This essay explores the resilience of the Beijing Queer Film Festival (BJQFF) amid intensified cultural regulation and LGBTQIA+ repression in China. Using insider ethnography and recent scholarship, it contends that the BJQFF’s survival relies not on visibility or institutional expansion, but on adaptive organising strategies, guerilla tactics, decentralisation, and a minoritarian ethic of care. The festival embraces failure as a collective resource, transforming vulnerability into solidarity and creativity. Through disidentification and continuous improvisation, the BJQFF redefines what constitutes queer success, presenting an alternative model of endurance for grassroots activism under restrictions.

A tenacious heteropatriarchal logic of gender normativity continues to script the behaviour of Chinese gay men. It was a decade ago when Tiantian Zheng (2015) made the anthropological observation that the kind of gay sex that Chinese homosexuals were having was, essentially, not about sex. The bottoms she interviewed confessed to a lack of sexual […]

China’s foreign student programs, many initiated under the banner of the unity of socialist countries and Afro-Asian solidarity, were originally designed to project international recognition of the newly established People’s Republic of China. Yet, these initiatives unfolded within an environment where government agencies closely monitored public expression and everyday life. For foreign students, daily life was mediated by state-managed hospitality, limited mobility, and surveillance. On the Chinese side, distrust of foreigners was pervasive at that time and actively cultivated by the authorities. All this caused foreign students to experience a feeling akin to what today is known as political depression.

In How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) and Land of Milk and Honey (2023), C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’ in nineteenth-century and contemporary Euro-American contexts. Using these two novels as examples, this essay traces the dialectic of self-representation and interpellation, the afterlives of transgenerational trauma, and the imbrication of aspiration with pleasure. It further elucidates how Zhang entwines debates on universal human rights amid anthropogenic catastrophe with an analysis of individual responsibility under transnational capitalism.

It has become something of a truism, in both academic discourse and everyday conversation, that invisibility is a central form of queer oppression. In a culture in which queer lives are erased—whether through passive ignorance, deliberate exclusion, or reductive portrayals as tragic, broken figures—the urgency of authentic representation cannot be overstated. But when it comes […]

(Translated and introduced by Yahia MA) I first experienced Cui Zi’en’s work in mainland China in the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate at a university in the country’s northwest and was becoming increasingly aware of my own sexuality. At that time, Cui was creating his queer-themed films and fiction, including Pseudo-Science Fiction Stories […]

In 2009, a woman named Lou Jing, born to a Chinese mother and an African American father, went on a TV show in China and declared herself a proud and patriotic Chinese person (Leung 2015). Her remarks ignited a firestorm online as people debated whether a mixed-race person could be considered truly, properly Chinese. Supporters […]

In January 2025, I was chatting online with a few friends about the ongoing controversy surrounding the construction of a factory for Chinese carmaker BYD in Brazil, which had just come under scrutiny after the country’s Public Labour Prosecution Office accused it of ‘slavery’, following an investigation into the working conditions of Chinese labourers at […]

‘I am a pig’—these are the words that interrupt Chu Yuxun as she peacefully writes her first impressions of the new school. Looking up, she sees a male student in a basketball jersey stammering the humiliating sentence before bolting away. Three more male students follow in quick succession. Fed up with these peculiar encounters, Yuxun […]