Current Announcements

Salmenkari, T. 2025, Global Ideas, Local Adaptations: Chinese Activism and the Will to Make Civil Society, Edward Elgar.

Exploring the boundaries, fringes, and inner workings of civil society, Taru Salmenkari investigates local forms of political agency in China in light of the globalization of political values, practices, and institutions. She provides a theoretical framework for globalization, examining new forms of governance emerging with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and how these have reconfigured social power in China.

This topical book outlines how civil society has been promoted globally since the 1980s, as NGOs advance development cooperation, democratization, and neoliberal third-sector service production. Salmenkari studies the outcomes of these processes in China, where civil society promotion met strong localizing forces rising from NGO activists” own values, governmental regulation, and local society. Evaluating various forms of Chinese self-organizing, she discusses the social omissions of Chinese environmental NGO agendas, Confucian ties in global translations, gay self-organizing, and the idea and practice of Minjian.… Read more ⤻

Lives and Power. Biographical Writing in Sima Qian’s Work and Beyond, in Ancient China and Rome, Coédition Hémisphères/Maisonneuve & Larose, 2025

In this volume derived from an international symposium held at the Collège de France in Paris in 2022, a panel of European, North-American, and East Asian scholars reflects on the biographical and autobiographical genres in the ancient East Asian and Mediterranean worlds. The twelve collected essays trace the sociopolitical conditions of emergence and production of both genres, analyze their various narrative functions and delineate their historical evolution.

Member’s Publication: Halina Zawiszová, Giorgio Strafella, and Martin Lavička (Eds.) Olomouc Asian Studies, 2025

“Embodied Entanglements: Gender, Identity, and the Corporeal in Asia.” Edited by Halina Zawiszová, Giorgio Strafella, and Martin Lavička
We are excited to announce the publication of a new edited monograph, “Embodied Entanglements: Gender, Identity, and the Corporeal in Asia.” Edited by Halina Zawiszová, Giorgio Strafella, and Martin Lavička from the Department of Asian Studies at Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic.
This book highlights complex links and interactions that bind these three interpretative axes. Cutting across the quotidian and the avant-garde, activism and art, violence and pleasure, as well as the intimate and the political, it sheds new light on Asian cultures and societies, spanning India, Indonesia, Japan, mainland China, Taiwan, and Thailand, affirming thus the region’s significance in broader debates on biopolitics, gender, and human dignity.
The book represents the third volume in our Olomouc Asian Studies series.… Read more ⤻

Simon Yongjun Zheng 郑永君 2025, A Study on the history of CICM in China and its Dutch-speaking Sinologist Jozef Mullie, 上海古籍出版社

Newly launched publication in China: A Study on the history of CICM in China and its Dutch-speaking Sinologist Jozef Mullie by Simon Yongjun Zheng 郑永君, Researcher at the Verbiest Institute KU Leuven

In no doubt, there are countless fascinating stories about Sino-European encounters that are filled with intriguing characters, and missionary activities played a significant role in it from very early in history until the early 20th century. The Belgian missionaries, in particular the Flemish, have been mentioned in Chinese sources in a number of ways. Their handwritten materials, such as the writings of van Rubroeck, Verbiest, and more recent ones of the late 19th century, whose numbers are much greater than their forerunners, provide us with a wealth of information about China from their perspective. Due to this, the Scheut missionaries, a remarkable group of Flemish clergy with a long history of carrying out missions in northern China, captured my attention and piqued my interest, so much so that their works and stories became the focus of my PhD research.… Read more ⤻

Vinci R. (ed.) 2024, Navigating the Mediterranean: Through the Chinese Lens: Transcultural Narratives of the Sea Among Land, Firenze University Press

The volume Navigating the Mediterranean: Through the Chinese Lens: Transcultural Narratives of the Sea Among Lands, edited by Renata Vinci, Firenze University Press, 2024, is now available in open access and can be fully downloaded at the following link:
https://books.fupress.com/catalogue/navigating-the-mediterranean-through-the-chinese-len/15330

Synopsis:
In the postnational era, as scholars investigating the circulation of reciprocal knowledge between China and foreign countries, we are called to reconsider the relevance of national borders in our own research. This comes as a response to an extended demand to rethink the ties imposed by concepts such as nation, language and heritage in favour of essential inclusive sentiments of shared interests and belonging. This volume is the initial outcome of the research project The Mediterranean Through Chinese Eyes (MeTChE), which aims to investigate the perception and representation of the Mediterranean region in Chinese sources, conceptualising this ‘region among lands’ as a transcultural and debordered space, as advanced by contemporary Mediterranean Studies.… Read more ⤻

Ngo, K. (2025) Unlocking the Treasury: Elementary Learning for Boys in Qing China. Ann Arbor: Lever Press

New Open Access book on the Treasury of Elementary Learning (Youxue qionglin 幼學瓊林)
The is the first major European study of the Treasury of Elementary Learning (Youxue qionglin 幼學瓊林), a traditional Chinese children’s primer from Qing dynasty China.
In recent years, renewed interest in traditional Chinese elementary educational material has led to an increased use of these texts as teaching materials in Chinese schools, as well as in popular literature and academic research. Unlocking the Treasury seeks to address the gap in Occidental scholarship regarding pre-modern Chinese primary education, its theories, and textbooks. Using the concept of interpretive communities, this monograph explores the impact of socio-political influences and differences in Qing schools of thought, including the school of principle, the school of heart-mind, and practical learning. As such, this study examines the Treasury through three critical readings of the text: as a handbook for practical learning, a child-oriented reading of the school of heart-mind, and the instrumental perspective of education as examination training.… Read more ⤻

Collective Volume Modern China in Flux: Networks, Mobility, and Transformation (De Gruyter). This book explores Chinese society through the notion of networks—as a concept, a social reality, and a method—in order to reveal its complexity and fluidity during a pivotal period, from the late Qing dynasty to the early People’s Republic.

The volume originates from an international workshop co-organized by the Elites, Networks, and Power in Modern China (ENP-China) project and the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica. It brings together contributions from European and Taiwanese scholars, covering topics such as business networks, technocrats, women, Taiwanese elites, Chinese students in Belgium, and Sino-American alumni networks.

The book is available in open access—feel free to explore and share it! The print version will be available on March 3.
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111374437/html… Read more ⤻

Keller, A., and Chemla, K. (eds.) (2024) Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World. Textual Criticism, Critical Editions and Translations of Scholarly Texts in History. Book series: Archimedes ed. J. Buchwald. Cham: Springer Nature.

Link to the publisher:
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-49617-2
Should you wish to write a review of this book, please contact directly Christopher Wilby from Springer (Chris.Wilby@springer.com ).… Read more ⤻

Lauren Walden. (2024) Surrealism from Paris to Shanghai. Hong Kong University Press

Surrealism in China initially gained a foothold in Shanghai’s former French concession during the early 1930s, disseminated by returning Chinese students who had directly encountered the movement in Paris and Tokyo. Shanghai surrealism adopted a dialectical form, resonating with the modus operandi of the Parisian movement as well as China’s traditional belief system of Daoism. Reconciling the thought of Freud and Marx, Surrealism subsumed the multiple contradictions that divided Republican Shanghai, East and West, colonial and cosmopolitan, ancient and modern, navigating the porous boundaries that separate dream and reality. Shanghai surrealists were not rigid followers of their Parisian counterparts. Indeed, they commingled Surrealist techniques with elements of traditional Chinese iconography. Rather than revolving around a centralized group with a leader, Shanghai Surrealism was a much more diffuse entity, disseminated across copious different periodicals, avant-garde groups, and the entire gamut of political ideology, ranging from Nationalist party supporters to Communist sympathizers.… Read more ⤻

The editors of the EACS Journal are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 5 (2024). This issue contains a special section on ‘Commentary and Exegesis’ in poetry and fiction, history, and thought, stretching from the early imperial period to the present day, plus a Spotlight article giving a comparative perspective from Japan. There are also reviews of four recent scholarly publications, and a list of doctoral theses defended at European universities in the year 2023-24. We hope that China scholars, whether EACS members or not, will find this issue interesting, and that you will bear the Journal in mind when you are looking to publish a scholarly article (on any China-related topic) or a book review, or when you or one of your doctoral students completes a doctoral thesis. We especially welcome reviews of books (particularly translations) published in European languages other than English.
https://journals.univie.ac.at/index.php/jeacs/issue/view/663

We thank our authors and reviewers for their work and wish all a happy new year.… Read more ⤻

Ngo, K. (2024) Ordering Tang China: Cultural Memory, Emperor Taizong and the Essentials. Ann Arbor: Lever Press

New Open Access book on a seventh-century Chinese anthology for imperial governance

This is the first book-length study in English of the Essentials for Bringing about Order from Assembled Texts (Qunshu zhiyao 群書治要), a rulership anthology that became renowned for its model of governance in ancient and early modern East Asia. The Essentials is one of the earliest Chinese anthologies designed to educate rulers in cultivating an ethical character and governing the state. Commissioned for the Tang emperor Taizong in the 620s, the Essentials articulates a distinctive political philosophy through a collection of excerpts from earlier canonical, historical, and masters writings, and their commentaries. Examining the Essentials and its transmission in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam through the lens of cultural memory, Ordering Tang China explores the foundation, conduct, and impact of Zhenguan rulership, which became synonymous with good governance among later generations of ruling elites, scholars, and historians in China and beyond.  … Read more ⤻