In Burnout Market Feminism: Urban Chinese Businesswomen in the Internet Age (MIT Press, 2026), Ling Tang invites readers to explore the aspirations, achievements, and everyday struggles of women at the forefront of China’s digital economy. Through the stories of elite businesswomen navigating e-commerce and the broader internet industry, the book explores how gender, sexuality, entrepreneurship, […]
In her new book, The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society (University of Michigan Press, 2026), Mujun Zhou provides an ambitious and insightful account of the concept of ‘civil society’ (公民社会) as an ideational movement that informs, inspires, and at times conflicts with the development of Chinese civil society, from the early 1990s to […]
Environmental historians of modern China have often examined how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of economic development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People: The Burden of Conservation in Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2025), Micah Muscolino shifts the focus from the environmental outcomes of conservation to the […]
At a time when right-wing populism appears to be rampaging through global politics, studies about its discourses and strategies remain thin and even marginal in the field of international relations. This is especially true for authoritarian states where far-right discourses are not so much about electoral competitions as about regime legitimation. Chenchen Zhang’s new book, […]
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 […]
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