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 […]
It was never quite her decision. ‘I wasn’t ready to be a mother, but it was impossible not to,’ Hui (a pseudonym) said during our interview in 2016, not long after China’s decades-long One-Child Policy ended. Her husband had made it clear to her that the ‘DINK’ (Double Income, No Kids) life—which Hui had long […]
This essay examines how the dual role of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) during the fifth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in Hong Kong prompts us to consider the interconnectedness of medicine and politics in the city. On the one hand, the Hong Kong Government strongly promoted the use of TCM in what arguably amounted to nationalist propaganda. On the other hand, TCM provided an alternative method of treatment when the option of hospitalisation was not available or desired, with community TCM clinics’ free consultation services and related projects demonstrating a bottom-up politics based on mutual aid.
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 […]
The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges for those conducting fieldwork in China. To understand how the situation has shifted, we collected firsthand accounts from internationally based China specialists, showcasing the difficulties they encountered and the strategies they used to cope. We also obtained insights from scholars based in China, which provided valuable perspectives on the changing fieldwork environment in the country. By reflecting on these findings, we aim to support a smoother transition for researchers looking to resume their fieldwork-based research in China in the post-pandemic era and beyond.
These grid managers were sitting in an office room. Their phones—all linked to a power bank—were inundated with calls from people who had found that their health code had suddenly turned red and wanted to know what to do to make it green again. The grid managers had stayed up the whole night until 5 […]
In November 2022, migrant labourers in Guangzhou’s urban villages protested en masse the lockdowns associated with China’s zero-Covid policy. While some critics in China and abroad described the mechanisms of population control in the zero-Covid policy as the ‘return’ of an all-encompassing state control akin to that of the Maoist period, this essay argues, rather, that the episode laid bare the social inequalities between migrant labourers and village landlords on which the global supply chains for the low-cost manufacturing of fast fashion depend.
The closure of the Beijing LGBT Centre (北京同志中心) on 15 May 2023, only three months after its fifteenth anniversary, caused shock and heartbreak among the Chinese queer community both within China and abroad. One of the largest and longest-running LGBTQ non-profit organisations in the country, the centre had operated as a physical gathering space, a […]
During the 1950s, the construction of large-scale water engineering infrastructure emerged as a crucial undertaking for the socialist state. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of engineers, Party cadres, and workers, this monumental task brought about revolutionary transformations to the landscape of China. Concurrently, a multitude of artists were commissioned to visit these projects and capture their essence. By closely examining and analysing some of these works of art, this essay aims to highlight the profound technological grandeur and immense labour intensity expressed in them, while also shedding light on some of the aspects that remained invisible within the state-sanctioned visual representations of these projects.
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