This essay examines how a liminal state of uncertainty and disorientation shapes the trajectory of a trans-advocacy organisation in contemporary China. By situating the group’s current struggles within the tension between global humanitarianism and China’s ambivalent institutional support for trans people, it argues that this situation produces a unique structure of feeling that can be called ‘fragile optimism’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the author shows how the members of this organisation cultivate fragile optimism as an affective orientation to navigate political and cultural constraints.

In 2023, the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) conference and exhibition, held in Sydney, featured an interactive installation by Miu Ling Lam titled Erased Murmurs. The art piece drew attention to the ever-vanishing graffiti in the artist’s hometown, Hong Kong. In Lam’s description, Erased Murmurs centred on affective, sentimental poems […]

This essay examines how Chinese retail investors make sense of repeated stock market failures across generations. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyses the recurring discourse of ‘defending the 3,000 points’ on the Shanghai Stock Exchange Index as a generational joke that reflects deeper temporal attachments to the market. I argue that intergenerational memories of loss do not necessarily discourage participation but instead reinforce it, as failures are reframed within the investors’ experience of improvement and narratives of national development. Through this process, disappointment is normalised

This essay examines how collective memory of the singer Anita Mui unfolds across cultural productions in post-2019 Hong Kong. It begins with an analysis of memorial narratives associated with the 2021 biographical movie Anita, then examines a 2023 public debate about urban planning for museums, including the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, which at the time hosted an exhibition about the singer. Tracing the online circulation of memory narratives, the essay introduces the concept of ‘temporal fugitives’ to describe those who strategically withdraw from a politically turbulent present by retreating into a reconstructed past to seek solace.

Foreign missionary contact, the rise of nationalism, and ethnic identification work undertaken under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party culminated in the construction of ‘Jews’ as an ethnic identity altogether foreign, resulting in the suppression of recent efforts to revive Sinicised Judaism in Kaifeng. Despite continued efforts by and optimism among some groups, a revival of any kind would be impossible without a reassessment of the Chinese nation itself.

At the end of 2024, as my postdoctoral appointment at a Chinese university was ending, I found myself at a professional crossroads. During the previous two years, based in mainland China as an anthropologist, I had experienced at first hand the constraints that institutional academia imposes on writing and public speaking. This led me to […]

In a town on the edge of a desert, a holoparasitic plant threads together memories of hardship, dreams of prosperity, and the feeling that development has come to a halt. Following centuries of human–plant encounters, this essay explores how China’s interior frontier has been shaped by successive incomplete projects of land reclamation, industrialisation, and nature conservation. Paying attention to this sense of unfinishedness sheds light on how people today live through political depression in China, where the future feels suspended but not entirely closed.

‘Political depression’ (政治性抑郁), first introduced into Chinese online discourse in the summer of 2019, is a term that gained wide circulation during the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, it was associated with anger and despair at the authorities’ mishandling of the Wuhan outbreak and its rapid slide out of control. Later in the prolonged crisis, it […]

Since the late 1990s, even amid continuing media censorship and sporadic government crackdowns on LGBTQIA+ activism, there has been a boom in queer groups, organisations, and events in urban China. Self-published queer zines, the Chinese queer version of samizdat, have catalogued the rise and fall of these queer communities and cultures. They have also functioned […]