Outstanding Academic Titles 2025: China

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to China

Posted on April 23, 2026 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2025 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles about China. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. The fox spirit, the stone maiden, and other transgender histories from late imperial China
Sommer, Matthew H. Columbia, 2024

This groundbreaking study explores transgender lives and practices in late imperial China, inspired by Susan Stryker’s definition of transgender and Natalie Zemon Davis’s skillful interpretation of the voices of the past. According to Stryker, self-determination is a core value of modern transgender politics, which emphasizes “the movement across a socially imposed boundary away from an unchosen starting place.” In imperial China, people moved away from the gender they were assigned at birth in different ways and for varied reasons. This book addresses critical questions, such as how transgender people and practices were represented and understood by the authorities who produced legal cases, and how authors of fanciful fiction explored transgressions and anomalies of sex. It starts with an overview of transgender paradigms from cross-dressing comedies to modern transphobia. Through close readings of court cases, zhiguai fictions, and modern newspaper accounts, Sommer (Stanford Univ.) deftly examines the paranoid fantasy of transgender predation, focusing on six cases of male-to-female cross-dressers or intersex commoners who appeared in legal disputes. Ironically, despite identifying as women, some transgender people were treated as men in the legal case records, showcasing how Confucian elites maneuvered gender nonconformism in Chinese contexts. This provocative historicization of gender crossing in late imperial China should be read widely. View on Amazon.

2. When food became scarce: how Chinese peasants survived the Great Leap Forward famine
Chen, Yixin. Cornell, 2024

The disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward campaign launched by Mao Zedong in 1958 are well known in the field of China studies. However, this book by Chen (Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington) differs from previous works in several ways. In addition to a comprehensive introduction that provides a concise overview of existing scholarship and details the book’s aim and content, it successfully provides a grassroots perspective to reconstruct the misery of the famine the campaign caused. Thanks to the author’s painstaking research, which makes effective use of a variety of sources unavailable to previous scholars, particularly invaluable oral sources from his decades of fieldwork, the book focuses on four villages in Anhui, the province hit hardest by the famine, and delves into the day-to-day survival saga of those affected. Chen’s main finding is that while the famine was widespread, farmers’ survival depended on the function of the lineages they traditionally relied on in lean times. Survival also depended on peasants’ resistance strategies, as Chen’s comparative studies of Jiangxi Province show. All in all, this is an incredibly useful book for anyone teaching the history of modern China.  View on Amazon.

3. Manipulating authoritarian citizenship: security, development, and local membership in China
Vortherms, Samantha A. Stanford, 2024

Manipulating Authoritarian Citizenship asks why and how China’s authoritarian government manages to expand socioeconomic rights to internal migrants through the hukou system. Vortherms (Univ. of California) argues that, at multiple levels, the Chinese bureaucracy attempts to balance security and economic motivations when granting migrants access to citizenship rights. Security interests incentivize local governments to exclude migrants, while economic interests compel them to include migrants in government redistribution. This balancing act between security-based conservatism and development-promoting liberalization has created “a highly institutionalized form of authoritarian citizenship” (p. 4). Internal citizenship regimes allow the government to adopt a flexible policy of inclusion and exclusion to ensure local economic development and social stability. Such regimes subdivide the population into different classifications of citizens with differentiated rights entitlements. This thoroughly researched book focuses on the evolution of China’s age-old, controversial hukou system, which has become an essential tool for managing labor across the country in the contemporary Chinese political economy. Extensive field research, archival study, and interviews support the analysis and argument. This excellent book provides invaluable insights into local governance, resource management, internal migration, regional gaps, and other key sociopolitical issues in China today. View on Amazon.  

4. The regulation of prostitution in China: law in the everyday lives of sex workers, police officers, and public health officials
Boittin, Margaret L. Cambridge, 2024

Prostitution is both illegal and ubiquitous in contemporary China. Biottin (Osgoode Hall Law School, York Univ., Canada) foregrounds this contradiction and explores how sex workers, grassroots state players, and nongovernmental organizations interact with each other against a backdrop of anti-prostitution laws, a deepening HIV/AIDS crisis, and a thriving sex and entertainment industry that keeps local governments afloat. The author conducted extensive fieldwork—ethnographic observation, interviews, and social surveys—in the late 2000s in cities of varying sizes throughout China. Her solid empirical work affords a nuanced, comparative study of all three major classes of sex workers in China, revealing their opinions on sex work, the ban on prostitution, and their varied experiences with clients, business owners, and local government agencies. Biottin’s examination of the understudied and most vulnerable lower-tier sex workers, who work in streets, parks, and small mom-and-pop brothels, is particularly valuable and enlightening. Equally admirable are her efforts to recognize and explain local state agencies’ predicaments, institutional weaknesses, and interagency tensions. This is an empirically rich, methodologically innovative, must-read book for anyone interested in sexuality, ethnographic methods, and law and society in China and beyond. Scholars, activists, and policymakers alike will find it accessible and informative. View on Amazon.

5. The art of state persuasion: China’s strategic use of media in interstate disputes
Wang, Frances Yaping. Oxford, 2024

Wang (Colgate Univ.) brings a fresh perspective to the issue of authoritarian state use of propaganda to answer two related questions: Why and how do authoritarian states use domestic media campaigns focused on foreign policy issues? Wang’s answer, illustrated by four case studies of China’s foreign policy disputes and wars with Vietnam and the Philippines between 1979 to 2016, is that autocratic leaders amplify the rhetoric of international disputes by using media campaigns when public opinion and state goals are misaligned in order to align them. Analyzing the case studies reveals two types of media campaigns—mobilization and pacification—both meant to align public opinion with China’s foreign policy goals. Readers from many disciplines will appreciate both the exhaustively documented case studies carefully framed by alignment and other IR theories, and Wang’s reminder that China cares deeply about public opinion, especially in the era of heightened access to information via social media. The two appendixes provide additional information on Wang’s methods and sources. Readers who want more context on autocracies and propaganda should consult Erin Carter and Brett Carter’s Propaganda in Autocracies: Institutions, Information, and the Politics of Belief (CH, Jun’24, 61-2878).  View on Amazon.

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