In recent years, familiar or seemingly ‘traditional’ landscape forms have provided artists working in China with legible ecocritical modes. This essay expands on an earlier account of what the author describes as documentary and illusionistic ‘Chinese landscapes of desolation’ by outlining an additional mode: the speculative. Speculative landscapes look forward to a time (fast approaching […]
Nowhere is the Chinese Party-State’s Promethean thinking more vividly apparent than in its continuous proclivity to build more and bigger water projects. And where these projects create problems, the solution is not to remove the projects but to build further projects, to construct ‘fixes to fix the fixes’. From Yellow River conservancy in the first […]
In October 2021 at a forum organised by the US–Asia Institute, China’s Ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, updated his American audience about the situation in his country. China remained isolated from the world after closing its borders in March 2020 following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic: I know that due to COVID-19, […]
This essay argues that regardless of President Xi Jinping’s stated intentions, China cannot meet its carbon-neutral pledge. First, there are insuperable technical barriers to decarbonising the ‘hard-to-abate’ industries that account for about half of China’s carbon dioxide emissions. Second, there are insuperable political barriers posed by Xi’s overriding concern to save the Chinese Communist Party from the fate of the Soviet Communist Party by winning the race to technical supremacy and overtaking the United States to become the world’s top superpower. To this end, he has no choice but to maximise the growth of the very industries that are driving China’s emissions off the charts.
Throughout contemporary Chinese history, Shanghai has been perceived as an exceptional cosmopolitan space. While these days this exceptionalism is generally framed in terms of the city’s status as a global financial hub, it should not be forgotten that Shanghainese cosmopolitanism is rooted in more than a century of migration, grassroots activism, and the rejection of […]
Act One The Theme: Study Me! Be Loyal and Struggle! In the opening of his 72-page report to the Twentieth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping (2022b) proclaimed that the theme of the congress would be ‘comprehensively implementing Xi Jinping Thought’. The theme also included ‘carrying forth Great Party-Founding Spirit’ (伟大建党精神), […]
It was the middle section of a north–south road in the prewar French Concession and was originally named Route Magy (Maiqi Road, 麦琪路) for Alfred Magy, a French officer in World War I. Lined on both sides with dense rows of French plane trees (法国梧桐树), it ran through a neighbourhood of villas, consulates, and Shanghai-modern […]
In his new book, Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China (Duke University Press, 2022), Charlie Yi Zhang explores how the Chinese State mobilises love to regulate the affective economy and life choices of its population. Affective notions of love, Zhang demonstrates, are constructed in a way that bolsters nationalism, heteronormativity, and neoliberalism—forces […]
On 26 November 2022, prompted by a deadly fire in a high-rise apartment block in Ürümqi, the capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, protesters took to streets and university campuses across China calling for an end to the country’s restrictive ‘zero Covid’ policy (清零政策) (Davidson and Yu 2022). Unsurprisingly, the libertarian right, anti-maskers, and […]
Peter Thilly’s new book, The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China (Stanford University Press, 2022), focuses on the nitty-gritty of the opium trade in Fujian Province from the 1830s to 1938. Its main goal is to shift our attention from the still-prevalent overarching narratives of national humiliation and anti-imperialist moralism […]
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