Sia X. Yang is on an extended career hiatus due to motherhood. Her recent academic writing has appeared in the Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Made in China Journal, Memo Review, Art Review Oxford, and Cultural Politics.
This essay examines the cyber-based ‘New Federal State of China’ (NFSC), a transnational movement founded by Chinese businessman and self-described billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui in alliance with Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Through a digital ethnography of the NFSC’s online ‘farms’, I trace how followers transform exile politics into affective labour—performing loyalty, investing money, and circulating belief as both moral capital and speculative value. The essay argues that the NFSC network exemplifies the logic of communicative and algorithmic capitalism, under which participation substitutes for transformation and faith becomes a fungible asset.
This essay presents a case study of the widely known—and at times controversial—artist Ge Yulu and his interventionist practice. Through an account of Ge’s life and career, including his early years as a grassroots migrant artist navigating precarity in Beijing, the essay explores how radical artistic gestures are gradually tempered, and often reshaped into more palatable forms that conform to institutional aesthetics. At the same time, it shows how a persistent critical impulse—despite the risks of censorship, social marginalisation, and financial hardship—sustains hope and continues to provoke public engagement.
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