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 […]
A tenacious heteropatriarchal logic of gender normativity continues to script the behaviour of Chinese gay men. It was a decade ago when Tiantian Zheng (2015) made the anthropological observation that the kind of gay sex that Chinese homosexuals were having was, essentially, not about sex. The bottoms she interviewed confessed to a lack of sexual […]
On a clear October morning in 2025, two massive cranes rolled up to a middle school in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Workers prised off the large Chinese and Mongolian signs running along the roofline of the main teaching building and replaced them with a new sign that erased the Mongolian name from the […]
Six years after the spectacular ‘Be Water’ rebellion that rippled across national borders, Forever Hong Kong asks: What historical conditions and precedents precipitated the citywide revolt in 2019? How can we understand Hongkongers’ political resistance as acts of decolonial defiance? Weaving cogent historical and political-economy analyses of Hong Kong’s colonial history with rich ethnographic data […]
‘Our motto is —’, the supervisor chanted. ‘Meituan Delivery, punctual and helpful [美团配送, 准时好用]!’, dozens of drivers responded in unison. At 9.30 am, drivers assembled for a roll call under a bridge near a residential complex. The supervisor reminded them to clean their delivery boxes, reiterated the health and safety guidelines, and reported the rate […]
A carved stone discovered in Qinghai Province in 2020 drew wide attention in June 2025 when a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences proposed that it was an inscription from the reign of China’s first emperor, Qin Shihuang (r. 221–210 BCE), a claim that seemed to extend Qin influence to the Tibetan Plateau. […]
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 […]
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