The revolution may not be televised, but it will be illustrated. This graphic novel begins with the 2019 anti-extradition protests in Hong Kong, taking us through an alternative 2022 into a dystopian 2030s, where the U.S. and China (both fascist in different ways) are at war, Taiwan is split into two, and three protestors from 2019 find different ways to resist. Written by Chinese-American journalist Melissa Chan, who was expelled from China in 2012, and illustrated by Badiucao, a Chinese-Australian political cartoonist, this high-octane story (its black-and-white drawings punctuated by splashes of red and yellow) pulls no punches. “Look what protesting peacefully got the students at Tiananmen,” says Maggie, a radicalized protestor, as she shows Andy — offspring of one of the Tiananmen generation — a cache of Molotov cocktails. “We can’t afford to adopt the tools of our enemy,” responds Andy. The novel’s title, a quotation from Mao Zedong, suggests that the only foreclosed path is not being involved at all.

From imaginary to real revolutions. In this short paperback, Jeffrey Wasserstrom connects the thread between three loci of political resistance: Hong Kong, Thailand and Burma, with Taiwan also mentioned. Informally dubbed the “milk tea alliance” (as they all drink chai with dairy, in contrast to the unadulterated tea of mainland China), activists from each region have been observing and learning from each other. Wasserstrom interviews several of those dissidents, from Agnes Chow, a pro-democracy activist in Hong Kong who was jailed for her role in the 2019 protests (also covered in the author’s previous book Vigil), to Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a Thai demonstrator protesting compulsory military service and lèse-majesté laws. Drawing on pop culture references, such as the Burmese cross-Asian rap “Dictators Must Die,” he sketches out the connections and mutual inspiration between those who “deeply believe in the possibility of a better future even in dark times,” showing that each fight does not exist in a vacuum.

Broken engagement between the U.S. and China — also the title of an e-book of interviews by Bob Davis — seems to be a new buzzword. In this new work, the prolific academic David Shambaugh (never one to miss the zeitgeist) takes the temperature of Sino-U.S. relations since their restitution in 1972, through to the recent shift of American policy from engagement to competition. For this, he places the blame both on Xi Jinping’s pugilistic foreign policy but also America’s paternalistic attempts to turn China into an image of itself. The book traces the genesis of the “engagement coalition” and its early advocates, before discussing the China policy of every U.S. president since Nixon, and its calcification under Trump and Biden. It ends with an overview of schools of China policy today inside the beltway, from the “Stealthy Rival School” to the “Strategic Empathy School,” before recommending a middle path of “competitive coexistence.” Whatever the approach, he warns, “there is no realistic prospect or false nirvana of returning to an amicable and cooperative bilateral relationship.”

How do political contexts affect, even manipulate, our very notions of love? In this compelling study, Hong Kong-based scholar Ting Guo demonstrates how emotion has been adapted into political discourse in modern China, all in the name of nation-building. She begins in the early Republic, with Sun Yat-sen’s adoption of the classical idea of “universal love” (博爱), taking us through the “ardent love” (热爱) of the Mao era — when “emotions were shaped into and capitalized by revolutionary forms” — as well as the rise of “romantic love” (爱情) and the “patriotic love” (爱国) of today. There is also a lengthy aside on Hong Kong’s push-and-pull between filial piety and local loyalty. Guo points out the religious and Confucian undertones at play throughout, despite China’s supposed secularism, to depict an “affective regime that replaces old religious affects with new political-religious ones.” The book is academic but accessible, packed with lively historical details, such as the adaptation of folklore into revolutionary opera, to show these “emotional mobilization techniques.”

Tailing the list, a summer novel recommendation to cool temperatures. Daniel Tam-Clairborne’s debut novel, like his earlier short story collection What Never Leaves (2012), is all about culture shock and mixed identities. A Chinese-American woman, Liz, teaches English at a rural university in Shanxi province, where she befriends a local student, Lin, who gets involved with another foreign teacher, Travis. When things fall apart, Lin leaves China, ending up at an American community college near Liz’s Ohio hometown. Meanwhile, Liz stays in China to uncover her family roots as a different kind of migrant. The pandemic, and increasingly fractured relations between America and China, pull the two characters further apart. It is this double helix of the twin protagonists which provides the narrative tension of the book’s second half, as well as the thematic challenge of whether individual connections can transcend national circumstance. ∎