Cultural Mavericks traces the rise of independent bookselling in China over the last twenty years. That such a rise should merit a two-hundred-page academic study is, at first glance, counter-intuitive; this, after all, has been an era in which online bookstores and other digital reading solutions have, in the west, made independent bookselling seem an…
High Lands, Pure Earth foregrounds Tibetan experiences of urban transitions in China’s late-reform period. In the 21st century, China’s accelerated urbanization has transformed the Tibetan Plateau. Yet Tibetan urban experiences continue to be profoundly shaped by senses of being in the world that long predate Tibet’s inclusion into the modern Chinese nation-state. Eveline Washul adopts…
In 2020, when the pandemic forced the world into lockdown, M Lin—who had moved to New York City from Beijing first as a film student—began writing fiction. The result was the stunning collection of nine stories titled The Memory Museum. These stories touch upon a wide range of experiences confronting China’s post-90s generation: seeking a…
In one sense the title of Xiaobing Li’s biography of Chinese Admiral Liu Huaqing, China’s Mahan, is somewhat misleading because the author concludes that Admiral Liu has more in common with the onetime commander of the Soviet Navy Sergey Gorshkov than with the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan. Admiral Liu himself stated…
In one of the cases of history not so much repeating itself as rhyming, the current trend of Chinese Americans moving to China, either for opportunity or to avoid perceived threats, is hardly a new phenomenon. Historian Charlotte Brooks tells such a story from a century ago in her new book, The Moys of New…
Jennifer Wong’s Light Year is a meditation on separation and exile, tracking the concerns of other authors of the Hong Kong diaspora. The title is especially appropriate for the theme: a unit of measurement that calculates distance through the optics of speed and time. Indeed, the poetry focuses on the geographical distance between the United…
English language children’s picture books that center around Asian folktales and themes are no longer as uncommon as they once were. Yet it’s still rare to find collections of folktales that originate from Asian countries themselves. Now David Conger, Liana Romulo, Joan Suyenaga and Marian Davies Toth have come together in Asian Folktales for Children…
Leading the vanguard of his armies across India, Genghis Khan suddenly encountered an uncanny animal, blue‑green in colour, with the body of a bull, the tail of a horse, and a single horn. The Great Khan declared this apparition inauspicious, turned his reins, and led his army back to Mongolia. In The Khan and the Unicorn,…
Observing the Unseen explores how literate and marginally literate people in China between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries investigated the invisible, the ubiquitous, and the inexplicable. Whether through medical encyclopedias, daily-use almanacs, or novels and anecdotes, readers pursued knowledge of the natural world with curiosity shaped as much by wonder as by empiricism. Rather than privileging…
It’s one of the biggest questions in economic history: How did a richer, more advanced China fall behind Europe? Why was Europe the home of the Industrial Revolution, and not China? And what does that journey tell us about politics and culture?
The art historian Ernst Gombrich once observed that in Chinese landscape painting, the aim is not to reproduce the appearance of things, but to convey the rhythm and spirit of nature. Among genres of traditional Chinese art, landscape painting is widely regarded as a central tradition and admired for its qualities beyond the aesthetics, with…
This groundbreaking study examines the poetry of Yang Mu, a pivotal Taiwanese writer who used Chinese literary forms to challenge Sinocentric narratives during Taiwan’s White Terror and democratization. Drawing on postcolonial theory and close reading, it explores his poetic use of ambivalence, mimicry, and minor narrative to resist cultural hegemony and reclaim historical memory.
My Destiny is the third Liang Xiaosheng book brought into English translation, but the first novel. It follows the short story collection The Black Button published by Panda Books in 1992, and the memoir Confessions of a Red Guard from the University of Hawai’i Press in 2018. The latter and My Destiny are both translations…
Can someone be Chinese and Muslim? For some academics, this has been a surprisingly fraught question, with some asserting that Chinese Muslims are not really Chinese, or not really Muslim.
Wu Ming-Yi is one of Taiwan’s most celebrated contemporary writers, whose work bridges literature, environmental thought, and history with a global perspective. The Wu Ming-Yi Companion, edited by Michael Berry and Kuei-fen Chiu, is the first comprehensive volume in English dedicated to his oeuvre, offering new scholarship from leading researchers across Taiwan, Hong Kong, North…