New Books in Chinese Studies

Colin Flahive
is an American entrepreneur and writer who has spent more than two
decades living and running social enterprises in southwestern China. He
is best known as one of the founders of Salvador's Coffee House, which
is a hub of international exchange in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan
province.

In this New Books Network episode, we talk with Colin about his latest book, The Galaxy's Last Ride: Shifting Gears in Rural China (Earnshaw Books, 2026).

The Galaxy's Last Ride is a rich combination of
memoir, travelogue, and oral history that explores China's sweeping
development through a deeply personal lens. The book weaves together
several strands—a 2,500-kilometer solo motorcycle journey that Colin
took across rural China during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the
personal stories of Salvador’s employees, and recollections from Colin’s
past travels—to paint a part-insider-part-outsider portrait of China’s
evolutions over the last two decades.

Anthony Kao is a writer who intersects international affairs and cultural criticism. He founded/edits Cinema Escapist—a
publication exploring the sociopolitical context behind global film and
television—and also writes for outlets like The Guardian, Al Jazeera,
The Diplomat, and Eater.
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Home to 25 million people, Shanghai is the most populous and wealthiest city
in China. A meeting point between China and the wider world, the city
has become the beating heart of Chinese capitalism, a place of
initiative, confidence, and forward thinking. It is a city of stark
contradictions, suffused with both extreme wealth and poverty, luxury
living, and a highly organised criminal underworld.

In Shanghai: The Story of China's Most Dynamic City
(Yale University Press, 2026), Professor Michael Dillon explores the
full history of Shanghai, from its origins as a small fishing village to
the bustling financial hub of today. The city has been central to some
of the most turbulent events in China’s modern history, from the British
and French colonial concessions of the nineteenth century, to the birth
of the Chinese Communist Party and its vital role in Chinese economics
and politics today. Shanghai is a fascinating portrait of China’s most dynamic city—and explores its future role in the country’s development.

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.
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Walmart: Made in China
(Stanford University Press, 2026) by Dr. Eileen Otis tells the story of
Walmart's expansion in China, making the case that it is the story of a
major shift in the structure of global capitalism. Walmart, argues Dr.
Otis, is a leading actor in the rise of merchant capitalism, wherein the
role of the merchant has changed from operating at the whim of industrialists, to leveraging
control over large consumer markets. As Walmart's retail business grew
at unprecedented rates across the globe, so too did this business model.

Walmart: Made in China
documents the business's expansion into China not as a tale of seamless
market entry, but as a case of frictions, improvisations, and labor
struggles that reveal deeper transformations in global economic power.
Drawing on years of fieldwork in Walmart stores across China, Dr. Otis
traces an internal supply chain—from warehouse to checkout—where workers
stock, promote, explain, and process goods under varying regimes of
control. These labor
regimes, structured by gender, migration, surveillance, and corporate
rules and culture, as well as managerial oversight, reveal how
capitalist value is realized, and how it can be contested.

At
the heart of her analysis is the rise of a new system—merchant
capitalism—in which control over consumer markets, rather than
production, drives profit. Thus, Walmart: Made in China offers a compelling account of this shift in global capitalism, as it gets made and remade, on the retail floor.

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

⁠Connoisseurs and conmen: The contest for cultural authority in early twentieth-century Britain⁠
(Manchester University Press, 2026) by Dr. Lewis Ryder examines John
Hilditch (1872-1930), a notorious collector of Chinese art who lied,
hoaxed and manipulated in his struggle against museum experts to become a
cultural authority. Previously overlooked as a pest with a dubious
collection, this book uses Hilditch to interrogate how far the
monumental social, cultural
and political changes of the early twentieth century unsettled social
and cultural hierarchies and how these hierarchies were remade. It shows
how the cultural elites were forced to engage with the public and
re-draw the boundaries of citizenship, expertise and high and low
culture in response to unprecedented social mobility, the
democratisation of culture and politics, as well as the effects of
British imperialism which brought ordinary Britons access to antiquities
as well as confidence to claim expertise over foreign cultures. The
book will interest social and cultural historians of Modern Britain,
museum scholars and art historians.

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

How did a vast, nationwide institution like a modern postal system
come into being in Qing China—right at the very end of the empire?

In The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization, and the Connection of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 2024), Weipin Tsai
takes up this question by tracing the origins and early development of
China’s postal system. The book asks not only how such an institution
was built, but why it emerged when it did and in the particular form it
took. In doing so, Tsai situates the post office within the Qing’s
broader efforts to modernize, showing how its development intersected
with political maneuvering, imperial pressures, and changing ideas about
the nature of the state.

The Making of China’s Post Office examines both the
high-level decisions and the ground-level operations that shaped the
system’s creation and expansion. Tsai pays particular attention to the
economic and social pressures that drove its growth, as well as the
everyday work of postal employees, including the nitty-gritty of routes,
logistics, and administration. This dual focus allows Tsai to show how
the circulation of mail depended on the interplay between central
ambitions and local realities, while also uncovering the work that
happened at the local level.

Tsai’s book offers a new perspective on China’s encounters with
imperialism, efforts at centralization, and changing conceptions of
governance. In following the routes and emerging and routines of the
post, The Making of China’s Post Office delivers a rich account
of how a modern communications network took shape. This book will be of
interest to readers of modern Chinese history, as well as those working
on global histories of infrastructure, communication, and the state.
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