New Books in Chinese Studies

Chinese investment in the United States has become an increasingly contentious issue that is much more complicated than headlines suggest. In this episode, we reflect on recent debates in Michigan’s democratic primary and use it as a jumping-off point to examine more than 25 years of Chinese investment in the US and subnational relationships with Chinese business. We’re joined by Emily Conrad, whose research examines Chinese manufacturing investment in the US. We discuss where investment is concentrated and how local governments interact with investments, with attitudes ranging from facilitation to passivity to obstruction. We also discuss how Chinese companies navigate the present environment and varied contexts across the US. As federal scrutiny has intensified and states have introduced new restrictions on foreign land ownership and investment, Chinese firms face mounting political and regulatory headwinds. Yet, investments have not disappeared, and companies are adapting, raising questions about how geopolitics is reshaping investment, manufacturing and subnational policies and politics in the US.

Sign up for Emily’s Substack

Emily’s book The Faithless?: The Untold Story of the Electoral College

Analysis of State Attitudes towards Chinese investments over time from Conrad’s research here

Other resources from the episode:

Rhodium Group’s China cross-border monitor

YouTube podcast with Abdul al-Sayed that mentions some about China: here

Wall Street Journal article about the State Armor organization: here

NPR podcast with one of the best overviews on Gotion:here

More on Gotion:

‘No CCP in USA!’: Inside a Michigan town's unhinged war over a Chinese battery plant

A Chinese battery company bet on a small Michigan town for its U.S. expansion

Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate primary debate audio used in this episode

Tweet on the CCP by Sen. Elissa Slotkin

Financial Times article, China’s assault on Europe’s car market has barely begun

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

From misty mountain oolongs to the global boba boom, Taiwan’s teas carry far more than flavor. They embody contested borders, evolving identities, and the complexities of nationhood. Routes of Taiwan Tea: Mobility, Borders, and Territoriality (U Washington Press, 2026) by Dr. Po-Yi Hung traces tea varieties, processing expertise, and merchants across Taiwan and Southeast Asia to reveal how a simple leaf has become a force in global politics.Drawing on decades of fieldwork and extensive archival research, Dr. Hung delves deep into the history of Taiwan’s tea industry, from its roots in the Qing empire to its role in modern food nationalism. Hung shows how advocacy for Taiwanization—the movement to recover and celebrate the island’s unique history and culture—occurs not only within Taiwan’s food scenes but also through cross-border exchanges. Oolong cultivation in Thailand’s highlands and bubble tea’s rise in Vietnam demonstrate how tea acts as a nonhuman agent, fostering connections and unsettling conventional notions of sovereignty. Through these routes, tea becomes more than agriculture; it becomes an instrument of diplomacy, a marker of authenticity, and a symbol of cultural pride.Offering a fresh perspective on Taiwan’s geopolitical positioning, Routes of Taiwan Tea redefines how borders are imagined and lived. It is an essential contribution to food studies, political geography, and East and Southeast Asian studies, illuminating how everyday practices like drinking tea shape global relations.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Popular
history tells the story of how the tea boycott during the American
Revolution caused a transition in American taste from tea to coffee,
making the young country a coffee-drinking nation. In truth, Americans
did not give up their tea so easily, and the United States grew to be
the second-largest importer of tea from China. Diverging from British
black tea traditions, U.S. consumers preferred green tea, cultivated a
particular taste for Oolong tea, and invented the English Breakfast Tea
brand to market Chinese black tea.

This World in a Teacup: Credit, Taste, and Power in the U.S.-China Tea Trade, 1784–1911
(University of Nebraska Press, 2026) by Dr. Dan Du is the first book to
detail the American tea trade with China after the American Revolution
through the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival sources and
perspectives from both sides of the Pacific, Dr. Du offers new insights
to help understand fundamental developments in U.S.-China relations
within a global context. This World in a Teacup shows that, rather than
depending on hard-money transactions or a barter economy, a
sophisticated credit system buttressed American tea purchases in China:
Credit instruments such as promissory notes, bills of exchange, and
checks financed the transactions between Chinese and U.S. tea merchants,
crystallizing changing power dynamics in the global economy. This World in a Teacup
explains how the circulation of these credit instruments challenged the
conventional understanding of China’s economy as a primitive system and
how the power structure of American, British, and Chinese tea trade in
the credit economy reshaped American consumption patterns.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

A series of questions have been sparked by the indigenous urgency of
the moment: What does it mean to live through a world coming undone? How
do people carry on amid rupture, loss, and grief? Decolonial Endurance: Lisu Worldmaking Against Chinese Settler Colonialism (Stanford University Press, 2026) explores
these questions through the turbulent lives of Indigenous Lisu
subsistence farmers in China’s Eastern Himalayas, bordering Myanmar and
Tibet.

Like many of China’s Indigenous borderlands, this
mountainous region has long borne the force of encroaching Chinese state
power. Since the 1980s, the Chinese state has been compelling the Lisu
to give up their subsistence lifeways, move into urban settlements, and
send their children to government boarding schools. In exchange for the
so-called gifts of development—healthcare, income, and education—they
suffer environmental and social catastrophes such as mass landslides,
strange new illnesses, and toxic food.

Drawing on over a decade
of engagement with the Lisu, Ting Hui Lau takes readers into the world
of ex-shamans, heart-pained mothers, restless spirits, and demon-mad
migrants as they grapple with the fallout from state development, which
Lau argues is the latest phase in a centuries-long project of settler
colonialism along China's Southwest frontier. At once a portrayal of
loss and an ethnography of hope, Lau chronicles Lisu worldmaking amid
this destruction, centering their quiet resistance through everyday acts
of communal caretaking. In a time of escalating geopolitical and
ecological crisis, this book calls for a new decolonial politics rooted
in the transformative power of endurance.

Ting Hui Lau (email
address: lau.th@nus.edu.sg) is Assistant Professor of Sociology and
Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. She studies
sociocultural, psychological, and medical anthropology, development and
environmental change, Indigeneity and colonialism, and the borderland
areas of East and Southeast Asia.

Yadong Li is an
anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural
Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship
and research interests can be found here.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies

Pedagogies of Value: Marketing Foreign Goods in China (Berghahn,
2026) by Dr. Máximo Badaró explores how China is reshaping global
hierarchies of worth. Through ethnographic research among marketers,
consultants, and brokers who promote foreign goods in Shanghai, Beijing,
and beyond, this book investigates how value is taught, contested, and
transformed in everyday encounters. From luxury brands and consumer
ethnography to real estate, wine, and organic food, the book reveals how
foreign intermediaries attempt
to ‘educate’ Chinese consumers, only to confront shifting power
dynamics that challenge Western authority. Blending vivid narratives
with sharp analysis, this study argues that China has become a central
arena for reimagining the very meaning of value. 

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book
focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty
negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative
analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find
Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/chinese-studies