Book reviews

mclc book reviews

All under Heaven review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Peter Zarrow’s review of All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order, by Zhao Tingyang. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/zarrow/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

All under Heaven:
The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order

By Zhao Tingyang

Translated by Joseph E. Harroff

Reviewed by Peter Zarrow

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright June, 2025)

Zhao Tingyang, All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order Tr. by Joseph E. Harroff. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021. 332 pp. ISBN 9780520325005 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780520325029 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780520974210 (ebook).

Tianxia 天下 is an ancient term, found on Zhou bronzes and in early classics such as the Book of Odes (詩經), Book of Documents (書經), and the Analects (論語). The Anglosphere has found it convenient either to translate the term more or less literally as “All-under-Heaven” or, capturing its practical usage, as “kingdom” or “empire”—that is, China.[1]  In the former guise, Tianxia might be regarded as similar to ancient theocratic empires: it performs legitimacy while also providing the conceptual basis for what was politically possible. The more territorialized sense of Tianxia, in turn, might be regarded as a self-reference that various dynasties found useful. This is not the understanding presented by Zhao Tingyang 赵汀阳 in All under Heaven: The Tianxia System for a Possible World Order.  For one, both understandings of Tianxia treat it as a form of the state, whereas Zhao points to the classical distinction between Tianxia and guo 國 (state) to suggest it is something else. Namely, Tianxia refers to the world and therefore in no sense does it refer to a state (in contrast to the Greek polis, for example).  Zhao finds the concept emerging in China’s most ancient period, “too early for its own time” (xiv), while the “Tianxia system” (if not the concept) emerged with the Zhou and ended in 221 BCE.

Haroff’s fine translation captures Zhao’s style and conveys his sometimes technical philosophical terminology and his restatements of ancient texts in ways that should make sense to Western political thinkers as well as Sinologists, yet without flattening the particularities of Zhao’s ideas. In this review, I first present a summary of Zhao’s argument, and then a critique.  Use of the term Tianxia in modern scholarship took off in the early 2010s, at least according to Google’s N-gram counter, in both the original Chinese and in its romanized form. Zhao’s first major work on Tianxia, published in 2005, did much to prompt discussion. This revival of an ancient concept has sometimes been seen as a kind of ideological mask for Chinese dominance: “The tianxia system is defined as a Sino-centric hierarchical relationship among unequals, governed according to Confucian principles of benevolence,” in June Teufel’s words.[2]  Zhao Tingyang would deny he seeks any kind of Chinese dominance. For Zhao, Tianxia is a resource or a “method” to ameliorate our anarchic, violent, and oppressive world order.  In All under Heaven, he argues for the need to reinvent Tianxia in the wake of the failure of the Kantian search for world peace and the contemporary disasters of international politics. Zhao begins his interdisciplinary but mainly philosophical study of Tianxia by calling it “an ideal concerned with achieving cosmopolitical order,” but also sees it as a tool (in the realm of reality as opposed to the ideal) and “also [as] a methodology” (vii).  In Zhao’s understanding, in the Tianxia system there is no dichotomy between the inner and outer, since nothing can exist outside of the world.  Likewise, there is no distinction between friend and enemy—there are differences but no goal of annihilating the Other. Zhao would keep “national sovereignty,” but the powers of states would be limited by “world sovereignty” (22), with both sovereignties existing in the same system.  When questions affecting all humanity are at stake, those would be in the field of world sovereignty. Conflict is thus ultimately futile; “relational reasoning” (mutual aid, in a sense) ultimately works better than “individual rationality” (maximizing self-interest). In a word, Zhao believes Western political theory, centering on the nation-state, can be and should be replaced by theories that define politics as the “art of shared living” (36) on the global level. Continue reading All under Heaven review →

Imperial-Time-Order review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Magnus Fiskesjö’s review of Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire, by Kun Qian. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/fiskesjo/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Imperial-Time-Order: Literature,
Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire

By Kun Qian

Reviewed by Magnus Fiskesjö

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Kun Qian, Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire Leiden: Brill, 2016. xii + 368 pp. ISBN: 9789004309296 (hardback) / ISBN 9789004309302 (e-book).

It used to be, in China, that empire and imperialism were words associated with evil foreign powers—especially Western powers encroaching on Asia—and, to a lesser extent, with China’s own past empires, also characterized as unjust and oppressive.

Today, we see an increasingly explicit embrace of the idea of empire in China. In a complete reversal of Communist Party policy, there is even a renewed identification of today’s China with its own past empires, in discourse as well as in state actions both inside and outside of the modern Chinese nation-state that replaced the Qing empire after 1911.

Kun Qian’s Imperial-Time-Order: Literature, Intellectual History, and China’s Road to Empire provides a very useful analysis of how this shift occurred, with particular focus on the cultural realm. Because of current developments, her remarkable and extremely rich book is gaining in timeliness every day. Grounded in a deep engagement with both Chinese and Western philosophy and literature, Imperial-Time-Order will continue to help explain the roots of the Chinese imperial imagination to readers and students for a long time to come.

The book begins, appropriately, with an introduction to the ambivalent figure of Mao, who regarded himself as a revolutionary overthrowing the old and creating something new—not just another imperial dynasty. And yet, at the same time, as many have observed, Mao took on imperial manners. Kun Qian emphasizes how deeply influenced Mao was by the history of the imperial eras that came before. She argues that Mao saw himself as part of a Chinese continuity, unfolding on a Chinese time, a “universal time” in which there always is a China. Continue reading Imperial-Time-Order review →

On the Edge review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Shaoling Ma’s review of On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, by Margaret Hillenbrand. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/shaoling-ma/. This review is a leftover from Jason McGrath’s tenure as our media studies book editor. My thanks to Jason for ushering this review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

On the Edge:
Feeling Precarious in China

By Margaret Hillenbrand

Reviewed by Shaoling Ma

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)

Margaret Hillenbrand. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. ??? pages, ISBN 9780231212151 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780231212144 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780231559232 (E-book)

On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China scrutinizes the role that contemporary cultural forms play in rousing feelings of precarity among the underclass—marginalized rural and urban Chinese populations subject to internal expulsion or what the book terms “zombie citizenship”—and its less disenfranchised counterparts. Rooted in cultural studies but with an ambitious interdisciplinary arc spanning sociology, art history, anthropology, political economy, and the law, Margaret Hillenbrand conceives of performance art, visual art about waste, workers’ poetry, suicidal protests, and short video and livestreaming apps as “factious forms,” which stage and vivify class strife at a time when the Chinese ruling party has banished class as part of its political lexicon. On the Edge extends existing scholarship on the well-acknowledged problems of inequality and migrant labor in the People’s Republic of China by excoriating the less perceptible threats of social descent and civic jeopardy confronting cultural workers, online platform employees, unemployed university graduates, tech workers, and other people not usually associated with the underclass. This book decisively rectifies China’s absence from influential discourses of precarity over the last two decades; more subtly, it marshals resurging discussions in China studies and beyond on the increasingly troubled relation between aesthetics and politics under late capitalism. It is the stakes of cultural production that are most salient in Hillenbrand’s searing study: do aesthetic practices that reincite class as a political category assume or reject their own commodification? In other words, are the cultural practices in Hillenbrand’s consideration independent from the material determinations from which they emerge? Continue reading On the Edge review →

Hong Kong Crime Films review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of of Tom Cunliffe’s review of Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986, by Kristof Van den Troost. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/cunliffe/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Hong Kong Crime Films:
Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986

By Kristof Van den Troost

Reviewed by Tom Cunliffe

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2025)

Kristof Van den Troost, Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. 256 pages, ISBN 9781399521772 (Paperback)/ 9781399521765 (Hardback).

The term “Hong Kong crime film” conjures up numerous images, and ubiquitous among them would probably be Chow Yun-fat 周潤發 wielding dual pistols in a John Woo movie. But what of the rich history of Hong Kong crime cinema and its many sub-genres from the 1950s to the mid-1980s before Woo and others came along and shook the industry up? What of this genre’s complex relationship with Hong Kong society? How have crime films continuously exploited ambiguities in their representation of cops and gangsters? How did the politics of image making develop as colonial censorship protocols morphed? And how was cinematic realism shaped by a contesting array of forces? Kristof Van den Troost sets out to answer these questions and many more in this passionately written and extremely well researched study of Hong Kong crime films during this period. In the process, it lays out a huge watchlist for any crime film aficionado of films rarely written about in English or Chinese. Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society, 1947-1986 fills in several blanks in Hong Kong film history in its exhaustive coverage of the various sub-genres within Hong Kong crime cinema before the explosive success of A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色, 1986) kickstarted the heyday of the genre in the mid-to-late 1980s. Such achievements could inspire further research projects on Hong Kong film and media history. Understanding the roots and development of the crime film genre also explains the genre’s continuing popularity in Hong Kong, as exemplified by the recent huge success of Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In (九龍城寨之圍城, 2024). Continue reading Hong Kong Crime Films review →

Soft Burial review

by at

Source: The Atlantic (3/27/25)
The Chinese Communist Party’s Ultimate Taboo
Fang Fang’s newly translated novel uncovers the brutal, buried history of land reform in China.
By Ian Johnson

collage of images depicting land reform in China

Illustration by Colin Hunter / The Atlantic. Sources: Chronicle / Alamy; Tzido / Getty; Wikicommons.

Over its 75-year history, the People’s Republic of China has suffered numerous traumas, but perhaps none with longer-lasting consequences than land reform—a violent campaign of torture, murder, and mob rule that the Communist Party enacted in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The program’s stated intent was to redistribute property to landless farmers, but in reality it was used to bring huge swaths of Chinese society to heel through the brutal persecution of landowners.

This history is the governing party’s ultimate taboo, its unspoken original sin. Over the decades, independent historians and ordinary people in China have at times managed to publicly criticize some of the party’s actions—even major upheavals such as the Cultural Revolution—without facing reprisal. But land reform is so fundamental to how the current government took power that no citizen may portray it as anything other than a benevolent campaign that brought fairness and prosperity to China’s long-suffering farmers.

This context is what makes Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial, recently translated into English by Michael Berry, so electrifying. Starting around the turn of the 21st century, independent historians began to explore land reform, drawing on oral histories to challenge the party’s narrative. But their works were either quickly banned or circulated only underground. Soft Burial, first published in China in 2016, was different. Fang is one of her country’s best-known novelists, and a longtime member of its literary establishment. After Soft Burial was published, it won a sought-after literary prize and was widely discussed in mainstream Chinese media, until backlash prompted censors to ban it. Continue reading Soft Burial review →

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Wen-chi Li’s review of Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/wen-chi-li/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere

Edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma

Reviewed by Wen-chi Li

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright March, 2025)

Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, eds., Queer Literature in the Sinosphere London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025. xii + 284 pp. ISBN 9781350415331 (Hardback) / ISBN 9781350415355 (ePDF) / ISBN 9781350415348 (eBook)

Queer Literature in the Sinosphere, edited by Hongwei Bao and Yahia Zhengtang Ma, arrives at a pivotal moment when queer communities are gaining more visibility worldwide. The editors first justify their choice of using “queer literature in the Sinosphere” rather than terms such as “queer Chinese literature” or “queer Sinophone literature.” Whereas the former privileges China, the latter excludes works from the PRC. They adopt the term “Sinosphere,” as proposed by Chris Berry, to encompass all works in Sinitic languages. I am particularly impressed by the book’s introduction, which offers a literary history while also pointing to key academic works for readers to gain a foundational understanding. The volume is divided into four sections—“Trans Formation,” “Queer Women’s Spaces,” “Queer Intersectionality,” and “In Queer Memory”—and explores diverse dimensions of queer literature.

In the first section, “Trans Formation,” three scholars examine the possibilities of transgender identities within Chinese contexts. Aixia Huang revisits male homoerotic literature from the Ming-Qing period, highlighting how male characters often undergo male-to-female gender crossing to preserve their relationships with male lovers; the adoption of trans-femininity rationalizes or legitimizes their intimacy with men. This transformation is sometimes driven by practical concerns, such as improving their social or living conditions. Continue reading Queer Literature in the Sinosphere review →

China’s Counter-Histories

by at

Source: NY Review of Books (2/27/25)
China’s Counter-Histories
By Perry Link

In Sparks, Ian Johnson writes of Chinese people who risk their careers and even their lives to uncover suppressed truths about their country’s modern history.

Hu Jie: Let there be light #16, 2015; from a series of woodblock prints about China’s Great Famine of 1958–1962

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, by Ian Johnson. Oxford University Press, 381 pp., $27.95; $19.99 (paper)

The word “China,” as used by Western journalists and government officials, almost always refers to the thoughts, values, positions, and plans of high-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party. This is the case when one reads of “China’s” position on Ukraine, “China’s” effort to stimulate domestic consumption, and so on.

In Ian Johnson’s bracing book Sparks, “China” means something else. Johnson writes of Chinese people who uncover momentous truths about their country’s modern history and risk their careers, indeed their lives, to do it. Their values and actions are continuous with ancient moral traditions as well as with the daily life that lies beyond official reach today. They, too, are China.

The CCP presses them terribly and largely succeeds. The journalists, professors, rights lawyers, and primitively equipped filmmakers who make up Johnson’s “underground historians” (alternatively, “counter-historians”) appear to be only a tiny minority. But he shows how they draw on values that have not only survived dynasties but also helped to bring some dynasties down. Today’s rulers seem aware of that. Our best evidence of this is the highly expensive 24/7 “stability maintenance” measures that the regime uses to monitor, dissuade, and, if necessary, stifle them. The tools of dissuasion are basically two: threats designed to induce fear and offers of comfort to reward capitulation. Beyond that, punishment. Continue reading China’s Counter-Histories →

The Anaconda in the Chandelier review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Jeffrey Kinkley’s review of The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China, by Perry Link. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/kinkley2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

The Anaconda in the Chandelier:
Writings on China

By Perry Link

Reviewed by Jeffrey C. Kinkley

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Perry Link, The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Writings on China Perry Link. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2025. viii + 287 pp. ISBN 9781589881983 (paper)

Perry Link’s eminence as scholar and as public intellectual is well known to most MCLC readers. His pioneering scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese popular narratives and on the linguistic inventiveness of Chinese oral and written expression more generally is embodied in full-length monographs,[1] supplemented by studies of the circulation of Mao-era printed novels and unapproved hand-copied manuscripts, as well as essays on comedians’ dialogues (xiangsheng 相声) of the Mao and post-Mao years. Link’s 2007 essay on xiangsheng in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC) serves as a bang-up penultimate chapter for The Anaconda in the Chandelier.[2] The book prints in total thirty-one of Link’s 1998-2023 short and medium-length essays, book reviews, and prefaces, including a number of Link’s longer and more academic articles, together with their footnotes. Most are reprints—with revisions, says the preface, but changes are scarcely visible. Many of these contributions take on the dark task of explaining the finely tuned mechanics, psychology, and social psychology of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) control of Chinese communication through censorship, pre-censorship, and, above all, the creation of an unconscious, second-nature self-censorship among writers and the general public. Link calls the condition “fossilized fear.” That was the subject of a landmark monograph from Princeton University Press he published in 2000—on the “uses” of literature in China.[3] He updated the story in newsy and learned essays published in The New York Review of Books and various op-ed and human rights forums. (NYRB-related contributions make up about half of the essays anthologized in The Anaconda in the Chandelier.) The author’s expertise, Chinese friends and informants, and ever-critical yet always humanely empathetic social probings enabled what is probably now his best-known research: historical and biographical accounts of Chinese dissidence and protest. That focus, too, dates back to the 1980s, when he began to translate, edit, and publish short fiction and essays by freethinking PRC writers who surfaced, or, like Liu Binyan 刘宾雁, resurfaced, after the demise of Mao.[4] Consideration of the 1989 June Fourth massacre accelerated Link’s major collaborative academic projects and human rights activism, which includes documenting and explaining the before-and-after of China’s nationwide 1989 calamity, the Charter 08 movement, and the life story of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波.[5] Through it all, Link has pursued yet another vocation: teaching in and administering Chinese language programs, while coproducing textbooks for them.[6] Continue reading The Anaconda in the Chandelier review →

Disoriented Disciplines review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carles Prado-Fonts’ review of Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, by Rosario Hubert. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/prado-fonts/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Disoriented Disciplines: China,
Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

By Rosario Hubert

Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).

The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.

The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues. Continue reading Disoriented Disciplines review →

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to annnounce publication of Chuanhui Meng’s review of Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation, by Sheldon H. Lu. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/chuanhui-meng/. My thanks to Shaoling Ma, our film/media studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication. This is Prof. Ma’s first review since she replaced Jason McGrath in that position.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Contemporary Chinese Cinema and
Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation

By Sheldon H. Lu

Reviewed by Chuanhui Meng

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright December, 2024)

Sheldon H. Lu, Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture: Envisioning the Nation London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Xi + 256 pp. ISBN 978-1350234185 (hardcover)

Zhang Yimou’s 张艺谋 2016 blockbuster production The Great Wall (长城) presents a fantastical narrative where foreign mercenaries join forces with Chinese defenders to protect the Great Wall, and by extension the Chinese nation, from monstrous and foreign invasions. The film’s story and production embody two seemingly contradictory aspects. On the one hand, the diegetic narrative aims to consolidate the “border” of the Chinese nation by fortifying the Great Wall against external threats. On the other hand, the diegetic incorporation of friendly foreign forces and the extra-diegetic, transnational collaborations between U.S.-China-and-Japanese film production companies in the making of the film cross the proverbial “Great Wall” in today’s global film industry. These ongoing tensions—among nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization; among the “walling” and “de-walling” of culture and national borders—capture a central concern of Sheldon H. Lu’s most recent book Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture. In theorizing nation-building in contemporary China within the context of transnationalism and globalization, Lu examines this distinguished phenomenon of “walling,” defining it not primarily as “setting up physical barriers,” but more as “the selective, restrictive flow of information, ideas, and ideology” in both physical and virtual spaces (12). Continue reading Contemporary Chinese Cinema and Visual Culture review →

The Unfilial

by at

Colleagues might be interested in this recent review on the Irish Times regarding a new novella collection in translation Find below relevant parts of the review and information about the book.–Daniel Li <Daniel.li@alaincharlesasia.com>

The Unfilial (Sinoist Books, £15.99) is a collection of four stories by Chinese writer Yao Emei 姚鄂梅. The long story – 50 or more pages – is a favourite format of mine, proving the perfect length for an evening’s reading.

In the first tale, It Runs in the Family (translated by Will Spence), a young man throws his lover from a bridge, making the family reliant on the local police chief. Things are complicated by the fact that the chief is the spurned lover of the murderer’s mother. Gran is on Her Way (translated by Olivia Milburn), is about a hospital cleaner who gave up her own child for adoption when the father was imprisoned. Years later, she finds herself drawn into the desperate circumstances of other young women, while also dealing with the hangover from her own past. It is one of the best stories you’ll read all year.

Skeletons in the Closet (translated by Honey Watson) follows a young woman’s clandestine affair with an older, married doctor. Though drawn into the passion and subterfuge, she is keenly aware of the betrayal involved. You’ll Do the Job With Skill and Ease (translated by Martin Ward) is a novella-length story about a father who gambles away his family’s house, forcing them into an itinerant living experiment, staying in hotels or squatting in friends’ houses. It is a parable about the foundational importance of home in a family.

There are common plot points among the stories – prison, mistakes, hospital, feckless men and unplanned pregnancy. Yao handles difficult subject matter with sensitivity yet also confidence. She makes bold choices and creates complex but credible human dilemmas rather than providing pat morality for reader comfort. Highly recommended.

The Unfilial: Four Tragic Tales from Modern China – Yao Emei (Trans: Will Spence, Olivia Milburn, Honey Watson and Martin Ward). 288 pp. Sinoist Books, 2024. ISBN: 978-1-83890-581-1. Pricing: £15.99

One Man Talking review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Charles Laughlin’s review of One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939, edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/laughlin/. My thanks to Michael Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

One Man Talking: Selected Essays
of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939

By Shao Xunmei
Edited and Translated Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala

Reviewed by Charles Laughlin
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright October, 2024)

Shao Xunmei, One Man Talking: Selected Essays of Shao Xunmei, 1929-1939 Edited and translated by Paul Bevan and Susan Daruvala. Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press, 2023. 454 pp. ISBN: 978-9629376604 (paper).

Over the past quarter century, there has been growing scholarly attention to Shao Xunmei 邵洵美 (1906-1968), initially as a poet, but increasingly as a publisher and cultural figure. One chapter of Leo Ou-fan Lee’s 1999 book Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945, introduces Shao as a decadent poet alongside the “dandy” Ye Lingfeng 葉靈鳳, but also devotes space to his important role in the publishing industry.[1] In 2001, Jonathan Hutt published an article entitled “La Maison d’Or: The Sumptuous World of Shao Xunmei.” In 2016, Jicheng Sun and Harold Swindall published a collection of Shao’s poetry in English translation, The Verse of Shao Xunmei. More recently, in 2020, is Tian Jin’s critical study of Shao’s poetry, The Condition of Music: Anglophone Influences in the Poetry of Shao Xunmei.

Parallel to this increased attention to Shao’s poetry, Paul Bevan has published extensively on Western impacts on Republican era print culture with a particular emphasis on illustrated magazines, and these works have fleshed out Shao Xunmei’s broader profile as a cultural figure. In 2018, Bevan published a monograph on Shao Xunmei’s Modern Miscellany (時代畫報), and in 2020 he brought out “Intoxicating Shanghai”—An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines in Shanghai’s Jazz Age, a broader study on pictorial magazines based in Shanghai and their contributing artists. Bevan has also published a journal article on Mexican illustrator Miguel Covarrubias’ momentous encounter with 1930s Shanghai and his impact on its visual print culture (2021), and more recently a book chapter on Shao’s bookshop The Golden House and his relationship with translation (2024), both of which overlap with the content of One Man Talking. One Man Talking can thus be seen as a collection of source materials on Shao Xunmei that supplements Bevan’s research on Shao and his milieu, that establishes Shao as a cultural figure using his own (prose) voice. This effort is aided by the editors’ collaboration with Shao’s daughter Shao Xiaohong, who provided valuable materials, including an essay on Shao’s wartime publication efforts, and to whose memory the book is dedicated. The book also features a foreword by Leo Ou-fan Lee, translations and commentary by co-editor Susan Daruvala, Michel Hockx, Helen Wang, and Sun Xinqi. Continue reading One Man Talking review →

Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal: A Review Essay

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Viren Murthy’s essay “Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal,” which reviews two books: How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green, and Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose. The essay appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/murthy/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translation/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal:
A Review Essay

How Asia Found Herself, by Nile Green
Asia after Europe, by Sugata Bose

Reviewed by Viren Murthy
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Nile Green, How Asia Found Herself: A Story of Intercultural Understanding New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022. 472 pp. ISBN: 9780300257045 (hardcover).

Sugata Bose, Asia after Europe: Imagining a Continent in the Long Twentieth Century Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024. 288pp.ISBN: 9780674423497 (hardcover).

In the past few years, there has been a renewed interest in the category of Asia. This might seem strange because, at least since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism and, more recently, Martin E. Lewis and Kären Wiggen’s The Myth of Continents,[1] “Asia” has been easy to deconstruct. Harry Harootunian puts the problem succinctly in his critique of area studies:

It has been one of the enduring ironies of the study of Asia that Asia itself, as an object, simply doesn’t exist. While geographers and mapmakers once confidently named a sector on maps, noting even its coordinates as if in fact it existed, this enmapped place has never been more than a simulacrum of a substanceless something. It refers only to itself in the expectation that something out there will eventually correspond to it or be made to align with it. The cartographers’ art has been produced by an age-old fantasy and then reinforced by requirements of World War II. Nonetheless we have in this country professional organizations devoted to the study of this simulacrum, and educational institutions pledged to disseminating knowledge of it, even as the object vanishes before our eyes once we seek to apprehend it.[2] Continue reading Finding Asia and the Concrete Universal: A Review Essay →

Shifts of Power review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Theodore D. Huters’ review of Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by Luo Zhitian, translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/huters/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Shifts of Power:
Modern Chinese Thought and Society

By Luo Zhitian
Translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun

Reviewed by Theodore D. Huters
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright September, 2024)

Luo Zhitian, Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society Trs. Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun. Leiden: Brill, 2017. Xvi + 425 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-35055-7 (hardbound) ISBN 978-90-04-35056-4 (e-book)

Shifts of Power: Modern Chinese Thought and Society, by the prolific historian Luo Zhitian 罗志田 and admirably translated by Lane J. Harris and Mei Chun, was originally published in Chinese in 2014 as Quanshi zhuanyi: jindai Zhongguo de sixiang yu shehui (权势转移: 近代中国的思想与社会). With one exception, this important book consists of an assemblage of nine separate articles that appeared over almost twenty years in academic journals between the late 1990s and the date of its Beijing publication as a monograph. The titles of the chapters and their original publication dates are as follows: (1) The Worship of the New: A Shift of Power in Modern Chinese Thought under the Impact of the Western Tide (1999-2000); (2) The Abolition of the Examination System and the Disintegration of the Four-Class Society: Modern Social Change in the Eyes of an Inland Member of the Gentry (1997); 3) The Impact of the Abolition of the Examination System on Rural Society (2006); (4) Shifts of Social Power in Modern China: The Marginalization of Intellectuals and the Rise of the Marginal Intellectual (1999); (5) The Worries and Responsibilities of Educated Chinese in the Age of Transition (2009); (6) The Monolithicization of Chinese Tradition: The Development of Anti-Traditional Trends in the Late Qing and Early Republic (2003); (7) The Divided West: The International Storm and the Development of Chinese Thought in the May Fourth Era (1999); (8) Reflections on the Uniqueness of Modern Chinese Nationalism (2003); and (9) The State Advances, the People Retreat: The Rise of a Trend in the Late Qing (no date). Continue reading Shifts of Power review →

Beyond Citizenship review

by at

MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Frederik H. Green’s review of Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, by Di Luo. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/green3/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and
Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945

By Di Luo

Reviewed by Frederik H. Green

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright August, 2024)

Di Luo, Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945 Leiden: Brill, 2022. Xviii + 282 pp. ISBN 9789004524736 (Hardback) | ISBN 9789004524743 (eBook).

Di Luo’s highly engaging monograph Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900-1945, explores the intricate relationship between literacy and the rise of the nation state in Republican-period China. Luo does not focus on the means through which gains in literacy were achieved or the tangible and intangible benefits improved literacy rates presented to the newly educated citizens or the nation state. Rather, Luo’s interest lies in the question of how the practice of literacy training in itself shaped the relationship between the state and the various actors involved in literacy training, including administrators, policy makers, local cadres, teachers, and students. Literacy training remained high on the agenda of both the GMD (KMT) and the CCP throughout the first part of the twentieth century, yet there existed distinct differences in each party’s respective discourse regarding the form and purpose of literacy training as well as in the ways each party named and presented illiteracy. Luo’s intention is not to demonstrate whether the GMD’s or the CCP’s strategies for literacy training were more successful. Instead, she illustrates through a number of fascinating case studies how the various actors involved perceived the role and value of those efforts and what differences existed in the way success was recorded, measured, and presented differently by the GMD and CCP. By putting the training process at the center of her analysis, as the reader is informed in the introduction, Luo highlights the “agentive role of historical actors and their participatory experience in meaning-making, rather than literacy per se” (18). To Luo, literacy training is a social process the importance of which to the making of modern China does not rest on the practice of learning alone, but equally “on the practices of sponsoring, managing, teaching, and representing” (20). In order to document this social process and the multi-dimensional practices the GMD and CCP engaged in, Luo carefully studied government and other official records in over a dozen major libraries and archives in China and the US. The result is an eye-opening study that captivates its reader through both its depths and breath and that spans from the late Qing until the first years of the People’s Republic. Continue reading Beyond Citizenship review →