In The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949–2019 (Stanford University Press, 2023), Huaiyin Li reconstructs the realities of worker performance and factory governance under Mao Zedong and after. Drawing from fresh data collected through oral histories, he reassesses the extent to which Chinese workers were becoming ‘the masters’ in the People’s Republic of […]

Alessandro Russo’s groundbreaking work Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Duke University Press, 2020) revisits the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—a revolutionary process the inheritance of which is still open, even though most of the world, and China in particular, has all but disowned it. In his book, Russo excavates the unfinished work, theoretical debates, and possibilities […]

In On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), Margaret Hillenbrand probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. She argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in a state of ‘zombie citizenship’—a condition of dehumanising exile from […]

In their new book, Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control (St Martin’s Publishing Group, 2022), investigative reporters Josh Chin and Liza Lin examine the emergence of automation-assisted digital surveillance in China and in spaces of Chinese development around the world. Drawing from reporting done in Xinjiang, eastern China, […]

In The Left in China: A Political Cartography (Pluto Press, 2023), Ralf Ruckus traces the fascinating history of left-wing, subversive, and oppositional forces in China over the past 70 years. He looks at the interconnected movements since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, drawing out the main actors, ideas, and actions. […]

Jia Tan’s Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China (NYU Press, 2023) interrogates the intersections across digital media of feminist rights activism, queer culture, and neoliberalism in an illiberal context. Drawing on a wide range of artefacts—interviews with feminist advocates and queer media practitioners, participant-observations at queer community events, and cultural analysis of […]

China’s green transition is often perceived as a lesson in authoritarian efficiency. In a mere few years, the state managed to improve air quality drastically without apparent resistance from the market. In Clean Air at What Cost? The Rise of Blunt Force Regulation in China (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Denise van der Kamp explains how […]

This discussion is a dialogue about changes in how we, and others, have approached China and futurity. It has two movements: 1) A Conversation about Futures Past, and 2) Five Propositions on the Future Perfect. We begin with a conversation about some of the scholarly and popular discourses that framed our understandings of China and […]

While China’s reproductive policies have long been studied as a mechanism of biopolitical control, the everyday reproductive experiences of Chinese people are often eclipsed. Spanning more than a century, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez’s important monograph Reproductive Realities in Modern China: Birth Control and Abortion, 1911–2021 (Cambridge University Press, 2023) fills this gap by examining how Chinese […]

Ghassan Moazzin’s Foreign Banks and Global Finance in Modern China: Banking on the Chinese Frontier, 1870–1919 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) is a scrupulously researched and riveting story about the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (DAB), a German bank that was active in China between 1890 and World War I. The DAB rose to become the peer of the […]