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
The Chinese Government imposes strict controls on publishing through both formal legal mechanisms and informal, arbitrary enforcement. Within this institutional context, independent publishing that does not rely on state-authorised or major commercial publishers is inherently precarious, therefore demanding constant resilience and creativity. 51 Personae is a notable independent publishing project that was born in this […]
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.
One evening in the early 1960s, physicist Chen Ning Yang took a train from New York City to Long Island. An elderly Chinese man sat next to him and the two struck up a conversation. Born in the central Chinese city of Hefei in 1922, Yang moved across the Pacific at the end of World […]
From royal court legends to a seventeenth-century deity, gay people have been part of Chinese life and literature for millennia. Since the 1990s, legal reforms and deeper integration into global capitalism have fostered new avenues for civic action. Queer Chinese activists have fought for their rights in the courts, through legislative channels, and by garnering […]
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.
‘Many of us who came and stayed here for more than two years are still stuck in Chinese-speaking communities.’ A Chinese asylum-seeker shared this with us during a conversation in late 2024. The sentiment is striking not because it is unusual, but because it is so widely echoed by Chinese immigrants who have sought asylum […]
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