This year marks 30 years since China launched its ambitious Tibet-Aid Project (援藏计划), a vast and ongoing party-state effort to reshape the region. Unveiled at the 1994 Tibet Work Forum, the scheme pairs Tibet’s administrative units with inland provinces, cities, and state-owned enterprises, injecting Han Chinese expertise, resources, and capital into the Tibetan Autonomous Region […]
From the turn of the twentieth century, Marxist socialist thinkers internationally grappled with what was known as the ‘agrarian question’. Initially, this referred to the problem of whether their respective national peasantries were disappearing, transforming into industrial workers as Marx predicted and as was deemed necessary for their revolutionary projects. In the many cases where […]
While the Chinese Government bans most popular foreign social media services, it does not underestimate the strategic role of these networked technologies, particularly their potential to strengthen China’s communication with the world. In recent years, leveraging foreign social media platforms has become a common practice in the foreign-aimed reporting sector in China. This essay explores how Chinese foreign-aimed journalists—individuals who are expected to use and normalise foreign platforms at work—navigate a changing work environment as their journalistic practices and traditional routines are increasingly platform-based and digitally oriented.
With the lifting of pandemic-related travel restrictions, international researchers are now returning to China. While the end of ‘Zero-Covid’ opens new possibilities for mobility and access, China remains a challenging environment for fieldwork; given current geopolitical tensions, mounting anti-foreign (and anti-Chinese) rhetoric, and an ever-growing list of ‘sensitive’ research topics, it seems unlikely that conditions […]
On 1 July 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping stood atop Tiananmen Gate and thrust his fist in the air while saying: ‘Long live the great, glorious, and correct Chinese Communist Party.’ It was the dramatic conclusion to his speech commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Descriptions of the […]
Change and continuity are interrelated dynamics. All social scientists grapple with this interrelation. How is continuity embedded in change? How does change enable continuity? In struggling with such issues, social scientists, along with everybody else, create concepts to depict the dynamics of change and social continuity. These concepts are never a perfect match with the […]
Yabi is a controversial subcultural phenomenon active in China since 2019. Like the Western ‘hipster’, the yabi mash-up appropriation of styles from the ‘global supermarket of culture’ is deemed messy, superficial, and shamelessly middle class by mainstream critics. Through a historical analysis, this essay argues that the yabi exemplify the return of the feminine supernatural—present throughout imperial and modern Chinese history—as a response to the challenges of the Anthropocene from the present-day involuted generation.
I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom. —bell hooks (2014: 12) All kinds of contraband items were smuggled into the Alabama prisons where I worked as an educator and administrative assistant from June 2022 to January 2024 through […]
On 1 March 2022, just one week after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an anonymous group of internationalists from mainland China composed a letter expressing their support for the Ukrainian people. The document, titled ‘Sharing the Shame: A Letter from Internationalists in Mainland China’ (与有耻焉: 来自中国大陆国际主义者的一封信), was subsequently published by Chuang, a website renowned for its […]
Since the 1980 launch of the One-Child Policy, population has been a fraught domain of Chinese politics. An analysis of Weibo comments suggests that the announcement in the mid-2010s of the Two-Child Policy was met with excitement and hope—a sign that the government had heard the people’s demands and opened the circle of freedom after […]
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