New Books in East Asian Studies

Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) (Cambria Press, 2023) is a fascinating book that sits at the intersection of Buddhist studies and premodern Korean literary history. Gregory N. Evon’s book unfolds in two parts: the first charts the history of the place, position, and status of Buddhism in Chosŏn Korea, charting how Buddhism went from being outright attacked to grudgingly tolerated. The second part looks at how this background and court intrigue led the Chosŏn official Kim Manjung 金萬重 (1637–1692) — someone typically thought of as a stalwart Neo-Confucian — to find value in Buddhism, so much so that he wove into his novel Lady Sa’s Journey to the South (Sassi namjŏng-gi 謝氏南征記) the idea that Buddhism might even hold the key to save Confucianism. Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea should be of interest to those interested in the history of Buddhism, Chosŏn Korea, and premodern literature. It should particularly appeal to readers who might be more familiar with Kim Manjung’s more well-known work, A Nine Cloud Dream (Kuunmong 九雲夢). For such readers in particular, this book offers a new and more complex way to think about this author — and the place of Buddhism in early modern Korea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship–if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-Sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994. But who was Kim Il-Sung? How did someone who spent most of his early years in nearby Manchuria end up running North Korea? And how was Kim able to not just secure his own position, but also the position of his son (and then, in turn, his grandson)? Kim is the subject of Fyodor Tertitsky’s latest book, Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung (Hurst, 2025). Fyodor Tertitskiy has been living in South Korea for more than a decade, where he researches North Korean political, social and military history. He has authored several books in English and Korean, including Soviet-North Korean Relations During the Cold War (Routledge: 2024) and The North Korean Army: History, Structure, Daily Life (Routledge: 2023). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Accidental Tyrant. 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/east-asian-studies

Japan at War, 1914-1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience. The author argues that war was central to Japanese life in this period--the era when Japan rose and fell as a world power. The volume examines how World War I set off profound changes that led to the rise of a politicized military, aggressive imperial expansion, and the militarization of Japanese social, political, and economic life. War was extraordinarily popular, which helped confirm Japan's aggressive imperialism in the 1930s and war across the Asia-Pacific in the 1940s. It took a defeat by 1945 and occupation through 1952 to undo war as a national concern and to remake Japan into a peaceful nation-state. In telling this story of Japan in war and peace, this book highlights the importance of Japan in the creation of the modern world. This study of political power and its influences in domestic and foreign affairs will be of great value to nonspecialist readers who are interested in this period, undergraduate and postgraduate students in introductory classes, and scholars interested in Japanese history and political, military, and international history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Often I will find in a chronology or a biography, you know, official materials, evidence that because I have other evidence, it’s meaningful in a way that maybe the people who edited those collections might not have expected. That’s the idea of mosaic theory – you bring together many pieces of evidence, even small ones, to bring the full meaning out. — Joseph Torigian, NBN interview May 2025 In his new book, The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping (Stanford University Press, 2025), Joseph Torigian leads readers deep into the complex work of historical reconstruction – a process he metaphorically describes as mosaic theory. Studying elite politics in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Torigian explains, isn’t about uncovering one decisive document; it’s about piecing together partial, often contradictory fragments like the Li Rui diaries, edited speeches, and scattered archival traces into a fuller, richer picture. Torigian’s approach builds on foundational insights from political scientists like Paul Pierson and China historians Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, whose empirical rigor has long shaped the field of CCP elite politics. Following this tradition, Torigian resists simple or deterministic narratives, showing that even dramatic moments like the Tiananmen protests must be understood as products of internal fractures, improvisation, and deep uncertainty – not as inevitable climaxes. In this interview, Torigian discusses how his course “The Revisionists” invites students to wrestle with the ethical tension between judging and understanding. His own scholarship, he explains, aims to provide the tools, context, and historical reconstruction that allow readers to form their own moral judgments – without handing them a prefabricated verdict. Ultimately, Torigian’s book and his public reflections invite us to step back from binaries of hero and villain, reformer and hardliner, or loyalist and dissenter, and to see history as a web of improvisation, contradiction, and meaning. He suggests that the historian’s role is not to dictate the final moral judgment, but to parse the evidence by piecing together and coloring a mosaic that illuminates the pressures and choices that shaped the past – leaving the moral reckoning, and the hard questions, to the rest of us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global South.” But there were periods where things seemed a bit rosier. For about a decade, between 1988 and 1998, relations between India and China thawed—and prompted heady predictions of an Asian century. Vappala Balachandran, who was part of those off-line discussions with China, writes about the ups and downs of China-India relations in his latest book India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History (Hurst: 2025) Vappala Balachandran is a columnist, former special secretary for the Indian Cabinet Secretariat, and author of four books on Indian security, strategy and intelligence. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of India and China at Odds in the Asian Century. 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/east-asian-studies

This podcast episode is hosted by Toomas Hanso International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) who is talking to Urmas Hõbepappel. Urmas is an analyst at the University of Tartu Asia Centre and a researcher at the ICDS. His academic work deals with political psychology, collective identity, and history narratives in China, but this episode focuses on his upcoming article on the psychological function of coping in Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to legitimise its rule. Starting from the very general question of what the century of humiliation is, who are the main historical culprits in humiliating China, and to what extent is Russia different from other colonial powers, we delve into more specific aspects of humiliation as a psychological phenomenon. Hõbepappel explains why we must pay attention to the psychological aspect of coping to understand how humiliation legitimises CCP’s hold on power - by reminding its people of past humiliation(s), the CCP effectively generates unease and anxiety among its populace that needs to be mitigated to have a normal life. The CCP has so far been able to administer just the right amount of poison (the national humiliation narrative) not to kill the patient and provided just the right amount of medicine (politically correct coping mechanisms) to keep its hold on power stable. In addition, as Hõbepappel argues, the psychology of humiliation in China is understudied and surrounded by several misconceptions. For example, in the study of Chinese nationalism, humiliation is often equated to other affective states like shame, anger, sense of inferiority and insecurity. While these emotions are indeed often associated with the nationalist sentiments in China, they are psychologically distinct and should also be analysed as such. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan during the eighteenth century and prospered as a free-trade emporium in maritime East Asia. Mo Jiu and his son, Mo Tianci, maintained an independent polity through ambiguous and simultaneous allegiances to the Cochinchinese regime of southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Siam, and the Dutch East India Company. A shared value system was forged among their multiethnic and multi-confessional residents via elite Chinese culture, facilitating closer business ties to Qing China. The story of this remarkable settlement sheds light on a transitional period in East Asian history, when the dominance of the Chinese state, merchants, and immigrants gave way to firmer state boundaries in mainland Southeast Asia and Western dominance on the seas. Xing Hang is Associate Professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia Ghassan Moazzin is Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Gennifer Weisenfeld, Walter H. Annenberg Distinguished Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University, dives into the evolution of Japanese advertising design. She discusses how this commercial art shaped national identity and ideologies from the early 1900s to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Weisenfeld reveals the interplay between fine art and advertising, and how brands like Morinaga navigated cultural narratives. The compelling analysis connects advertising design to Japan's broader historical context, illustrating its role in both nation-building and consumer capitalism.

Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025) uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogācāra social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the violent Social Darwinist logic of the survival of the fittest. Its proponents were convinced that the root cause of crisis in both China and the West was epistemic—an unexamined faith in one common, objective world and a subject-object divide. This dualistic paradigm, in their view, had dire consequences, including moral egoism, competition for material wealth, and racial war. Yogācāra insights about plurality, interdependence, and intersubjectivity, however, had the capacity to awaken the world from these deadly dreams. Jessica Zu reconstructs this account of modern Yogācāra philosophy, arguing that it offers new vocabularies with which to reconceptualize equality and freedom. Yogācāra thinking, she shows, diffracts the illusions of individual identity, social categories, and material wealth into aggregated, recurring karmic processes. It then guides the reassembly of a complex society through nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and collaborative actions, sustained by new behavior patterns and modes of thought. Demonstrating why Chinese Buddhist social philosophy offers powerful resources for social justice and liberation today, Just Awakening invites readers to think with modern Yogācāra philosophers about other ways of building egalitarian futures. Jessica X. Zu is assistant professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California, Dornsife. She received her Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University in 2020, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2003. She is an intellectual historian and a scholar of Buddhist philosophy. Her research uncovers surprising ways that ancient Buddhist processual philosophy was reinvented by marginalized groups to seek justice, build community, and change the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies

Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explores the lived experiences of six women, including the author herself, with physical disabilities in China. The book provides in-depth descriptions of each woman's experiences in different aspects and analyze the commonalities and differences in their experiences through their life courses. The book explores answers to some of these questions: How do physically disabled women make sense of their experiences? What are some of the empowering and/or disempowering moments/events in their lives, if any? What are disabled women's experiences in terms of education, employment, relationships, family life, and social activism? How does some of the disabled women in the book become motivated and mobilized to work on disability issues? This book serves to amplify Chinese disabled women's stories and make their presence more visible. Too often, dominant narratives and depictions of disability are written by people without disabilities, while disabled people's voices are either invisible or secondary. Sadly, this phenomenon is not new and disability advocates have been faced with these types of narratives for quite some years. To have one's own voice and speak up is to claim subjectivity, agency, and power. Different stories told by women with disabilities themselves can enrich our understanding of disability and gender. These stories have the potential to challenge dominant and oppressive narratives prevalent in our ableist societies. The stories included in this book could provide space and potential to connect with disabled people (people with either visible or invisible disabilities) elsewhere. Women's empowering experiences and encounters shown in this book could inspire relevant stakeholders to think of ways to better understand and support disabled women in their environments. This book will have wide implications for readers not only in China, but also in other parts of the world. Many disability stories of exclusion and/or empowerment of the world are still hidden and not reflected upon. The author invites readers to reflect on their own experiences and how societies have impacted the life courses of individuals with or without disabilities in their respective social, political, economic, and cultural environments. Cultural and social change around disability can start with anyone who are touched by genuine stories of vulnerability and reflexivity, as the ones to be shared in this book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies