rule," (Stanford University Press, 2019)In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, booming demand for natural resources transformed China and its frontiers. Historians of China have described this process in stark terms: pristine borderlands became breadbaskets. Yet Manchu and Mongolian archives reveal a different story. Well before homesteaders arrived, wild objects from the far north became part of elite fashion, and unprecedented consumption had exhausted the region's most precious resources.
In A World Trimmed with Fur, Jonathan Schlesinger uses these diverse archives to reveal how Qing rule witnessed not the destruction of unspoiled environments, but their invention. Qing frontiers were never pristine in t...2024-10-3015 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIYoon Sun Yang, "From Domestic Women to Sensitive Young Men: Translating the Individual in Early Colonial Korea," (Harvard University Asia Center, 2017)The notion of the individual was initially translated into Korean near the end of the nineteenth century and took root during the early years of Japanese colonial influence. Yoon Sun Yang argues that the first literary iterations of the Korean individual were prototypically female figures appearing in the early colonial domestic novel―a genre developed by reform-minded male writers―as schoolgirls, housewives, female ghosts, femmes fatales, and female same-sex partners. Such female figures have long been viewed as lacking in modernity because, unlike numerous male characters in Korean literature after the late 1910s, they did not assert their own moder...2024-10-3018 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMax Oidtmann, "Forging the Golden Urn: The Qing Empire and the Politics of Reincarnation in Tibet," (Columbia University Press, 2018)In 1995, the People’s Republic of China resurrected a Qing-era law mandating that the reincarnations of prominent Tibetan Buddhist monks be identified by drawing lots from a golden urn. The Chinese Communist Party hoped to limit the ability of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile to independently identify reincarnations. In so doing, they elevated a long-forgotten ceremony into a controversial symbol of Chinese sovereignty in Tibet.In Forging the Golden Urn, Max Oidtmann ventures into the polyglot world of the Qing empire in search of the origins of the golden urn tradition. He seeks to understand the rel...2024-10-3024 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIC.W. Lara Blanchard, "Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire (Women and Gender in China Studies, 10)," (Brill, 2018)In Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire, Lara Blanchard examines the writing of interiority in paintings of women, considering correspondences to examples of erotic poetry and how such works address the concerns of artists, patrons, and viewers.
Lara C. W. Blanchard, Ph.D. (2001), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is Luce Professor of East Asian Art at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She has published articles on gender and Chinese art from the Song to Ming dynasties.
Song Dynasty Figures of Longing and Desire
Lara Blanchard on Chinese Art and G...2024-10-3039 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIHo-fung Hung, "City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule," (Cambridge University Press, 2022)For decades, Hong Kong has maintained precarious freedom at the edge of competing world powers. In City on the Edge, Ho-fung Hung offers a timely and engaging account of Hong Kong's development from precolonial times to the present, with particular focus on the post 1997 handover period. Through careful analysis of vast economic data, a myriad of political events, and intricate networks of actors and ideas, Hung offers readers insight into the fraught economic, political, and social forces that led to the 2019 uprising, while situating the protests in the context of global finance and the geopolitics of the US-China rivalry...2024-10-3016 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIKenneth Pomeranz, "The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy," (Princeton University Press, 2001)The Great Divergence brings new insight to one of the classic questions of history: Why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As Ken Pomeranz shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, Pomeranz demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages t...2024-10-3017 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AICarole McGranahan, "Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War," (Duke University Press Books, 2010)In the 1950s, thousands of ordinary Tibetans rose up to defend their country and religion against Chinese troops. Their citizen army fought through 1974 with covert support from the Tibetan exile government and the governments of India, Nepal, and the United States. Decades later, the story of this resistance is only beginning to be told and has not yet entered the annals of Tibetan national history. In Arrested Histories, the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan shows how and why histories of this resistance army are “arrested” and explains the ensuing repercussions for the Tibetan refugee community.
Drawing on rich...2024-10-3019 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMelvyn C. Goldstein, "A History of Modern Tibet" Vol 1+2Melvyn C. Goldstein (born February 8, 1938) is an American social anthropologist and Tibet scholar. He is a professor of anthropology at Case Western Reserve University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on Tibetan society, history and contemporary politics, population studies, polyandry, studies in cultural and development ecology, economic change and cross-cultural gerontology.
A History of Tibet Vol 1 and 2 by Melvyn C. Goldstein
Tibetan History and Society Analysis
Melvyn Goldstein, Tibet Scholar and Anthropologist
Tibetan Culture and Contemporary Politics
Polyandry and Social Structures in Tibet
Economic Change in Tibetan Society
Population...2024-10-2919 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIKaushik Roy, "War, Culture and Society in Early Modern South Asia, 1740-1849," (Routledge, 2011)This book argues that the role of the British East India Company in transforming warfare in South Asia has been overestimated. Although it agrees with conventional wisdom that, before the British, the nature of Indian society made it difficult for central authorities to establish themselves fully and develop a monopoly over armed force, the book argues that changes to warfare in South Asia were more gradual, and the result of more complicated socio-economic forces than has been hitherto acknowledged.
The book covers the period from 1740, when the British first became a major power broker in south India...2024-10-2930 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJohn Hinnells and Richard King eds., "Religion and Violence in South Asia: Theory and Practice," (Routledge, 2006)Do religions justify and cause violence or are they more appropriately seen as forces for peace and tolerance?
Featuring contributions from international experts in the field, this book explores the debate that has emerged in the context of secular modernity about whether religion is a primary cause of social division, conflict and war, or whether this is simply a distortion of the ‘true’ significance of religion and that if properly followed it promotes peace, harmony, goodwill and social cohesion.
Focusing on how this debate is played out in the South Asian context, the book engages with...2024-10-2917 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIKenneth Conboy and James Morrison, "The CIA's Secret War in Tibet," (University Press of Kansas, 2002)Defiance against Chinese oppression has been a defining characteristic of Tibetan life for more than four decades, symbolized most visibly by the much revered Dalai Lama. But the story of Tibetan resistance weaves a far richer tapestry than anyone might have imagined.Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison reveal how America's Central Intelligence Agency encouraged Tibet's revolt against China—and eventually came to control its fledgling resistance movement. While the CIA's presence in Tibet has been alluded to in other works, the authors provide the first comprehensive, as well as most compelling account of this little known agency enterprise.2024-10-2915 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPoo Mu-Chou, "Ghosts and Religious Life in Early Chinaous Life in Early China," (Duke University Press, 2022)For modern people, ghost stories are no more than thrilling entertainment. For those living in antiquity, ghosts were far more serious beings, as they could affect the life and death of people and cause endless fear and anxiety. How did ancient societies imagine what ghosts looked like, what they could do, and how people could deal with them? From the vantage point of modernity, what can we learn about an obscure, but no less important aspect of an ancient culture? In this volume, Mu-chou Poo explores the ghosts of ancient China, the ideas that they nurtured, and their role...2024-10-2928 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJoseph W. W. Esherick, "The Origins of the Boxer Uprising," (University of California Press, 1988)The book examines the historical and social factors that led to the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1900. The book analyzes the role of various groups, including the Big Sword Society, the White Lotus Sect, and the Spirit Boxers, in the uprising. It explores their origins, religious beliefs, and the role of foreign influence, particularly Christian missionaries, in the escalating tensions that led to the rebellion. Esherick's work also focuses on the geographic and social conditions of Shandong province, where the Boxer movement originated, as well as the political climate in China during this period. The book aims to offer a...2024-10-2812 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIFrederic Wakeman Jr., "Strangers at the Gate is a historical account of the Taiping Rebellion in South China between 1839 and 1861," (University of California Press, 1997)The book explores the social and political upheaval during this period, analyzing the causes of the rebellion and the response of the Chinese government. Wakeman examines the complex interactions of the gentry, the peasantry, and the imperial government, and the role of the British in exacerbating tensions in the region. He argues that the Taiping Rebellion was a result of multiple factors, including the Opium War, economic instability, and social unrest. The book also explores the impact of xenophobia, clanism, and secret societies on the course of the rebellion.
Taiping Rebellion Social and Political Analysis
...2024-10-2817 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIFrederic Wakeman, Jr. "The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China, Volume 1," (University of California Press, 1985)The book is a historical study of the Manchu conquest of China during the Ming dynasty. The excerpts focus on the fall of the Ming dynasty, the rise of the Qing dynasty under Nurhaci, and the Manchu quest for power. The text includes discussions of the Manchu military system, their relationship with the Chinese people, and the impact of the conquest on Chinese society and culture. The excerpts also provide a detailed account of the Manchu invasion of Liaodong and the conquest of the Ming capital at Beijing.
Manchu Conquest of China...2024-10-2818 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AITaisu Zhang, "The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England," (Cambridge University Press, 2017)Tying together cultural history, legal history, and institutional economics, The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Preindustrial China and England offers a novel argument as to why Chinese and English preindustrial economic development went down different paths. The dominance of Neo-Confucian social hierarchies in Late Imperial and Republican China, under which advanced age and generational seniority were the primary determinants of sociopolitical status, allowed many poor but senior individuals to possess status and political authority highly disproportionate to their wealth. In comparison, landed wealth was a fairly strict prerequisite for high status and authority in the...2024-10-2716 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AITobie Meyer-Fong, "What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China," (Stanford University Press, 2013)The Taiping Rebellion was one of the costliest civil wars in human history. Many millions of people lost their lives. Yet while the Rebellion has been intensely studied by scholars in China and elsewhere, we still know little of how individuals coped with these cataclysmic events.
Drawing upon a rich array of primary sources, What Remains explores the issues that preoccupied Chinese and Western survivors. Individuals, families, and communities grappled with fundamental questions of loyalty and loss as they struggled to rebuild shattered cities, bury the dead, and make sense of the horrors that they had witnessed....2024-10-2714 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIR. Kent Guy, "Qing Governors and Their Provinces: The Evolution of Territorial Administration in China, 1644-1796," (University of Washington Press, 2013)During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the province emerged as an important element in the management of the expanding Chinese empire, with governors ― those in charge of these increasingly influential administrative units ― playing key roles. R. Kent Guy's comprehensive study of this shift concentrates on the governorship system during the reigns of the Shunzhi, Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors, who ruled China from 1644 to 1796.In the preceding Ming dynasty (1368–1644), the responsibilities of provincial officials were ill-defined and often shifting; Qing governors, in contrast, were influential members of a formal administrative hierarchy and enjoyed the support of the central government, including access t...2024-10-2714 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPhilip A. Kuhn, "Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768,“ (Harvard University Press, 2006)Midway through the reign of the Ch'ien-lung emperor, Hungli, in the most prosperous period of China's last imperial dynasty, mass hysteria broke out among the common people. It was feared that sorcerers were roaming the land, clipping off the ends of men's queues (the braids worn by royal decree), and chanting magical incantations over them in order to steal the souls of their owners. In a fascinating chronicle of this epidemic of fear and the official prosecution of soulstealers that ensued, Philip Kuhn provides an intimate glimpse into the world of eighteenth-century China. Kuhn weaves his exploration of the...2024-10-2713 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPhilip A Kuhn, "Rebellion and its enemies in late imperial China,: Militarization and social structure, 1796-1864," (Harvard University Press, 1970)This book examines the development of local militia in China during the Qing dynasty. The author focuses on how local elites organized and utilized militias to defend their communities and influence the state's policies. He analyzes the various levels of local organization, from village-based groups to larger multi-village confederations, and explores the relationship between the militia system and existing structures like lineage, market communities, and the bureaucracy. The text also explores how the Qing state attempted to control and integrate these local militias into its own military system. Finally, the author compares the organization and effectiveness of orthodox Confucian-led...2024-10-2731 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIPatricia Ann Berger, "Empire of Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing China," (Univ of Hawaii Pr, 2003)Imperial Manchu support and patronage of Buddhism, particularly in Mongolia and Tibet, has often been dismissed as cynical political manipulation. Empire of Emptiness questions this generalization by taking a fresh look at the huge outpouring of Buddhist painting, sculpture, and decorative arts Qing court artists produced for distribution throughout the empire. It examines some of the Buddhist underpinnings of the Qing view of rulership and shows just how central images were in the carefully reasoned rhetoric the court directed toward its Buddhist allies in inner Asia. The multilingual, culturally fluid Qing emperors put an extraordinary range of visual styles in...2024-10-2717 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AINicola Di Cosmo and Don J Wyatt eds, "Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries and Human Geographies in Chinese History," (Routledge, 2003)Boundaries - demanding physical space, enclosing political entities, and distinguishing social or ethnic groups - constitute an essential aspect of historical investigation.It is especially with regard to disciplinary pluralism and historical breadth that this book most clearly departs and distinguishes itself from other works on Chinese boundaries and ethnicity. In addition to history, the disciplines represented in this book include anthropology (particularly ethnography), religion, art history, and literary studies. Each of the authors focuses on a distinct period, beginning with the Zhou dynasty (c. 1100 BCE) and ending with the early centuries after the Manchu conquest (c. CE 1800...2024-10-2726 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMorris Rossabi, "Governing China's Multiethnic Frontier," (University of Washington Press, 2004)Upon coming to power in 1949, the Chinese Communist government proclaimed that its stance toward ethnic minorities--who comprise approximately eight percent of China’s population--differed from that of previous regimes and that it would help preserve the linguistic and cultural heritage of the fifty-five official "minority nationalities." However, minority culture suffered widespread destruction in the early decades of the People’s Republic of China, and minority areas still lag far behind Han (majority) areas economically.
Since the mid-1990s, both domestic and foreign developments have refocused government attention on the inhabitants of China’s minority regions, their relationship to the...2024-10-2719 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMatthew H. Sommer, "Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China," (Stanford University Press, 2002)This study of the regulation of sexuality in the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual behavior criminalized by the state, arguing that the eighteenth century in China was a time of profound change in sexual matters. During this time, the basic organizing principle for state regulation of sexuality shifted away from status, under which members of different groups had long been held to distinct standards of familial and sexual morality. In its place, a new regime of gender mandated a uniform standard of sexual morality and criminal liability across status boundaries—all people were expected to conform to...2024-10-2728 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMatthew Mosca, "From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China," (Stanford University Press, 2013)Between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Qing rulers, officials, and scholars fused diverse, fragmented perceptions of foreign territory into one integrated worldview. In the same period, a single "foreign" policy emerged as an alternative to the many localized "frontier" policies hitherto pursued on the coast, in Xinjiang, and in Tibet. By unraveling Chinese, Manchu, and British sources to reveal the information networks used by the Qing empire to gather intelligence about its emerging rival, British India, this book explores China's altered understanding of its place in a global context. Far from being hobbled by a Sinocentric worldview, Qing China's...2024-10-2713 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJonathan N. Lipman, "Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China," (University of Washington Press, 2011)The Chinese-speaking Muslims have for centuries been an inseparable but anomalous part of Chinese society--Sinophone yet incomprehensible, local yet outsiders, normal but different. Long regarded by the Chinese government as prone to violence, they have challenged fundamental Chinese conceptions of "self" and "other" and denied the totally transforming power of Chinese civilization by tenaciously maintaining connections with Central and West Asia as well as some cultural differences from their non-Muslim neighbors.
Familiar Strangers narrates a history of the Muslims of northwest China, at the intersection of the frontiers of the Mongolian-Manchu, Tibetan, Turkic, and Chinese cultural regions. B...2024-10-2718 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJames Polachek, "The Inner Opium War (Harvard East Asian Monographs)," (Harvard University Asia Center, 1991)Why did defeat in the Opium War not lead Ch'ing China to a more realistic appreciation of Western might and Chinese weakness? James Polachek's revisionist analysis exposes the behind-the-scenes political struggles that not only shaped foreign-policy decisions in the 1830s and 1840s but have continued to affect the history of Chinese nationalism in modern times.
Polachek looks closely at the networks of literati and officials, self-consciously reminiscent of the late Ming era that sought and gained the ear of the emperor. Challenging the conventional view that Lin Tse-hsu and his supporters were selfless patriots who acted in...2024-10-2714 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJames Millward, "Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang," (Columbia University Press, 2009)Eurasian Crossroads is the first comprehensive history of Xinjiang, the vast central Eurasian region bordering India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Mongolia. Forming one-sixth of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Xinjiang stands at the crossroads between China, India, the Mediterranean, and Russia and has, since the Bronze Age, played a pivotal role in the social, cultural, and political development of Asia and the world.Xinjiang was once the hub of the Silk Road and the conduit through which Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam entered China. It was also the point at which the Chinese, Turkic, Tibetan, a...2024-10-2717 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIBeatrice S. Bartlett, "The book, Monarchs and Ministers: The Grand Council in Mid-Ch'ing China, 1723-1820," (University of California Press, 1990)This book describes the transformation of Ch'ing governance from monarchical rule to ministerial administration, presenting a wholly new account of the Grand Council's founding and rise to dominance. This period has been viewed as an era of intensified government centralization and increasing autocracy, but Bartlett persuasively demonstrates that this characterization must be modified in the light of her findings.Bartlett identifies the inner-outer court dichotomy often studied in earlier dynasties but never before in the Ch'ingas the key framework for understanding Grand Council development. She conclusively shows how the council arose from the Yung-cheng Emperor's attempt to e...2024-10-2716 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIC. Patterson Giersch, "Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China's Yunnan Frontier," (Harvard University Press, 2006)C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China's Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select...2024-10-2719 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIJanet Gyatso, "Being Human in a Buddhist World: An Intellectual History of Medicine in Early Modern Tibet," (Columbia University Press, 2015)Critically exploring medical thought in a cultural milieu with no discernible influence from the European Enlightenment, "Being Human" reveals an otherwise unnoticed intersection of early modern sensibilities and religious values in traditional Tibetan medicine. It further studies the adaptation of Buddhist concepts and values to medical concerns and suggests important dimensions of Buddhism's role in the development of Asian and global civilization.Through its unique focus and sophisticated reading of source materials, " Being Human" adds a crucial chapter in the larger historiography of science and religion. The book opens with the bold achievements in Tibetan medical illustration, commentary...2024-10-2719 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AITsering Shakya, "The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet Since 1947," (Penguin Publishing Group, 2000)Based entirely on unpublished primary sources, Tsering Shakya's groundbreaking history of modern Tibet shatters the popular conception of the country as an isolated Shangri-la unaffected by broader international developments. Shakya gives a balanced, blow-by-blow account of Tibet's ongoing struggle to maintain its independence and safeguard its cultural identity while being sandwiched between the heavyweights of Asian geopolitics: Britain, India, China, and the United States. With thorough documentation, Shakya details the Chinese depredations of Tibet, and reveals the failures of the Tibetan leadership's divided strategies. Rising above the simplistic dualism so often found in accounts of Tibet's contested recent history, Th...2024-10-2716 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIVictor Lieberman, "Strange Parallels," Volumes 1+2, (Cambridge University Press, 2003/2009)Volume 1:
In an ambitious effort to overcome the extreme fragmentation of early Southeast Asian historiography, this study connects Southeast Asia to world history. Victor Lieberman argues that over a thousand years, each of mainland Southeast Asia's great lowland corridors experienced a pattern of accelerating integration punctuated by recurrent collapse. These trajectories were synchronized not only between corridors, but most curiously, between the mainland as a whole, much of Europe, and other sectors of Eurasia. Lieberman describes in detail the nature of mainland consolidation and dissects the mix of endogenous and external factors responsible.
2024-10-2630 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIQichen Qian, "“Benign” Bellicosity: Tibetan Military History and the Making of Ganden Podrang (1642–1793)," (Columbia University, 2024)This dissertation reinterprets Tibetan history by focusing on the Tibetan Buddhist state's military history, challenging the notion of a peaceful Tibet and exploring how the Ganden Podrang regime used warfare to expand its territory and consolidate power. The author analyzes the Ganden Podrang's military reforms, examining the army's organization, training, and weaponry. The dissertation also investigates the Ganden Podrang's conflicts with neighboring states like Bhutan and Ladakh, highlighting the role of figures like Polhané in shaping Tibet's military strategy. The dissertation concludes by exploring the potential of Big Data to provide new perspectives on Tibetan military history, drawing on a...2024-10-2619 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AIMark C. Elliott, "The The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China," (Stanford University Press, 2001)In 1644, the Manchus, a relatively unknown people inhabiting China’s rude northeastern frontier, overthrew the Ming, Asia’s mightiest rulers, and established the Qing dynasty, which endured to 1912. From this event arises one of Chinese history’s great conundrums: How did a barely literate alien people manage to remain in power for nearly 300 years over a highly cultured population that was vastly superior in number? This problem has fascinated scholars for almost a century, but until now no one has approached the question from the Manchu point of view.
This book, the first in any language to be bas...2024-10-2612 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AITonio Andrade, "The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History," (Princeton University Press, 2017)Tonio Andrade is professor of history at Emory University and the author of Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton) and How Taiwan Became Chinese.
A first look at gunpowder's revolutionary impact on China's role in global historyThe Chinese invented gunpowder and began exploring its military uses as early as the 900s, four centuries before the technology passed to the West. But by the early 1800s, China had fallen so far behind the West in gunpowder warfare that it was easily defeated by Britain in the...2024-10-2623 min
The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AISusan Naquin, "Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900" (University of California Press, 2000)Summary
The book examines the social and religious history of Peking during the Ming and Qing dynasties, with particular emphasis on the city's temples, and how they were used by both the Imperial Court and the local population. The text highlights the changing nature of Peking during this period, demonstrating how the city evolved from being a solely Imperial center into a diverse and complex urban environment.
Keywords:
Peking Temple, Ming Dynasty, Qing Dynasty, Religious Organization, Urban Society, Social History, Religious History
Review
"Susan Naquin describes Peking during the Ming (1368-1644) when...2024-10-2526 min