Jian Lin, Wilfred Yang Wang, and Ping Sun’s Chinese Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, 2025) is one of the first English-language books to offer a systematic examination of Chinese digital platforms across technology, geopolitics, business, culture, gender, and labour. For decades, scholarship on Chinese platforms has been shaped by a dichotomy: either viewing them […]
The Chinese Government imposes strict controls on publishing through both formal legal mechanisms and informal, arbitrary enforcement. Within this institutional context, independent publishing that does not rely on state-authorised or major commercial publishers is inherently precarious, therefore demanding constant resilience and creativity. 51 Personae is a notable independent publishing project that was born in this […]
Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration: Experiences of Ethnic Performers in Southwest China (Bristol University Press, 2024) offers a compelling account of the intimate experiences of Chinese migrant workers engaged in ethnic performance at restaurants and tourist sites in southwest China. Departing from the more commonly examined narratives of rural-to-urban migration to first-tier […]
Six years after the spectacular ‘Be Water’ rebellion that rippled across national borders, Forever Hong Kong asks: What historical conditions and precedents precipitated the citywide revolt in 2019? How can we understand Hongkongers’ political resistance as acts of decolonial defiance? Weaving cogent historical and political-economy analyses of Hong Kong’s colonial history with rich ethnographic data […]
Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (University of Michigan Press, 2024) unpacks the ways in which the transnational circulation of queer culture, politics, and institutions are structured through the antagonist interdependence of China and the United […]
In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news transformed China’s political and social landscape. He shows how new technologies of communication created a Chinese ‘newsscape’ that linked distant regions, shaped how people understood […]
In Crafting a Tibetan Terroir: Winemaking in Shangri-La (University of Washington Press, 2025), Brendan Galipeau takes readers to the Sino-Tibetan border region rebranded as ‘Shangri-La’ by the Chinese Government to promote tourism. Drawing from his ethnographic research in the area, he shows how wine has transformed Tibetan landscapes and livelihoods. With grapes originally introduced to […]
Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) examines how the language of love (愛 ai) has been appropriated and politicised by Chinese political leaders throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to legitimise authority, mobilise emotion, and shape state ideology. The book traces a genealogy from Sun Yat-sen’s […]
In the past decades, the Uyghurs in China have become known as an oppressed ethnic and religious minority in their homeland, today’s Xinjiang. Islam and Islamophobia are central to that story, but visitors to Xinjiang and students of Uyghur history know that there is another, lesser-known, Buddhist history and culture of the Uyghurs, which remain […]
Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97 (Manchester University Press, 2023) examines state–society relations in one of the United Kingdom’s last strategically important colonial dependencies, Hong Kong. Using underexploited archival evidence, it explores how a reformist colonial administration investigated Chinese political culture, and how activism by social movements in […]
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