New book offers global academic insights into China topics

The inaugural volume of the book series, The Digest of Chinese Studies, has recently been published. This book series aims to excerpt and translate academic achievements in the field of China studies from dozens of high-quality foreign humanities journals, while also including book reviews and discussions on various viewpoints related to the subject matter.

A total of 46 essays and book reviews have been compiled in the first issue, focusing mainly on the politics, economics, diplomacy, ecology, culture and art of ancient and modern Chinese societies. The philosophy of translation, as well as the translation of philosophical works into Chinese, has also been discussed.

Studies into historical phenomena — such as Chinese Bronze Age political economies; the political power of the great-clan eunuchs at court of the late Tang Dynasty (618-907); silver supply, as well as the production, diversity and global consumption of paper, in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties; the publication and circulation of Qing court gazettes; and the gift exchanges between royal courts of China and Europe in the 17th to 18th centuries — have demonstrated the creativity, depth and research interest of the field of Sinology in recent years, the book introduction says.