Cybercrime unchained
Nick J. Freeman
Cybercrime is a big business, and some of its leading perpetrators are playing a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities in Southeast Asia.
Category: East Asia
Bringing Iwao home
Kirsten Han
Hakamata Iwao is believed to have been the world’s longest-serving death row prisoner. For more than half a century, his sister Hideko has never given up on him.
Memories of disaster
Shu-Mei Huang
As discussions of a so-called nuclear power renaissance resurface, Return to Fukushima pushes us to (re)consider not only the ways we live but also the exploitative systems through which energy is produced and consumed.
Taiwan’s historical burden
Jacques van Wersch
The conceit of Chris Horton’s Ghost Nation is that most of the world treats Taiwan like it doesn’t exist, and he makes the case that Taiwan deserves bolder recognition.
Silencing
Paul French
For English language readers outside China, these translations of The Running Flame and Soft Burial help to reframe Fang Fang as a writer of more than Wuhan Diary.
Lying flat in Qing China
Sebastien Smith
As an attempt to preserve what is gone, Shen Fu’s writing endures as a reminder to treasure what we still have and what we will someday mourn.
A party man
Martin Laflamme
Despite enduring humiliation, punishment, and incarceration, Xi Zhongxun’s loyalty to the Party—and even his “emotional attachment” to Mao Zedong—never wavered.
Entangled histories
Kiara Agoncillo
Filipino Hongkongers are generally excluded from the city’s self-understanding as an Asian metropolis with a distinct cultural heritage, but the historical ties between Hong Kong and the Philippines run deep.
Clerical politics
Michel Chambon
With both humanist insight and historical precision, Paul P. Mariani shows how Bishop Louis Jin Luxian was, above all, a Jesuit of his time.
To traverse the unbearable
Liesl Schwabe
“As Freud has said, if we don’t mourn, we’ll be trapped forever in melancholy as a violent site. That, to me, is a worldwide symptom”
The ‘desert book’
Nat Ty
Attempting to rebuild their relationship after her coming out, a daughter finds a momentary connection with her mother over Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara.
빛 (Hope)
Taeyeon Song
While Y2K’s SM Town artists reflected a new era and hopeful future, the K-pop artists of 2025 have been positioned as soft power cultural pawns.
A world that no longer exists
Victoria Audu
If history is written by the victors, then literature is the rebellion of the defeated.
After the war, The river remembers, Letters from the diaspora
Aisha Khalid
Poetry by Aisha Khalid.
Bhopal, forty years on
Claudio Avella
Forty years after the world’s worst industrial disaster in Bhopal, activists and survivors are still struggling for justice and accountability.
Star power
Mathieu Berbiguier
Dorothy Wai Sim Lau undertakes a nuanced interrogation of how fame, altruism and regional identity intersect in Asia’s transnational mediascape.
Personal/Political struggles
C.J. Anderson-Wu
You Must Take Part in Revolution combines powerful imagery with a compelling plot to convey the political turmoil we’ve experienced and might face in the near future.
Foreign influence
David Frazier
While the voices and expressions in Chinese rock have come from Chinese musicians, outsiders have consistently injected know-how and resources into the country’s marginalised underground musical movements.
Real men eat tofu
Nick J. Freeman
Despite tofu’s lack of structural integrity, Russell Thomas notes that its versatility has given it the resilience to “stand up in a range of figurative and real-life settings”.
Shades of the same colour
Taeyeon Song
Kornel Chang, a diasporic Korean historian and author, paints a picture of a post-Second World War Korea searching for a singular vision of what independence looks like.
Preserving Cantonese
Chong Ja Ian
Simin Li’s book is a reminder that continuing assertions about the singularity of Chinese culture and politics belie the pluralism and diversity of the Sinophone tradition.
Architecture in context
Troels Steenholdt Heiredal
Shifting Horizons: The Generation of Emancipatory Architecture in Taiwan is a unique exhibition including the many aspects that make up architectural production and attempting to locate the formation of contemporary Taiwanese architecture.
Claiming home
Carolyn Nash
Ava Chin’s memoir is a story of roots dismissed and homes denied.
Lessons in fragility
Radhika Oberoi
Nature provides expressive backdrops for Han Kang’s fiction; while she chronicles human frailty and barbarity, she also allows the light to seep in through the foliage.
When Gilbert & George went to China
Paul French
Among a post-Tiananmen flurry of activity, Gilbert & George, the British duo who’d been a dominant force in the UK’s 1980s art scene, made a trail to China and inspired many looking to break free of their constraints.
Making protests fun
Seulki Lee
How does one save the world against evil with little more than one’s own imagination? When faced with hopeless nonsense from the political leadership, what can one do with their writing?
K-pop boys for the end of the world
Kirsten Han
We’re all just finding ways to relieve the anxieties of living in a world that’s spinning out of control.
National security on show
Jennifer Eagleton
Walking through a new exhibition on national security in the Hong Kong Museum of History.
The mystery of the Little People
James Baron
Few who encounter Pas-ta’ai, the ritual to the “little people”, and the complex, sometimes contradictory, folklore associated with it are unmoved. Some even become obsessed with unravelling the ceremony’s mysterious origins.
The hardliner
James Crabtree
Matt Pottinger doesn’t much like the term “China hawk”. Even so, he’s become one of the most prominent voices in the United States pushing for a tougher line against Beijing.
The defector talks
Paul French
Thae Yong-ho’s book, a must read for the dedicated band of North Korea watchers, reminds us of the millions still struggling to survive between the 38th Parallel and the Yalu River.
Compromise(d)
Martin Laflamme
Zhou Enlai might have attempted to temper some of Mao Zedong’s worst excesses, but he did not have the courage to defy Mao when it counted the most.
The nostalgia of the colonised
Ting-Jen Kuo
Taiwan is constantly forced to assert its own identity and presence. Yet this struggle hasn’t made it impervious to colonial hangovers.
The decoloniser
Munkhnaran Bayarlkhagva
Gankhuugiin Purevbat was never keen to claim credit, but his contribution to the rebirth of Mongolian Buddhism and the decolonisation of Mongolia cannot be denied.
Family duty
Kang-Chun Cheng
Creating Feeding Ghosts, a graphic memoir, was the only way Tessa Hulls could think of to repair her relationship with her mother and make sense of the responsibilities borne by each generation.
Jade, Pine, Orchid, Kidney
Robert Wood
Eileen Chong’s poetry defies national categories, making its way into cracks and crevices like an orchid in cement, grown beautiful and a little wild.
Tongue-tied
Divya Vaze
Hong Kongers from the Indian subcontinent, the Philippines and Indonesia have lived in the city for a long time. Yet Asian minority Hong Kongers often end up segregated from ethnic Chinese children in the education system.
From Haeundae Beach to the River Kelvin
Taeyeon Song
Taeyeon Song reflects on what Glasgow taught her about being Korean.
Memory as resistance
Sophie Beach
The Uyghurs: Kashgar Before the Catastrophe and Under the Mulberry Tree: A Contemporary Uyghur Anthology are testament to the power of memory as resistance against crackdown and erasure.
A changing India
Salil Tripathi
India goes to the polls mid-April in a huge democratic exercise that will take over a month. But the nature of Indian society and democracy has changed quite fundamentally in the past decade.