Me and My Censor

When Liu Lipeng first contacted me in July 2020, I was still in China. I initially wanted to write this as a fictional short story, but I didn’t have the courage to do it at the time because it would have landed me in prison. I left China in 2021 and spent time thinking about […]

Download PDF

Gender and Disability in China: The Rise of Female-Led Disabled Persons’ Organisations

In recent years, thanks to the popularity of digital platforms, an increasing number of female-led disabled persons’ organisations (DPOs) focusing on disability inclusion has emerged in mainland China. This growth marks a welcome change from the traditional male dominance of such organisations. While multiple definitions of DPOs exist, in this essay, we view DPOs as […]

Download PDF

Uxorilocal Marriage in Xiaoshan, 1970s to 2020s

In late March 2024, I accompanied Yifan to Golden Phoenix, a matchmaking agency specialising in arranging uxorilocal marriages in Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou, a place where life still moves at a leisurely pace. Yifan was in his early thirties, short, and slightly balding. As we were on our way, he constantly made self-deprecating jokes about his […]

Download PDF

Is China Winning Hearts and Minds among Global South Students?

When Beijing Normal University economist Professor Hu Biliang, a dear friend who sadly passed away earlier this year, remarked during an interview that African students in China received an annual stipend of RMB100,000 (about US$13,000) and that this amount was ‘not too high’, it sparked an uproar online (The Initium 2020). Many Chinese netizens suggested […]

Download PDF

The Tibet-Aid Project and Settler Colonialism in China’s Borderlands

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 […]

Download PDF

China’s Urban Question: The Other Side of the Agrarian Question

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 […]

Download PDF

Digital Hope or Digital Trap?

Understanding China’s Waixuan Jizhe (Foreign-Aimed Journalists) in the Internet Age

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.

Download PDF

Rebooting Qualitative Research in China: Reflections on Doing Fieldwork in the Post-Covid Era

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 […]

Download PDF

Great, Glorious, and Correct: The Origins and Afterlives of a Maoist Slogan

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 […]

Download PDF

Imagining Social Change through Policy Failures in China

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 […]

Download PDF

Subscribe to Made in China

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.


Back to Top