China’s Soft Power, Counter-Localisation, and the Role of Stateless Uyghurs in Turkey

[Some people are saying that they cannot contact their relatives in Xinjiang. They are demonstrating in front of our embassy. They also spread fake news on social media. Several Turkish Ministers of Parliament and the Vice-President of the World Uyghur Congress were also involved in endorsing this fake news. It seems it was an organised […]

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Prometheus and the Fishpond

A Historical Account of Agricultural Systems and Eco-Political Power in the People’s Republic of China

Recent environmental projects of the Chinese state, including the preservation of ‘agricultural heritage’ and the promotion of ‘ecological civilisation’, are inspiring people from around the world. However, these endeavours are deeply embedded in two ideologies that foster technocratic and growth-oriented approaches to managing the natural environment: economic thinking and systems thinking. Meanwhile, the Chinese state’s very active involvement in these projects has increasingly served to limit the critical standpoint found among many proponents of ecological agriculture elsewhere. While state support for sustainability provides opportunities for much excellent scholarship and science, ecopolitics in China is also enhancing the power of an oppressive, technocratic state.

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Praising a Dead Dictator: How US Officials’ Visits to Taiwan Wade into Complex Historical Debates

In August 2022, US Senator Marsha Blackburn travelled to Taiwan in what was the last of three visits by members of the US Congress during that month alone. The trip occurred soon after Nancy Pelosi had visited the island with a bipartisan delegation of other elected US officials in what was the first visit by […]

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Poverty and Pacification: A Conversation with Dorothy J. Solinger

Dorothy J. Solinger’s latest book, Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022), is dedicated to ‘all of those whose lives were wrenched’ in globalising China. Solinger is passionate about working people, including rural migrants and laid-off urban workers, as reflected in her decades-long commitment to activism and […]

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Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: A Conversation with Brian DeMare

The rural county of Poyang in northern Jiangxi Province goes largely unmentioned in the annals of modern Chinese history. Yet records from the Public Security Bureau archive hold a treasure trove of data on the everyday interactions between locals and the law. Drawing on these largely overlooked resources, in Tiger, Tyrant, Bandit, Businessman: Echoes of Counterrevolution from New China (Stanford University Press, 2022), Brian DeMare follows four criminal cases that together uniquely illuminate the dawning years of the People’s Republic of China. 

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Dear Jude: A Tribute to Jude Howell (1956–2022)

For people who study Chinese civil society, the work of Professor Jude Howell is a familiar staple. For many, it’s an inspiration. For those who had the great luck of knowing Jude, her kindness, good humour, and generosity were every bit as uplifting as her work. Through a fortuitous phone call from Professor Wang Ming, […]

The Shanghai Lockdown as a Chronotope: The Biopolitics of Zero Covid, Auto-Immunisation, and the Security Discourse

Reading the Shanghai lockdown as a chronotope, this essay explores the biopolitical process of immunisation through an analysis of the Zero Covid policy in the context of the security discourse that has taken root in the People’s Republic of China over the past decade. By reviewing the voices of those who have expressed dissatisfaction with […]

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Peasant Worker Communist Spy: A Chinese Intelligence Agent Looks Back at His Time in Cambodia

This essay examines the nostalgic reflections of Sino-Khmer journalist turned Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence agent Vita Chieu (周德高, 1932–2020) on his time working for the CCP and the Chinese Embassy in Phnom Penh. The essay engages with Chieu’s memoir exegetically to underscore his activities as an intelligence agent and highlight how he reflected nostalgically about working for the CCP even decades after resigning from the party and renouncing communism.

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Mainlanders’ Nostalgic Writing in Taiwan: Memory, Identification, and Politics

After the Kuomintang was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, about 1.5 million people followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan. This marked the beginning of four decades of social separation across the Taiwan Strait, in a political standoff that lasts to this day. Over the years, civil war exiles in Taiwan produced much nostalgic writing. This essay examines the evolution of these texts from the 1950s to the 2010s, exploring the authors’ narratives of China in relation to the concept of ‘homeland’.

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‘The Mine Was Our Home’: Narrativising Nostalgia between Socialist and Post-Socialist Mining Zones

At a Chinese-owned fluorspar mine in Mongolia, one group of workers stood out from the rest. Their life stories—often narrated with a tinge of nostalgia for home and a golden age of industrial labour—were closely intertwined with fluorspar. Joining them on an annual trip from their workplace to their once fluorspar-rich hometown in Jiangxi Province […]

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