@madeinchinajournal.com
The Made in China Journal is an independent #openaccess publication that seeks to facilitate critical discussion about Chinese politics and society. Visit us at https://madeinchinajournal.com. A Global China Lab initiative (https://globalchinalab.com).
@wozzeckhuang.bsky.social traces a line from neurasthenia in Mao-era China to the rise of 'political depression' today. Revisiting Arthur Kleinman's argument that neurasthenia was an embodied memory of political trauma, he asks: as depression took its place, how much of that burden was carried over?
Daniel Herszberg discusses how Hong Kong's former pro-democracy protestors navigate dissent under the National Security Law. Focusing on two forms of soft resistance—the retention of artefacts and private commemoration—he argues they do so through grief, memory, and preserving what came before.
We warmly invite you to send your pitches by early April, then full manuscripts will be due in early July. For more information, please see the calls for papers.
We are also planning an issue of Global China Pulse on ‘Global China and the Shifting Moral Order’. We are inviting contributions on how moral claims about the world are being renegotiated in this moment of transition and how moral and political orders emerge in specific contexts.
|| NEW CALL FOR PAPERS || To mark the 50th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s death, we are planning an issue on memories and lessons from the Mao era. We invite contributions revisiting overlooked experiences, questioning established interpretations, or reflecting on what Maoist China can teach us today.
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.