Publications by EACS members

Helena F. S. Lopes, Cardiff University, Neutrality and Collaboration in South China: Macau during the Second World War
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023

The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empires. In this highly original study, Helena F. S. Lopes analyses the layers of collaboration that developed from neutrality in Macau during the Second World War. Exploring the intersections of local, regional and global dynamics, she unpacks the connections between a plurality of actors with competing and collaborative interests, including Chinese Nationalists, Communists and collaborators with Japan, Portuguese colonial authorities and British and Japanese representatives. Lopes argues that neutrality eased the movement of refugees of different nationalities who sought shelter in Macau during the war and that it helped to guarantee the maintenance of two remnants of European colonialism – Macau and Hong Kong.… Read more ⤻

Pelzer, Thorben, 2023. Engineering Trouble: US–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent, 1905–1945. China Studies, Volume 52. Boston: Brill, 2023.

In the early twentieth century, the first large batch of Chinese civil engineers had graduated from the USA, and together with their American senior colleagues returned to China. They were enthusiastic about reconstructing the young republic by building new railways, highways, and canals, but what the engineers experienced in China, including mismanaged railways, useless highways, and silted canals, did not always meet their expectations and ideals. In this book, Thorben Pelzer makes the stories of these Chinese and American engineers come to life through exploring previously unpublished letters, rare images, maps, and a rich biographical dataset. He argues that the experiences of these engineers include a myriad of contradictions, disillusionment, and discontent, keeping the engineering profession in a constant flux of searching for its meaning and its place in Republican China.

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Nina Borevskaia, 2023. The translation of Luo Maodeng’s novel The Tale of Zheng He’s Voyage to the Western Ocean (San Bao taijian Xiyang ji, 1597). Moscow, Shans Publishing House. 2 Vols.

The Russian translation of one of the classical Chinese novels Sanbao taijian xia Xiyang tongsu yanyi (Xiyangji, Author Luo Maodeng, 1597) was published in Moscow by Shanse publishing house in May 2023 (slightly abridged version, in two volumes with three appendixes, coloured illustratins and many comments), The translation was made by Nina Borevskaia, EACS member for almost 35 years. The book is in two volumes, each of about 440 pages. It has a welcome address by the famous modern writer Wang Meng and a long Preface in the format of the interview between the translator and the author called “Over the Abyss of Time and Space”. The translation is provided with several thousand comments (references).

English Abstract

Abstract: The translation of Luo Maodeng’s novel
The Tale of Zheng He’s Voyage to the Western Ocean
(San Bao taijian Xiyang ji, 1597)

According to the generally accepted Eurocentric ideas shared by many historians, the era of great geographical discoveries of the 15th — 16th centuries began with the expeditions of Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, and Ferdinand Magellan.… Read more ⤻

Homola, Stéphanie. 2023. The Art of Fate Calculation. Practicing Divination in Taipei, Beijing, and Kaifeng. New York: Berghahn Books (Asian Anthropologies Series). ISBN 978-1-80073-812-6

This book dives into Chinese fate calculation, a practice which enthralls the Chinese despite official condemnations which have disparaged this traditional knowledge as “superstitions” since the beginning of the 20th century. From housewives to students and high-ranking officials, people from all social backgrounds visit fate calculation masters to learn about and make the most of their destiny, be it to choose a career, get promoted, make an investment, or get married. How do clients experience fate calculation consultations? How do they choose a diviner and how do they assess his/her skills? How does one become a fortune-teller? What controversies structure the professional milieu? How is a person’s fate calculated? Through an investigation that takes us from Taiwan to China to meet the various actors of fate calculation, this work explores why so many people are interested in a form of knowledge which everyone admits to be highly complex and questionable.… Read more ⤻

The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China – A Case Study of the Xinmin Congbao and the Minbao, 1902-1910, Qing Cao, Routledge Studies in Chinese Discourse Analysis, January 2023: 148pp

The Language of Nation-State Building in Late Qing China investigates the linguistic and intellectual roots of China’s modern transformation by presenting a systematic study of the interplay between language innovation and socio-political upheavals in the final decade of the Qing Empire.
This book will be useful and relevant to academics, postgraduate students and final year undergraduate students in the field of Chinese Studies, and anyone
interested in the role of language in shaping modern intellectual history.… Read more ⤻

Alison Hardie, An Illustrated Brief History of Chinese Gardens: People, Activities, Culture, New York & Shanghai: SCPG, 2023, 164pp., US$19.95, ISBN 978-1-93836-887-5.

This book, illustrated with many images of Chinese gardens, ancient paintings, block prints, and other artefacts, is a social history of Chinese gardens, focusing on how gardens have functioned and been used in Chinese society through the ages. Apart from the aesthetic or philosophical aspects of Chinese gardens, it discusses how gardens functioned as real estate, how they gave opportunities of employment to skilled artisans, how they opened up outdoor space to both elite and lower-class women, and how they allowed men of different social classes and of different ethnicities to interact and gain mutual benefit; in short, how the existence of gardens exerted an influence on society as a whole. At the same time, the reader can find how the wider society, and even socio-economic changes beyond China’s own borders, had an impact on how gardens in China developed.… Read more ⤻

Dr. Merle Schatz, Dr. Thorben Pelzer, “100 Karten über China” (in German), KATAPULT Verlag 2022, 208 Seiten

https://katapult-verlag.de/programm/100-karten-uber-china-9783948923426… Read more ⤻

Björn Alpermann, Xinjiang — China and the Uyghurs, Würzburg University Press, (open access in French and German)

I am happy to announce that my book “Xinjiang — China and the Uyghurs” published last year in German (Würzburg University Press) is now also available in French. Both versions are open access. You find the blurbs in both languages and the download links below.

Le Xinjiang – la Chine et les Ouïghours
La situation au Xinjiang, région du Nord-Ouest de la Chine, a ces dernières années suscité une attention internationale croissante. Les rapports sur les internements massifs de Ouïghours et d’autres groupes ethniques dans des camps de rééducation, le travail forcé, les stérilisations forcées et autres atteintes aux droits humains font la une de l’actualité et affectent les relations entre la Chine et ceux qui la critiquent. Le gouvernement chinois, en revanche, justifie sa manière d’agir par la lutte contre le terrorisme, l’extrémisme islamique et le séparatisme ethnique.… Read more ⤻

Alison Hardie, The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022, 320pp., HK$750, ISBN 978-988-8754-07-6.
The Many Faces of Ruan Dacheng: Poet, Playwright, Politician in Seventeenth-Century China is the first monograph in English on a controversial Ming dynasty literary figure. It examines and re-assesses the life and work of Ruan Dacheng (1587–1646), a poet, dramatist, and politician in the late Ming period. Ruan Dacheng was in his own time a highly regarded poet, but is best known as a dramatist, and his poetry is now largely unknown. He is most notorious as a ‘treacherous official’ of the Ming–Qing transition, and as a result his literary work—his plays as well as his poetry—has been neglected and undervalued. Hardie argues that Ruan’s literary work is of much greater significance in the history of Chinese literature than has generally been recognised since his own time.… Read more ⤻

Fern von Geschichte und verheißungsvollen Tagen. Neoklassizistische Cyberlyrik im ChinaNetz und die Schreibweise des Lizilizilizi (2000-2020)

(Distant From History and Auspicious Days. Neoclassicist Cyberpoetry in the ChinaNet and the Poetic Diction of Lizilizilizi (2000-2020))

As a first attempt to explore in greater detail the contemporary phenomena of “modern verse in old style” 舊體新詩 published and read online, this book-essay contributes to a shift of perception in the studies of modern Chinese literature postulated by individual scholars and manifested collectively “not only to set right the misconception of the deterministic view regarding the development of the Chinese literary tradition, but also to affirm its vitality, continuity, and power of rebirth. (“Frankfurt Consensus”,2015)

In the first two parts of the book, the phenomena is approached from various angles: 1. biased perception and representation (via translation) of modern and classical Chinese poetry in the West, 2. transition from “old style poetry” to “new old style poetry” in China, distinction between “classicist” and “neoclassicist” diction, 3.… Read more ⤻

Principles and Laws in World Politics: Classical Chinese Perspectives on Global Conflict (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2021) by Walter Lee, 524 pages

The search for universal principles and laws in world politics is a colossal common task for all civilisations. It should not be monopolised by the Western liberal paradigm. Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, global conflicts have been satisfactorily resolved neither by communism nor liberalism. Humanitarian intervention, now under the cover of the responsibility to protect (R2P), has destabilised many societies, leaving justice undone. This inspiring book invites debates on the post-liberal imagination of “emancipated Leviathan”: an almighty political authority which exercises awe and force to restore order, as well as enshrines globally-negotiated values of common conscience and reinvented cosmopolitanism. Human well-being will truly become reality when we synergise pre-modern and pre-liberal ways of thinking, worldviews, ethics, and aesthetic styles by means of cross-civilisational, cross-disciplinary fundamental research, and let an emancipated Leviathan exercises principles and laws of virtue derived from the study.… Read more ⤻