Suyoung Son’s book Writing for Print: Publishing and the Making of Textual Authority in Late Imperial China (Harvard UP, 2018) examines the widespread practice of self-publishing by writers in late imperial China, focusing on the relationships between manuscript tradition and print convention, peer patronage and popular fame, and gift exchange and commercial ... Show More
Yesterday
Micah S. Muscolino, "Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China" (U Washington Press, 2025)
From the 1940s to the 1960s, soil and water conservation measures transformed both the arid, erosion-prone environment of China’s Loess Plateau and the lives of rural people. Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (U Washington Press ... Show More
1h 4m
Nov 21
Yanqiu Zheng, "In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974" (U Michigan Press, 2024)
What does it mean for a country to seek admiration — and what kinds of institutions try to make that admiration possible?
Yanqiu Zheng’s In Search of Admiration and Respect: Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the United States, 1875–1974 (U Michigan Press, 2024) traces how China atte ... Show More
1h 12m
Nov 15
Jennifer Yip, "Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
How did China’s Nationalists feed their armies during the long war against Japan? In her new book, Grains of Conflict: The Struggle for Food in China’s Total War, 1937-1945 (Cambridge UP, 2025), Jennifer Yip (National University of Singapore) looks at China’s military grain syste ... Show More
55m 40s
Apr 2023
A Concubine Rises to Rule China
April 27, 1856. In Beijing’s Forbidden City, one of the emperor’s consorts, a woman named Cixi, has given birth to a son – the emperor’s first heir. This landmark event is met with mass celebration. But in just five years time, the emperor will be dead and Cixi will be planning a ... Show More
38m 26s
May 2011
Dagmar Schaefer, “The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China” (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
In her elegant work of historical puppet theater The Crafting of the 10,000 Things: Knowledge and Technology in Seventeenth-Century China (University of Chicago Press, 2011), Dagmar Schaefer introduces us to the world of scholars and craftsmen in seventeenth-century China through ... Show More
58m 38s
May 2024
Ian Johnson, "Sparks: China's Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Even as most contemporary states look to history in order to legitimize their existence in some way or other, the past – and narrations of it – hold particular weight in China. This is not a new phenomenon, for which pasts to elevate and which to suppress has long been a concern ... Show More
1h 6m
Jan 2022
378 Liu Xinwu and the "Scar Literature" of China (with Jeremy Tiang) | Bharati Sneak Preview (with Mira Sundara Rajan)
In this episode, Jacke talks to Jeremy Tiang about his new translation of The Wedding Party, a Chinese classic contemporary novel written in the early 1980s by Liu Xinwu, one of the originators of what has been termed "scar literature." PLUS we feature a sneak preview of our conv ... Show More
49m 26s
Mar 2018
Sun Tzu and The Art of War
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas attributed to Sun Tzu (544-496BC, according to tradition), a legendary figure from the beginning of the Iron Age in China, around the time of Confucius. He may have been the historical figure Sun Wu, a military adviser at the court of Kin ... Show More
48m 23s
Mar 2021
Hawraa Al Hassan, "Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba'thist State" (U Edinburgh Press, 2020)
Hawraa Al Hassan’s Women, Writing and the Iraqi Ba’thist State: Contending Discourses of Resistance and Collaboration, 1968-2003 (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020) is unique because it both explores discourse concerning women and how women themselves used literature to create ... Show More
54m 54s