New Books in East Asian Studies

In March 1942, Japanese troops landed on Java's north coast and were welcomed by many of the Indonesians they had come to conquer. It’s an indication of just how much the Second World War undermined the foundations of European empire, setting up a postwar order that still governs Asia today. Hans van de Ven’s new book Blood Dawn: World War II and the Making of Modern Asia (Basic Books, 2026) starts in the 19th century, as European empires spread across Asia—only for Japan’s invasion of China in 1937, followed by its rapid advance south in 1941, to undermine the rationale for Western influence and control in China, Indonesia and India—and then, even after Japan’s defeat, the West was forced to retreat from the region. Hans van de Ven is a professor of modern Chinese history at Cambridge University and a visiting chair professor in history at Peking University. He is the author or editor of ten previous books on Chinese history and the history of warfare. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Blood Dawn. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions: The Roots of Modern Korean (U Toronto Press, 2026) traces the emergence of vernacular Korean as a distinct subject of study in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Centering on school textbooks as key sites of change, Daniel Pieper reveals how language education became instrumental in forging modern Korean literacy and identity. The book situates this process within broader global patterns of vernacularization and nation-building across East Asia, Europe, and South Asia. Introducing the concept of “transformative bilingualism,” it argues that Korea’s language modernization – while catalyzed by colonial influence – ultimately reshaped both Korean and Japanese literacies. Daniel Pieper is a Korea Foundation Lecturer in Korean Studies at Monash University. He specializes in modern Korean language and literary history. His current research focuses on the emergence of vernacular Korean as a discrete subject in the modern school, the textual differentiation process of cosmopolitan Hanmun and vernacular Korean, and the role of language ideology in directing language standardization in pre-colonial and colonial-era Korea. Buy Cosmopolitan Memories, Vernacular Visions here Dr. Pieper’s University Profile: here Dr. Pieper on Academia.edu Profile: here More by the author: "Foreign Objects or One Wing of the Same Bird? The Place of Hancha in Modern Korean Identity" in The Politics of Script and Language here "Language Policy and Vernacular Education in Korea up to 1945" in Handbook of Language Policies in East Asia here About the host: Leslie Hickman is an Anthropology graduate student at Emory University. She has an MA in Korean Studies and a KO-EN translation certificate from the Literature Translation Institute of Korea. You can contact her at [email protected]

On the podcast today I am joined by Gareth Breen, Assistant Professor in anthropology at University of Sussex. Gareth is joining me to talk about his new book, Sublime Sociality: An (Auto)Ethnographic Theory of Chinese Christianity, out now with LSE Press. Sublime Sociality follows the deeply influential, nameless religious movement formed by a transnational Sino-Taiwanese community of followers of Witness Li. The movement is now considered one of the first indigenous Chinese Christian groups of the twentieth century and the only one to become a global phenomenon in the twenty-first. In this book, anthropologist Gareth Breen asks: what is ‘Chinese’ about ‘Chinese Christianity’? He locates its distinctiveness in followers’ pursuit of what they call ‘organic oneness’, which Breen describes as a form of ‘sublime sociality’ that combines spontaneous social interaction with countervailing tendencies towards conformity and routine. By examining how unity is sustained through the everyday rhythms of church life—from meetings and daily prayer to communal meals and social groups—Breen offers a compelling portrait and penetrating analysis of Chinese Christianity, while bringing a new perspective to the anthropology of religion. Read Online and download for free here

Contrasts classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with Confucian "zoetology" ("the art of living"). In Living Chinese Philosophy: Zoetology As First Philosophy (SUNY Press, 2025), Roger T. Ames uses comparative cultural hermeneutics as a method for contrasting classical Greek ontology ("the science of being in itself") with classical Chinese "zoetology" ("the art of living"), which is made explicit in the Yijingor Book of Changes. Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle give us a substance ontology grounded in "being qua being" or "being per se" (to on he on) that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. This substratum or essence includes its purpose for being (telos) and defines the "what-it-means-to-be-a-thing-of-this-kind" (eidos) of any particular thing, thus setting a closed, exclusive boundary and the strict identity necessary for a particular thing to be "this" and not "that." In the Book of Changes, we find a vocabulary that makes explicit cosmological assumptions that are a stark alternative to this substance ontology. It also provides the interpretive context for the canonical texts by locating them within a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. To provide a meaningful contrast with this fundamental assumption of on or "being," we might borrow the Greek notion of zoe or "life" and create the neologism "zoe-tology" as "the art of living" (shengshenglun). This cosmology begins from "living" (sheng) itself as the motive force behind change and gives us a world of boundless "becomings": not "things" that are but "events" that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human "beings" and a process conception of what the author calls human "becomings." The Host's reading notes: "Being qua being" modality of dealing with change and no-change prioritizes no-change, mistakes stability as eternity, confuses order with hierarchy; zoetological paradigm of change and no-change encourages complexity-enhancing modes of how change happen, nurtures difference-enriching modalities of encounter, decodes stability as adaptability, and considers order as emergent, evolving patterns of co-living and becoming-with. If you are interested in continuing the conversation with Prof. Ames, please contact the host ([email protected]) for Prof. Ames's email address.

The podcast covers the book Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo (U Washington Press, 2025), which is about satirical speech traditons from Amdo region of Tibet and the role of zurza in Tibetan cultural production and modernity. Tune in to find out more about satire, languages, cultures of what's funny and why.