In this episode, our host Lara Momesso interviews Dr Isabelle Cockel, an academic based in the UK, to discuss the wider impact of her academic work. Isabelle’s extensive research on marriage and labour migrants in Taiwan has evolved into efforts to raise awareness of migrant issues beyond the academic sphere both in Asia and Europe. She has written blogs featuring migrant voices, translated and promoted films about migrants, and, whenever possible, she has worked to assist migrants in Taiwan.

For those who are interested to know more about Isabelle’s work, here you can find some links:

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When defenders of the British royal family scrounged around for dirt on Wallis Simpson, the divorced U.S.-born fiancee of King Edward VIII, they often highlighted her year spent in China—often sharing scurrilous, and poorly-sourced–if not entirely unfounded–details of her time there.

China historian Paul French tries to set the record straight with Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St. Martins: 2024). Simpson managed to have a jam-packed year, with time spent in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, as different warlords fought for control of China.

Paul French was born in London and lived and worked in Shanghai for many years. His book Midnight in Peking was a New York Times Bestseller and a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. He received the Mystery Writers’ of America Edgar award for Best Fact Crime and a Crime Writers’ Association (UK) Dagger award for non-fiction. Both Midnight in Peking and his latest book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir are currently in development for film.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Her Lotus Year. 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.

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Justin K.H. Tse captures the voices of Cantonese Protestant Christians from the San Francisco, Vancouver, and Hong Kong metropolitan areas as they reflect on their efforts to adapt to secular communities while retaining their identity and beliefs.

In the context of the transpacific region between Asia and the Americas, the “Pacific Rim” refers to a window of time in which predominant narratives emphasized skilled migration and the rise of multicultural societies—the era before the rise of Chinese nationalism in 2012 and the Hong Kong protests. Diasporic Cantonese Protestant Christians of this time were frequently portrayed as a homogenous people bringing their Chinese culture and Christian communities from Hong Kong to cities such as Vancouver and San Francisco—sometimes contesting liberal developments like same-sex marriage but also offering new democratic awareness.

Sheets of Scattered Sand: Cantonese Protestants and the Secular Dream of the Pacific Rim (U Notre Dame Press, 2024) challenges that depiction of Cantonese Protestants with authentic voices from the community. Based on research done in the San Francisco Bay area, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, author Justin K.H. Tse finds that Cantonese Protestants consider themselves “sheets of scattered sand”—politically disparate and ideologically fragmented, but united in a sense of tension with the secular world. Tse’s work serves as an illuminating prequel to contemporary stories of the Hong Kong protests and a newly emergent Asian American politics, underscoring the importance of incorporating these voices in wider reflections on Christianity and secularity.

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What identity does the post-2000s Inland Tibet Class (ITC) generation mean? How do Sinophone-Tibetan films articulate the expression of such identity? How does affective visuality mediate the cultural, political, and gender identity formation of female artists of the post-2000s ITC generation?

Jinyan Zeng, a researcher at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, introduces her research in this podcast episode of the Nordic Asia Podcast, hosted by Ning Ao, PhD student at the Centre. The episode is produced by Lisa Sihvonen, student intern at the Centre. China has introduced a policy of Inland Tibet Class (ITC) to educate talented Tibetan pupils from Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) in Chinese language boarding schools since 1985. Jinyan Zeng’s recent article Visualising the Post-2000s Inland Tibet Class Generation focuses on the experiences of female artists, filmmakers, and writers of the ITC who were born in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Following the experience of the Sinophone-Tibetan filmmaker Kangdrun in a Chinese language education environment, her films, and Tibetan cultural communities, Jinyan Zeng’s research contributes to a fresh understanding of modern Tibetan authors’ generational relationships; the expressive styles of female Sinophone-Tibetan authors.

Her gender analysis of the ITC generation critically contributes to Tibetan studies and China studies both theoretically and methodologically. A new volume titled Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (Bloomsbury Academic), co-edited by Jinyan Zeng with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen came out in December 2024.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners:

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What do we get if we combine stories about a merchant, an exile, an activist, a pop star, a doctor, and a president together into one book? Dr. Niki J. P. Alsford, Professor of Asia Pacific studies and head of Asia Pacific Institutes at the University of Central Lancashire, did exactly that and more with his most recent book Taiwan Lives: A Social and Political History (University of Washington Press, 2024).

In his book Niki J. P. Alsford explores Taiwan's historical journey from Japanese colonization in 1895 to its modern political and social developments under President Tsai Ing-wen. The book uniquely presents Taiwan’s history through the narratives of 24 individuals, offering a diverse perspective on significant events, social transitions, and the island's evolving identity. This approach provides readers with a humanized and nuanced understanding of Taiwan's past and present, making the work both informative and engaging for those interested in Taiwanese history and its contemporary affairs.

The episode is hosted by Assoc. Prof. Linas Didvalis from Vytautas Magnus University's Centre for Asian Studies.

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During the Second World War, FDR promised thousands of tons of US material to Chiang Kai Shek in order to keep China in the war and keep Japan distracted. But how would the US get it there? The only land route had been cut off by the Japanese invasion, leaving only one other option: air.

For the next three years, US planes flew “The Hump”: an air route from Assam to Chongqing, over the dangerous Himalayan mountains and Burmese jungles. Countless planes were lost, whether on a Himalayan mountainside or deep in the jungle.

That tale is the subject of Skies of Thunder: The Deadly World War II Mission Over the Roof of the World (Viking: 2024), by Caroline Alexander, who joins us today.

Caroline Alexander is the author of the bestselling The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (Knopf: 1998), which has been translated into thirteen languages. She writes frequently for The New Yorker and National Geographic, and she is the author of four other books, including Mrs. Chippy’s Last Expedition (Harper Perennial: 1999), the journal of the Endurance ship’s cat.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Skies of Thunder. 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.

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To the untrained eye there’s nothing as unexciting as tofu, normally regarded as a tasteless, beige, congealed mass of crushed, boiled soybeans. However, tofu more than stands up on its own. Reviled for decades as a vegetarian oddity, the brave, wobbly block has made a comeback.

Tofu: a Culinary History (Reaktion, 2024) by Russell Thomas is a global history of bean curd stretches from ancient creation myths and tomb paintings, via Chinese poetry and Japanese Buddhist cuisine, to deportations in Soviet Russia and struggles for power on the African continent. It describes the potentially non-Chinese roots of tofu, its myriad types, why ‘eating tofu’ is an insult in Cantonese, and its environmental impact today. Warning: this book actually makes tofu exciting. It’s anything but bland.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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In this episode, our host, Ti-han, invited Taiwanese Queer author, Kevin Chen, to talk about his LGBTQ novel, Ghost Town (Europa Editions, 2022) 鬼地方 and its fever worldwide. In our conversation, Kevin shared with us how he first “come out” as a gay writer in Taiwan in the 90s, and how his writings was influenced by key Taiwanese LGBTQ authors and continue to be shaped by his migratory experiences in Berlin. He also told us how he thinks translation and the transability of a literary work can be useful in terms of authors’ impacts on society. If you’re a fan of Kevin’s writing, you certainly can’t miss this episode!

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The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice (Wiley, 2024) describes former CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) Ken Wilcox's firsthand challenges he encountered in four years “on the ground” trying to establish a joint venture between SVB and the Chinese government to fund local innovation design―and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) efforts to systematically sabotage the project and steal SVB's business model. This book provides actionable advice drawn from meticulous notes Wilcox took from interviews with people from all walks of Chinese life, including Party and non-Party members, the business elite, and domestic workers.

Describing a China he found fascinating and maddeningly complex, this book explores topics including:

Engrossing, enlightening, and entertaining, The China Business Conundrum: Ensure That "Win-Win" Doesn't Mean Western Companies Lose Twice is an essential cautionary tale and guidebook for anyone seeking to do business in or with China, and an essential first-person account for academics trying to understand China’s unique political economy and development trajectory.

Ken Wilcox was the CEO of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) from 2001 to 2011, then the CEO of SVB’s joint venture with Shanghai Pudong Development Bank (SPDB-SVB) in Shanghai until 2015, followed by four years as its Vice Chairman. He currently serves on the boards of the Asia Society of Northern California, the Asian Art Museum, and UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center, as well as Columbia Lake Partners, a European venture-debt fund. He is on the Board of Advisors of the Fudan University School of Management in Shanghai and teaches as an Adjunct Professor at U.C. Berkeley.

Ken holds a PhD in German from Ohio State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He is a former member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. He has given numerous speeches in both English and Chinese, published a variety of articles in the banking press, and recently wrote the management book “Leading Through Culture: How Real Leaders Create Cultures That Motivate People to Achieve Great Things” (Waterside Productions, 2020) and its accompanying workbook, “How About You?” (Waterside Productions, 2023). The father of two sons, he lives in San Francisco with his wife, Ruth, and several antique cars.

For more of Ken’s insights, follow his substack.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.

Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s tech sector include From Click to Boom, on the political economy of e-commerce in China, Trafficking Data, on how Chinese and American firms exploit user data, The Tao of Alibaba, on Alibaba’s business model and organizational culture, Surveillance State, on China’s digital surveillance, Prototype Nation, on the culture and politics of China’s innovation economy.

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The redistribution of political and economic rights is inherently unequal in autocratic societies. Autocrats routinely divide their populations into included and excluded groups, creating particularistic citizenship through granting some groups access to rights and redistribution while restricting or denying access to others. This book asks: why would a government with powerful tools of exclusion expand access to socioeconomic citizenship rights? And when autocratic systems expand redistribution, whom do they choose to include?

In Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship: Security, Development, and Local Membership in China (Stanford UP, 2024), Samantha A. Vortherms examines the crucial case of China—where internal citizenship regimes control who can and cannot become a local citizen through the household registration system (hukou)—and uncovers how autocrats use such institutions to create particularistic membership in citizenship. Vortherms shows how local governments explicitly manipulate local citizenship membership not only to ensure political security and stability, but also, crucially, to advance economic development. Vortherms demonstrates how autocrats use differentiated citizenship to control degrees of access to rights and thus fulfill the authoritarian bargain and balance security and economic incentives. This book expands our understanding of individual-state relations in both autocratic contexts and across a variety of regime types.

Samantha Vortherms is an assistant professor at University of California, Irvine's Department of Political Science. She is a faculty affiliate at UCI’s Long U.S.-China Institute; its Philosophy, Political Science, and Economics program; and is a Non-resident Scholar at UC San Diego’s 21st Century China Center. The primary focus of her research is on how processes of economic development affect institutional change and the relationship between the individual and the state. Her research has been published in journals such as The China Quarterly, World Development, Review of International Political Economy, Business and Politics, and Urban Studies. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, her M.A. in International Relations at the University of Chicago, her A.M. in Public Policy from University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, and her B.A. from the University of Richmond.

Interviewer Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of San Francisco, a nonresident scholar at the UCSD 21st Century China Center, an alumnus of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China Relations, and is currently a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions. His research focuses on the economics of information, incentives, and institutions, primarily as applied to the development and governance of China. He created the unique Master’s of Science in Applied Economics at the University of San Francisco, which teaches the conceptual frameworks and practical data analytics skills needed to succeed in the digital economy.

Lorentzen’s other NBN interviews relating to China’s economy and social control include Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, on governance and quantification, Outsourcing Repression, on the use of nonstate actors for coercion, How China Escaped Shock Therapy, on China’s marketization procession, Invisible China, on the urban-rural divide, and Welfare for Autocrats, on the strategic targeting of poverty assistance.

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