As in many other rural villages across China, the 300 or so residents of Upper Jidao in Guizhou Province have been ‘living with tourism’ (to use Hazel Tucker’s 2003 book title) since the early 2000s, when rural tourism development was widely and enthusiastically promoted by the Chinese State as the path to rural poverty alleviation […]
This essay delves into the language ideologies of the Uyghur diaspora community in the United States and their efforts to maintain their heritage language. It argues that the language ideologies of these Uyghurs significantly influence their language maintenance practices, such as forming social connections with like-minded individuals and enforcing rules at home for language maintenance. Additionally, the ongoing settler-colonial process of eliminating Uyghur identity in the Uyghur homeland is fostering a transnational language ideology that views the Uyghur language as integral to Uyghur identity and speaking Uyghur as a form of resistance.
How does settler-colonial imperialism operate in Asia, and what are the ways in which Asian Indigeneities become mobilised? To address this question, in 2017, I brought together scholars who are observing various settler-colonial and imperial dynamics and developments across Asia for a panel discussion titled ‘Asian Settler-Colonialisms and Indigeneities’ at the 116th annual American Anthropological […]
In Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c. 1500–1937 (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Margherita Zanasi skilfully marshals a wide range of primary sources and secondary literature in several languages to take readers on a fascinating journey through several hundred years of Chinese economic thought. Ghassan Moazzin: Your first book, Saving the Nation: […]
Over the past four decades in China’s forward march to capitalist modernisation, the nation’s vast urban expansion has been contingent on demolition and relocation. Since Xi Jinping came to power, projects such as the ‘Traditional Village’ heritage scheme have sought to gear development towards a new era in which Chinese heritage sits at the core. […]
World, Meet World is the title of this brief intervention. When considering what to call this, I was thinking of that quip I heard retold by a weary African thinker leaving a forum: ‘China comes to Africa to talk about trade, culture, and investment. The West comes to Africa to talk about China.’ I enter […]
Yabi is a controversial subcultural phenomenon active in China since 2019. Like the Western ‘hipster’, the yabi mash-up appropriation of styles from the ‘global supermarket of culture’ is deemed messy, superficial, and shamelessly middle class by mainstream critics. Through a historical analysis, this essay argues that the yabi exemplify the return of the feminine supernatural—present throughout imperial and modern Chinese history—as a response to the challenges of the Anthropocene from the present-day involuted generation.
Just as China emerged as a revolutionary trope in interwar Black internationalist imaginaries, Shanghai-based journals started to introduce African American writing to Chinese readers. This essay traces early translations of Black literature in Republican-era China and unpacks the parallactic visions as the Harlem Renaissance travelled across the Pacific. Literary Blackness built on and expanded the […]
On 14 June 2024, the verdict in the case of Chinese feminist activist and independent journalist Huang Xueqin and labour activist Wang Jianbing (hereinafter referred to as the ‘XueBing case’) was finally announced. Both had been accused of ‘inciting subversion of state power’. After nearly 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, Huang was sentenced to five […]
Under Xi Jinping, China’s policies towards minorities have taken an aggressively assimilationist turn. But even before the Xi era, for many of the ethnic minorities of China’s borderlands, the early twenty-first century was a time of social upheaval that generated profound anxieties about culture loss. The ‘Open Up the West’ (西部大开发) development campaign, launched in […]
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