Darren Byler is an Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of an ethnography titled Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2021) and a narrative-driven book titled In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony (Columbia Global Reports, 2021), as well as the co-editor of Xinjiang Year Zero (ANU Press, 2021). His current research interests are focused on infrastructure development and global China in the context of Xinjiang and Malaysia.

Yangyang Cheng is a Research Scholar in Law and a Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and US‒China relations. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED, and have received several awards from the Society of Publishers in Asia, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. She is a co-host, writer, and producer of the narrative podcast series Dissident at the Doorstep, from Crooked Media. Born and raised in China, Cheng received her PhD in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for more than a decade, most recently at Cornell University, and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

Andrea E. Pia is Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Cutting the Massline: Water, Politics, and Climate in Southwest China (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024), the co-editor of China as Context: Anthropology, Post-globalisation and the Neglect of China (Manchester University Press, forthcoming in 2025) and the translator of the Italian edition of 中国人类学史 (Renmin University Press, 2008). His essays have appeared in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Cultural Anthropology, and the Journal of Political Ecology, among others. He is the creator of the interactive digital ethnography The Long Day of the Young Peng.

Maria Repnikova is an Associate Professor in Global Communication, and the inaugural William C. Pate Chair in Strategic Communication at Georgia State University. She has written widely on China's media politics, including propaganda, critical journalism, digital nationalism, and soft power. She is the author of Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2017), as well as Chinese Soft Power (Cambridge Global China Element Series, 2022). Other than working on China, Repnikova does comparative work on information politics in China and Russia. Most recently, she has been researching and completing a monograph on China’s image-building in Africa, with a focus on Ethiopia.

Holly Snape is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Glasgow. She is currently attempting to understand the Chinese Party-state relationship and how it shapes the political system. She is also interested in civil society, social activism, and political discourse.

Christian Sorace is a Lecturer of Global China at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso Books, 2019) and Proletarian China: One Century of Chinese Labour (Verso Books, 2022). His work explores political concepts and practices in China and Mongolia, spanning the study of ideology, discourse, urban planning, air pollution, and aesthetics. He is also interested in the histories and legacies of communism in Asia.

Shui-yin Sharon Yam is Associate Professor in Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and Faculty Affiliate in Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Kentucky. She is a diasporic Hongkonger, and the author of Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Ohio State University Press, 2019). Her research focuses on transnational rhetorics, political emotions, gender, and race.

Chenchen Zhang is an assistant professor in international relations at Durham University. Her current research interests span postcolonial nationalism, the global right, and Chinese digital discourse. She is a co-editor of Geopolitics and co-host of the Shicha podcast.