Growing up in 1990s China, Yangyang encountered two contradictory narratives about what it meant to be a worker. In older periodicals and occasionally in state media, workers were hailed as the ‘master class’ and being one was glorious. Many of her relatives and teachers, however, held up laid-off state-enterprise workers as a stern warning: if […]
Life before e-commerce can feel like a foreign country. For the ‘Chinamaxxing’ crowd, fresh meals and fancy gadgets delivered to your doorstep almost instantly, at astonishingly low prices, are among the country’s top draws. Yet these conveniences come with hidden costs, and China’s path to becoming an e-commerce giant has been far from certain. How […]
The need for food and medicine is universal. Yet, few subjects have stirred as much nationalistic debates on both sides of the Pacific as the development and application of biotechnologies. Why, in a country scarred by famine like China, did the public turn against genetically modified crops? Should medicine be a commodity, and if so, […]
For millions of children in China, life has been a race against time since the day they were born. They are blasted with advertisements that warn ‘Do Not Lose at the Starting Line’, and handed by their elders a checklist of milestones to hit by a certain age as they grow up: diplomas, property, marriage, […]
For years, Anglophone coverage of the Chinese internet has emphasised the Great Firewall. The focus on censorship and surveillance collapses information production and access into a false binary between the haves and have-nots, the free and unfree. Yet, the authoritarian state cannot extinguish the Chinese people’s creativity and entrepreneurship, and the wall itself can unfold […]
From royal court legends to a seventeenth-century deity, gay people have been part of Chinese life and literature for millennia. Since the 1990s, legal reforms and deeper integration into global capitalism have fostered new avenues for civic action. Queer Chinese activists have fought for their rights in the courts, through legislative channels, and by garnering […]
This month, China’s National People’s Congress held its annual meeting and passed a new law on ‘promoting ethnic unity and progress’. The legislation further codifies the suppression of non-Han languages and customs in China in the name of national cohesion and civilisational uplift. For years, the Party-State has dictated the correct way to be Chinese […]
In 2019, more than a million people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong, with many returning week after week. The song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ soon emerged as the movement’s unofficial anthem. What began as a protest against an ill-advised extradition bill quickly became, for many, the city’s last stand against Beijing’s tightening grip. […]
Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White House has been pressuring companies from its East Asian allies, including the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to invest in the United States and open […]
Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online scams. With luck and vigilance, this amounts to little more than a nuisance; yet, for the many who fell victim to […]
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