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Podcast: NBN Book of the Day
Episode: Guoqi Xu, "The Idea of China: A Contested History" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Description: What counts as China, and who counts as Chinese?
China became a capitalist superpower by investing in globalization. Now that it has established its credentials—and emerged as a major US competitor—its leaders are looking within, focused on suppressing dissent and fostering cohesion. The result has been an increasingly nationalist cultural agenda, celebrating a Chinese identity steeped in the mystique of the Middle Kingdom and nostalgia for heroic twentieth-century resistance. Yet Chinese nationalism, like nationalism everywhere, is fraught. Few Westerners, and even fewer Chinese, recognize that the very idea of China is up for grabs.Â
Xu...