Growing up in 1990s China, Yangyang encountered two contradictory narratives about what it meant to be a worker. In older periodicals and occasionally in state media, workers were hailed as the ‘master class’ and being one was glorious. Many of her relatives and teachers, however, held up laid-off state-enterprise workers as a stern warning: if […]
Scholars have long debated whether the transition from the Mao Zedong era to Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up was a moment of rupture or continuity. One influential view holds that the 1980s saw a rise of Western-influenced liberalism (Calhoun 1994) and Deng’s program marked a ‘fundamental departure’ from Maoism (Vogel 2011). This rupture thesis […]
Linda Qian’s Homesick Nation: Development, Migration and Yearning in Rural China (Cambridge University Press, 2026) examines rural development in contemporary China through the lens of 乡愁 xiangchou, a concept connoting homesickness and rural nostalgia. Centred on Heyang, a heritage village in Zhejiang, the book employs hometown ethnography to trace the complex return flows of people, […]
The four propellers begin to spin. A gust of wind presses down the surrounding rice plants as a pulsing rotor-whir fills the air. The drone, carrying its battery and a tank of pesticides, lifts off and stabilises, hovering briefly before angling towards the fields. It accelerates over the paddies, the air beneath it flattening the […]
Life before e-commerce can feel like a foreign country. For the ‘Chinamaxxing’ crowd, fresh meals and fancy gadgets delivered to your doorstep almost instantly, at astonishingly low prices, are among the country’s top draws. Yet these conveniences come with hidden costs, and China’s path to becoming an e-commerce giant has been far from certain. How […]
China’s artificial intelligence (AI) trajectory is often characterised as ‘frugal innovation’ (Waters 2025), ‘self-reliance’ (Wang et al. 2025), or a state-controlled approach to innovation and diffusion (Roberts et al. 2021). Many observers have focused on China’s AI policy and regulatory approach, portraying it as ‘vertical’ (as opposed to the ‘horizontal approach’ of the European Union’s […]
Ballroom culture emerged in Black and Latinx communities in the United States in the twentieth century as drag balls (Jones 2017). In the middle of the century, it developed into a comprehensive system of competitive balls between ‘houses’ competing to win category prizes such as best makeup, best runway, and for a dancing style known […]
In October 2021, Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健), a North Korean defector held in Jilin Prison in Northeast China, broke out of the facility and spent 40 days on the run before he was caught near the Fengman Dam, a site with a long history of Japanese colonial engineering. Artist Zhang Hanwen (张瀚文) retraces this journey in […]
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, […]
Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话: 悟空; hereinafter BMW), an action role-playing game developed by the Chinese studio Game Science (游戏科学), became both a commercial and a cultural phenomenon after its release on 20 August 2024. BMW belongs to the ‘Souls-like’ genre, named after the Dark Souls series, whose punishing difficulty is by design: it appeals to […]
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