The New East Asian Studies Podcasts in the Age of AI

How did commerce, law, and politics shape the rise of modern capitalism? In this episode, we explore the political and economic history of Argentina’s transformation from colony to republic, tracing the evolution of commerce, property, and state-building. We discuss how merchants and capitalists navigated political upheavals, the transition from Natural Law to formalized property rights, and the role of liberal intellectuals in crafting a centralized political economy.

Drawing parallels to the broader Atlantic world, we also examine mechanisms of pre-industrial commerce—shops, markets, trade networks, and banking—that laid the foundation for modern capitalism. What can Argentina’s struggles tell us about the connections between economic justice, political institutions, and the global economy? Join us for a deep dive into how trade, commodities, and legal frameworks shaped a nation’s economic destiny.

What is objectivity, and how has it evolved? In this episode, we explore historical epistemology through the works of Lorraine Daston, Peter Galison, and Ian Hacking. We discuss how scientific practices and visual culture shaped the concept of objectivity, tracing its history from "truth-to-nature" ideals to "trained judgment" in disciplines like anatomy, crystallography, and astronomy.

We also highlight Ian Hacking's reflections on the philosophical uses of history, exploring how concepts emerge and transform through styles of reasoning, language, and historical contexts. From Michel Foucault's influence on intellectual history to the creation of scientific personas, we uncover the dynamic relationship between seeing, knowing, and being. Join us to rethink how knowledge is created, preserved, and challenged through history and philosophy.

How did capitalism evolve, and what role did the global economy play in its development? In this episode, we explore economic history, focusing on Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton and foundational Marxist critiques of capitalism. We uncover how European imperialism, slave labor, and industrial innovation reshaped global economies, creating vast inequalities and modern capitalist structures that persist to this day.

Drawing on key insights from Marx's Capital and other writings, we discuss how labor exploitation, commodification, and class struggles became central to capitalism's growth. What can this history tell us about the relationship between power, economics, and inequality? Join us as we dive into the history of capital, empire, and labor to rethink the origins of modern economic systems.

In this episode, we explore In Search of Admiration and Respect, Yanqiu Zheng’s insightful book on Chinese cultural diplomacy in the United States between 1875 and 1974. Faced with Western misunderstandings and stereotypes, China sought to reshape its image through cultural initiatives. The discussion highlights key players, including the China Institute in America and the Nationalist government, and their contrasting approaches to promoting Chinese culture abroad. We delve into the concept of “infrastructure of persuasion,” where American philanthropy and cultural institutions influenced intercultural exchanges, often within a power-imbalanced global context. Join us for a nuanced exploration of how China navigated cultural diplomacy to combat Orientalism and gain international respect.

South Korea faces a demographic crisis characterized by an alarmingly low birth rate and a rapidly aging population. In this episode, we discuss the cultural, economic, and social factors contributing to these trends, including shifting attitudes toward marriage, family, and the impact of forced early retirement policies. We examine the government’s efforts to boost the birth rate, why financial incentives have failed, and the challenges posed to national security, particularly for the military. The episode also explores the potential of increased immigration as a solution, the societal implications of such a shift, and how South Korea’s approach compares with strategies in other East Asian nations like Japan and China. Join us for an insightful analysis of one of the most pressing issues facing South Korea today.

In this episode, Professor Taylor Fravel of MIT explores the evolution of China’s military strategy since 1949, analyzing its transformation from preparing for total war to focusing on localized conflicts and informatised warfare. Drawing insights from his acclaimed book Active Defense, Fravel discusses the goals and components of China’s current military strategy, with a special emphasis on Taiwan, territorial disputes, and nuclear policy. He highlights key moments of strategic change, such as in 1956, 1980, and 1993, and explains the conditions under which China has adjusted its defense policies.

This book rewrites the story of classical Chinese philosophy, which has always been considered the single most creative and vibrant chapter in the history of Chinese philosophy. Works attributed to Confucius, Mozi, Mencius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Han Feizi and many others represent the very origins of moral and political thinking in China. As testimony to their enduring stature, in recent decades many Chinese intellectuals, and even leading politicians, have turned to those classics, especially Confucian texts, for alternative or complementary sources of moral authority and political legitimacy. Therefore, philosophical inquiries into core normative values embedded in those classical texts are crucial to the ongoing scholarly discussion about China as China turns more culturally inward. It can also contribute to the spirited contemporary debate about the nature of philosophical reasoning, especially in the non-Western traditions.This book offers a new narrative and interpretative framework about the origins of moral-political philosophy that tracks how the three normative values, humaneness, justice, and personal freedom, were formulated, reformulated, and contested by early Chinese philosophers in their effort to negotiate the relationship among three distinct domains, the personal, the familial, and the political. Such efforts took place as those thinkers were reimagining a new moral-political order, debating its guiding norms, and exploring possible sources within the context of an evolving understanding of Heaven and its relationship with the humans. Tao Jiang argues that the competing visions in that debate can be characterized as a contestation between partialist humaneness and impartialist justice as the guiding norm for the newly imagined moral-political order, with the Confucians, the Mohists, the Laoists, and the so-called fajia thinkers being the major participants, constituting the mainstream philosophical project during this period. Thinkers lined up differently along the justice-humaneness spectrum with earlier ones maintaining some continuity between the two normative values (or at least trying to accommodate both to some extent) while later ones leaning more toward their exclusivity in the political/public domain. Zhuangzi and the Zhuangists were the outliers of the mainstream moral-political debate who rejected the very parameter of humaneness versus justice in that discourse. They were a lone voice advocating personal freedom, but the Zhuangist expressions of freedom were self-restricted to the margins of the political world and the interiority of one's heartmind. Such a take can shed new light on how the Zhuangist approach to personal freedom would profoundly impact the development of this idea in pre-modern Chinese political and intellectual history.

This episode celebrates the life and scholarship of Ezra Vogel, one of the most influential figures in East Asian studies, and examines his groundbreaking work on Deng Xiaoping. Through a panel discussion featuring Vogel’s colleagues, family, and students, we explore his contributions to understanding East Asia, his mentorship of a global network of scholars, and his dedication to cross-cultural dialogue. The discussion highlights Vogel’s seminal publications, including Japan as Number One and Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Dive into Vogel’s reflections on Deng, China’s boldest reformist, and his pivotal role in reshaping global history through economic reform and modernization.

Winner of the 2022 Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences
Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.

How did U.S. immigration policies cultivate the "model minority" narrative for Asian Americans? In this episode, we explore Madeline Hsu’s The Good Immigrants, which examines a century of Chinese elite migration to the U.S. through the lens of immigration exemptions for intellectuals, businessmen, and students.

From the earliest restrictions targeting Chinese laborers to exemptions for those with professional skills or Western education, we discuss how U.S. policies shaped the characteristics of Chinese migrants. Through stories of figures like Madame Chiang Kai-shek and I. M. Pei, we delve into how geopolitical events such as World War II and the Cold War further transformed Chinese immigrants into symbols of American competitiveness and modernity. Join us as we uncover how talent and training created pathways to citizenship for a select few while reinforcing broader immigration inequalities.