New Books in Chinese Studies

Command of Commerce: America's Enduring Economic Power Advantage over China (Oxford UP, 2025) provides a systematic reevaluation of the balance of economic power between the U.S. and China. The conventional wisdom is that China's economic power is very close to America's and that Washington cannot undertake a broad economic cutoff of China without hurting itself as much or more. This book demonstrates the conventional wisdom is wrong on both fronts. In peacetime, America's lead in economic power over China is more dramatic than commonly appreciated because the vast majority of the firms that drive global commerce, particularly in high-technology sectors, are based in the U.S. and its allies. China's economic capacity has also been overestimated because Beijing manipulates its economic data and because comparing China's uniquely structured economy with other leading economies is challenging. These facts are necessary to understand why Washington has been able to target and undermine individual Chinese companies and even entire sectors in recent years while facing so little retaliation from Beijing. America's advantage in economic power over China would be even more marked in wartime. Our analysis indicates Washington could impose massive, disproportionate harm on Beijing if it were to impose a broad economic cutoff of China in cooperation with its allies or via a distant naval blockade. Across six scenarios, China's short-term economic losses from a broad cutoff range from being 5 to 11 times higher than America's. And in the long run, America and almost all its allies would return to previous economic growth levels; in contrast, China's growth would be permanently degraded Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region.King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cordelia. Goneril and Regan win the kingdom through flattery, Cordelia’s honesty is rewarded with exile. That opening–and the other developments in Lear’s tragic story–hold special resonance for Nan Z. Da, who uses Shakespeare’s play as a way to grapple with China’s history, and her own personal experiences with it. The result is The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025)Nan Z. Da is associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-US Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (Columbia University Press: 2018) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Chile holds the distinction of being the first South American nation to forge diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China, as well as the first in Latin America to enter into a free trade agreement with China. Despite the nearly 24-hour journey required to travel between the two countries, this considerable distance has not hindered the expanding interactions between them. The presence of various waves of the Chinese diaspora in Chile, while often overlooked, is a real aspect of the country's demographic landscape. In this episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, Maria Montt Strabucchi, an Associate Professor at the Institute of History at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (Pontifical Catholic University of Chile) and Vice President for International Affairs at the same University, discusses the deepening connections between Chile and China and their implications for the development of China-related studies and education within Chile. Maria Montt Strabucchi served as the alternate director of the “Millennium Nucleus Impacts of China in Latin America (ICLAC)” project, which is supported by the Chilean National Agency for Research and Development. This initiative provides free online courses in Spanish aimed at enhancing understanding of China and has also developed online investment maps to illustrate China's influence in Chile. Her research interests encompass the portrayal of "China" and "Chineseness," as well as the dynamics of Chinese-Latin American relations, particularly in the context of Chile. Her 2023 publication, “Representation of China in Latin American Literature (1987-2016)” (Liverpool University Press), is available as an open-access resource. Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki (Finland). Since 2023, she has been involved in the EUVIP: The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe coordination and support action 10107906 (HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ACCESS-03). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply divided. They agreed that China had to reform its economic system and move toward more marketization - but struggled over how to go about it. Should China destroy the core of the socialist system through shock therapy, or should it use the institutions of the planned economy as market creators?With hindsight, the historical record proves the high stakes behind the question: China embarked on an economic expansion commonly described as unprecedented in scope and pace, whereas Russia's economy collapsed under shock therapy. Based on extensive research, including interviews with key Chinese and international participants and World Bank officials as well as insights gleaned from unpublished documents, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (Routledge, 2021) charts the debate that ultimately enabled China to follow a path to gradual reindustrialization. Beyond shedding light on the crossroads of the 1980s, it reveals the intellectual foundations of state-market relations in reform-era China through a longue durée lens.Isabella M. Weber is a political economist working on China, global trade and the history of economic thought. She is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Research Leader for China at the Political Economy Research Institute.Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new Master's program in Applied Economics focused on the digital economy. His own research focuses on China’s political economy and governance. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history.In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Grace widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.Grace Huang is professor of government at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. She likes to tackle a range of intellectual questions, including: what are the conditions in leadership that promote collective inspiration versus collective hysteria or violence? How do talented subordinates weigh their ability to modify a leader’s deleterious actions against their moral culpability of participating in those policies? How does a particular democratic ideology and culture shape the choices of working mothers, and how do such mothers make decisions about care, family, and work? Her research interests include political leadership, the political uses of shame in Chinese leadership, and gender, labor, and the family. She can be reached at ghuang@stlawu.edu.Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one to two million azoospermic men--those who are unable to produce their own sperm--the demand remains insatiable. China’s twenty-two sperm banks cannot keep up, spurring sperm bank directors to publicly lament chronic shortages and even warn of a national ‘sperm crisis’ (jingzi weiji).Ayo Wahlberg book Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China (U California Press, 2018) explores the issues behind the crisis, including declining sperm quality in the country due to environmental pollution, as well as a chronic national shortage of donors. In doing so, Wahlberg outlines the specific style of Chinese sperm banking that has emerged, shaped by the particular cultural, juridical, economic and social configurations that make up China’s restrictive reproductive complex. Good Quality shows how this high-throughput style shapes the ways in which men experience donation and how sperm is made available to couples who can afford it.Victoria Oana Lupascu is a PhD candidate in dual-title doctoral program in Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of interest include 20th and 21st Chinese literature and visual art, medical humanities and Global South studies.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding relationship with the sea. Through the lives of pirates, maritime advisors, cartographers, admirals, writers, and travelers, Ronald C. Po brings maritime China to life — revealing a world far more connected and sea-orientated than often assumed. Richly detailed and captivating, Shaping the Blue Dragon should interest those in Chinese history, East Asian history, and the maritime world. But this is also a book for anyone who loves great stories. Packed with figures from a pirate king ruling the South China Seas to a gentry son-turned-traveler shipwrecked on his voyage to Southeast Asia, Shaping the Blue Dragon is a compelling blend of narrative and analysis. During our conversation we also talked about Po's first book, The Blue Frontier: Maritime Vision and Power in the Qing Empire (Cambridge UP, 2018) (a must-read!). Listeners who want to know more about this book in particular should also check out the episode about the book The Chinese History Podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Bonny Ling, Executive Director of Work Better Innovations, brings her expertise in human rights and migrant worker legislation to the discussion. She shares insights on the complex realities of migrant workers in Taiwan's supply chains, highlighting their significant roles beyond low-wage labor, particularly in critical sectors. The conversation addresses Taiwan's legislative frameworks and the ethical responsibilities of businesses to improve labor standards, while calling for clear guidelines from the government to align local practices with international human rights norms.

In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urban society. Throughout their long history, Chinese cities have been shaped by interactions with those around the world, and the story of urban China is a crucial part of the history of how the world has become an urban society. Exploring the global connections of Chinese cities, the urban system, urban governance, and daily life alongside introductions to major historical debates and extracts from primary sources, this is essential reading for all those interested in China and in urban history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

How do states advance their national security interests? Conventional wisdom holds that states must court the risk of catastrophic war by “tying their hands” to credibly protect their interests. Dan Reiter overturns this perspective with the compelling argument that states craft flexible foreign policies to avoid unwanted wars. Through a comprehensive analysis of key international crises, including the Berlin, Taiwan Straits, and Cuban Missile Crises, and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Reiter provides new perspectives on the causes of wars, the role of international alliances, foreign troop deployments, leader madness, and the impact of AI on international relations. With critical insights into contemporary foreign policy challenges, such as America’s role in NATO, the risks of war with China, containing a resurgent Russia, and the dangers of nuclear war, Untied Hands: How States Avoid the Wrong Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how states can effectively manage international crises while avoiding the wrong wars. Dan Reiter is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Political Science at Emory University. Leo Bader is a senior at Wesleyan University studying political theory and history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies