Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (University of Michigan Press, 2024) unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United […]

In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news transformed China’s political and social landscape. He shows how new technologies of communication created a Chinese ‘newsscape’ that linked distant regions, shaped how people understood […]

In Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La (University of Washington Press, 2025), Brendan Galipeau takes readers to the Sino-Tibetan border region rebranded as ‘Shangri-La’ by the Chinese Government to promote tourism. Drawing from his ethnographic research in the area, he shows how wine has transformed Tibetan landscapes and livelihoods. With grapes originally introduced to […]

Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) examines how the language of love (愛 ai) has been appropriated and politicised by Chinese political leaders throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to legitimise authority, mobilise emotion, and shape state ideology. The book traces a genealogy from Sun Yat-sen’s […]

In the past decades, the Uyghurs in China have become known as an oppressed ethnic and religious minority in their homeland, today’s Xinjiang. Islam and Islamophobia are central to that story, but visitors to Xinjiang and students of Uyghur history know that there is another, lesser-known, Buddhist history and culture of the Uyghurs, which remain […]

Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97 (Manchester University Press, 2023) examines state–society relations in one of the United Kingdom’s last strategically important colonial dependencies, Hong Kong. Using underexploited archival evidence, it explores how a reformist colonial administration investigated Chinese political culture, and how activism by social movements in […]

Pang Laikwan’s One and All: The Logic of Chinese Sovereignty (Stanford University Press, 2024) is a critical exploration of the Chinese concepts and structures of sovereignty in imperial, republican, socialist, and post-socialist periods. The book traces how sovereignty branches out into articulations of popular, territorial, and economic sovereignty. With this genealogy in mind, Pang shows […]

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 […]