New Books in East Asian Studies

On the podcast today I am joined by Gareth Breen, Assistant Professor in anthropology at University of Sussex. Gareth is joining me to talk about his new book, Sublime Sociality: An (Auto)Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, out now with LSE Press. 

Sublime Sociality follows the deeply influential, nameless religious movement formed by a transnational Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li. The movement is now considered one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian groups of the twentieth century and the only one to become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first. 

In this book, anthropologist Gareth Breen asks: what is ‘Chinese’ about ‘Chinese Christianity’? He locates its distinctiveness in followers’ pursuit of what they call ‘organic oneness’, which Breen describes as a form of ‘sublime sociality’ that combines spontaneous social interaction with countervailing tendencies towards conformity and routine. By examining how unity is sustained through the everyday rhythms of church life—from meetings and daily prayer to communal meals and social groups—Breen offers a compelling portrait and penetrating analysis of Chinese Christianity, while bringing a new perspective to the anthropology of religion.

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Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2025), Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with classical Chinese "zoetology" ("the art of living"), which is made explicit in the Yijingor Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in "being qua being" or "being per se" (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the "what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind" (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be "this" and not "that." In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or "being," we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or "life" and create the neologism "zoe-tology" as "the art of living" (shengshenglun). This cosmology begins from "living" (sheng) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless "becomings": not "things" that are but "events" that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human "beings" and a process conception of what the author calls human "becomings." The Host's reading notes: "Being qua being" modality of dealing with change and no-change prioritizes no-change, mistakes stability as eternity, confuses order with hierarchy; zoetological paradigm of change and no-change encourages complexity-enhancing modes of how change happen, nurtures difference-enriching modalities of encounter, decodes stability as adaptability, and considers order as emergent, evolving patterns of co-living and becoming-with. If you are interested in continuing the conversation with Prof. Ames, please contact the host ([email protected]) for Prof. Ames's email address.

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The podcast covers the book Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo (U Washington Press, 2025), which is about satirical speech traditons from Amdo region of Tibet and the role of zurza in Tibetan cultural production and modernity. Tune in to find out more about satire, languages, cultures of what's funny and why.

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The Bund's grand facades and the leafy streets of the former French Concession are usually read as monuments to Western enterprise in China. But those buildings were raised by Chinese labor, and the concessions that defined old Shanghai could not have run without the Chinese who served, traded, and lived inside them. In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City (Yale University Press: 2026), Michael Dillon sets out to tell the city's story from the Chinese side.

Michael's new book follows the city from a small fishing town on the Huangpu River, a tributary of the Yangtze, through the Opium War and the treaty ports, the foreign concessions, the Japanese occupation, and the Communist takeover, to its place today as the most representative city of China's forward-looking, economy-driven modernization. Drawing on Chinese-language sources, Michael argues that Shanghai's history has been told for too long through Western eyes.

Michael joins the show today to talk about Shanghai's long rivalry with Beijing, the 1927 Shanghai Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's later admission that leaving Shanghai out of the first special economic zones was a mistake.

Michael Dillon is professor of history and an affiliate of King’s College London’s Lau China Institute. An expert on modern Chinese history, politics, and society, he is the author of numerous books, including We Need to Talk About Xi, a history of modern China, and biographies of Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Shanghai. 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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Making Sense of China's Economy (Routledge, 2023) untangles China’s complex economic structure, evolving issues and curious contradictions, and explains some key features of this most puzzling of global economic powerhouses. This book reveals how factors such as demographics, the initial stage of development in 1978, the transition away from full state ownership and central planning, the dual urban-rural society, and a decentralised governance structure have combined to shape the economy, its development and its reforms. It shows how the pragmatic and adaptive nature of China’s policymaking upends familiar perspectives and hinders simple cross-country comparisons. The book also explores crucial topics including the property market, debt accumulation and environmental challenges. In this book, Tao Wang innovatively weaves the multiple strands of China’s economy into a holistic and organic tapestry that gives us unique insights from both a Chinese and an international perspective. This book is critical reading for business leaders, investors, policymakers, students, and anyone else hoping to understand China’s economy and its future evolution and impact, written by a specialist who has studied the country from both inside and out.

Tao Wang is senior advisor at UBS Investment Bank in Hong Kong, and until recently was chief China economist at the firm.

Michael Leger is Policy Fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford.

Lucas Tse is Examination Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

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Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing (U Michigan Press, 2025) by Katherine L. Alexander explores how one late Qing Confucian reformer sought to rebuild society in the aftermath of the Taiping Civil War. Focusing on the prolific writer and teacher Yu Zhi (1809–1874), the book examines how he used writing, printing, education, and performance to promote a vision of moral renewal from the ground up, arguing that ordinary people could become agents of social transformation through literature and teaching.

Drawing on Yu Zhi’s extensive body of writings, the book shows how literature functioned not simply as a vehicle for moral instruction but as a practical tool for social reform. Through detailed and careful readings of Yu’s efforts to reach schoolchildren, women, and popular audiences through textbooks, morality plays, precious scrolls, and other forms of vernacular literature, the book reveals how conservative Confucian ideals were advanced through innovative and accessible media. More broadly, it offers a compelling portrait of how late imperial intellectuals responded to crisis and how they framed texts, performance, and education as a means to restore a fractured society.

Teaching and Transformation in Popular Confucian Literature of the Late Qing should appeal to readers interested in late Qing history, popular literature, religion, education, and anyone interested in how print and performance can be used to shape ideas about moral reform and social change.

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Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." But what if the riddle is partly of our own making—the product of a habit of looking only west for answers? Michael Khodarkovsky today argues that to understand Russia, we need to look east, to the steppe and the empires it shaped.

Michael’s new book, The Steppe and Its Empires: The Russian Empire and Its Eurasian Counterparts (Yale UP, 2026), sets Russia beside the Ottoman, Persian, and Mughal empires in order to uncover the things that connect them: universal monarchy, reliance on outsider elites, law in the service of the state. From the Mongol conquest to Putin's Russia. the steppe ends up explaining more than we’d expect it to. 

Michael is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. He is the author, most recently, of Russia’s 20th Century: A Journey in 100 Histories and Russia’s Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Steppe and Its Empires. 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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Six great Asian river systems have their origins in the Tibetan glacial region: the Brahmaputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Red and the Yangtse ('BISMRY'). Together they comprise the largest concentration of fresh water on the planet outside of the polar regions, and they support one third of humanity. In the age of imperialism, Western colonial powers dreamed of harnessing the economic potential of these great rivers, as if an ‘empire of men’ challenged a much older ‘empire of rivers’. This is the theme of Iftekhar Iqbal’s conceptually ambitious new book, The Range of the River: A Riverine History of Empire across China, India, and Southeast Asia, just published by Stanford University Press this year. This neo-Braudellian history of Asia’s great rivers encourages us to re-examine our thinking about the impact of imperialism, historical agency, Cold War regional categories of ‘South Asia’, ‘Southeast Asia’, and ‘East Asia’, into which the study of Asian history is usually divided, and even the humble mule, which played a crucial role in connecting this mountainous, watery region. 

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Japan has been aging for decades. The country’s birth rate first fell below the replacement rate in 1974, long before phrases like the “demographic transition” and the “silver economy” became commonplace. Now, with many countries rich and small staring at the prospect of an aging population, what’s happening in Japan may now be a leading indicator as to what other countries may soon struggle with. 

Tom Feiling, author of Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future (Allen Lane, 2026), spent three years in Tokyo when Japan was a vibrant, thriving economy and a symbol of a possible future. Twenty-four years later, he returned to find a different country, with a shrinking workforce, changing opinions on relationships and isolation, and villages quickly running out of people.

Tom is a writer and journalist. His celebrated books include The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World, Short Walks from Bogotá: Journeys in the New Colombia and The Island that Disappeared: Old Providence and the Making of the Western World.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Alone in Japan. 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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How do individuals seek to become better persons in contemporary China? How do they navigate the complex demands of personal growth given the fragmentation of China’s moral landscape? 

Gil Hizi’s careful ethnography on “soft skills” workshops in China examines the pursuit and enactment of virtue, termed “capitalist virtuousness,” through the expanding genre of self-improvement.

Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China (NUS Press, 2026) reveals how these workshops create heterotopian spaces that offer participants “transient optimism and virtue realization,” in which individuals experientially exceed their social reality. They perform an idealized sense of self-worth and autonomy, even if these transformations remain short-lived and bounded. Through this volume, Hizi illuminates how self-improvement becomes a constant state of incompleteness, requiring self-validation, in the context of aspiration for a “purified and moral image” of global capitalism.

With a deep appreciation of the moral turn, this book offers insights into Chinese studies, affect studies, anthropology and sociology, by meticulously detailing the lived experiences of person-making amidst globalizing forces and the contradictions inherent in modern aspirations.

 Gil Hizi is a sociocultural anthropologist working as a lecturer and researcher at University of Cologne. His research is about ongoing social transformations in China with the focus on concepts of personhood, interpersonal ethics and emotions.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here. 

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