In October 2021, Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健), a North Korean defector held in Jilin Prison in Northeast China, broke out of the facility and spent 40 days on the run before he was caught near the Fengman Dam, a site with a long history of Japanese colonial engineering. Artist Zhang Hanwen (张瀚文) retraces this journey in […]
In Burnout Market Feminism: Urban Chinese Businesswomen in the Internet Age (MIT Press, 2026), Ling Tang invites readers to explore the aspirations, achievements, and everyday struggles of women at the forefront of China’s digital economy. Through the stories of elite businesswomen navigating e-commerce and the broader internet industry, the book explores how gender, sexuality, entrepreneurship, […]
Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话: 悟空; hereinafter BMW), an action role-playing game developed by the Chinese studio Game Science (游戏科学), became both a commercial and a cultural phenomenon after its release on 20 August 2024. BMW belongs to the ‘Souls-like’ genre, named after the Dark Souls series, whose punishing difficulty is by design: it appeals to […]
Dance from and by ethnic minorities constitutes a significant part of how people perceive both ethnic minority cultures in China and Chinese dance at large. However, observers often miss how the staging of contemporary Chinese ethnic folk dance is not a direct representation of some original ‘folk body’. It is, rather, the accumulated product of […]
The road to Long Bow used to be much longer. When American agronomist and author of Fanshen (1966), William Hinton, made the journey to this seemingly unremarkable village in the autumn of 1947, he spent weeks navigating the North China Plain. Travelling at the height of the Chinese Civil War, he traversed territories held by […]
Diaspora is conventionally understood as the dispersion of a people from a shared homeland—a formulation that could reproduce binary imaginaries of centre and periphery, origin and afterlife, homeland and shadow. Such frameworks also tend to tether diasporic belonging to lineage and return, treating political life as something transmitted through continuity. As David Eng (2010: 13) […]
In her new book, The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society (University of Michigan Press, 2026), Mujun Zhou provides an ambitious and insightful account of the concept of ‘civil society’ (公民社会) as an ideational movement that informs, inspires, and at times conflicts with the development of Chinese civil society, from the early 1990s to […]
Environmental historians of modern China have often examined how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of economic development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025), Micah Muscolino shifts the focus from the environmental outcomes of conservation to the […]
Since the promulgation of the Charity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2016, the relationship between the state and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in China has undergone profound changes. Drawing on fieldwork and an analysis of official policies and regulations, this essay argues that the positive term ‘charity’ has been strategically deployed by the […]
At a time when right-wing populism appears to be rampaging through global politics, studies about its discourses and strategies remain thin and even marginal in the field of international relations. This is especially true for authoritarian states where far-right discourses are not so much about electoral competitions as about regime legitimation. Chenchen Zhang’s new book, […]
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