One night during my fieldwork in 2019, I was hanging out with friends in Beijing. Shortly after we sat down at a street food hall, the waitress offered us some packets of hand wipes that were packaged like condoms (see Figure 1). Neither the English nor the Japanese text on the cover made sense. The […]

This essay rethinks the place of foreign Maoists in the People’s Republic of China through the case of Joan Hinton, one of the most prominent American supporters of the Chinese Revolution. Drawing on newly examined archival materials from her 1963 visit to Shanghai, it argues that Hinton’s position in Maoist China was defined by a structural duality: she was celebrated as an internationalist symbol yet governed as a foreign subject. The archives further reveal a deeper mismatch between what American Maoists understood as the socialist project—egalitarian reform, labour rights, everyday justice—and what the Chinese Communist Party prioritised: geopolitical alignment, diplomatic utility, and national security.

This essay examines the rise and fall of Pity Party, a series of grassroots mental health art exhibitions that sought to challenge the individualisation and medicalisation of depression while creating dialogical, community-based spaces for healing. By tracing the exhibition practices across different stages between 2017 and 2025, the article highlights the political possibilities created by […]

One evening in the early 1960s, physicist Chen Ning Yang took a train from New York City to Long Island. An elderly Chinese man sat next to him and the two struck up a conversation. Born in the central Chinese city of Hefei in 1922, Yang moved across the Pacific at the end of World […]

Foreign missionary contact, the rise of nationalism, and ethnic identification work undertaken under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party culminated in the construction of ‘Jews’ as an ethnic identity altogether foreign, resulting in the suppression of recent efforts to revive Sinicised Judaism in Kaifeng. Despite continued efforts by and optimism among some groups, a revival of any kind would be impossible without a reassessment of the Chinese nation itself.

‘Many of us who came and stayed here for more than two years are still stuck in Chinese-speaking communities.’ A Chinese asylum-seeker shared this with us during a conversation in late 2024. The sentiment is striking not because it is unusual, but because it is so widely echoed by Chinese immigrants who have sought asylum […]

This essay examines ‘Taobao Villages’ as a lens through which to interrogate the new spatial and labour formations produced by the platformisation of rural China. Focusing on Junpucun in Guangdong Province, it argues that these villages exemplify a process of recursive ruralisation: the cyclical return of capital and technology to the countryside. The article positions the rural not as a peripheral residue of urban modernity, but as an active terrain where global capitalism is absorbed, reworked, negotiated, and contested.

This essay examines the cyber-based ‘New Federal State of China’ (NFSC), a transnational movement founded by Chinese businessman and self-described billionaire-in-exile Guo Wengui in alliance with Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Through a digital ethnography of the NFSC’s online ‘farms’, I trace how followers transform exile politics into affective labour—performing loyalty, investing money, and circulating belief as both moral capital and speculative value. The essay argues that the NFSC network exemplifies the logic of communicative and algorithmic capitalism, under which participation substitutes for transformation and faith becomes a fungible asset.