Made in China Journal

With lots of new people joining Bluesky, we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the projects falling under the umbrella of the Global China Lab, a new non-profit we established this year with the aim of advancing open knowledge about China. 1/

The shifting status of workers in Chinese society embodied China’s transition from socialism to market capitalism. But how did workers see themselves in this process? And has the Party-State lived up to its promises? In our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks to Eli Friedman and Yueran Zhang.

In this essay, Shao Jiang traces a lineage of dissent that runs from the Mao era through the reform period, in manuscripts, big-character posters, and unofficial magazines that saw the Party-State as a class of ‘bureaucratic owners’, culminating in the 1989 protests against official profiteering.

In 'Homesick Nation', Linda Qian returns to her ancestral village in Zhejiang to show how 乡愁, a word for nostalgia, longing, and homesickness, draws people and money back to the village, and how the state turns that yearning into a tool of governance. A conversation with Mozhuo Chen.

In this essay, @lenakaufmann.bsky.social argues that China's farming drones aren't a clean break from the past. The Mao-era Green Revolution is still there in the reservoirs, fields, seeds, and chemicals these machines fly over, with the old political projects shaping new tech.

China’s approach to AI governance is best understood as ‘infrastructural statecraft’ combined with managed pluralism: the Party-State builds the layered infrastructure (energy, compute, chips, talent, and governance), then invites firms to compete in developing applications, writes Haiqing Yu.

Fresh meals and fancy gadgets delivered to your doorstep instantly, at rock-bottom prices, are among China's top draws. But at what cost? For our podcast, Lizhi Liu and Jack Linzhou Xing join @yangyangcheng.bsky.social to unpack the rise of China's e-commerce giants and the politics behind them.

Drawing on her fieldwork at Longquan Tanhua Monastery, a Chinese Buddhist institution in Tanzania, Mingyi Xiao argues that language plays a constitutive role in reshaping Chinese Buddhism in Africa, both in how it reaches out to local communities and in how it articulates its teachings.

In Nigeria’s Ibeju-Lekki area, Chinese-led industrialisation is producing gendered dispossession. Local women got hit from three sides: farming is gone, fishing is gone, and most new jobs went to migrant men. Meanwhile they are still doing all the care work at home. An essay by Soumya Mishra.

Since the 2010s, ballroom culture has begun to flourish in China. In this conversation with @ianliujiatian.bsky.social, three ballroom participants discuss how this still-emerging scene has become a vital venue for trans and nonbinary people to build community and alternative kinship.

The new issue of Global China Pulse is out! Guest-edited by Mingwei Huang & Robert Wyrod, it addresses a key gap in Global China Studies: gender and sexuality. Contributors draw on research from Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, Europe, China to examine dispossession, precarity, labour, and intimacy.

||NEW PROFILE|| COFCO, China's state-owned agribusiness giant, is now a major player on the Paraná–Paraguay River corridor, a 3,442km waterway across 5 countries vital to global soybean exports. Via its Nidera & Noble Agri buys, it controls ports, crushing plants, and storage around the Rosario hub.

Historian Dayton Lekner engages artist Zhang Hanwen about his 'Hostile Landscapes' (不明的风景, 2025), a two-channel film retracing North Korean defector Ju Hyeongeon's 40-day escape through Northeast China. They discuss terrain as unstable archive, and how to tell a story that resists confirmation.

The future of Global China Studies depends very much on how we produce knowledge. Drawing on ethnography in China, Rwanda, and the UK, @xiananj.bsky.social develops 'un-whitening' as a practice for confronting the racial, geopolitical, and epistemic hierarchies shaping transnational knowledge.

||NEW PROFILE|| Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Armenia has sought to diversify its foreign policy, economic, and security partnerships, with China playing an increasingly important role in this diversification, writes Anna Vardanyan in the People's Map.

In 'Burnout Market Feminism', Ling Tang adopts a bottom-up approach to feminist theorising to explore the aspirations and everyday struggles of women at the forefront of China's digital economy, where gender and sexuality meet entrepreneurship and digital capitalism. A conversation with Xumeng Xie.

How did Black Myth: Wukong become a flashpoint for reactionary politics across borders? Dino Ge Zhang and Nathanel Amar trace how reactionary gaming discourse travels between Western and Chinese online spheres, with anti-'woke' and nationalist anti-feminist currents feeding each other.

The new issue of the Made in China Journal is out! Over the past decade, we have watched hopes for a more pluralist China fade, with activists describing growing feelings of dejection and powerlessness. There is a term for it: political depression. In this issue, we explore this condition.

'Reshaping Identity' is a Chinese contemporary dance work bringing together dancers of different ethnic backgrounds. In this essay, performer Yijie Chen takes the show as a lens to discuss the tension between ethnic folk dance as a state-defined form and the individual bodies it claims to represent.

At @madeinchinajournal.com, Brian DeMare examines the original manuscript for FANSHEN and discusses how omitted passages drastically change (and, in his opinion, improve) William Hinton's classic work on land reform.

No book shaped Western understanding of the Maoist revolution more than William Hinton's Fanshen. Drawing on Chinese-language sources and an unpublished draft of Fanshen, Brian DeMare explores the outsider/insider relationship in rural China, as well as Hinton's struggles in documenting it.

China's 'dormitory labour regime' is going global. Comparing SEZs in India and Uganda, Charlotte Goodburn shows how Chinese-inspired industrial zones build gendered workplace–residence systems that discipline migrant women's fertility and daily lives, while externalising the long-term costs.

Few subjects have stirred as much nationalistic debate across the Pacific as biotech. For our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks to Abigail Coplin and Chenjian Li about the power and limits of biotechnologies, and how the body becomes a geopolitical battleground and site for profit.

In 'The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society', Mujun Zhou provides an ambitious and insightful account of the concept of ‘civil society’ (公民社会) as an ideational movement that informs, inspires, and at times conflicts with the development of Chinese civil society. A conversation with Bin Xu.

Environmental historians of modern China often examine how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In 'Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People', @mmuscolino.bsky.social shifts focus to the people whose labor enabled those transformations.

Ten years after China's Charity Law, what did it actually accomplish? Registered NGOs are declining and donations are lower, but according to Di Wu the law's real work was discursive: 'charity' was deployed to displace 'civil society', recasting NGOs as mere depoliticised service providers.

||NEW CfP|| China's 'Science Silk Road' invests in research cooperation with countries along the new Silk Road. But does this create distinct ways of doing science? How does it address local-global development challenges? And is it reshaping the global science system? Visit our website for details.

From dockside London and Liverpool to colonial HK, US border control, and Afro-Chinese Caribbean returnees, in 'Archives of Intimacy', Nadine Attewell offers a humane account of Eurasian lives and multiracial encounters at the margins of early 20th-century empires. A conversation with Kun Huang.

In 'Easting the West', @chenchenzhang.net stares into the abyss of digital reactionary discourse in China, showing how the Chinese right appropriates the language of postcoloniality to reproduce racial and civilisational hierarchies and justify exclusion. A conversation with @clydewang.bsky.social.

|| NEW CALL FOR PAPERS || To mark 30 years since the Hong Kong handover, we welcome scholarly work and practitioners' recollections that revisit overlooked experiences, question established interpretations, or reflect on what lessons may be drawn from the city's history. Pitches due 30 September.

What drives Chinese children to study overseas, and how do they and their parents plan around shifting immigration regimes? For the our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with sociologists @coralinglingxu.bsky.social and Mengwei Tu about education and mobility in and out of China.

In this new essay, Chong Liu shows how sex-ed in China works as a form of classed and gendered governance. In Chinese classrooms, sexuality is sidelined or stigmatised in ways that steer young people toward different class futures while reinforcing gendered double standards and heteronormativity.

Jian Lin, Wilfred Wang, and Ping Sun’s 'Chinese Platforms: A Critical Introduction' is one of the first English-language books to offer a systematic examination of Chinese digital platforms across technology, geopolitics, culture, gender, labour. Read the conversation with @joycecontact.bsky.social.

What if depression isn't a private medical problem, but a political and collective one? In this essay, Mengyuan Chen traces Pity Party, a grassroots art project that turned mental health into a shared, dialogical space. She asks what its exhaustion reveals about doing this kind of work in China.

|| NEW PROFILE || China barely engaged with Dominica until 2004, when the island dropped Taiwan for Beijing, triggering a wave of Chinese-financed infrastructure. Two decades on, Chinese contractors are a permanent, if contested, fixture on the island, writes Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente.

What does it feel like to do advocacy work when no one signs up and the state offers neither support nor prohibition? Tianyi Bai reflects on trans advocacy in China, tracing what they call 'fragile optimism', the affective orientation that sustains a movement through fatigue and burnout.

What does techno-modernity look like from inside the Great Firewall? On the 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social discusses creativity and self-expression at the edge of what's permissible with journalist @yilingliu95.bsky.social and writer @afrawang.bsky.social.

How do Chinese retail investors make sense of repeated market failures across generations? Based on ethnographic research, Hairuo Jin argues that memories of loss don't discourage participation but reinforce it, with failures reframed through narratives of national development and self-improvement.

In the early twentieth century, tin extraction on the island of Bangka, Indonesia, rested on Chinese workers. Koen van der Lijn argues that their labour was not a temporary expedient but the structural foundation of Dutch colonial mining, central to both its profitability and long-term viability.

How does independent publishing survive in China when ISBNs are state-controlled and a single anonymous tip can shut you down? 51 Personae founder Yun Chen speaks with Faye Linfei Xu and Jingzhe Zhang about the end of the 'golden years' of Chinese art book fairs and finding new readers abroad.

How to find solace in a politically turbulent present? In a new essay, David Kwok Kwan Tsoi examines the case of Anita Mui's cultural afterlife in post-2019 Hong Kong to introduce the concept of 'temporal fugitives': those who cope with political depression by retreating into a reconstructed past.

144 years ago this week, the Chinese Exclusion Act became law. Restrictions at both the border and the interior shaped Chinese lives in the US for generations. Their lasting impacts are still felt on both sides of the Pacific. Four new books explore the complexities. I write @madeinchinajournal.com:

Four books explore Chinese lives in the US from the 19th century to the present, laying bare the shifting boundaries between the citizen and the alien, the criminal and the law. The colour line and class divisions are barriers more formidable than national borders, writes @yangyangcheng.bsky.social.

From ancient deities to modern poets, queer life has shaped Chinese culture for centuries. In our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social sits down with @queercomrades.bsky.social and @dariuslongarino.bsky.social to explore queer Chinese activism, literature, and why poetry can reign when courts fail.

|| NEW PROFILE || Funded by China Eximbank and built by Sinohydro, Uganda's 600MW Karuma Dam is one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest hydro projects. Yet it has been plagued by construction delays, quality issues, labour abuses, and land disputes, write Robert Wyrod and Casondra Heiss.

What does digital capitalism look like beyond Silicon Valley? Andrea Pollio talks to Tinhinan El Kadi about the five years he spent among renegade Chinese entrepreneurs, Kenyan state planners, VC analysts, and engineers in Nairobi's Silicon Savannah, the subject of his new book, 'Silicon Elsewhere'.

In this new essay, Cai Chen recovers the queer lives hidden inside Chinese migration to Africa. Following three gay men across multiple countries, he develops the idea of 'unintended sexual migration', journeys where sexuality wasn't the motive but reshaped the path. Global China can be queer.

How did Kaifeng's old Jewish community go from revival to erasure? @jordynhaime.bsky.social traces the forces that recast Judaism as foreign in China, from missionaries to rising nationalism to CCP ethnic policy, asking whether any revival is possible without rethinking the Chinese nation itself.