135: Chinese Political Culture With Shoufu Yin

Making of a Historian

In this episode I speak with PhD Candidate Soufu Yin about Chinese political culture. If you're anything like me, your idea of China is pretty monolithic: politics is all about emperors, bureaucrats, and the civil service examination. But Shoufu argues that much of this is a trick of perspective, and that when we look at Chinese political culture we find lots of examples of a very different kind of politics. In this episode we talk about medieval public opinion polls, and female military commanders.