Soda Science: A Conversation with Susan Greenhalgh

To many, a can of Coke is a refreshing treat or an unhealthy indulgence. For years, companies like Coca-Cola have shaped not just our diet and waistlines, but also science and society. Their influence is not limited to the United States. Alongside their products, Big Soda has exported their ideas of fitness and nutritional science […]

Rebooting Qualitative Research in China: Reflections on Doing Fieldwork in the Post-Covid Era

With the lifting of pandemic-related travel restrictions, international researchers are now returning to China. While the end of ‘Zero-Covid’ opens new possibilities for mobility and access, China remains a challenging environment for fieldwork; given current geopolitical tensions, mounting anti-foreign (and anti-Chinese) rhetoric, and an ever-growing list of ‘sensitive’ research topics, it seems unlikely that conditions […]

Great, Glorious, and Correct: The Origins and Afterlives of a Maoist Slogan

On 1 July 2021, General Secretary Xi Jinping stood atop Tiananmen Gate and thrust his fist in the air while saying: ‘Long live the great, glorious, and correct Chinese Communist Party.’ It was the dramatic conclusion to his speech commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Descriptions of the […]

Imagining Social Change through Policy Failures in China

Change and continuity are interrelated dynamics. All social scientists grapple with this interrelation. How is continuity embedded in change? How does change enable continuity? In struggling with such issues, social scientists, along with everybody else, create concepts to depict the dynamics of change and social continuity. These concepts are never a perfect match with the […]

Ginkgo Village: A Conversation with Tamara Jacka

In Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation (ANU Press, 2024), Tamara Jacka takes readers deep into a village in central-eastern China. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Ginkgo villagers experienced terrible trauma and far-reaching socioeconomic and political change. At the heart of this book are eight tales that draw on ethnographic and life-history research to re-create […]

Are You Okay?

I couldn’t be content with just reading books and visiting libraries. In a historical situation [the Algerian Revolution] in which in every moment, every political statement, every discussion, every petition, the whole reality was at stake, it was absolutely necessary to be at the heart of events and to form one’s own opinion, however dangerous […]

A Letter from a Tehran Prison

My experiences in 2022 sound terrifying, but I know that they are only an insignificant footnote in this absurd year that we have all gone through together. I was a knowledge and culture worker living in mainland China. In the past few years, because of my professional and social activities, I have been frequently harassed […]

Setting Knowledge Free: Towards an Ethical Open Access

There is widespread agreement that academia has a publishing problem. After decades of large commercial publishers like Springer Nature and Elsevier extracting higher profits than the major tech companies while simultaneously keeping publicly financed research behind expensive paywalls (Buranyi 2017), in recent years universities and funders have attempted to renegotiate publishing agreements to ensure that […]

Dear Jude: A Tribute to Jude Howell (1956–2022)

For people who study Chinese civil society, the work of Professor Jude Howell is a familiar staple. For many, it’s an inspiration. For those who had the great luck of knowing Jude, her kindness, good humour, and generosity were every bit as uplifting as her work. Through a fortuitous phone call from Professor Wang Ming, […]

Inciting Subversion by Association: 120 Days in Detention

On 16 February 2020, just a few hours after her partner Xu Zhiyong, a leading Chinese human rights lawyer, was detained, women’s rights and labour activist Li Qiaochu went missing. China’s state security bodies would hold her incommunicado for four months under the system known as ‘residential surveillance at a designated location’ on suspicion of […]

Subscribe to Made in China

Made in China publications are open access and always available as a free download. To subscribe to email alerts for each issue of the Journal, newly published books, and information about upcoming events, please provide your contact information below.


Back to Top