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.

What does it mean to come of age in a society where the paths to adulthood are increasingly uncertain, yet the pressure to succeed remains relentless? In today’s China, youth navigate the fading promise of reform-era mobility, the grind of economic slowdown, and a moralising narrative that glorifies hardship. Two expressions have come to define this generational mood: neijuan (内卷, ‘involution’), the feeling of being trapped in endless competition with little reward, and tangping (躺平, ‘lying flat’), a quiet refusal to play by those rules. In response to these pressures, young people are experimenting with new ways of living, working, and imagining the future, even as that future grows more precarious. This issue of Made in China Journal explores how these dynamics unfold across schools, homes, workplaces, digital platforms, and creative spaces. Rather than casting youth as rebels or victims, the contributions examine the everyday strategies and compromises that define life under constraint.

Chinese journalism is dead—long live Chinese journalism! The dramatic transformations in China’s media landscape over the past decade have led many to declare the death of quality journalism in the country. The Party-State’s tightening grip on information, the dismantling of once vibrant investigative outlets, and the growing precarity of media professionals seem to confirm this narrative. And yet, as traditional spaces for critical reporting shrink, new modes of journalistic practice continue to emerge, often in dispersed and unexpected forms. From citizen-led investigations and social media exposés to transnational collaborations, Chinese journalism has not disappeared—it has adapted. This issue of the Made in China Journal explores the shifting terrain of journalistic production in and about China, tracing the resilience, reinvention, and risks that define the profession today.

A new Chinese government textbook for university students, An Introduction to the Community of the Zhonghua Race (中华民族共同体概论), promotes President Xi Jinping’s vision for governing the country’s diverse population. This approach shifts away from celebrating cultural differences—what the political scientist Susan McCarthy once termed ‘communist multiculturalism’—and towards a Han-dominant identity, a form of racial nationalism inspired by sociologist Fei Xiaotong’s concept of ‘multiple origins, single body’ (多元一体). While the constitution of the People’s Republic of China as amended in 2018 guarantees minority rights and political autonomy through the framework of ‘minority nationalities’ (少数民族), the textbook suggests that Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongols, and other Indigenous groups should eventually assimilate into Han culture, raising concerns about the future of minority languages and traditions. Xi Jinping’s new approach to national unity faced significant resistance from both minority and Han officials. Yet, this resistance only prompted an even more muscular response: revamping government departments, a harsh crackdown in minority-populated areas, and removing minority officials who oversaw ethnic affairs. In this issue of the Made in China journal, we ask contributors to reflect on the state of ethnic minority culture in the wake of Xi’s new ethno-nationalist order and explore what remains of cultural differences at the end of dreams of communist pluralism and ethnic autonomy.

The year 2023 began with a series of jolts in China, as the government abruptly rolled back its notoriously strict pandemic measures following countrywide protests in late 2022. While external popular perceptions saw China as being uniformly locked down for the first years of the pandemic, the reality was that the country’s pandemic governance was unevenly applied and varied substantially from place to place. The result was mixed—and often even contradictory—attempts to control the spread of SARS-CoV-2, with vastly differentiated experiences on the ground. While heterogeneous and fragmented governance in China is nothing new—and indeed is the basis of how most scholars understand policy implementation in the country—the pandemic nevertheless produced patterns of governance that were at times surprising, while also reinforcing previous trends. This issue of the Made in China Journal examines patterns of pandemic governance and the subjectivities associated with living through lockdown and the ever-present possibility of quarantine.

In 2020, Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping pledged to ‘transition to a green and low-carbon mode of development’, as well as to ‘peak the country’s CO2 emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’. Xi’s pledge offered a tangible example of what has come to be known as the ecological civilisation (生态文明)—the idea of engineered harmony between humans and nature that was recently incorporated into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. But what kind of engineering is required for sustainable transitions at this scale and pace? Through which political concepts and technical practices could such a harmonious rebalancing of China’s resource-devouring development be envisioned and achieved?

This issue of the Made in China Journal addresses these questions by borrowing political theorist John Dryzek’s rereading of the Greek myth of Prometheus. Inspired by the story of a demigod who stole the technology of fire for the sole purpose of human advancement, Prometheanism describes an eco-modernist orientation that perceives the Earth as a resource whose utility is determined primarily by human needs and interests and whose environmental problems are overcome through continuous political and technological innovation. In contrast with other environmental perspectives, Prometheanism prioritises human interests and needs over those of ecosystems or the individual needs of other lifeforms. Through this framework, we asked our contributors to offer their takes on the following questions: To what extent can Xi’s dream of an ecological civilisation be understood in terms of techno-optimism and the anthropocentrism that characterise Prometheanism? What price is China paying in its effort to transition towards a heavily engineered ‘sustainable’ market utopia?

Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym famously distinguished two types of nostalgia: a restorative one that ‘manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past’; and a reflective one that ‘lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time’. But nostalgia is not necessarily only backward-looking. Rather, it can represent a feeling of longing for a future yet to be lost or even realised. For the historian Roxanne Panchasi, nostalgia may originate in the ways in which people anticipate and plan their lives around an expected future. This anticipated future, Panchasi intimates in her 2009 book Future Tense, ‘can tell us a great deal about the cultural preoccupations and political perspectives of the present doing the anticipating’. In these and other ways, nostalgia can actualise in cultural expression and performance within communities of nostalgia and as immersive environments that shine a light on past trauma to move closer to reconciliation. Contributors to this issue of the Made in China Journal explore the workings of nostalgia in people’s memories and spaces in China and beyond from a variety of perspectives to uncover how and why admirers of the Maoist and post-socialist eras express their longings for pasts real, imagined, and somewhere in between.