Japan's Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History(Bloomsbury, 2018) by Ethan Mark draws upon written and oral Japanese, Indonesian, Dutch and English-language sources to narrate the Japanese occupation of Java as a transnational intersection between two complex non-Western Asian societies – one a colonizer and the other colonized. The book places this narrative in a larger wartime context of domestic, regional, and global crisis. Japan's occupation of Java is here revealed in a radically new and nuanced light, as an ambiguous encounter revolutionary in the degree of mutual interests that drew the two sides together, fascinating and tragic in its evolution, and profound in the legacies left behind. Mark structures his study around a diverse group of Japanese and Indonesians captivated by the wartime vision of a 'Greater Asia.' The book is not only the first transnational study of Japan's wartime occupation of Java, but the first to focus on the Second World War experience in transnational terms 'on the ground' anywhere in Asia. Breaking new ground interpretatively, thematically, and narratively, Mark's monumental study is of vital significance for students and scholars of modern Asian and global history. Ethan Mark is a Senior University Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He specializes in modern Japanese history, with a particular expertise in Japanese imperialism and the social and cultural history of the 1920s-1940s. He is also a scholar of modern Indonesia. Shatrunjay Mall is a PhD candidate at 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Since the founding of the Communist Party in China just over a century ago there is much the country has achieved. But who does the heavy lifting in China? And who walks away with the spoils?Cadre Country: How China Became the Chinese Communist Party(NewSouth Books, 2022) places the spotlight on the nation’s 40 million cadres—the managers and government officials employed by the ruling Communist Party to protect its great enterprise – to show how the Communist Party operates in China and how the stories the party tells about itself are based on thin foundations. The book pays particular attention to the history, language, and culture of the Communist Party but maintains a relentless focus on what has become of China since the Global Financial Crisis and in particular since Xi Jinping came to power. The party is in the act of swallowing a liberalised society, a marketized economy, and a diverse country. This matters for everyone, because the way China’s government behaves at home frames its conduct abroad. John Fitzgerald is an historian of China and the Chinese diaspora. He headed the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy at Swinburne University after serving five years as China Representative of The Ford Foundation in Beijing (2008-13). From 2015 to 2017 he served as President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His recent books includeCadre Country: How China became the Chinese Communist Party(2022),Taking the Low Road: China’s Influence in Australia’s States and Territories(edited, 2022), andChinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 1850–1949(edited with Hon-ming Yip, 2020). Earlier books includeBig White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia(2007), awarded the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association, andAwakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution(1997), awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney (BA 1976), Nanjing University (Language Cert 1977) and ANU (PhD 1983), and studied at UW Madison as a Fulbright post-doctoral fellow (1988). 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Citizenship is traditionally viewed as a legal status to be possessed.Cultivating Membership in Taiwan and Beyond: Relational Citizenship(Lexington, 2021)proposes the concept of relational citizenship to articulate the value-laden, interactive nature of belongingness. Hsin-I Cheng examines the role of relationality which produces and is a product of localized emotions. Cheng attends to particular histories and global trajectories embedded within uneven power relations. By focusing on Taiwan, a non-Western society with a tradition to adeptly attune to local experiences and those from various global influences, relational citizenship highlights the measures used to define and encourage interactions with newcomers. This book shows the multilayered communicative processes in which relations are gradually created, challenged, merged, disrupted, repaired, and solidified. Cheng further argues that this concept is not bound to nation-state geographic boundaries as relationality bleeds through national borders. Relational citizenship has the potential to move beyond the East vs. West epistemology to examine peoples’ lived realities wherein the sense of belonging is discursively accomplished, viscerally experienced, and publicly performed. Hsin-I Cheng is an associate professor in the Communication department at Santa Clara University. Her research and teaching interests focus on how multiple identities intersect and influence human interaction and relationships. She is the author ofCulturing Interface: Identity, Communication, and Chinese Transnationalism(2008), and her work appears inJournal of International and Intercultural Communication,Language and Intercultural Communication,andWomen & Language. Li-Ping Chen is Postdoctoral Scholar and Teaching Fellow in the East Asian Studies Center at the University of Southern California. Her research interests include literary translingualism, diaspora, and nativism in Sinophone, inter-Asian, and transpacific contexts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports? In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of Asian studies journals discuss the challenges of publishing high-quality articles in the field, in a lively and wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo. Julie Yu-Wen Chenis Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki. One of the editors of theJournal of Chinese Political Science,until recently Julie was also the editor-in-chief ofAsian Ethnicity. Hyung-Gu Lynnis AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the University of British Columbiaand the longstanding editor ofPacific Affairs. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS:www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts:http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Veronika Mak’sMilk Craze: Body, Science, and Hope in China(U ofHawaii Press,2021) mixes historical and ethnographic research on milk to understand the morality politics of class, labor, and identity in modern Hong Kong and the Shunde area of Guangdong. Beginning with the historical “milkscapes” of ancient China, Mak’s book explores the influence of British colonization on dairy culture in Hong Kong; the role of governments and corporations in making China one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of cow’s milk; and the medicalization and moralization of practices and identities around milk, breastmilk, and infant formula in contemporary Hong Kong. Along the way,Milk Crazeexamines the demolition of indigenous water-buffalo cheesemaking in Shunde, the development of Hong Kong silk-stocking milk tea, and the pressures created by society and pharmaceutical firms on working mothers to choose infant formula over breastfeeding. Nathan Hopsonis an associate professor of Japan...
In 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra boarded a Pan Am 707 plane in Philadelphia for a once-in-a-lifetime journey: a multi-city tour of Maoist China, months after Nixon’s history-making visit. There was drama immediately after they landed in Shanghai. Chinese officials asked for a last-minute change to the program: Beethoven’s Sixth. After protests that the Orchestra didn’t bring scores with them, officials returned with copies haphazardly sourced from across the country, with different notations and different notes, forcing the orchestra to make do. That’s just one of the stories recounted in Jennifer Lin’s book,Beethoven in Beijing: Stories from the Philadelphia Orchestra's Historic Journey to China(Temple University Press: 2022). The book stems from the work Lin did in putting together a documentary film on the Philadelphia Orchestra’s trip; with so much left on the cutting room floor, she decided to turn it into an oral history. Jennifer Lin is an award-winning journalist, a...
Contrary to intuition, many countries have found that having abundant natural resources such as petroleum or diamonds may be a curse as much as a blessing. Broad-based economic development may be stunted as resource extraction dominates the economy, and politics may be corrupted as different interest groups focus on controlling and redistributing resource rents instead of on governing well. In the worst cases, the fight for control over this wealth breaks into armed conflict. China is not usually considered in this light, since at the national level it has become a manufacturing powerhouse with natural resources only playing a minor economics role. However, the picture is different at the local level. China's Contained Resource Curse: How Minerals Shape State Capital Labor Relations(Cambridge UP, 2022), by Jing Vivian Zhan, explores how mineral booms have affected business, the state, and ordinary people in China’s mineral-rich regions. Her book combines econometric analysis with a...
Hong Kong has always existed on the edge of empires, providing services and capabilities to powerful nations. And even to this day when the one country two systems idea is all but defunct, Beijing still needs Hong Kong to provide China with access to world markets – especially financial ones. But what next? Ho Fung Hung, Professor in Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University and author ofCity on the Edge: Hong Kong Under Chinese Rule(Cambridge UP, 2022)discusses the future of Hong Kong. Owen Bennett-Jonesis a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
As COVID-19 disrupted maritime trade with China, the world was again reminded of the importance of shipping in global commerce. The roots of Nordic maritime trade relations with Asia go back centuries, and this history reveals interesting details about early Finnish interaction with China. For example, the Swedish East India Company’s 18thcentury trade voyages produced the first-ever Finnish academic dissertation on China, which was defended by Cadet Israel Reinius in Turku in 1749. In this episode, Dr. Erja Kettunen-Matilainen from the University of Turku introduces us to this fascinating but somewhat less known historical aspect of Finnish relations with China. Dr. Erja Kettunen-Matilainen is a Senior Research Fellow in Economic Geography and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Marketing and International Business at the University of Turku. She has written aboutCadet Israel Reinius and Finland’s first China-related dissertation from 1749as well as theparticipation of Finns in the Swedish East India Company’s trade voyages in the 18thcentury(in Finnish). Ari-Joonas Pitkänenis a Doctoral Researcher at the Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku. The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo. We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia. About NIAS:www.nias.ku.dk Transcripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts:http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies
Today I talked toSheila A. Smith about her bookJapan Rearmed: The Politics of Military Power(Harvard UP, 2019). Modern Japan is not only responding to threats from North Korea and China but is also reevaluating its dependence on the United States, Sheila Smith shows. No longer convinced they can rely on Americans to defend their country, Tokyo's political leaders are now confronting the possibility that they may need to prepare the nation's military for war.Smith and Traphagan's conversation explores a variety of topics related to the intersection of culture and politics in relation to Japan's rearming, including an interesting discussion of Article 9 of Japan's constitution.Dr. Smith also provides some important observations on where Japan may be headed over the next few years as it continues to think through the nature and role of its military. John W. Traphagan, Ph.D. is Professor and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor in the Program in Human Dimensions of Organizations. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/east-asian-studies