Across the world, debates around gender and sexuality have become closely tied to questions of belonging, citizenship, and moral order. In China, these issues have taken on particular urgency as the state promotes an increasingly narrow vision of family and social life, even as individuals continue to build relationships and identities that move beyond these limits. Global LGBTQIA+ discourses circulate widely, but their translation into local contexts is uneven and often shaped by assumptions that do not fully capture lived experience. It is within this complex terrain that this issue of Made in China Journal, ‘Queer China’, intervenes, approaching queerness as a lens through which to examine contemporary Chinese society and politics.