The executive ignored widespread dissent to force through an illiberal agenda. Violent confrontations between protesters and police brought forth increased repression. In less than a year, new policies all but outlawed any form of substantive criticism of the government. On the surface, life appears normal, as journalists, academics, researchers, and others continue to show up […]
A week after the devastating fire that claimed at least 159 lives in Hong Kong on 26 November, people were still queuing daily for hours until after midnight to join the mourning. As flowers, gifts, and Lennon Wall–style post-it notes evolved into a landscape, residents also expressed anger and requested independent investigations into the tragedy. […]
Editors’ introduction: The following piece, written by Lee Wai Kwan and translated by Yiwen Liu, originally appeared in Initium Media on 28 November 2025. In republishing it here in the Made in China Journal with the permission of Initium, we hope to connect voices of the Hong Kong community to wider audiences who might benefit […]
China’s foreign student programs, many initiated under the banner of the unity of socialist countries and Afro-Asian solidarity, were originally designed to project international recognition of the newly established People’s Republic of China. Yet, these initiatives unfolded within an environment where government agencies closely monitored public expression and everyday life. For foreign students, daily life was mediated by state-managed hospitality, limited mobility, and surveillance. On the Chinese side, distrust of foreigners was pervasive at that time and actively cultivated by the authorities. All this caused foreign students to experience a feeling akin to what today is known as political depression.
Chinese society has long been patriarchal, whereby men hold more privilege and power than women. Despite challenges and transformations over time, patriarchy has been a persistent and pervasive foundational organising principle of social and political life (Evans 2024). The ideological reinvention of neo-Confucianism as the moral standard in Xi Jinping’s China (Yan 2021) has further […]
Kaiser Kuo’s (2025) ‘The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China’ is a bracing provocation. He argues that China is no longer merely ‘catching up’ but increasingly sets the tempo of economic, technological, and institutional development. Legitimacy in the twenty-first century, he contends, rests increasingly—though not exclusively—on performance, with climate policy as the […]
When the MaskPark incident broke in mid-2025, it jolted the Chinese internet (Hawkins 2025). Hidden behind the encrypted walls of Telegram—a platform officially blocked in China but accessible through virtual private networks (VPNs)—the story first came to light when a young woman accidentally discovered that her photos had been shared on the private MaskPark channel […]
In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’ in nineteenth-century and contemporary Euro-American contexts. Using these two novels as examples, this essay traces the dialectic of self-representation and interpellation, the afterlives of transgenerational trauma, and the imbrication of aspiration with pleasure. It further elucidates how Zhang entwines debates on universal human rights amid anthropogenic catastrophe with an analysis of individual responsibility under transnational capitalism.
Laoye left Louisiana like an outlaw cowboy, abandoning all his earthly possessions, and hitting the road. The flat-screen TVs, the piles of clothes, the closet full of USB cords? No longer needed. Just a backpack of essentials and he was out the door. He would be back, he promised, but Louisiana was now squarely in […]
Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White House has been pressuring companies from its East Asian allies, including the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to invest in the United States and open […]
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