While China’s reproductive policies have long been studied as a mechanism of biopolitical control, the everyday reproductive experiences of Chinese people are often eclipsed. Spanning more than a century, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez’s important monograph Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911–2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) fills this gap by examining how Chinese […]

Ghassan Moazzin’s Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a scrupulously researched and riveting story about the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB), a German bank that was active in China between 1890 and World War I. The DAB rose to become the peer of the […]

In his new book, Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China (Duke University Press, 2022), Charlie Yi Zhang explores how the Chinese State mobilises love to regulate the affective economy and life choices of its population. Affective notions of love, Zhang demonstrates, are constructed in a way that bolsters nationalism, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism—forces […]

Peter Thilly’s new book, The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022), focuses on the nitty-gritty of the opium trade in Fujian Province from the 1830s to 1938. Its main goal is to shift our attention from the still-prevalent overarching narratives of national humiliation and anti-imperialist moralism […]

How does one write the history of an empire? One approach is to focus on plans made in a metropole and carried out by armies and colonial officials in nearby or distant locales. Another highlights struggles in those targeted locales carried out by people threatened by imperial actions. And yet another combines a top-down concern […]

Howard Chiang’s Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific (Columbia University Press, 2021) articulates a methodology that connects Sinophone Studies with transgender history. Specifically, Chiang argues for the need to ‘reorient the way transness and queerness are understood in the field of Asian studies’ (p. xii). Drawing on transnational archival materials and cultural artefacts, he demonstrates the […]

Dorothy J. Solinger’s latest book, Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), is dedicated to ‘all of those whose lives were wrenched’ in globalising China. Solinger is passionate about working people, including rural migrants and laid-off urban workers, as reflected in her decades-long commitment to activism and […]

The rural county of Poyang in northern Jiangxi Province goes largely unmentioned in the annals of modern Chinese history. Yet records from the Public Security Bureau archive hold a treasure trove of data on the everyday interactions between locals and the law. Drawing on these largely overlooked resources, in Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China (Stanford University Press, 2022), Brian DeMare follows four criminal cases that together uniquely illuminate the dawning years of the People’s Republic of China. 

In his new book, The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia University Press, 2022), Eli Friedman offers a novel take on China’s handling of internal migration through the perspective of migrant workers’ children. Through ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, he shows how the […]