Focusing on counter-narratives that challenge or undermine the grand nationalist Chinese theme, this book studies the ways Sinophone artists, writers, and other cultural agents reimagine a future (world) society that can be more tolerant of cultural, ecological, ethnic, gender and ideological diversity.
“Everybody has their own Hong Kong story,” begins the introduction to Don Mak’s Once Upon a Hong Kong. Over a series of 18 illustrations, Mak has the opportunity to tell his story. Mak takes readers on a journey through daily Hong Kong life—from Hong Kong Park to Temple Street to Lantau Island.
Zhang Ling is so renowned a writer in China that one of her books was adapted to film as China’s first IMAX movie. She has written nine novels, as well as a number of collections of stories, all in Chinese. But Zhang Ling has not lived in China since the mid-1980s, when she immigrated to…
A shimmering, fairy-tale city of glass towers where nothing is quite as it seems: this is the vision of Hong Kong presented by award-winning writer Dorothy Tse in her first solo novel.
Sometimes one ends up reviewing the book one read rather than the one that was written. Lin Zhang’s The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy is more sociology than tech, more labor theory than business. But it is also a granular, grass-roots, bottom-up view of the past couple of decades of…
Socialist women have been erased from the history of the international women’s movement. When we write them back in, and center Asia in the process, we arrive at a richer, more complex, and more accurate understanding of global feminisms.
There is a general consensus that in 1820, China had the world’s largest economy. By the end of the century, it was suffering from an existential crisis. Much ink, scholarly and otherwise, has been spilled as to what went “wrong” and why; somewhat less common are discussions as to how China came to terms with…
The “six” in Dinner for Six is the number at the assembled table when a Chinese widow and widower form a temporary family with their respective son and daughter each. Author Lu Min, in this translation from Nicky Harman and Helen Wang, first focuses on the widow’s son Ash, who becomes shaped by all the…
Can Xue’s experimental novella Mystery Train opens in total darkness: a chicken-farm employee named Scratch wakes up to find himself “in one of [the] pitch-dark sleeper cars” of a train. Confused, Scratch gets out of bed and looks at his wrist to check the time, but is unable to make out the face of his…
From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. Problematizing worldwide euphoria about digital entrepreneurship while complicating the dichotomy of “China threat vs. China model”, The Labor of Reinvention attends…
Chinese Art Since 1970: The M+ Sigg Collection and its sister volume, M+ Collections Highlights are the handsome (and befittingly large) catalogs for M+, Hong Kong’s Herzog & de Meuron-designed museum of modern and contemporary visual culture which opened to the public in November of 2021.
On 12 March 1867, an American merchant ship, the Rover, capsized near Kenting, on Taiwan’s southern coast. A handful of survivors managed to come ashore, but almost all were promptly killed by a local indigenous tribe.
Hospital by acclaimed Chinese science-fiction writer Han Song is a kafkaesque trip through a fictional hospital turned nation-state that explores the Buddhist philosophy on suffering, the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, and the mental state of patients who suffer from chronic conditions.
In 2010, Ping An took over Shenzhen Development Bank, ending an experiment that had never been tried before, and not been tried since: a foreign company owning and managing a Chinese bank. Newbridge Capital, a private equity firm, shocked the financial world when it agreed to take over the bank five years earlier—and successfully made…
On 1 January 2017, Daniel Bell was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University—the first foreign dean of a political science faculty in mainland China’s history. In The Dean of Shandong, Bell chronicles his experiences as what he calls “a minor bureaucrat”, offering an inside account of the…