The chaos and sheer human density of Kowloon are often synonymous with Hong Kong. Multilevel arcades of little restaurants sit alongside street markets selling keepsake magnets. In these busy streets, up a quiet staircase, hide a few surviving independent bookstores. These bookstores became regular stops on my fieldwork visits in Kowloon. By the door in […]
This essay examines ‘Taobao Villages’ as a lens through which to interrogate the new spatial and labour formations produced by the platformisation of rural China. Focusing on Junpucun in Guangdong Province, it argues that these villages exemplify a process of recursive ruralisation: the cyclical return of capital and technology to the countryside. The article positions the rural not as a peripheral residue of urban modernity, but as an active terrain where global capitalism is absorbed, reworked, negotiated, and contested.
Since the late 1990s, even amid continuing media censorship and sporadic government crackdowns on LGBTQIA+ activism, there has been a boom in queer groups, organisations, and events in urban China. Self-published queer zines, the Chinese queer version of samizdat, have catalogued the rise and fall of these queer communities and cultures. They have also functioned […]
This essay examines how the classical Chinese story of the Rabbit God has been reinterpreted in the global Chinese diaspora in recent years. Using the examples of Andrew Thomas Huang’s 2019 film The Kiss of the Rabbit God, the author’s 2024 poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God, and artist FJ’s Rabbit God performance at the ‘We Are LGBTQIA+ ESEA’ exhibition held in 2025, the article showcases some creative ways in which the Rabbit God story has been reimagined for cultural and political purposes, advocating an open and undogmatic approach to queer Chinese identity and heritage.
The death of Mao Zedong in 1976, followed by the beginning of Reform and Opening Up, sparked a period of intense intellectual energy and literary revival known as ‘cultural fever’ (文化热), when fascination with Western culture mixed with a search for lost roots and collective consciousness gave way to self-expression. During this period, poetry again […]
This essay explores the resilience of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF) amid intensified cultural regulation and LGBTQIA+ repression in China. Using insider ethnography and recent scholarship, it contends that the BJQFF’s survival relies not on visibility or institutional expansion, but on adaptive organising strategies, guerilla tactics, decentralisation, and a minoritarian ethic of care. The festival embraces failure as a collective resource, transforming vulnerability into solidarity and creativity. Through disidentification and continuous improvisation, the BJQFF redefines what constitutes queer success, presenting an alternative model of endurance for grassroots activism under restrictions.
This essay examines the cyber-based ‘New Federal State of China’ (NFSC), a transnational movement founded by Chinese businessman and self-described billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui in alliance with Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Through a digital ethnography of the NFSC’s online ‘farms’, I trace how followers transform exile politics into affective labour—performing loyalty, investing money, and circulating belief as both moral capital and speculative value. The essay argues that the NFSC network exemplifies the logic of communicative and algorithmic capitalism, under which participation substitutes for transformation and faith becomes a fungible asset.
Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration: Experiences of Ethnic Performers in Southwest China (Bristol University Press, 2024) offers a compelling account of the intimate experiences of Chinese migrant workers engaged in ethnic performance at restaurants and tourist sites in southwest China. Departing from the more commonly examined narratives of rural-to-urban migration to first-tier […]
This essay examines the 2024–25 Haitang Incidents, a crackdown on danmei (‘boys’ love’) authors producing online male-male erotica, and argues that these events marked a shift from heteronormative ideological policing to predatory state brokerage. Challenging optimistic narratives of queer resistance, it introduces the notion of ‘ugly beauty’ to analyse danmei’s ecological rupture. It traces how revenue-driven ‘oceangoing fishing’ law enforcement, platform capitalism, and political depression fracture the community, while also sustaining danmei as a fragile but resilient survival strategy in post-Covid China.
Today there are two great peoples on earth who, starting from different points, seem to advance toward the same goal … —Alexis de Tocqueville (2012: 655) In 1919, after visiting Bolshevik Russia, the American journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared: ‘I have seen the future, and it works’ (Reed 2023). A century later, a related […]
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