In the autumn of 1995, Ye Shuhua made a speech. During the NGO Forum at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the 68-year-old astronomer took to the microphone and called on fellow women to break the glass ceiling and realise their potentials (Ye 2023; China Science Daily 2016). The daughter […]
It has become something of a truism, in both academic discourse and everyday conversation, that invisibility is a central form of queer oppression. In a culture in which queer lives are erased—whether through passive ignorance, deliberate exclusion, or reductive portrayals as tragic, broken figures—the urgency of authentic representation cannot be overstated. But when it comes […]
Jin Xing 金星 (literally, ‘golden star’, or ‘Venus’ in English) is a household name in mainland China. Since undergoing gender-affirmation surgery in 1994, she has established herself as a dancer, television personality, businesswoman, and, most prominently, transgender icon. From 2015 to 2017, The Jin Xing Show (金星秀) on Dragon Television (东方卫视) made her China’s first […]
(Translated and introduced by Yahia MA) I first experienced Cui Zi’en’s work in mainland China in the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate at a university in the country’s northwest and was becoming increasingly aware of my own sexuality. At that time, Cui was creating his queer-themed films and fiction, including Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories […]
Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online scams. With luck and vigilance, this amounts to little more than a nuisance; yet, for the many who fell victim to […]
One summer a few years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to attend an LGBTQ+ youth camp in a city in southern China, where I made many friends. After each day of classes, we hung out in the sweaty heat, chatting and laughing, discussing politics and society, and going to underground […]
In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news transformed China’s political and social landscape. He shows how new technologies of communication created a Chinese ‘newsscape’ that linked distant regions, shaped how people understood […]
In 2009, a woman named Lou Jing, born to a Chinese mother and an African American father, went on a TV show in China and declared herself a proud and patriotic Chinese person (Leung 2015). Her remarks ignited a firestorm online as people debated whether a mixed-race person could be considered truly, properly Chinese. Supporters […]
Three years after announcing their intent to construct a mega-dam along the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River as part of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, Chinese officials gave their approval to proceed with the project on 25 December 2024. This was followed by a ground-breaking ceremony led by Premier Li Qiang on 19 July 2025. While key […]
In 1947, the acclaimed Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang stunned the world with an invention: the first Chinese-language typewriter with a keyboard. Lin poured years of effort and his life’s savings into the design, which he named MingKwai, ‘clear and fast’. Despite its celebrity and Lin’s high hopes, the MingKwai never went into production, […]
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