New Books in East Asian Studies

Today, the Hong Kong Philharmonic is one of the world’s great symphony orchestras. But when John Duffus landed in Hong Kong in 1979 as the Philharmonic’s general manager–its fifth in as many years–he quickly learned just how much work needed to be done to make a Western symphony orchestra work in a majority Chinese city.

John Duffus’s memoir Backstage in Hong Kong: A Life with the Philharmonic, Broadway Musicals and Classical Superstars (Blacksmith: 2024) charts his life from running the Philharmonic, bringing acts like the Three Tenors and Cats to Asia, and his thoughts on the Hong Kong Cultural Center and the West Kowloon Cultural District.

John joins the show today to explain what the general manager of an orchestra actually does, the trickiest problems he had to solve in Hong Kong and China, and his thoughts on whether Hong Kong is truly a “cultural wasteland.”

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Backstage in Hong Kong. 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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Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) offers a trenchant and singular analysis of the convergence of digital media, feminist and queer culture, and rights consciousness in China. Jia Tan examines the formation of what she calls “rights feminism,” or the emergence of rights consciousness in Chinese feminist formations, as well as queer activism and rights advocacy. Expanding on feminist and queer theory of masquerade, she develops the notion of “digital masquerade” to theorize the co-constitutive role of digital technology as assemblage and entanglement in the articulation of feminism, queerness, and rights.

Drawing from interviews with various feminist and queer media practitioners, participant observation at community events, and detailed analyses of a variety of media forms such as social media, electronic journals, digital filmmaking, film festivals, and dating app videos, Jia Tan captures the feminist, queer, and rights articulations that are simultaneously disruptive of and conditioned by state censorship, technological affordances, and dominant social norms.

Jia Tan is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Qing Shen is a PhD candidate in anthropology at Uppsala University, Sweden.

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Dr. Dennis Wuerthner’s Poems and Stories for Overcoming Idleness: P’ahan chip by Yi Illo (U Hawaii Press, 2024) is the first complete English translation of one of the oldest extant Korean source materials. The scholar, Yi Illo (1152–1220), filled this collection with poetry by himself and diverse writers, ranging from Chinese master poets and Koryŏ-era kings, to long-forgotten lower-level officials and rural scholars. The verse compositions are embedded in short narratives by Yi that provide context for the poems, a combination called sihwa.

The book contains a comprehensive introduction that explores the lives of Yi Illo and his contemporaries, and the political landscape at the time this collection came into being. The translation itself is richly annotated to provide context to the allusions and to explore possible meanings.

The publication is an excellent resource for readers interested in the political and social environment of the Koryŏ Dynasty (918–1392) and for anyone with a love for poetry and prose.

Dr. Dennis Wuerthner is assistant professor of East Asian literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures, at Boston University. He holds a PhD from Ruhr University in Bochum and his main field of research is Korean literature, history and culture in a broader East Asian context.

Leslie Hickman is a translator and writer. She has an MA in Korean Studies from Yonsei University and lives in Seoul, South Korea. You can follow her activities at https://twitter.com/AJuseyo.

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Why should we focus on Taiwan to understand the future risks facing the world? Professor Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London, presents a compelling case for this in his latest book, Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Dictate Our Future, published by St. Martin's Press.

Why Taiwan Matters provides critical insights into the factors behind today's tense geopolitical climate. Brown examines how Taiwan navigates its position at the center of a dangerous international standoff and how the global community can better understand the tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Set for release in January 2025, this book serves as an essential guide for anyone looking to understand Taiwan's unique story.

The episode is hosted by PhD candidate Jiabin Song from Vytautas Magnus University's Centre for Asian Studies.

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In 1955, the leaders of 29 Asian and African countries flock to the small city of Bandung, Indonesia, for the first-ever Afro-Asian conference. India and its prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru played a key role in organizing the conference, and Bandung is now seen as a part of Nehru’s push to create a non-Western foreign policy that aligned with neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union.

But as Andrea Benvenuti’s Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy (Oxford UP, 2024) points out, Nehru wasn’t actually keen on the idea at all. Nor was Nehru keen on a second summit, feeling that the summit merely highlighted divisions rather than forge consensus. And wrapped up in this whole discussion is Nehru’s attempt to bring China into the fold, perhaps best exemplified by Zhou Enlai, the only leader to emerge as a bigger star from Bandung than Nehru.

Andrea Benvenuti is Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales, teaching twentieth-century international history at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Nehru’s Bandung. 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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Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China (Anu Press, 2023) provides an original and powerfully intimate bottom-up perspective on China’s recent tumultuous history. Drawing on ethnographic and life-history research, the book takes readers deep into a village in a mountainous region of central-eastern China known as Eyuwan. In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, villagers in this region experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socio‑economic and political change. In the civil war (1927–1949), they were slaughtered in fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces. During the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), they suffered appalling famine. Since the 1990s, mass labor outmigration has lifted local villagers out of poverty and fueled major transformations in their circumstances and practices, social and family relationships, and values and aspirations.

At the heart of this book are eight tales that recreate Ginkgo Village life and the interactions between villagers and the researchers who visit them. These tales use storytelling to engender an empathetic understanding of Ginkgo Villagers’ often traumatic life experiences; to present concrete details about transformations in everyday village life in an engaging manner; and to explore the challenges and rewards of fieldwork research that attempts empathetic understanding across cultures.

Tamara Jacka is an Emeritus Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University. A feminist social anthropologist, her main research interests are in gender, rural-to-urban migration and social change in contemporary China. She is the author of Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (2006), which won the Francis L.K. Hsu prize for best book in East Asian Anthropology.

Yadong Li is a PhD student in anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests lie at the intersection of economic anthropology, medical anthropology, hope studies, and the anthropology of borders and frontiers. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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In Confucian Feminism: A Practical Ethic for Life (Bloomsbury, 2024), Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee expands the theoretical horizons of feminism by using characteristic Confucian terms, methods, and concerns to interrogate the issue of gender oppression and liberation.

With its theoretical roots in the Confucian textual tradition, this is the first re-imagining of Confucianism that enriches, and is enriched by, feminism.

Incorporating distinctive Confucian conceptual tools such as ren (benevolent governance), xiao (filial care), you (friendship), li (ritual), and datong (great community), Rosenlee creates an ethic of care that is feminist and Confucian. At the same time she confronts the issue of gender inequity in Confucian thought. Her hybrid feminist theory not only broadens the range of feminist understandings of the roots of gender oppression, but opens up what we believe constitutes gender liberation for women transnationally and transculturally.

Here is a practical ethic that uses Confucianism to navigate the contours of inequality in everyday life.

Readers interested in the book referenced during our interview please check here: Beyond Individualism by Rupp.

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Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China (MIT Press, 2021) by Dr. Anna Lora-Wainwright digs deep into the paradoxes, ambivalences, and wide range of emotions and strategies people develop to respond to toxicity in everyday life.

An examination of the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and of the varying forms of activism that develop in response. Residents of rapidly industrializing rural areas in China live with pollution every day. Villagers drink obviously tainted water and breathe visibly dirty air, afflicted by a variety of ailments—from arthritis to nosebleeds—that they ascribe to the effects of industrial pollution. In Resigned Activism, Anna Lora-Wainwright explores the daily grind of living with pollution in rural China and the varying forms of activism that develop in response. This revised edition offers expanded acknowledgment of the contributions of Lora-Wainwright’s collaborators in China. Lora-Wainwright finds that claims of health or environmental damage are politically sensitive, and that efforts to seek redress are frustrated by limited access to scientific evidence, growing socioeconomic inequalities, and complex local realities. Villagers, feeling powerless, often come to accept pollution as part of the environment; their activism is tempered by their resignation. Drawing on fieldwork done with teams of collaborators, Lora-Wainwright offers three case studies of “resigned activism” in rural China, examining the experiences of villagers who live with the effects of phosphorous mining and fertilizer production, lead and zinc mining, and electronic waste processing. 

The book also includes extended summaries of the in-depth research carried out by Ajiang Chen and his team in some of China’s “cancer villages,” village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence. These cases make clear the staggering human costs of development and the deeply uneven distribution of costs and benefits that underlie China’s economic power.

Dr. Elena Sobrino is a lecturer in Anthropology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on the politics of crisis in the American Rust Belt. She is currently teaching classes on science and technology studies, theories and ethnographies of crisis, and global racisms. You can read more about her work at elenasobrino.site.

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"With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that 1949 was actually the beginning, not the end, of the Chinese revolution." Building from this premise, Andrew G. Walder's new book looks at the ways that China was transformed in the 1950s in order to understand why and how Mao's decisions and initiatives - among those of other leaders - had the effects that they did. Written for a broad reading audience, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard University Press, 2015)focuses on a core theme: the results of Mao's initiatives were often "unintended, unanticipated, and unwanted," by Mao himself, the party leadership, and the broader population. To help readers understand why this is important and how it happened, the first part of Walder's book offers a detailed and compelling account of the Communist Party's road to power and the legacy of this struggle for what happened after, including a military mobilization that formed the bureaucratic foundation for the new Chinese state, an organization oriented toward discipline and unity, and a flawed economic system imported from the Soviet Union. (Walder pays special attention to the differences in party tactics for mobilizing the cities and countryside.) The later chapters explore the transformations in the party in the 1950s and after, including a significant change in the meaning and motives for party membership that spurred Mao to enact measures with consequences ranging from counterproductive to devastating. China Under Mao analyzes these consequences, including the political and organizational causes of the massive failure of the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. The book ends with a call to rethink Mao's legacy.

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What is going on when a graphic novel has a twelfth-century samurai pick up a telephone to make a call, or a play has an ancient aristocrat teaching in a present-day schoolroom? Rather than regarding such anachronisms as errors, Samurai with Telephones: Anachronism in Japanese Literature (U Michigan Press, 2024) develops a theory of how texts can use different types of anachronisms to challenge or rewrite history, play with history, or open history up to new possibilities. By applying this theoretical framework of anachronism to several Japanese literary and cultural works, author Christopher Smith demonstrates how different texts can use anachronism to open up history for a wide variety of different textual projects.

From the modern period, this volume examines literature by Mori Ōgai and Ōe Kenzaburō, manga by Tezuka Osamu, art by Murakami Takashi, and a variety of other pop cultural works. Turning to the Early Modern period (Edo period, 1600–1868), which produced a literature rich with playful anachronism, he also examines several Kabuki and Bunraku plays, kibyōshi comic books, and gōkan illustrated novels. In analyzing these works, he draws a distinction between anachronisms that attempt to hide their work on history and convincingly rewrite it and those conspicuous anachronisms that highlight and disrupt the construction of historical narratives.

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