China is experiencing climate whiplash: extreme fluctuations between drought and flooding that threaten the health and autonomy of millions of people. Set against mounting anxiety over the future of global water supplies, Andrea E. Pia’s Cutting the Mass Line: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024) investigates the enduring political, […]
To many, a can of Coke is a refreshing treat or an unhealthy indulgence. For years, companies like Coca-Cola have shaped not just our diet and waistlines, but also science and society. Their influence is not limited to the United States. Alongside their products, Big Soda has exported their ideas of fitness and nutritional science […]
In Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation (ANU Press, 2024), Tamara Jacka takes readers deep into a village in central-eastern China. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ginkgo villagers experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socioeconomic and political change. At the heart of this book are eight tales that draw on ethnographic and life-history research to re-create […]
In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c. 1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi skilfully marshals a wide range of primary sources and secondary literature in several languages to take readers on a fascinating journey through several hundred years of Chinese economic thought. Ghassan Moazzin: Your first book, Saving the Nation: […]
How do revolutions end? In Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978–1985 (University of California Press, 2024), Jennifer Dorothy Lee asks how the aesthetic and cultural projects of the socialist period should be understood in the immediate aftermath of Mao Zedong’s death. Focusing on the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, Lee argues that the activist […]
In Science Interrupted: Rethinking Research Practice with Bureaucracy, Agroforestry, and Ethnography (Cornell University Press, 2024), anthropologist Timothy G. McLellan investigates and breaks down audit cultures and the practice of dealing with bureaucracy within scientific research. The book takes place within a transnational agroforestry research institute in southwest China, the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF), […]
In the 2000s, a blind Chinese barefoot lawyer named Chen Guangcheng became a global icon of freedom and democracy for suffering years of unlawful imprisonment because of his fight against China’s draconian One-Child Policy. When, one night in 2012, he staged a daring escape from the house where he was being detained and eventually managed […]
In Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America 1898–1918 (Stanford University Press, 2023), Zhongping Chen traces the networks in which reformers around Kang Youwei and revolutionaries around Sun Yat-sen operated. Chen focuses mostly on Canada and the United States. His time frame is the period between the failure of the Hundred Days’ Reform […]
In The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949–2019 (Stanford University Press, 2023), Huaiyin Li reconstructs the realities of worker performance and factory governance under Mao Zedong and after. Drawing from fresh data collected through oral histories, he reassesses the extent to which Chinese workers were becoming ‘the masters’ in the People’s Republic of […]
Alessandro Russo’s groundbreaking work Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Duke University Press, 2020) revisits the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—a revolutionary process the inheritance of which is still open, even though most of the world, and China in particular, has all but disowned it. In his book, Russo excavates the unfinished work, theoretical debates, and possibilities […]
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