The new issue of the Made in China Journal is out! This time we explore how queerness offers a lens for understanding contemporary Chinese society, as state visions of family and citizenship collide with diverse lived realities and unevenly translated global LGBTQIA+ discourses.

In this essay, @queercomrades.bsky.social explores how the classical Chinese story of the Rabbit God has been reinterpreted across the global Chinese diaspora in recent years, highlighting creative reimaginings that promote an open and undogmatic vision of queer Chinese identity and heritage.

In this essay, Jenny Man Wu examines how the Beijing Queer Film Festival has endured amid intensifying cultural regulation and LGBTQ+ repression in China, arguing that its survival rests on adaptive organising, guerrilla tactics, decentralisation, and a minoritarian ethic of care.

In 'Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration', Jingyu Mao offers a compelling account of the intimate experiences of Chinese migrant workers engaged in ethnic performance at restaurants and tourist sites in southwest China. Read the conversation with Hongkun Wang.

In his acclaimed 'Breakneck', Dan Wang frames China as a fast-moving technocratic 'engineering state' and the US as a rule-bound 'lawyerly society'. In this review, Clark Aoqi Wu argues the contrast is overly simplistic, substituting a memorable slogan for historical explanation.

Why do Chinese gay men eroticise the heteropatriarchal masculinity that oppresses them? Examining online S&M subcultures centred on the worship of straight-acting men, Bingchang Sun challenges interpretations that frame these practices solely as abjection or resistance.

In this essay, @jleibold.bsky.social and Soyonbo Borjgin expose the systematic dismantling of Mongolian-medium schooling in Inner Mongolia and argue that changing school names from Mongolian into Chinese constitutes one of the final acts in cancelling once-promised autonomy and sovereignty.

Big @madeinchinajournal.com essay by @tristangbrown.bsky.social on China's "archeological state," in which the Party-state uses the excavation and display of artifacts to bolster its claims to civilizational and historical continuity.

Six years after the ‘Be Water’ rebellion, in 'Forever Hong Kong' Ching Kwan Lee interrogates the historical conditions and precedents that precipitated the 2019 revolt, reinterpreting Hongkongers’ political resistance as acts of decolonial defiance. A conversation with @sharonyamsy.bsky.social.

How does food delivery become masculinised? Zihao Zhang and Jenny Chan show how managers recruit and discipline riders through gendered ideas of masculinity, rewarding a few 'successful' breadwinners while casting others as less worthy men. A look at gender, labour, and the gig economy in China.

I’ve just published an article reflecting on several extended trips I’ve made to China over the past few years. A number of outlets, most recently the NYTimes and the Economist, have written about China’s museum boom, usually framing it in terms of national pride or nationalism.

From imperial ritual through Maoist dialectics to Xi-era heritage politics, in this essay @tristangbrown.bsky.social explores how China’s heritage bureaucracy has turned archaeology into a language of governance, transforming artefacts into symbols of civilisational continuity and state authority.

as historians say, we always live in precedented times. Sphere of influence logics also echo and reinforce one another now. they flow across not only geopolitical, but also ideological boundaries. e.g. this "multipolar civilizational order" thing that some decolonial people are also obsessed about

As the Monroe Doctrine resurfaces through US military action in Venezuela, Craig Smith looks back to the 20th century to show how, in periods of imperial expansion, Pan-American and Asianist discourses flowed in both directions across the Pacific, not only echoing but also reinforcing one another.

|| NEW PROFILE || Although Mauritius has not formally joined the Belt and Road Initiative, its close trade and investment ties with Beijing have prompted scholars and the press to question the motivations and impacts of China’s growing presence in the country, writes Sheng Xuan.

Blending archival research, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s 'Queer Chimerica' explores how queer culture, politics, and institutions circulate through the antagonistic interdependence of China and the US. A conversation with Qing Shen.

The American China Studies field is facing an existential threat under the Trump administration. To protect its integrity, we should infuse our work with a critical, comparative, and intersectional analysis of authoritarianism in the United States and China, argues @arthurkaufman.bsky.social.

When the Hong Kong fire occurred, initial international media coverage focused on bamboo scaffolding. This Orientalised and exoticised the tragedy, obscuring the fact that it was not just an accident, but an outcome shaped by long-term neglect and inequality, writes @tingguowrites.bsky.social.

This Thursday, join us for the final webinar in our series on online gender-based violence in China. This session turns to the global stage, looking at how journalists, activists, and policymakers around the world are responding. Register here: globalchinalab.org/confronting-...

In this piece originally published in @initiummedia.bsky.social and translated by Yiwen Liu, Lee Wai Kwan describes how, in the wake of the HK fire, strangers came together through grassroots relief efforts to contribute their time and talents, before the authorities imposed their own bureaucracy.

||NEW PROFILE|| The Vientiane Saysettha Development Zone is China’s only national-level economic and trade cooperation zone in Laos. Framed as a low-carbon demonstration zone, the SDZ nonetheless faces persistent challenges related to labour, land, and the environment, write Ellen Li and Juliet Lu.

How did China’s early foreign student programs balance socialist solidarity with a climate of surveillance and distrust? In this essay, Yimei Liu traces how foreign students in the early PRC navigated state-managed hospitality, restricted mobility, and pervasive monitoring.

||EVENT|| Join us this Thursday for the second webinar in our series on online gender-based violence in China. This session will shine a light on groups whose experiences are often pushed further into invisibility, especially LGBTQ+ individuals and women with disabilities. Registration is essential.

|| NEW EPISODE || Six years after Hong Kong’s mass protests, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social talks with sociologist Ching Kwan Lee and historian @jwassers.bsky.social about the struggle’s enduring significance, its transnational afterlives, and what it teaches us amid today’s democratic backsliding.

|| NEW PROFILE || Chinese migration to Madagascar began more than a century ago and the new arrivals evolved into a deeply integrated community. However, bilateral ties have experienced ebbs and flows, with China’s image in the country impacted by recent controversies, writes Xuefei Shi.

Don’t miss the first in our three-part webinar series on online gender-based violence in China, happening this Thursday. The event will be held in English and Chinese, with simultaneous interpretation. Register and help us spread the word: globalchinalab.org/confronting-...

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.

Join us for a webinar series on online gender-based violence in China. We will discuss how technology-facilitated sexual violence unfolds in China, who bears the brunt of it, and where legal and policy gaps persist, while also drawing on global experiences and promising practices.

|| NEW PROFILE || Since establishing diplomatic ties in 1955, Nepal’s relations with the People’s Republic of China have evolved around three key factors: Nepal’s strategic Himalayan location, its pursuit of economic development, and Beijing’s security concerns over Tibet, writes Zezhou Yang.

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.

Always a lot of interesting pieces in @madeinchinajournal.com Drones,a typewriter, hydropower, love, basketball are amongst the topics in the 20+ articles contained.

The new issue of the Made in China Journal is out! This time we explore what it means to come of age in China today, at a moment when the paths to adulthood are increasingly uncertain, yet the pressure to succeed remains relentless. Download the whole issue at madeinchinajournal.com/2025/10/27/b...

||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.

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.