Best JEREMY KUANG Podcasts (2025)

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Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025) 53:25

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1d ago53:25

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Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, according to historian and filmmaker Sam Dalrymple. Sam, in his book Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia (William Collins, 2025), …

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Margaret E. Roberts, "Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall" (Princeton UP, 2020) 50:55

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We often think of censorship as governments removing material or harshly punishing people who spread or access information. But Margaret E. Roberts’ new book Censored: Distraction and Diversion Inside China’s Great Firewall (Princeton University Press, 2020) reveals the nuances of censorship in the age of the internet. She identifies 3 types of cen…

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Maren A. Ehlers, "Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan" (Harvard U Asia Center, 2018) 1:08:51

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Maren A. Ehlers’s Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018) examines the ways in which ordinary subjects—including many so-called outcastes and other marginalized groups—participated in the administration and regulation of society in Tokugawa Japan. Within this context, the book focuses…

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Dan Wang, "Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future" (Norton, 2025) 1:02:50

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Dan Wang is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover History Lab, and previously a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center. Before that, he was an analyst focused on China’s technology capabilities at Gavekal Dragonomics, based across Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai. Dan is perhaps best known for a series of annual letters, pub…

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Robert Cribb et al., "Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History" (Brill, 2022) 1:08:04

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Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the creation of camps and the segregation of people in them mean for society as a whole? Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asi…

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Nan Z. Da, The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear (Princeton UP, 2025) 29:38

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I’m Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. On this show, we interview authors writing in, around, and about the Asia-Pacific region. King Lear, one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragedies, starts with Lear dividing up his kingdom between his three daughters: Goneril, Regan and Cord…

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Chile’s Growing Interests in China 27:47

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Chile holds the distinction of being the first South American nation to forge diplomatic ties with the People's Republic of China, as well as the first in Latin America to enter into a free trade agreement with China. Despite the nearly 24-hour journey required to travel between the two countries, this considerable distance has not hindered the exp…

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Isabella M. Weber, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate" (Routledge, 2021) 51:50

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China has become deeply integrated into the world economy. Yet, gradual marketization has facilitated the country's rise without leading to its wholesale assimilation to global neoliberalism. This book uncovers the fierce contest about economic reforms that shaped China's path. In the first post-Mao decade, China's reformers were sharply divided. T…

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Grace C. Huang, "Chiang Kai-Shek's Politics of Shame: Leadership, Legacy, and National Identity in China" (Harvard UP, 2021) 47:09

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Once a powerful figure who reversed the disintegration of China and steered the country to Allied victory in World War II, Chiang Kai-shek fled into exile following his 1949 defeat in the Chinese civil war. As attention pivoted to Mao Zedong’s communist experiment, Chiang was relegated to the dustbin of history. In Chiang Kai-shek’s Politics of Sha…

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Ayo Wahlberg, "Good Quality: The Routinization of Sperm Banking in China" (U California Press, 2018) 1:12:16

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From its crude and uneasy beginnings thirty years ago, Chinese sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex. Today, there are sperm banks in each of China’s twenty-two provinces, the biggest of which screen some three thousand to four thousand potential donors each year. Given the estimated one t…

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Eiko Maruko Siniawer, "Ten Moments that Shaped Tokyo" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 49:03

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How did Tokyo—Japan’s capital, global city, tourist hotspot and financial center—get to where it is today? Tokyo–or then, Edo–had a rather unglamorous start, as a backwater on Japan’s eastern coast before Tokugawa decided to make it his de facto capital. Eiko Maruko Siniawer picks ten distinct moments in Edo’s, and then Tokyo’s, history to show how…

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Ronald C. Po, "Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties" (Liverpool UP, 2024) 1:15:46

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Shaping the Blue Dragon: Maritime China in the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Liverpool UP, 2024) offers a vivid look at China's dynamic and longstanding relationship with the sea. Through the lives of pirates, maritime advisors, cartographers, admirals, writers, and travelers, Ronald C. Po brings maritime China to life — revealing a world far more conne…

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Professional Chat: Home, Migrant Workers, and Decent Work in Supply Chains, with Bonny Ling 46:29

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Better Innovations, to talk about Taiwan as a home for migrant workers, and decent work in supply chains. After a brief overview of key risks in this area, we touched upon Taiwan’s major legislation to date in a global context, and addressed the importance of economic diplomacy for Taiwan – being seen as a responsible global actor in business and h…

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Toby Lincoln, "An Urban History of China" (Cambridge UP, 2021) 1:31:18

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In An Urban History of China (Cambridge UP, 2021), Toby Lincoln offers the first history of Chinese cities from their origins to the present. Despite being an agricultural society for thousands of years, China had an imperial urban civilization. Over the last century, this urban civilization has been transformed into the world's largest modern urba…

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William Marx, "Libraries of the Mind" (Princeton UP, 2025) 1:05:38

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Erich Auerbach wrote his classic work Mimesis, a history of narrative from Homer to Proust, based largely on his memory of past reading. Having left his physical library behind when he fled to Istanbul to escape the Nazis, he was forced to rely on the invisible library of his mind. Each of us has such a library—if not as extensive as Auerbach’s—eve…

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Scott Pearce, "Northern Wei (386-534): A New Form of Empire in East Asia" (Oxford UP, 2023) 1:14:11

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Emerging from collapse of the Han empire, the founders of Northern Wei had come south from the grasslands of Inner Asia to conquer the rich farmlands of the Yellow River plains. Northern Wei was, in fact, the first of the so-called "conquest dynasties" complex states seen repeatedly in East Asian history in which Inner Asian peoples ruled parts of …

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Benoit Berthelier and Immanuel Kim, "Hidden Heros: Anthology of North Korean FIction" (Anthem, 2025) 45:15

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Hidden Heroes (Anthem Press, 2025) offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the lives of ordinary North Koreans through a collection of short stories by renowned DPRK authors. Spanning from the 1980s to the present, these works explore the theme of the “hidden hero,” a popular moniker in the DPRK to describe the average citizen who navigates the com…

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Frank Jacob, "Japanese War Crimes during World War II: Atrocity and the Psychology of Collective Violence" (Praeger, 2018) 1:06:07

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When you mention Japanese War crimes in World War Two, you’ll often get different responses from different generations. The oldest among us will talk about the Bataan Death March. Younger people, coming of age in the 1990s, will mention the Rape of Nanking or the comfort women forced into service by the Japanese army. Occasionally, someone will men…

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Sarah Teasley, "Designing Modern Japan" (Reaktion Books, 2022) 1:43:12

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Sarah Teasley's Designing Modern Japan (Reaktion, 2022) unpicks the history of Japanese design from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth, focusing on continuities and disruptions within communities and practices of design. Designing Modern Japan explores design in the unfolding contexts of modernization, empire and war, defeat and…

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Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020) 1:10:31

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Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 2020), helps us to rethink how we tell the story of Islam and the lived expressions of Muslims without privileging certain linguistic, cultural, and geographic realities. Focusing on themes of reform, pol…

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Christopher Marquis and Kunyuan Qiao, "Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise" (Yale UP, 2022) 48:21

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Mao and Markets: The Communist Roots of Chinese Enterprise (Yale University Press, 2022) by Dr. Christopher Marquis & Dr. Kunyuan Qiao presents a thoroughly researched assessment of how China’s economic success continues to be shaped by the communist ideology of Chairman Mao It was long assumed that as China embraced open markets and private enterp…

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Ian Johnson, "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao" (Pantheon, 2017) 1:14:16

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Ian Johnson’s new book, The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao (Pantheon, 2017), was called "a masterpiece of observation and empathy" by The New York Review of Books, and The Economist, who included the book on its Best of 2017 list, said the book, "Shows how a resurgence of faith is quietly changing the country." The Guardian said t…

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Ketian Zhang, "China's Gambit: The Calculus of Coercion" (Cambridge UP, 2023) 1:11:57

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Emerging from an award-winning article in International Security, China's Gambit examines when, why, and how China attempts to coerce states over perceived threats to its national security. Since 1990, China has used coercion for territorial disputes and issues related to Taiwan and Tibet, yet China is curiously selective in the timing, target, and…

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Cara Wallis, "Social Media and Ordinary Life: Affect, Ethics, and Aspiration in Contemporary China" (NYU Press, 2025) 1:08:34

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Focusing on domestic workers, rural microentrepreneurs, disadvantaged young creatives, and young feminists, Social Media and Ordinary Life (NYU Press, 2025) is a deeply moving ethnography of how digital media infrastructures and platforms are woven into the rhythms of ordinary, everyday life. In choosing to foreground marginalized groups and commun…

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James D.J. Brown, "Cracking the Crab: Russian Espionage Against Japan, from Peter the Great to Richard Sorge" (Hurst, 2025), 39:49

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The Russians came late to Japan, arriving after the Portuguese and other European powers. But as soon as they arrived, Russia tried to use spies and espionage to learn more about their neighbor—with various degrees of success. Sometimes, it failed miserably, like Russia’s early attempts to make contact with pre-Meiji Japan, or the debacle during th…

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Kelly A. Spring, "SPAM: A Global History" (Reaktion, 2025) 32:00

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The year 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, a conflict that solidified SPAM’s place in global food culture. Created by Hormel Foods in 1937 to utilize surplus pork shoulder during the Great Depression, SPAM became an essential resource during the Second World War, and helped shape perceptions of American culture. SP…

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Simon Butt, "Judicial Dysfunction in Indonesia" (Melbourne UP, 2023) 40:13

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Indonesia's judicial system has long been described as dysfunctional. Many of its problems developed out of decades of authoritarian rule, which began in the last few years of the reign of Indonesia's first president, Soekarno. By the time President Soeharto's regime fell in 1998, the judiciary had virtually collapsed. Judicial dependence on govern…

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Lanlan Kuang, "Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China's New Cosmopolitan Heritage" (Indiana UP, 2024) 55:47

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How can art shape historical memory and national identity? And how can cultural heritage and historical references be used to enact a vision of a nation? In Staging Tianxia: Dunhuang Expressive Arts and China’s New Cosmopolitan Heritage (Indiana University Press, 2024), Lanlan Kuang explores these questions through the lens of Dunhuang expressive a…

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Tina Chen and Charlotte Eubanks, "Global Asias: Tactics & Theories" (U Hawaii Press, 2024) 1:10:37

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Global Asias: Tactics & Theories is the inaugural volume in an exciting new series that explores critical concerns animating Global Asias scholarship. It challenges the silos of academic knowledge formation that currently make legible and organize the study of Asia and its multiple diasporas. Transits, Indigeneity, Epistemology, Language, and A/Geo…

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Paul French, "Destination Macao" (Blacksmith Books, 2024) 57:39

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Macau–onetime Portuguese colony, now casino hotspot–has long captured the imaginations of travelers, reporters, artists and writers. The city served as the only gateway to China for centuries; then, after the rise of Hong Kong, its slightly seedier vibe made it a popular setting for books, articles and movies exploring the more criminal elements of…

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Alexus McLeod, "Myth and Identity in the Martial Arts: Creating the Dragon" (Lexington Books, 2025) 1:36:00

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Myth and Identity in the Martial Arts: Creating the Dragon (Lexington Books, 2025) is a study of the role of myth and ideology in the formation of social identity, focusing on a variety of communities of practice involving the martial arts in East Asian and Western history. Alexus McLeod argues that myths of the martial arts should not be understoo…

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Nan Z. Da, "The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear" (Princeton UP, 2025) 39:17

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At the start of Shakespeare's famous tragedy, King Lear promises to divide his kingdom based on his daughters' professions of love, but portions it out before hearing all of their answers. For Nan Da, this opening scene sparks a reckoning between King Lear, one of the cruelest and most confounding stories in literature, and the tragedy of Maoist an…

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Zev Handel, "Chinese Characters Across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese" (U Washington Press, 2025) 44:54

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For centuries, scribes across East Asia used Chinese characters to write things down–even in languages based on very different foundations than Chinese. In southern China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, people used Chinese to read and write–and never thought it was odd. It was, after all, how things were done. Even today, Cantonese speakers use Chinese …

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Minxin Pei, "The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China" (Harvard UP, 2024) 36:45

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Rising prosperity was supposed to bring democracy to China, yet the Communist Party’s political monopoly endures. How? Minxin Pei looks to the surveillance state. Though renowned for high-tech repression, China’s surveillance system is above all a labor-intensive project. Pei delves into the human sources of coercion at the foundation of CCP power,…

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Tie Ning, Annelise Finegan trans., "My Sister's Red Shirt" (Sinoist Books, 2025) 34:30

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Growing up in a glittering new decade of possibility, Anran is radically different to her sister. Outspoken and idealistic, she relishes in challenging hypocrisy, unlike the older Anjing, whose memories of a turbulent past remind her of the perils of going against the grain. When Anran is gifted a stylish red shirt that becomes the talk of their sl…

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Lieba Faier, "The Banality of Good: The UN's Global Fight Against Human Trafficking" (Duke UP, 2024) 55:44

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In The Banality of Good: The UN’s Global Fight against Human Trafficking (Duke University Press, 2024), Dr. Lieba Faier examines why contemporary efforts to curb human trafficking have fallen so spectacularly short of their stated goals despite well-funded campaigns by the United Nations and its member-state governments. Focusing on Japan’s efforts…

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John Man, "Conquering the North: China, Russia, Mongolia: 2,000 Years of Conflict" (Oneworld Publications, 2025) 50:20

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China, famously, built the Great Wall to defend against nomadic groups from the Eurasian steppe. For two millennia, China interacted with groups from the north: The Xiongnu, the Mongols, the Manchus, and the Russians. They defended against raids, got invaded by the north, and tried to launch diplomatic relations. John Man, in his book Conquering th…

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Chris Horton, "Ghost Nation: The Story of Taiwan and Its Struggle for Survival" (MacMillan, 2025) 1:00:40

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Chris Horton is a freelance journalist who has been based in Taiwan since 2015, before many Western publications had any dedicated presence on the island. Over the last decade, he has contributed to the New York Times, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications regarding Taiwan-related topics. In this episode of the New Books Network,…

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Gregory N. Evon, "Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Choson Korea (1392-1910)" (Cambria Press, 2023) 1:06:55

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Salvaging Buddhism to Save Confucianism in Chosŏn Korea (1392-1910) (Cambria Press, 2023) is a fascinating book that sits at the intersection of Buddhist studies and premodern Korean literary history. Gregory N. Evon’s book unfolds in two parts: the first charts the history of the place, position, and status of Buddhism in Chosŏn Korea, charting ho…

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Fyodor Tertitskiy, "Accidental Tyrant: The Life of Kim Il-sung" (Hurst UP, 2025) 32:36

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The Kims, of North Korea, are perhaps the 21st century’s most successful family dictatorship–if only due to sheer longevity, having run North Korea for the almost eight decades since the country’s post-war founding. Kim Il-Sung led North Korea for over half that time, from its founding in 1948 to Kim’s death in 1994. But who was Kim Il-Sung? How di…

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Jeremy A. Yellen, "Japan at War, 1914-1952" (Routledge, 2024) 1:00:12

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Japan at War, 1914-1952 is a synthetic and interpretive history that highlights the centrality of war to the modern Japanese experience. The author argues that war was central to Japanese life in this period--the era when Japan rose and fell as a world power. The volume examines how World War I set off profound changes that led to the rise of a pol…

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Joseph Torigian, "The Party’s Interests Come First: The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping" (Stanford UP, 2025) 1:36:59

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Often I will find in a chronology or a biography, you know, official materials, evidence that because I have other evidence, it’s meaningful in a way that maybe the people who edited those collections might not have expected. That’s the idea of mosaic theory – you bring together many pieces of evidence, even small ones, to bring the full meaning ou…

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Vappala Balachandran, "India and China at Odds in the Asian Century: A Diplomatic and Strategic History" (Hurst, 2025) 41:34

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China and India have had a tense relationship, disagreeing over territory, support for each other’s rivals, and even, at times, leadership of the “Global South.” But there were periods where things seemed a bit rosier. For about a decade, between 1988 and 1998, relations between India and China thawed—and prompted heady predictions of an Asian cent…

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NIAS Podcast from the University of Tartu Asia Centre China's Psychological Power 40:14

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This podcast episode is hosted by Toomas Hanso International Centre for Defence and Security (ICDS) who is talking to Urmas Hõbepappel. Urmas is an analyst at the University of Tartu Asia Centre and a researcher at the ICDS. His academic work deals with political psychology, collective identity, and history narratives in China, but this episode foc…

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Xing Hang, "The Port: Hà Tiên and the Mo Clan in Early Modern Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2024) 1:01:09

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The Port (present-day Hà Tiên), situated in the Mekong River Delta and Gulf of Siam littoral, was founded and governed by the Chinese creole Mo clan during the eighteenth century and prospered as a free-trade emporium in maritime East Asia. Mo Jiu and his son, Mo Tianci, maintained an independent polity through ambiguous and simultaneous allegiance…

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Gennifer Weisenfeld, "The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan" (Duke UP, 2025) 42:44

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Commercial art is more than just mass-produced publicity; it constructs social and political ideologies that impact the public’s everyday life. In The Fine Art of Persuasion: Corporate Advertising Design, Nation, and Empire in Modern Japan (Duke University Press, 2025), Gennifer Weisenfeld examines the evolution of Japanese advertising graphic desi…

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Jessica X. Zu, "Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China" (Columbia UP, 2025) 1:24:02

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Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2025) uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworld…

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Luanjiao Hu, "Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications" (IAP, 2024) 1:01:22

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Inclusion, Exclusion, Agency, and Advocacy: Experiences of Women With Physical Disabilities in China, With Worldwide Implications (IAP, 2024) explores the lived experiences of six women, including the author herself, with physical disabilities in China. The book provides in-depth descriptions of each woman's experiences in different aspects and ana…

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Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong" (Brixton Ink, 2025) 42:02

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Given what has happened since – from a global pandemic to wars in Europe, Africa and the Middle East – events in Hong Kong in 2019-20 can seem remote when seen from today’s perspective. But the momentous scale and significance of the protests there during those years, and the ensuing crackdown and increasing restrictions on Hong Kong’s distinctive …

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Lizhi Liu, "From Click to Boom: The Political Economy of E-Commerce in China" (Princeton UP, 2024) 57:37

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Alibaba. Tencent. JD. Pinduoduo. Run down the list of China’s most valuable companies and you’ll find, for the most part, that they’re all e-commerce companies—or at least facilitate e-commerce. The sector created giants: Alibaba grew from just 5.5 billion renminbi of revenue in 2010 to 280 billion last year. But how did Chinese e-commerce firms sh…