China Centre Book Talk: Institutional Genes: The Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism
by Chenggang Xu (Cambridge University Press, 2025)

This book explores the origins and evolution of China’s institutions and communist totalitarianism in general. Contemporary China's fundamental institution is communist totalitarianism. Introducing the concept of Institutional Genes (IGs), the book examines how the IGs of Soviet Russia merged with those of the Chinese imperial system, creating a durable totalitarian regime with Chinese characteristics.

China Centre Book Talk: Governing Digital China by Daniela Stockmann and Ting Luo

"Why I Write" - Natasha Trethewey, United States Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, will deliver the 2025 Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters. The event will be followed by a drinks reception and book signing.

Kerala has been widely regarded, throughout the latter part of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as one of the most progressive and egalitarian states of India. Its transformation, from one of the most oppressively hierarchical regions in the nineteenth century, has been facilitated by both radical politics and campaigning religious reform movements. The movement led by Trivandrum-born spiritual leader and social activist Sri Narayana Guru (1854-1928) has been especially influential.

In the reform period of China’s 1980s, more women directors emerged and created images at odds with the stereotypical representation of ‘Chinese women’. As Lidan Hu contends, these women directors provide alternative visions of the modernisation of Chinese cinema and call attention to the fundamental issues concerning modern female subjectivity. Lu Xiaoya (陆小雅, b. 1941), a former actress who transitioned to directing in the late 1970s, has consistently foregrounded social issues in her work, with a particular emphasis on women's experiences.

Chin's humour-filled memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, tells his story about growing up Asian in Detroit and coming out to his working class immigrant family, all set against the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s, AIDS, and his family's popular Chinese restaurant. The book has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, as well as CBS Saturday Morning News and NBC News. It's also been honoured by the State of Michigan and the American Library Association.