How do pregnant women in China navigate empowerment amid shifting gender norms? Mingxuan Li and Anna Lora-Wainwright show how women challenge patriarchal expectations through two intertwined strategies: seeking greater support from partners and asserting autonomy to protect their own agency.

China’s achievements at scale are undeniable—but scale is not system. Responding to @kaiserkuo.bsky.social’s call to judge by delivery, @messingschlager.bsky.social argues that durable performance depends on independent measurement, contestable feedback, and system integration, not size alone.

When the MaskPark case broke on China’s internet, it exposed a vast online trade in non-consensual images of women. As censorship buried the story, victims were left to navigate trauma, stigma, and official neglect on their own. Ling Li reflects on what this says on gendered violence in China today.

In her work, C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’, writes Kimiko Suda.

Drawing on one month of residence in a retirement community outside Beijing, Brian DeMare examines the Chinese silver-hair market, tracing everyday experiences of retirees and highlighting the interplay between personal memories of PRC history and the commodification of elder care in today's China.

Why did Western firms move manufacturing to East Asia? Who are the workers behind the region's industrial rise, and what are the social costs? For our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social spoke with Anru Lee and Ya-Wen Lei on gender, labour, and (de)industrialisation in China and Taiwan.

||NEW PROFILE|| Venezuela–China ties go back to 1974, but it was under Chávez that the relationship deepened through oil-backed loans and cooperation deals. Today, despite sanctions and economic collapse, Beijing remains a central, if more cautious, pillar of Caracas’ foreign and development policy.

In this essay, Qing Shen examines how older gay men in Shanghai reflect on their heterosexual marriages amid public debates that brand such unions as 'marriage fraud'. In doing so, he unsettles the moral certainty behind that label and shows why these arrangements cannot be reduced to deception.

In this essay, Ling Tang examines gender-critical currents in Chinese feminist scholarship: one revives socialist legacies to unsettle Western feminist paradigms, the other rejects both socialist and liberal frames in favour of grounded documentation within China’s historical and cultural contexts.

New book drop 📚 Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds Our visual feature created with authors @ivanfranceschini.bsky.social‬ and Ling Li details life inside huge scam factories using modern slavery to staff their secret compounds. 👉 scam-factories-life-inside....

In this essay, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee argues that China no longer mirrors Western modernity but transforms it from within, forcing us to rethink the very categories through which we understand capitalism, socialism, and the modern world, and to confront the limits of the West's theoretical imagination.

|| NEW PROFILE || A key node of the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor, the Kyaukphyu Deep-Sea Port was meant to anchor China’s access to the Indian Ocean. Yet, 12 years on, the project faces mounting obstacles—from armed conflict to debt concerns—casting doubt on its future, writes Linda Calabrese.

Thirty years after the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the Chinese government is once again calling on women to serve the nation, this time in science and technology. In this essay, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social revisits a century of women in science in China, tracing their struggles and achievements.

What does it mean to speak of decriminalisation or depathologisation of homosexuality in China? In his new essay, Petrus Liu challenges Western narratives of queer progress, arguing that same-sex desire was never criminalised but rendered unintelligible within prevailing legal and cultural norms.

How should we understand Jin Xing, China’s most famous transgender celebrity? In this new essay, Yahia Ma unpacks her embrace of gender binarism not as a paradox, but as a strategy that secures mainstream visibility while opening space to imagine cultural and political otherness in China and beyond.

Southeast Asia is now a global hub for online scams. But who works in these compounds, and under what conditions? How should authorities respond? In this episode of our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with @ivanfranceschini.bsky.social and Ling Li about their new book 'Scam' (Verso 2025).

What happens when queer desire, religion, and science fiction collide in space? In Jesus on Mars, Cui Zi’en offers a haunting, dreamlike story that moves between faith and fantasy. One of China’s most daring queer voices brought to new readers in Yahia Ma's translation.

In this essay, Ida Huang explores how LGBTQ+ student groups in China carve out 'queer heterotopias', fragile yet powerful spaces of care, imagination, and play within authoritarian structures. By centring these practices, she invites us to rethink what activism under constraint can look like.

|| UPDATED PROFILE || Sri Lanka has long been one of China’s closest partners in South Asia, with ties spanning diplomacy, trade, and massive infrastructure projects. But this partnership also sparks debate over debt, sovereignty, and who really benefits. A profile by Yihao Li and Thiruni Kelegama.

How did radio and the circulation of news transform modern China? In his new book 'Seeking News, Making China', John Alekna traces how emerging technologies reshaped politics, community, and state–society relations in the twentieth century. Read the conversation with Laura De Giorgi.

Neither fully accepted nor entirely apart, the descendants of foreigners in China embody the tensions of identity in a globalised yet nationalistic age. Chengzhi Zhang traces their struggles for belonging and what this reveals about the boundaries of Chineseness.

From Sanmenxia and Three Gorges to the Yarlung Tsangpo Dam, China has long relied on monumental hydropower to prove state capacity. @zenel25.bsky.social and @pguer.bsky.social show how such projects, while promising development and security, often deepen the very insecurities they claim to resolve.

Decades after it was assumed lost, the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard reappeared in a NY basement. For Ep.3 of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social talks with historian @tsmullaney.bsky.social about the legendary MingKwai and the century-long effort to type in Chinese.

Hardship has long been praised in China as the road to virtue and success. Today’s youth are beginning to question this tradition, linking the pressures of school with the exploitation of labour and asking whether hardship should still be seen as a moral ideal. An essay by @humayun.bsky.social.

|| NEW PROFILE || Mexico’s ties with China date back to the sixteenth-century Manila Galleon trade, when Mexican silver became central to China’s economy. Today, Mexico navigates growing Chinese trade and investment while balancing its strategic dependence on the US, writes Enrique Dussel Peters.

How does basketball shape youth and masculinity in China? In this new essay, Selina Kötter and Gil Hizi trace its role in TV dramas and the rise of 'village NBA' competitions, showing how sport negotiates gender ideals, market ambitions, and young people’s disillusionment.

What happens when airspace becomes an economic frontier? In Shenzhen, a booming low-altitude economy is turning the skies into a new arena for innovation and profit, writes @fanfanyang.bsky.social. Discover how drones are remapping the city’s horizons and reconfiguring tech, capital, and urban life.

What is Sinopessimism? From lying flat to runology, Dino Ge Zhang explores a grassroots lexicon of disillusionment in China. Not just youth disengagement but a low theory of coping, refusing, and imagining alternatives amid economic and social pressures.

In Episode 2 of our 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with journalist-turned-academics @roseluqiu.bsky.social and @fangkc.bsky.social about the state of journalism in China, delving into censorship, commercialisation, and the evolving role of diasporic media.

The new issue of Global China Pulse is now live! What does it mean to do fieldwork on Global China? This issue explores the methodological, ethical, and political challenges researchers face when studying China’s global presence from the ground up. Download here: globalchinapulse.net/download/glo...

What does China’s global information system really look like? Despite building its own digital ecosystem, China’s tech expansion still relies on US platforms—and is shaped by local contexts abroad. In this essay, Weidi Zheng unpacks the triangulation between China, the US, and recipient countries.

How do you do ethnography in places of suspended sovereignty? Richard Nyelade draws on his fieldwork in Taiwan to explore how researchers navigate legal ambiguity, geopolitical tension, and fragile alliances, proposing 'ethnographic diplomacy' as a mode shaped by silence, suspicion, and performance.

What does queer life feel like on the margins of China’s cities? In this essay, Ian Tian traces the stories of gender- and sexually nonconforming migrant workers in urban villages, exploring how queerness is shaped by class and space and why the LGBTQ+ movement must reckon with its own exclusions.

What does it mean to do fieldwork on the edge, where violence, fear, and trust collide? In this essay, Ling Li dives into the messy realities of researching trafficking and gender-based violence in China and Southeast Asia. Access is hard. Ethics are harder. Representation? That’s the real test.

In this essay, @stellahongzhang.bsky.social draws on her fieldwork experiences in Pakistan and Nigeria and on digital platforms like WeChat to unpack issues of trust, gatekeeping, and the geopolitics of access in Global China research. Reflexivity isn’t optional—it’s foundational.

|| NEW PROFILE || Vincent Ibonye charts Nigeria–China ties from Cold War solidarity to today’s strategic partnership, showing how Nigeria has navigated Chinese investment, military cooperation, and ‘debt trap’ allegations—while balancing relations with both China and the US.

In the first episode of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with @jingwang.bsky.social and Christian Sorace about the legacies of Covid-19 five years after the virus upended our lives. What has changed, what hasn’t, and what does it all mean for China and the world today?

How can interpretive methods help us study Global China in politically sensitive contexts? In this essay, @julieradomski.bsky.social draws on her experience of ethnographic research on a contested infrastructure project in Ecuador to reflect on how positionality influences access and insight.

A few of us at the Made in China Journal have been working on a very exciting new project. Stay tuned for the launch of our podcast, 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, a monthly interview series hosted by @yangyangcheng.bsky.social. The first episode drops next week, wherever you get your podcasts.

||NEW CFPs|| The Made in China Journal invites submissions for an issue on how political depression is navigated and negotiated in China. We’re especially interested in lessons for activists confronting democratic backsliding, authoritarian populism, or political disengagement around the world. 1/2

Can love hold a nation together—or hold it down? In her new book, @tingguowrites.bsky.social uncovers how Chinese leaders from Sun Yat-sen to Xi Jinping have harnessed the language of love—universal, ardent, paternal—to stir hearts, shape ideology, and legitimise power across a century.

Before Islam, the Uyghurs were Buddhists. In his new book, Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghur Buddhist world emerged and thrived in the multi-confessional landscape of medieval Central Asia. A story of memory, forgetting, and what gets written into history. A conversation with Sam Bass.

How do where we live and who we live with shape what we learn in the field? In this essay, based on fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cai Chen explores how living arrangements impact research on Global China and Chinese migration in Africa. Fieldwork begins at home.

In this conversation with Louisa Schein, Fan Yang discusses her book 'Disorienting Politics', which explores the entangled media landscapes of China and the US. Through case studies of viral images, ads, and art, she unpacks how race, capital, and geopolitics collide in the Chimerican imaginary.

How does the struggle for access shape how we see Chinese actors in Africa? In this essay on fieldwork in Uganda, Robert Wyrod argues access barriers in Global China research don’t just limit what we learn—they shape how we interpret what we see, long after those barriers fall. Reflexivity is key.

In this new essay, Sia X. Yang follows the journey of Ge Yulu, a once-precarious migrant artist whose bold gestures have been softened by institutional aesthetics. Yet a stubborn critical impulse endures—provoking, resisting, and reimagining the limits of art in contemporary China.

What does the 'Chinese Century' look like from Johannesburg’s China Malls? In 'Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism', Mingwei Huang draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine how Chinese migration and commerce intersect with colonial legacies, anti-Blackness, and global capitalism in South Africa.

How can we study Chinese multinationals ethnographically when access is restricted by geopolitics and tech rivalry? In this essay, @lenakaufmann.bsky.social draws on fieldwork in Switzerland to propose creative methods and a socio-technical lens for researching ICT firms in Europe and beyond.

What can a box of old love letters reveal about history, hope, and migration? In this essay, Suvi Rautio reflects on 1950s correspondence between her Chinese grandfather and Finnish grandmother—intimate artefacts that trace a cross-border romance and the idealism of a shared socialist future.