The story begins with water. ‘How do we make sure that that spigot remains open and free?’ an audience member asked during a panel discussion on scientific collaboration between the United States and China. He pointed out that the ‘very, very best students’ recruited from around the world are the ‘secret sauce’ that makes the […]

Most people would not consider China a typical migrant destination country even though over the past decades it has seen the growth of diverse communities of foreign populations, including African traders in Guangzhou and Yiwu (Wan 2023), intellectual migrants in its universities (Li et al. 2021), and European professionals in the major cities (Camenisch and […]

Since the 1980s, Chinese officials and technocrats have been presenting a rosy image of high-speed railway growth under the label of ‘Chinese Speed’. In this context, the Ministry of Railways conceived of the acceleration of train speeds as a techno-fix to the problems that public transportation and the national economy faced in post-socialist China. In the twentieth-first century, however, a mounting social critique of high-speed rail in China demonstrated public distrust of this technocratic order. In response to these criticisms, after the Wenzhou train collision on 23 July 2011, the MoR refashioned a technological-determinist mentality of speed into a discourse highlighting techno-risk regulation and economic rationales. This move shows how the meaning of Chinese Speed is a multiply authored cultural idea that has been transformed through technocratic–civil contestation.

This essay explores the purpose, progress, and strategic political motivations driving China’s development of the digital yuan. This central bank digital currency is not merely a technological advancement or modernisation of a fiat currency, it also serves as a key instrument in the agenda of the People’s Bank of China to consolidate monetary authority. The essay analyses the development of the digital yuan in the context of China’s broader economic and political strategies, including enhancing financial inclusion, centralising the nation’s payment ecosystem—currently dominated by private fintech players—and potentially challenging the US dollar’s global dominance. It also assesses its possible impacts on international trade, while addressing the challenges it faces in gaining global acceptance.

With outstretched arms ready to provide a hug, the winner of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics cross-country skiing women’s 30-kilometre Mass Start welcomed the last contestant as she reached the finish line. As the two embraced, Norwegian Olympic champion Therese Johaug consolingly told the last-place finisher, Dinigeer Yilamujiang of the Chinese team: ‘Be proud of […]

In 2015, the ‘maker culture’ of individual empowerment and open-source production was elevated as part of China’s national economic development strategy of mass entrepreneurship and innovation. Despite the hype, however, the top-down, government-promoted maker movement in China has been in decline since 2017. Drawing on seven months of participant observation as an intern in Shenzhen makerspaces and high-tech start-ups, as well as 95 semi-structured interviews conducted in 2020 and 2021, this essay examines recent developments in China’s maker movement and the perceptions, experiences, and negotiations of individual makers in this process, shedding light on the dynamics of entrepreneurship and innovation in China from the bottom up.

Shenzhen, the ‘Silicon Valley of China’, embodies rapid development and the profound challenges it brings. Harvey (2005: 1) describes China’s market-oriented reforms as ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’ and points out that China is the outcome of a ‘particular kind of neoliberalism interdigitated with authoritarian centralised control’ (Harvey 2006: 34). Shenzhen’s extraordinary transformation from a small […]

This essay examines how the dual role of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) during the fifth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong prompts us to consider the interconnectedness of medicine and politics in the city. On the one hand, the Hong Kong Government strongly promoted the use of TCM in what arguably amounted to nationalist propaganda. On the other hand, TCM provided an alternative method of treatment when the option of hospitalisation was not available or desired, with community TCM clinics’ free consultation services and related projects demonstrating a bottom-up politics based on mutual aid.

The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for those conducting fieldwork in China. To understand how the situation has shifted, we collected firsthand accounts from internationally based China specialists, showcasing the difficulties they encountered and the strategies they used to cope. We also obtained insights from scholars based in China, which provided valuable perspectives on the changing fieldwork environment in the country. By reflecting on these findings, we aim to support a smoother transition for researchers looking to resume their fieldwork-based research in China in the post-pandemic era and beyond.

Throughout contemporary Chinese history, Shanghai has been perceived as an exceptional cosmopolitan space. While these days this exceptionalism is generally framed in terms of the city’s status as a global financial hub, it should not be forgotten that Shanghainese cosmopolitanism is rooted in more than a century of migration, grassroots activism, and the rejection of […]