This essay describes the cosmological role of Mao in ritual and spirit mediumship in rural China. It considers the occulted forces hosted by the Chairman’s image and words, across movements of display, concealment, and circulation. Here, the Party-state has a cosmic double, and Maoist anti-religious policies are not what they seem.
A Bangkok roadside diviner examines two luxurious skyscrapers along the river. He believes that they were erected by Thailand’s largest corporation, the CP Group (Zheng Da in Chinese), on the instructions of their formidable in-house diviners. The master replicates a Buddhist discourse, according to which wealth flows naturally to those who can unlock the secrets of the cosmos.
Under Rodrigo Duterte’s administration, Chinese capital has increasingly flowed into the Philippines. Much of this new investment has been in online gambling firms—a peculiar type of capital that is not involved in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and is even criminalised by the Chinese state. Drawing from field research in Metro Manila, this essay interrogates the anti-Chinese sentiments among Filipinos that have been stoked by online gambling firms. In examining the broader social reverberations of Chinese capital on Philippine society, it argues that Chinese online gambling capital generates specific forms of economic and social exclusions.
Kashmir and Xinjiang share a border. Or, more precisely, the erstwhile princely state of Kashmir that is now divided between India, Pakistan, and China (and officially known as Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; Azad Kashmir and Gilgit Baltistan; Aksai Chin, respectively) shares a border with eastern Turkestan and Tibet—currently officially called Xinjiang and Xizang. In […]
There has been a lot of ink spilled over recent weeks on the changes to ‘bilingual education’ policy in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) of China, and protests among ethnic Mongolians in response to what is feared might become the first step in the eventual erasure of the Mongolian language and identity. For this […]
One of my companions throughout the Covid-19 lockdown has been Gushi.FM (故事FM), a podcast that is an oral historical archive, a diverse digital memory bank with stories of poverty, exploitation, coming out of the closet, and much more. At its heart, Gushi.FM is about giving people a voice. The podcast’s coverage of Covid-19–related events began […]
Yasmin is an international student residing in a southern US city. A queer activist back in China, she participates in the graduate union campaign in her university and is also a community organiser. She is among a group in the Chinese diaspora who are involved in country-of-residence social movements, a reality that tends to be […]
For the past year and a half, Hong Kong has been in turmoil, with a new generation of young and politically active citizens mobilising to protest Beijing’s tightening grip over the city. In Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China (Pluto Books 2020), prominent Hong Kong leftist intellectual Au Loong-Yu […]
In early June this year, officials in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (IMAR) released a new policy that would drastically undermine the use of the Mongolian language in schools, effectively replacing it as a language of instruction with Chinese (Baioud 2020). In response to this unwelcome imposition, petitions began circulating, calling for the repeal of […]
Modern China has inherited not only a large territory but also many ethnic groups from the Manchu Qing Empire it overthrew in 1912. How to ‘stretch the short, tight, skin of the nation over the gigantic body of the empire’ has been a question confronting both the successive governments of the Republic of China and […]
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