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.

What makes a language "modern"? How do technologies reflect power and shape our relations with the written word? So glad to discuss these and more with @tsmullaney.bsky.social for 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, a @madeinchinajournal.com podcast, starting with a legendary typewriter lost and found:

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.

"[D]oes China have an LGBTQ+ movement that also foregrounds economic justice?" At @madeinchinajournal.com, @ianliujiatian.bsky.social shares their ethnographic research among LGBTQ+ migrant workers in southern China.

|| 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.

My first take on the "low-altitude economy" in Shenzhen!

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.

China’s most expensive state-building infrastructure project is rising in Tibet: the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower dam. @stellahongzhang.bsky.social explores how this dam—framed as green progress—advances with little public scrutiny despite huge environmental, technical, and geopolitical stakes.

This is an impressive rundown of all the various non-“positive energy” threads in Chinese society over the past few years

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.

Delighted to be part of this #OpenAccess issue on researching #Global #China!

Cannot overstate how honored I was to have 閭丘露薇 @roseluqiu.bsky.social and 方可成 @fangkc.bsky.social on Ep.2 of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, a podcast @madeinchinajournal.com, to discuss the state of journalism in China. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did! madeinchinajournal.com/2025/07/25/e...

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...

Have you listened to 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, our new podcast? Catch Ep. 1, ‘Legacies of Covid-19’, before Ep. 2, ‘Being a Journalist in China’, drops next Wednesday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon Music so you don’t miss an episode! madeinchinajournal.com/gateway-to-g...

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.

In 'Crafting a Tibetan Terroir', Brendan Galipeau explores how wine is reshaping landscapes and livelihoods in the Sino-Tibetan border region known as Shangri-La. From missionary vines to luxury tourism, it is a story of modernity, identity, and global capitalism. A conversation with Dechen Pemba.

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?

I loved the opportunity to reflect on fieldwork highs and lows for the forthcoming @madeinchinajournal.com issue! And to share some recent photos from the banks of the Coca River💧

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.

Burned out and fed up with the grind, Chinese youth turned Hegang—a struggling coal town with bargain-basement housing—into a symbol of escape and rest. In this essay, Siyu Tang explores how social media fantasies of starting over became a way to channel anxiety, fear, and quiet rebellion.

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.

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.

So honored that Dissident at the Doorstep, a narrative podcast I served as a co-host, writer and producer for, won the 2025 AAJA Award for Excellence in Audio Storytelling, Longform or Series, from the Asian American Journalists Association @aajaofficial.bsky.social: awards.aaja.org/2025-journal...

The new Made in China Journal is out! Is journalism in China dead? As state control grows and old outlets vanish, new forms are emerging—from citizen exposés to cross-border investigations. This issue explores journalism's reinvention. Download for free at madeinchinajournal.com/2025/04/22/c...