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 […]

‘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.