Mithi Mukherjee is a Professor of History at the University of Colorado Boulder. She specializes in the legal, political, and cultural history of modern India.

Shatrunjay Mall is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. His work in modern Japanese history, South Asian history, and transnational Asian history explores ideas of Pan-Asianism and its legacies, as well as intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities between colonial India and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

Historian Paul French draws upon these sources, and others, for his latest work: The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City (St. Martin's Press, 2026) to tell a very different story about the life of Puyi and Wanrong: their marriage, the political shenanigans of the early Republic, and how Johnson and Ingram shaped the final chapter of the imperial court.

Paul is the author of many works of history, including Midnight in Peking, City of Devils, Destination Macao, Bloody Saturday: Shanghai’s Darkest Day, and Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books. 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.

Amy Chavez talks about Sheftall's books on the Asia Pacific War, in particular Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses and Nagasaki: The Last Witnesses both oral histories featuring interviews with survivors of the atomic bombs.

Has Japan's 80 years of peace education been all for naught? The book serves as a prescient warning given the current political climate and Japan's complex relationships with the US, Taiwan, China, and the broader world. Recent developments—including Nihon Hidankyo's 2024 Nobel Peace Prize and the ongoing protests against revising Article 9—bring this subject into sharp focus. Against this backdrop, the author offers his own perspective on Japan's nuclear future.

The Books on Asia Podcast is co-produced with Plum Rain Press.

Podcast host Amy Chavez is author of The Widow, the Priest, and the Octopus Hunter: Discovering a Lost Way of Life on a Secluded Japanese Island, and Amy's Guide to Best Behavior in Japan.

Subscribe to the BOA podcast from your favorite podcast service.

This volume offers readers an insight into three key areas where Central Asia's pandemic power grab was most visible: mobility control, whereby restrictive legislation limited freedom of movement and suppressed dissent; authoritarian information flows, whereby COVID-19-related measures aligned media and digital information to government messaging, further curtailing freedom of expression; and the international politics of the pandemic, whereby the regimes capitalised on global instability to strengthen their kleptocratic hold over Central Asia's politics and society. This book provides a detailed analysis of these strategies, offering a compelling exploration of how crises can be used to entrench authoritarianism.

It is ideal for scholars, students, and professionals in political science, international relations, and Central Asian Studies. The book is also valuable to readers interested in understanding the intersection between public health crises and authoritarian governance.

The Open Access version of this book, available here has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Adam Quinn is a Glasgow-based researcher whose work focuses on activism, social movements and state-society relations in the Post-Soviet space.

You can read more about the research discussed in this episode in the book The Long Reach of the Strong Arm: Evolving Forms of Transnational Authoritarianism, published by Springer.

Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Oslo.

Mubashar Hasan is an Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.

Karin Zackari Associate Senior Researcher at the School of Global Studies at the University of Gothenburg.

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and the Director of the Centre for South Asian Democracy at the University of Oslo.

The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).

We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

By exploring interactions among Beijing, the Yunnan provincial government, county officials, CCP Muslim cadres, and Shadian villagers against the backdrop of the CCP's nationwide political campaigns since the early 1950s, Dr. Wang shows how Islam and Maoism influenced the ways that local villagers and party cadres saw and dealt with each other—and how these encounters shaped the developing conflict and its aftermath. Providing an in-depth account of Chinese religious groups living under the CCP, Islam and Maoism in Southern Yunnan reveals how religion and politics shaped Muslim villagers' responses to the party-state's efforts to control and secularize them.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 

In this episode Dr. Chiara Formichi (Cornell University) and Leah Cargin (University of Oklahoma and Journal of Women’s History) discuss Domestic Nationalism. We converse about feminist theory and tensions between Indonesian women and colonial establishments. We talk about food, food choices, food preparation and nutrition to reveal an intersection of hygiene, nutrition, and imperialism. And last, we discuss how imperial and colonial invocation of novel hygiene practices was a global phenomenon in the mid-twentieth century.

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Trissia Wijaya is a McKenzie Research Fellow at the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne. Prior to this role, she worked as a Senior Research Fellow at Asia-Japan Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, and taught at the College of Global Liberal Arts. She received her PhD in Politics from Murdoch University, Australia, and remains affiliated as an Honorary Research Fellow at the Indo-Pacific Research Centre there. She has also worked at the Asian Development Bank and UNDP Indonesia, cultivating an interest in the political economy of development and evidence-informed policymaking. Her research spans green infrastructure financing, industrial policy, and critical mineral development. She has conducted intensive fieldwork across Indonesia, Japan, and China.

The Political Economy of Japanese and Chinese Infrastructure Financing Governance: Organizing Alliances, Institutions, and Ideology (Bristol University Press 2025)

Indonesia, nickel, and the political economy of polyalignment in the Second Cold War in Third World Quarterly

An EV-fix for Indonesia: the green development-resource nationalist nexus in Environmental Policy

Perhaps the book’s most moving aspect is the authors’ compassion for Kiya Saki, a karayuki-san (sex worker) from Nagasaki who migrated to Hong Kong and later died by suicide. Yoshiko and Georgina spoke movingly about discovering her story. Like Saki, both have experienced life far from home and understand the challenges of building a life as a sojourner. Her tragic fate inspired them to investigate the lives of early Japanese residents through the meticulous study of 470 graves in Happy Valley.

Beyond individual tragedies, the book reveals a diaspora divided by deep social tensions. While the Meiji state sought to project the image of a modern, civilised nation, the Japanese community in Hong Kong was effectively a ‘community of two halves’. Elite business figures, including Mitsubishi managers, existed alongside marginalised karayuki-san and boarding-house operators.

Yet from this division emerged a remarkable story of solidarity. Through institutions, wealthier members of the community funded healthcare, financial assistance, and dignified burials for those in need. Driven by the necessity of mutual support in a foreign colonial port, they transformed a fragmented group of migrants into a resilient and organised community.

This dynamic resonates with Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, which views the cemetery as a counter-site where distinctions of class, gender, and status dissolve. The Meiji graves vividly illustrate this reality. In death, social divisions that shaped everyday life become impossible to conceal: the graves of marginalised karayuki-san lie alongside those of the community’s elite. Together, they offer a unique window into a history shaped by colonialism, human trafficking, global trade, and Japan’s transformation into a world power.

Richly narrated and grounded in extensive archival research, Meiji Graves in Happy Valley fills an important gap in the histories of both Hong Kong and Japan. By recovering the experiences of ordinary migrants, merchants, workers and sojourners, it reveals the human stories behind larger processes of migration, empire, and modernisation, offering a fresh perspective on the intertwined histories of Hong Kong and Japan.

Yoshiko Nakano is a professor in the Department of International Design Management at Tokyo University of Science. She previously taught Japanese studies at the University of Hong Kong.

Georgina Challen holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the University of Hong Kong. Born in England, she grew up in Switzerland and has called Hong Kong home since 1990.

Bing Wang receives her PhD at the University of Leeds in 2020. Her research interests include the exploration of overseas Chinese cultural identity and critical heritage studies. She is also a freelance translator.

In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about the nature of the state.

The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the system’s creation and expansion. Tsai pays particular attention to the economic and social pressures that drove its growth, as well as the everyday work of postal employees, including the nitty-gritty of routes, logistics, and administration. This dual focus allows Tsai to show how the circulation of mail depended on the interplay between central ambitions and local realities, while also uncovering the work that happened at the local level.

Tsai’s book offers a new perspective on China’s encounters with imperialism, efforts at centralization, and changing conceptions of governance. In following the routes and emerging and routines of the post, The Making of China’s Post Office delivers a rich account of how a modern communications network took shape. This book will be of interest to readers of modern Chinese history, as well as those working on global histories of infrastructure, communication, and the state.

Dr. Dawley describes how successive waves of immigration changed Taiwan and how these diverse groups of Indigenous tribes and settlers interacted economically and culturally, creating new Taiwanese identities in the process. Over the last century Taiwan has developed from an authoritarian state to one of the world’s most vibrant democracies and advanced economies. It is a successful independent society, albeit one whose existence remains under a shadow.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

In this episode of the New Books Network, we chat with Cole about his latest book, The Taiwan Tinderbox: The Island-Nation at the Centre of the New Cold War (Polity, 2025).

Starting with the Sunflower Student Movement and rise of Xi Jinping, the book explores why the Taiwan Strait has become such a “tinderbox”, and surveys various tactics that the People’s Republic of China has used to destabilize Taiwan. With the Ukraine War’s shadow looming, Cole also examines the prospects of conflict between Taiwan and China, and discusses various means through which Taiwan and its liberal democratic allies can build resilience and interconnection.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, and Eater.

The book is an entertaining introduction to ancient Chinese thinkers, and what they can teach us about today’s most pressing political questions in China and beyond. China’s most original, diverse, and fascinating political debates took place more than two millennia ago, but they have profoundly shaped Chinese political thinking and practice ever since and, remarkably, their influence on the country’s leaders is only growing today. Yet these timeless debates which are very likely to influence the answers to such questions as whether China should use military force to take control of Taiwan seem far too little understood in the West. In this enlightening and entertaining book, Professor Bell takes the greatest thinkers from China’s past — Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Shang Yang, Han Feizi, Zhuangzi, and Mozi—and puts them in dialogue with each other in modern settings.

With generous, careful ethnography and incisive analysis, Kent challenges comfortable, linear narratives of transitional justice and argues that this memory work is reshaping the East Timorese social and political order—a process in which the dead are active, and sometimes disruptive, participants. Community ties and even the landscape itself are imbued with their presence and demands, and the horrific scale of mass death in recent times—up to a third of the population perished during the Indonesian occupation—means Timor-Leste’s dead have real, significant power in the country’s efforts to remember, recover, and reestablish itself.

Revolutions is a sparkling account of political upheaval and the power of history. We think of revolutions in terms of fleeting events, such as the fall of the Bastille or the storming of the Winter Palace. In reality, they take decades to burn out, if they ever do.
Historian Donald Sassoon takes the long view of some of the most famous upheavals: the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, the national uprisings that unified Italy and Germany, and the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. This is a history rich in irony and surprises. As Sassoon shows in this tour de force account, revolutions usually catch revolutionaries themselves by surprise, and the consequences are difficult to fathom at any remove. Revolutions will change how you think about the transformative moments in history, both big and small.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos

Arild Engelsen Ruud is Professor of South Asia Studies at the University of Oslo, Norway

Mubashar Hasan is Adjunct Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, Australia

Ishrat Hossain is an Associate at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies

Kenneth Bo Nielsen, your host, is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway

In this provocative new book, Twelve Japanese War Criminals and One Who Got Away, published by University of Hawaiʻi Press (2026), historians Robert Cribb and Sandra Wilson analyse thirteen case studies of Japanese war crimes. They attempt to answer a crucial question with contemporary relevance, how does one become a war criminal?

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine.

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

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes writes a comprehensive history of the fighting in The Battle of Manila: Poisoned Victory in the Pacific War (Oxford UP, 2025)

Nicholas Evan Sarantakes is an associate professor in the strategy and policy department at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of four books, including Dropping the Torch: Jimmy Carter, the Olympic Boycott, and the Cold War (Cambridge University Press: 2010)

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The Battle of Manila. 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.


On this background, Christine Loh’s book Underground Front: The Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong(Hong Kong University Press, 2018) is an indispensable guide to the Party's approaches to Hong Kong over time. As a former-lawmaker in the city’s Legislative Council, founder of the think tank Civic Exchange, and many other things, Loh makes the most of her unique vantage point on contemporary CCP affairs, as well her invaluable access to insights from the her hometown's colonial past. This book sets its analysis of how the Party seeks to maintain supremacy in Hong Kong within all-important historical context, and consequently will be a vital resource for anyone wishing to understand the questions of political culture, power and influence which are pivotal to the future of East Asia and the world at large.

Adopting a transnational approach that accounts for the rapid flow of information between Japan and the United States, Bo Tao examines the career of Kagawa as it unfolded within the context of the wars, imperialism, and economic depression of the early to mid-twentieth century. Using official documents and personal correspondence that have received scant attention in previous works, Tao reveals, for the first time at this level of detail, the extent of Kagawa’s cooperative relationship with the Japanese government, as well as the ways in which his idealized image was carefully constructed by his ardent missionary supporters.

This book provides a window into the global dimensions of broader cultural shifts during the interwar period, such as the rise of Christian internationalism and the Depression-era popularity of cooperative economics. Offering a holistic and nuanced exploration of the tensions resulting from Kagawa’s hybrid identity as a Japanese Christian, Cooperative Evangelist adds a new layer to our understanding of religion, empire, and politics in the shaping of social and international relations.

Bo Tao is Lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Chiba University in Chiba, Japan. His research interests include global history, U.S.-Japan relations, religion and politics, modern Japanese history, and the history of Christianity.

Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He works on transnational Asian history, and his dissertation explores intellectual, political, and cultural intersections and affinities that emerged between Indian anti-colonialism and imperial Japan in the twentieth century.

Relaying the deep history of the islands of Japan, Watkins tells the archaeological story from the earliest arrivals some 40,000 years ago to 16,000 years ago when local cultures began utilizing pottery and stone tools. About 2,300 years ago, another group of people immigrated from the Korean peninsula into the Japanese archipelago, bringing wet rice agriculture with them. They intermarried with the people who were there, forming the basis of the contemporary Japanese majority culture. As the Japanese state developed on the central Islands of Honshu, Ryukyu, and Shikoku, the people of Hokkaido continued developing along a different trajectory with minimal interaction with the mainland until colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, when the people known as the Ainu came under Japanese governmental policy.

Watkins's insightful analysis highlights the Ainu's enduring spirit and their resurgence as part of the global Indigenous movement. Key events such as the 1997 Nibutani Dam case and the 2007 recognition of the Ainu as Japan's Indigenous people are explored in depth, showcasing the Ainu's ongoing fight for cultural preservation and self-determination. By situating the Ainu's experiences within broader global colonial histories, Indigenizing Japan underscores the shared struggles and resilience of Indigenous communities worldwide.

Joe E. Watkins is a senior consultant for Archaeological and Cultural Education Consultants (ACE Consultants), based in Tucson, Arizona. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and anthropology's relationships with descendant communities and populations on a global scale.

Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network.

In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Shame, Grace Huang reconsiders Chiang’s leadership and legacy by drawing on an extraordinary and uncensored collection of his diaries, telegrams, and speeches stitched together by his secretaries. She paints a new, intriguing portrait of this twentieth-century leader who advanced a Confucian politics of shame to confront Japanese incursion into China and urge unity among his people. In also comparing Chiang’s response to imperialism to those of Mao, Yuan Shikai, and Mahatma Gandhi, Grace widens the implications of her findings to explore alternatives to Western expressions of nationalism and modernity and reveal how leaders of vulnerable states can use potent cultural tools to inspire their country and contribute to an enduring national identity.

Grace Huang is professor of government at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY. She likes to tackle a range of intellectual questions, including: what are the conditions in leadership that promote collective inspiration versus collective hysteria or violence? How do talented subordinates weigh their ability to modify a leader’s deleterious actions against their moral culpability of participating in those policies? How does a particular democratic ideology and culture shape the choices of working mothers, and how do such mothers make decisions about care, family, and work? Her research interests include political leadership, the political uses of shame in Chinese leadership, and gender, labor, and the family. She can be reached at ghuang@stlawu.edu.

Dong Wang is distinguished professor of history and director of the Wellington Koo Institute for Modern China in World History at Shanghai University (since 2016), a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

Over time, horses came to power mighty empires in Iran, Afghanistan, China, India, and, later, Russia. Genghis Khan and the thirteenth-century Mongols offer the most famous example, but from ancient Assyria and Persia, to the seventeenth-century Mughals, to the high noon of colonialism in the early twentieth century, horse breeding was indispensable to conquest and statecraft.

Scholar of Asian history David Chaffetz tells the story of how the horse made rulers, raiders, and traders interchangeable, providing a novel explanation for the turbulent history of the “Silk Road,” which might be better called the Horse Road. Drawing on recent research in fields including genetics and forensic archeology, Chaffetz presents a lively history of the great horse empires that shaped civilization.

David Chaffetz is an independent scholar with a lifelong passion for Middle Eastern and Inner Asian history. His 1981 book, several times republished, A Journey through Afghanistan, earned praise from Owen Lattimore, the then doyen of Inner Asian studies in America and the UK. He is a regular contributor to the Asian Review of Books, and has written for the South China Morning Post and the Nikkei Asian Review. His most recent book, Three Asian Divas, describes the important role of elite women entertainers in the transmission of traditional Asian culture.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

A Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Ian Johnson is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New York Times; his work has also appeared in The New Yorker and National Geographic. He is an advising editor for the Journal of Asian Studies and teaches courses on religion in Beijing. He is the author of The Souls of China, Wild Grass, A Mosque in Munich, and The Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West.

Greg Soden is the host "Classical Ideas," a podcast about religion and religious ideas. You can find it on iTunes here.

In this episode, Dr. Laura Ipatti, Postdoctoral Researcher at the unit of Contemporary History, University of Turku, tackles this question by introducing the findings of her Doctoral Dissertation, titled From Finlandization to Finland Boom. Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan, 1962–2003. In her study, Ipatti looks at the actors, means and motives that have participated in ‘making Finland known’ in the economic and cultural powerhouse of post-WWII Japan.

After the lost war against the Soviet Union, Finland was obliged to conclude an agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with Moscow but, against the odds, stayed a liberal democracy and a market economy that chose neutrality as a foreign policy line. To showcase the willingness and trustworthiness of the Finnish leaders and the society alike to Western cooperation, the Finnish government started an intense image campaigning to secure an access to the Western markets and political dialogue. These efforts at influencing foreign perceptions of Finland targeted even Japan, a member of the US-led bloc in the Cold War.

Today, the legacy of this campaigning is still visible, for example in the Japanese fashion trend called ‘Finland Boom’. But will Finland's appearance at the upcoming Expo 2025 in Osaka this spring build on the old ideals, too?

The episode is hosted by Dr. Outi Luova, Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku, Finland

Laura Ipatti: From Finlandization to Finland Boom. Finland’s Public Diplomacy in Japan, 1962–2003. University of Turku, Dec 2024.

In The Ripple Effect: China's Complex Presence in Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2024), Enze Han argues that a focus on the Chinese state alone is not sufficient for a comprehensive understanding of China's influence in Southeast Asia. Instead, we must look beyond the Chinese state, to non-state actors from China, such as private businesses and Chinese migrants. These actors affect people's perception of China in a variety of ways, and they often have wide-ranging as well as long-lasting effects on bilateral relations. Looking beyond the Chinese state's intentional influence reveals many situations that result in unanticipated changes in Southeast Asia. Han proposes that to understand this increasingly globalized China, we need more conceptual flexibility regarding which Chinese actors are important to China's relations, and how they wield this influence, whether intentional or not.

The Ripple Effect makes the case that to understand China's relationship with Southeast Asia, it is necessary to move beyond a narrow fixation on the Chinese state by scrutinizing the ordinary manifestations of China's presence in the region and recognizing the multifaceted web of actors and their effects on the dynamics between the two regions.

Enze Han is an associate professor of politics at the University of Hong Kong. He works on the international relations of East Asia, Southeast Asian politics and China-Southeast Asia relations. This is his third single-authored book from Oxford University Press.

Enze is in conversation with Duncan McCargo, President's Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University and one of the hosts on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies. Duncan's recent co-authored article on the relationship between Thai politics and attitudes to China, mentioned during the podcast, may be found here.

In this episode of Talking Thai Politics, prominent Thai political scientist Prajak Kongkirati discusses his new book Thailand: Contestation, Polarization and Democratic Regression (Cambridge UP, 2024), with Duncan McCargo. Prajak is an associate professor in the Faculty of Political Science at Thammasat University, and is well known for his extensive writings on Thai politics, notably on elections and political violence. His new book is an invaluable introductory text that anyone teaching Southeast Asian politics is likely to assign to their students.

Duncan McCargo is President’s Chair in Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University.

Talking Thai Politics brings crafted conversations about the politics of Thailand to a global audience. Created by the Generation Thailand project at Nanyang Technological University, the podcast is co-hosted by Duncan McCargo and Chayata Sripanich. Our production assistant is Li Xinruo.

And it all starts from humble beginnings: Horses domesticated for their milk, too small for anyone but children to ride.

David Chaffetz, regular Asian Review of Books contributor, member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, and author of A Journey through Afghanistan and Three Asian Divas, has traveled extensively in Asia for more than forty years.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Raiders, Rulers and Traders. 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.

Liu’s careful analysis of the inner workings of GMD youth organizations also illuminates the day-to-day operations of military training in gender-segregated upper-middle schools—including how the government selected instructors and the skills taught to students. According to Liu, mandatory military training contributed to preventing major protest against the government but the policy was not without critics. Intellectuals, parents, and students voiced their dissent at what they perceived as excessive control by a repressive government and a waste of resources interfering with academics. The government-mandated civics curriculum, including government-approved textbooks and standards, reveals the characteristics and duties GMD officials believed modern citizens of the next generation should possess. Through provisions for refugee students, youth organizations, military training, and civics classes, GMD secondary education policy played a critical role in the process of state building in both modern China and Taiwan.

Skillfully combining archival work in Nanjing and Taipei, along with oral interviews with former students and CYC administrators, instructors, and members, Liu offers a unique perspective toward a balanced assessment of Nationalist Party rule.

Jennifer Liu is associate professor of East Asian history at Central Michigan University. She specializes in the political and social history of twentieth-century China, particularly education, youth culture, studen​t protest, and ethnic identity.

Li-Ping Chen is a teaching fellow in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts.

Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia (U Hawaii Press, 2023) is an ethnographic study of how collective memories of state-sponsored ethnic discrimination have shaped Chinese identity politics in Indonesia. Combining case studies, in-depth primary data, and incisive analysis of Indonesia’s contemporary political landscape, anthropologist Charlotte Setijadi argues that trauma narratives are at the core of modern Chinese identity politics. Examining spaces and domains such as residential enclaves, educational institutions, the creative arts, and politics, this book paints a vivid picture of how different generations of Chinese Indonesians make sense of their historical trauma, ethnic identity, and belonging in a post-assimilation environment. Far from being passive victims of history, the ethnic Chinese are actively challenging old stereotypes and boundaries of acceptable Chineseness in the country.

This emphasis on group and individual agency marks a strong departure from structural analyses of Chinese Indonesians that mostly highlight their disempowerment as an oppressed minority. Furthermore, placing the analysis within the broader context of China’s rise in the twenty-first century demonstrates how the combination of persisting local anti-Chinese sentiments and renewed pride over China’s growing global dominance have prompted many Chinese Indonesians to re-evaluate their sense of ethnic and national belonging. By focusing on the nexus between collective memory, local identity politics, and the rise of China as an external factor, Memories of Unbelonging offers new perspectives of understanding about Chinese Indonesians, post-Suharto Indonesian society, and the relationship between China and ethnic Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.

Nathan Hopson is an associate professor of Japanese language and history in the University of Bergen's Department of Foreign Languages.

Denise Y. Ho’s new book explores this premise in a masterful account of exhibitionary culture in the Mao period (1949-1976) and beyond. Curating Revolution: Politics on Display in Mao's China (Cambridge University Press, 2017) argues that “curating revolution taught people how to take part in revolution,” and it develops that argument in a series of case studies that take readers into the local context of museums, revolutionary monuments, model neighborhoods, and more in Shanghai, while paying careful attention to the ways that the Shanghai case resonates with the larger scope of Maoist China as a whole. It’s a study that will be of interest to readers of Chinese history, museum studies, material cultures, and more. Enjoy!

Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here.

Yet the war merely ended in a truce, not a proper peace agreement. The specter of conflict have loomed over the Korean Peninsula in the five decades since, changing development in both North and South Korea as each tries to secure their own future in a conflict that–in theory–could return at any point.

We’re joined by Michael J. Seth, who joins the show to talk about this development and his latest book, Korea at War: Conflicts That Shaped the World (Tuttle, 2023). The book is about much more than just the war itself, as Seth looks at Korea’s pre- and post-war history, and how South Korea is unique in charting its own development while still, technically, in a state of war.

Michael J. Seth is Professor of History at James Madison University. He has authored several books on Korean history including A Concise History of Modern Korea: From the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present (Rowman & Littlefield: 2010), A Concise History of Korea: From the Neolithic to the Nineteenth Century (Rowman & Littlefield: 2006), and Education Fever: Politics, Society and the Pursuit of Schooling in South Korea (University of Hawaii Press: 2002).

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Korea at War. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

– Daniel A. Bell, The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat in China (2023)

On January 1, 2017, Daniel Bell was appointed dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University―the first foreign dean of a political science faculty in mainland China’s history. In The Dean of Shandong, Bell chronicles his experiences as what he calls “a minor bureaucrat,” offering an inside account of the workings of Chinese academia and what they reveal about China’s political system. It wasn’t all smooth sailing―Bell wryly recounts sporadic bungles and misunderstandings―but Bell’s post as dean provides a unique vantage point on China today.

Bell, neither a Chinese citizen nor a member of the Chinese Communist Party, was appointed as dean because of his scholarly work on Confucianism―but soon found himself coping with a variety of issues having little to do with scholarship or Confucius. These include the importance of hair color and the prevalence of hair-dyeing among university administrators, both male and female; Shandong’s drinking culture, with endless toasts at every shared meal; and some unintended consequences of an intensely competitive academic meritocracy. As dean, he also confronts weightier matters: the role at the university of the Party secretary, the national anticorruption campaign and its effect on academia (Bell asks provocatively, “What’s wrong with corruption?”), and formal and informal modes of censorship. Considering both the revival of Confucianism in China over the last three decades and what he calls “the Communist comeback” since 2008, Bell predicts that China’s political future is likely to be determined by both Confucianism and Communism.

Professor Bell’s other writings mentioned in this episode include:

Communitarianism and its Critics (Oxford, 1993)

• China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society (Princeton, 2008)
• The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in the Global Age (coauthored Princeton 2011)
• Ancient Chinese Thought - Modern Chinese Power (Trans. series: Xuetong; co-edited Princeton 2013)
• The China Model: Political Meritocracy and Limits of Democracy (Princeton, 2015)

In this interview two book reviews were discussed: 1) "Confessions of a Sinophile" by James Crabtree in the Financial Times, and 2) "Confessions of a China Apologist" by Gordon G. Chang in The New Criterion. Professor Bell graciously responded to a question about them and adds this post-interview thought for The New Criterion reviewer: ‘since my book is banned in China I wish Mr. Chang would inform the relevant authorities that I'm an apologist for China – it might help to unban the book!’

Professor Daniel A. Bell is a Canadian political theorist and currently Chair of Political Theory at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. He was previously Dean of the School of Political Science and Public Administration at Shandong University and professor at Tsinghua University (Schwarzman College and Department of Philosophy). He has authored eight books and edited and/or coedited as many while serving as a series editor for Princeton University Press.

The project, of great worth in its own terms, is underscored by the author’s desire to understand Chinese contemporary consumer culture. Indeed, the book’s short conclusion is pregnant with suggestion, asking readers to consider postsocialism not merely in terms of rupture with a failed socialist project, but as an inheritor of the relationalities developed in the era of the newborn socialist thing.

Interview conducted by Julia Keblinska, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University specializing in Chinese media history and comparative socialisms.

Except Deng’s opening was built upon an existing foundation of international trade, as shown by Professor Jason Kelly’s Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Harvard University Press, 2021)

Jason M. Kelly is a historian of modern China with interests in Chinese foreign relations during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, commerce and diplomacy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international history. He is currently an assistant professor in the Strategy & Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College and an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University.

The views he expressed in this interview are his own, and not those of the U.S. Naval War College.

We’re joined in this interview by fellow NBN host Sarah Bramao-Ramos. Sarah is a PHD candidate at Harvard University that studies Qing China and, like Jason, is a graduate associate at the Fairbank Center.

Today, the three of us talk about trade policy in Maoist China, and what that means for our understanding of the country’s attitude towards both the capitalist and socialist worlds. We also discuss what this history may mean for how we understand China’s attitude towards trade today.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Tom Phuong Le offers a novel explanation of Japan’s reluctance to remilitarize that foregrounds the relationship between demographics and security. Japan's Aging Peace: Pacifism and Militarism in the Twenty-First Century (Columbia UP, 2021) demonstrates how changing perceptions of security across generations have culminated in a culture of antimilitarism that constrains the government’s efforts to pursue a more martial foreign policy. Le challenges a simple opposition between militarism and pacifism, arguing that Japanese security discourse should be understood in terms of “multiple militarisms,” which can legitimate choices such as the mobilization of the Japan Self-Defense Forces for peacekeeping operations and humanitarian relief missions. Le highlights how factors that are not typically linked to security policy, such as aging and declining populations and gender inequality, have played crucial roles. He contends that the case of Japan challenges the presumption in international relations scholarship that states must pursue the use of force or be punished, showing how widespread normative beliefs have restrained Japanese policy makers. Drawing on interviews with policy makers, military personnel, atomic bomb survivors, museum coordinators, grassroots activists, and other stakeholders, as well as analysis of peace museums and social movements, Japan’s Aging Peace provides new insights for scholars of Asian politics, international relations, and Japanese foreign policy.

Jingyi Li is a PhD Candidate in Japanese History at the University of Arizona. She researches about early modern Japan, literati, and commercial publishing.

China's Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society Under Mao (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) reveals how disease control and prevention, executed through the government’s large-scale, clandestine anticholera campaign, were integral components of its restructuring initiatives, aimed at restoring social order. The subsequent rise of an emergency disciplinary health state furthered these aims through quarantine and isolation, which profoundly impacted the social epidemiology of the region, dividing Chinese society and reinforcing hierarchies according to place, gender, and socioeconomic status.

Rachel Pagones is chair of the doctoral program in acupuncture and Chinese medicine at Pacific College of Health and Science in San Diego and a licensed acupuncturist.

Tatiana Linkhoeva’s meticulously detailed Revolution Goes East: Imperial Japan and Soviet Communism (Cornell University Press, 2020) shows that Japanese responses to Soviet socialism during the 1920s and 30s were no exception to this. Indeed given the country’s situation at the time, the diversity of views on the revolution held by various government factions, the military, and society at large was especially diverse. But whether seeing this moment as an ideological or a geopolitical cataclysm, a threat or an opportunity for Japan’s growing imperial domain, or a fillip for the leftist ideas percolating through intellectual circles at this time, every Japanese observer of ‘Red October’ and its aftermath revealed something vital about Japan itself at this pivotal time.

Ed Pulford is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on friendships and histories between the Chinese, Korean and Russian worlds, and northeast Asian indigenous groups.

Anne Reinhardt’s new book Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignty, and Nation-Building in China, 1860–1937 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) focuses on these very dynamics and specifically the place of steam shipping as ‘a means of interrogating China’s experience of Euro-American and Japanese colonialism’ (p.2). Reinhardt's book reveals how trade in China’s coastal and inland waters, and the very vessels via which this was conducted, were sites where myriad grander processes crystallized in physical space. From the closer quarters of boardrooms, government departments and cabins below deck, Reinhardt also takes us to higher levels of elevation, revealing the place of steam shipping within global developments in trade, transport and technology during this crucial period. As well as being a captivating read, the book's fresh and nuanced presentation of China's ‘semi-colonial’ experience is vital for better understanding a history which to this day informs relations between China and the world at large.