The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet […]
Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (University of Michigan Press, 2024) unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United […]
The executive ignored widespread dissent to force through an illiberal agenda. Violent confrontations between protesters and police brought forth increased repression. In less than a year, new policies all but outlawed any form of substantive criticism of the government. On the surface, life appears normal, as journalists, academics, researchers, and others continue to show up […]
A week after the devastating fire that claimed at least 159 lives in Hong Kong on 26 November, people were still queuing daily for hours until after midnight to join the mourning. As flowers, gifts, and Lennon Wall–style post-it notes evolved into a landscape, residents also expressed anger and requested independent investigations into the tragedy. […]
Editors’ introduction: The following piece, written by Lee Wai Kwan and translated by Yiwen Liu, originally appeared in Initium Media on 28 November 2025. In republishing it here in the Made in China Journal with the permission of Initium, we hope to connect voices of the Hong Kong community to wider audiences who might benefit […]
China’s foreign student programs, many initiated under the banner of the unity of socialist countries and Afro-Asian solidarity, were originally designed to project international recognition of the newly established People’s Republic of China. Yet, these initiatives unfolded within an environment where government agencies closely monitored public expression and everyday life. For foreign students, daily life was mediated by state-managed hospitality, limited mobility, and surveillance. On the Chinese side, distrust of foreigners was pervasive at that time and actively cultivated by the authorities. All this caused foreign students to experience a feeling akin to what today is known as political depression.
Chinese society has long been patriarchal, whereby men hold more privilege and power than women. Despite challenges and transformations over time, patriarchy has been a persistent and pervasive foundational organising principle of social and political life (Evans 2024). The ideological reinvention of neo-Confucianism as the moral standard in Xi Jinping’s China (Yan 2021) has further […]
Kaiser Kuo’s (2025) ‘The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China’ is a bracing provocation. He argues that China is no longer merely ‘catching up’ but increasingly sets the tempo of economic, technological, and institutional development. Legitimacy in the twenty-first century, he contends, rests increasingly—though not exclusively—on performance, with climate policy as the […]
When the MaskPark incident broke in mid-2025, it jolted the Chinese internet (Hawkins 2025). Hidden behind the encrypted walls of Telegram—a platform officially blocked in China but accessible through virtual private networks (VPNs)—the story first came to light when a young woman accidentally discovered that her photos had been shared on the private MaskPark channel […]
In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’ in nineteenth-century and contemporary Euro-American contexts. Using these two novels as examples, this essay traces the dialectic of self-representation and interpellation, the afterlives of transgenerational trauma, and the imbrication of aspiration with pleasure. It further elucidates how Zhang entwines debates on universal human rights amid anthropogenic catastrophe with an analysis of individual responsibility under transnational capitalism.
Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. To subscribe to email alerts for each issue of the Journal, newly published books, and information about upcoming events, please provide your contact information below.
