“What happens when a US cultural institution is imported to China, the purported chief rival of the United States in the twenty-first century?” asks Jin Feng in The Transpacific Flow, a short 100-page study of MFA programs in China.
In December 1937, Bernhard Sindberg arrives at a cement factory outside of Nanjing. He’s one of just two foreigners, and he gets there just weeks before the Japanese invade and commit the now infamous atrocities in the Chinese city.
There are over sixty million “left-behind children” in China at present. These children have been “left behind” by parents who moved for work, or sometimes school. Most left-behind children grow up in rural villages, while their parents sojourn in China’s megalopolises. The phenomenon has touched the lives of Chinese families across generations, but especially since the market reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era. One left-behind child of the 1990s was Yuan Yang, the author of Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order. While her parents pursued higher education, Yuan Yang spent her earliest years living in rural Sichuan Province with her maternal grandparents. Then, at the age of four, she reunited with her father and mother in England, where she would later naturalize as a British citizen.
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s 1987 novel Takaoka’s Travels opens like a straightforward volume of history: “On the twenty-seventh day of the first month in the sixth year of the Xiantong era, Prince Takaoka set sail from Guangzhou on a ship bound for Hindustan.” Takaoka was a real historical figure, son of the Japanese Emperor Heizei (ruled 806-809 CE).
Harry Franck died in 1962. This latest edition of his work consists of a few excerpts from his original Roving Through Southern China published in 1925. The original much larger book described two years of roving that took Franck as far as Yunnan, but these excerpts focus on the few months he and his family spent living in Canton in the winter of 1924. The excerpts are supplemented with some very useful footnotes from Paul French explaining some of the things Franck mentions that are no longer familiar to the modern reader.
Harsh V Pant, Madhuchanda Ghosh (eds) (Orient BlackSwan, May 2024)
The Indo-Pacific has emerged as a new theater of strategic and economic competition in the twenty-first century. With the rise of China and the decline of US influence in Asia, India–Japan relations and foreign policies have also been undergoing a significant transformation. This volume critically assesses India–Japan relations with a particular focus on the growing power shift in the Indo-Pacific region. It brings together a diverse group of scholars and analysts from both countries who examine aspects of bilateral relations, partnerships at the regional level, obstacles in the way of fully cementing these ties, and the concrete policies that both countries can undertake for a comprehensive development of India–Japan relations.
Although it is the Silk Road that captures most of the contemporary attention and discussion, it was in fact spices, not silk, that drove Western Europeans to seek routes to Asia. “Lightweight and durable, spices” writes Roger Crowley in his new history (appropriately entitled Spice), “were the first truly global commodity … they could be worth more than their weight in gold.”
Canadian lawyer Patrick Brode has written an interesting and fast-moving account of the little-known Allied war crimes and treason trials of Canadian-born Kanao Inouye, known as the Kamloops Kid by the Canadian soldiers who suffered beatings and torture by Inouye and his Japanese confederates in Hong Kong during World War II. It is a tale of war, suffering, racial animosity, inhumane conduct and, Brode believes, partial injustice.
India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange.
For years, Andreas von Buddenbrock has been filling sketchbook after sketchbook with ink drawings that all aim to capture the places and people he comes across; from market stalls and their vendors to high rises and dilapidated buildings to lush, winding nature trails.
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