2024 CHUS Academic Excellence Book Award
Dr. Chen Jian’s monograph — Zhou Enlai: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2024).
This 800-page biography offers a nuanced and compelling portrait of Zhou Enlai, a pivotal figure in modern Chinese history, the PRC’s first premier, and a world-renowned diplomat. Drawing from an impressive array of sources spanning China, the USA, Russia, and India, Chen crafts a comprehensive narrative of Zhou’s life, tracing his journey from his early years to his final days. By examining the paradoxes of Zhou’s character within the complex historical contexts he navigated, the author delivers a balanced and insightful assessment of this extraordinary statesman. Meticulously structured and expertly written, the book employs a longue-durée perspective to illuminate China’s dramatic transformation from the late Qing dynasty to the Mao era. A must-read for those interested in modern China, diplomacy, and international relations, this work stands as a definitive account of Zhou’s enduring legacy.
Honorable Mention: Dr. Hanchao Lu’s monograph — The Shanghai Tai Chi: The Art of Being Ruled in Mao’s China (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Skillfully drawing from an extensive array of primary sources, Shanghai Taichi offers a rich and engaging narrative of the material world of the bourgeois under a politically adverse environment during the early decades of the PRC. It explores the intellectual contributions of the educated elites from the “old world,” the youth’s engagement with taboo literature, and the rise of women as a workforce, highlighting how women interpreted and enacted their visions of “liberation.” The work challenges the conventional demarcation of Mao’s China and the reform era by portraying the country’s economic rise over the past four decades not as a departure from Mao’s China but rather a drastic continuation of human behavior. The book seamlessly balances rigorous historiographical analysis with accessible and engaging prose, the book serves as a valuable resource for understanding the history of Shanghai, the People’s Republic of China, and the social history of communism.
2023 CHUS Academic Excellence Book Award
- Dr. Xiaobing Li’s China’s New Navy: The Evolution of PLAN from the People’s Revolution to a 21st Century Cold War (The Navy Institute Press, July 2023) can be seen as a pioneering scholarship in English on the historical development of the Chinese navy, therefore, its major contribution to the military history in general is far reaching. Loaded with valuable historical sources (especially newly available Chinese records and sources), individual interviews, personal stories, and convincing argument, China’s New Navy explicitly details the important turning points of Chinese naval history in combat experience, ideological transformation, new reform and strategy, and military technological modernization.
Li’s lucrative study of the growth and expansion of the Chinese modern Navy has provided a insightful perspective for scholars and policymakers alike to investigate naval operations and strategic planning among allies and opponents. Additionally, the authors’ in-depth exploration of the military confrontation in the Taiwan Strait over the past few decades reflects the political prospects and military concerns on both sides of the strait.
2. Dr. Xin Zhang’s The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China(Harvard University Press, April 2023) is an ambitious work which skillfully remakes a new history by examining the impact of “macro” history of a much-studied Opium War through the “micro” window of a local port, Zhengjiang, along the Yangzi River open to foreign trade by treaty.
The shrewd research methodology of the book deserves special attention. A well-written masterpiece, the book adopts a cross-sectional research approach bestowing a reinterpretation of an interplayed history where “the power of globalization is deeply intertwined with, and often shaped by, local specifics.” This unique research method has provided a valuable new direction for scholars of Chinese history to follow. As the title of the book suggests, the inquiries build upon a convincing dialogue between the study of the early globalization with the focus on the aftermath of the Opium War at transnational level, and the responses of local community to negotiate a process of transregional transformation. Through the local window of Zhengjiang, Zhang retells a different history of science, economy, as well as imperialistic experiences.
Honorable Mention: the monographs by Dr. Zhongping Chen and Dr. Di Luo.
Prof. Zhongping Chen’s Transpacific Reform and Revolution: The Chinese in North America, 1898―1918 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, July 2023) focuses on the “network” activities carried out by major reformists, especially Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen, among other activists, in North America to win oversea support and raise funds for their revolutionary reform movements during the last years of the Qing Dynasty. The research makes good use of various historical records, communications, and collections from a few merchant associations in Chinatown, including informational Canadian sources.
Prof. Di Luo’s Beyond Citizenship: Literacy and Personhood in Everyday China, 1900–1945 (Brill Academic Publishers, September 2022) offers a clear picture of the state-sponsored literacy movement during the first half of the 20th century. The case studies are well-presented to illustrate the purposes, programs, as well as the government efforts and intellectual participation in the early state building process in the new republic of China.
2022 CHUS Academic Excellence Book Award
- Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, April 2022) by Dr. Victor Seow, Department Of History, Harvard University
Featured by the publisher as “a forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine,” Dr. Seow’s hefty monograph provides a brilliant account of modern energy extraction in Fushun, China’s coal capital, by three state powers, the Japanese empire, the Nationalists, and the Communists. Especially interesting is Seow’s analysis of the structure of “Carbon Technocracy” where energy extraction was exploited to build and strengthen state power. Accordingly, the author scrutinizes a few important issues relating to the coal mining industry including the roots of fossil-fuel energy and the environmental and political consequences, which shaped the state policies in China and political order of East Asia. Thoughtfully argued and lucidly written, the book has drawn on an impressive range of research materials, including English sources and those from Japan and China. Seow’s study is not only a case study of global history of science and technology but also one of state policy and political environment of China and East Asia. Scholars in different fields of study will find Professor Seow’s book both informative and enlightening.
2. Arise, Africa! Roar, China! Black and Chinese Citizens of the World in the Twentieth
Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, December 2021) by Dr.
Yunxiang Gao, Department of History, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON,
Canada.
Receiving Honorable Mention from a couple of scholarly associations, Dr. Gao’s book is a
transnational and transcultural history against the background of the turbulent decades of World War II and the ensuing Cold War. It tells a vibrant story of the unique relationship between three of the most famous twentieth-century African Americans, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Langston Hughes, their little–known Chinese allies Liu Liangmo, and Sino-Caribbean dancer-choreographer Sylvia Si-lan Chen. Intriguingly, this well-researched study detailed activities of these five protagonists who “strove in their own way to create a politicized transpacific and enable global communication between African Americans and Chinese.” Through an exhaustive archival research, insightful and measured analysis, the author explores a few important and intertwines themes in Black internationalism, racial solidarity against racism and colonial oppression to bear on this complicated subject across regions in East Asia, North America, and Africa. As the author indicates, the book showcases the formative effects on not only “Chinese views of the Black diaspora” but also “African American views of China’s place in an emergent imaginary of anticolonial and racial liberation.”
2020 CHUS Academic Excellence Book Award
Dr. Xiaoyuan Liu, David Dean 21st Century Professor of Asian Studies & Professor of History, University of Virginia
Dr. Lorenz M. Lüthi, Associate Professor of History, McGill University
2017 CHUS Academic Excellence Book Award
Dr. Xiaoping Li is the most prolific writer among CHUS members, having authored or co-
authored eighteen books and edited volumes. These publications deal with a wide variety of subject areas, encompassing military, diplomatic, political, social, and cultural histories. Indeed, Dr. Li has done CHUS proud with his phenomenal scholarly accomplishments as well as his instrumental service to the organization.
To add one more golden leaf to his laurels, Dr. Li published another book in 2017, entitled The Cold War in East Asia, by the prominent publisher Routledge. This book places East Asia, including China, Japan, and the two Koreas, at the center stage of the Cold War from 1945 to 1991. While many conventional texts have taken a Euro-American centric approach, characterizing the Cold War as a confrontation between the United States and the (former) Soviet Union that led two contending camps in the post-WWII world — the “free world” and the communist/socialist block, East Asia in comparison has received less scholarly attention, partially due to cultural and linguistic barriers and the lack of readily available sources for Western researchers. While some monographs have focused on Sino-American relations, Japan-U.S. relations and the Korean War during the Cold War years, East Asia as a whole remains, by and large, in the periphery in the systemic and comprehensive analysis of the Cold War in its global context.
Dr. Li’s book can also serve as a survey text with its coverage of the different interpretations of the origins and developments of the Cold War in East Asia. It explores new historiographical, thematic, and topical trends in the history of modern East Asia. Told with an emphasis on East Asian views, it explains how China, Japan, and the two Koreas have played a distinctive and instrumental role in shaping the historical contours of the Cold War. Dr. Li argues that, more than an ideological battle between capitalism and communism, the Cold War in East Asia was also a struggle between different political, economic, social, and cultural determinations and resolutions. Significantly, East Asian countries molded the Cold War through their own adaptation and transformation, evidenced in their cultural resilience in the face of new economic, military, and political challenges, both domestic and international. It demonstrates how East Asian countries utilized the global Cold War politics and economy to craft their own particular versions of survival, struggle, and success in decolonization, independence, industrialization, and modernization through the second half of the twentieth century.
Dr. Li’s book also offers important resources for future research in Cold War studies, and opens new areas for Asian Studies courses. Scholars and students will find the book’s primary sources, many of which are not readily available in English, of great interest, and they will also discover many intriguing issues that have been previously overlooked. In light of the merits and strengths of this book, we recommend The Cold War in East Asia for the 2017 CHUS Scholarly Achievement award in strongest possible terms.