Some years back as a graduate student enrolled in a mandatory DEI training for college teaching, I distinctly recall raising a question about dealing with the unabashed misogyny, depictions of sexual violence and child abuse bursting out of the primary sources so often used in the history classroom. Encountering More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery, triggered the memory, especially when faced with an array of humorous yet disturbing stories about everyday social relations in 17th-century China.

For two decades, Singaporean diplomat and author Kishore Mahbubani has been a leading voice among a growing group of intellectuals and pundits publicizing the “Asian Twenty-First Century”, a triumphalist arc where Asian powers—especially a rising China—have cast off the shackles of Western colonialism to assume their “rightful” place atop in the global hierarchy of nations and civilizations. Mahbubani’s oeuvre, dominated by his series of bestsellers popularizing a tale of Western decline and Asia’s rise, has won recognition from a host of audiences ranging from American internationalists and Chinese nationalists.