Professor Shang-Jin Wei addressed the ongoing trade war and its effects on China’s economy in a recent National Public Radio news article, “Has the Trade War Taken a Bite Out of China’s Economy? Yes--But It’s Complicated.” According to Wei, China’s economic downturn had begun even before the trade war because of “structural issues like a lack of low-skilled workers to populate … [Read more...]
The Typographic Imagination: Reading and Writing in Japan’s Age of Modern Print Media
Nathan Shockey (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he … [Read more...]
Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China
Mary Brazelton (Cornell University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to … [Read more...]
Pirates and Publishers: A Social History of Copyright in Modern China
Fei-Hsien Wang (Princeton University Press, 2019) For information from the publisher, please click here. To read the author Q&A, please click here. In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a time of profound sociopolitical changes. Wang draws on a vast range … [Read more...]
Beauty in the Age of Empire: Japan, Egypt, and the Global History of Aesthetic Education
Raja Adal (Columbia University Press, 2019) For information on the publisher, please click here. Beauty in the Age of Empire is a global history of aesthetic education focused on how Western practices were adopted, transformed, and repurposed in Egypt and Japan. Raja Adal uncovers the emergence of aesthetic education in modern schools and its role in making a broad … [Read more...]
