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, […]
In January 2025, I was chatting online with a few friends about the ongoing controversy surrounding the construction of a factory for Chinese carmaker BYD in Brazil, which had just come under scrutiny after the country’s Public Labour Prosecution Office accused it of ‘slavery’, following an investigation into the working conditions of Chinese labourers at […]
‘I am a pig’—these are the words that interrupt Chu Yuxun as she peacefully writes her first impressions of the new school. Looking up, she sees a male student in a basketball jersey stammering the humiliating sentence before bolting away. Three more male students follow in quick succession. Fed up with these peculiar encounters, Yuxun […]
Imagine this scenario: you ordered takeout during lunch rush hour, but the delivery bros were overbooked, so a drone dropped from the sky to deliver your meal; on your commute, while ground traffic was jammed, flying cars allowed you to take an ‘air taxi’ to work … These scenes seemingly out of science fiction movies […]
19 July 2025, Nyingchi, Tibet. Against a bold red backdrop with snow-capped mountains looming in the distance, China’s Premier Li Qiang—flanked on both sides by four senior officials and leaders of major state-owned enterprises—formally announced the ground breaking on the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo Hydropower Project (LYT project). Below the stage, rows of officials and engineers […]
This essay is written precisely so that it could be dismissed. —Paul Mann (1991: 141) Gary Zhexi Zhang (2021) first coined the term ‘Sinopessimism’ as a speculative counterpart to Afropessimism, imagining a future in which China becomes the object, rather than the subject, of global racialisation. While Zhang’s usage was primarily a thought experiment, […]
For some in the West, being a journalist in China—especially one at a state media organisation—is seen as little more than parroting party propaganda. This caricature not only disregards the courage and dedication of many Chinese journalists but also misrepresents the complex realities they navigate as mere state coercion. How does censorship actually operate inside […]
This essay tells stories of gender and sexually nonconforming rural-to-urban migrant workers in two urban villages in Southern China. Based on an ethnography of their community-making through ‘cruising’—a pratice of seeking non-heterosexual sexual encounters in semi-public spaces—I argue that ‘queer life’ in China is divided by a spatialised structure of class. While LGBTQ+ individuals who are urban middle-class residents have gained visibility in tier one and tier two cities, migrant workers in these same cities face precarious conditions. This should compel the LGBTQ+ movement to ask different questions and confront its own economic and spatial exclusions.
Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. To subscribe to email alerts for each issue of the Journal, newly published books, and information about upcoming events, please provide your contact information below.
