In 2019, more than a million people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong, with many returning week after week. The song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ soon emerged as the movement’s unofficial anthem. What began as a protest against an ill-advised extradition bill quickly became, for many, the city’s last stand against Beijing’s tightening grip. […]
Chinese society has long been patriarchal, whereby men hold more privilege and power than women. Despite challenges and transformations over time, patriarchy has been a persistent and pervasive foundational organising principle of social and political life (Evans 2024). The ideological reinvention of neo-Confucianism as the moral standard in Xi Jinping’s China (Yan 2021) has further […]
Kaiser Kuo’s (2025) ‘The Great Reckoning: What the West Should Learn from China’ is a bracing provocation. He argues that China is no longer merely ‘catching up’ but increasingly sets the tempo of economic, technological, and institutional development. Legitimacy in the twenty-first century, he contends, rests increasingly—though not exclusively—on performance, with climate policy as the […]
When the MaskPark incident broke in mid-2025, it jolted the Chinese internet (Hawkins 2025). Hidden behind the encrypted walls of Telegram—a platform officially blocked in China but accessible through virtual private networks (VPNs)—the story first came to light when a young woman accidentally discovered that her photos had been shared on the private MaskPark channel […]
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.
Laoye left Louisiana like an outlaw cowboy, abandoning all his earthly possessions, and hitting the road. The flat-screen TVs, the piles of clothes, the closet full of USB cords? No longer needed. Just a backpack of essentials and he was out the door. He would be back, he promised, but Louisiana was now squarely in […]
Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White House has been pressuring companies from its East Asian allies, including the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC, to invest in the United States and open […]
In April 2025, Aqiang, a renowned gay rights advocate, published an online article titled ‘Condemning Gay Elders for “Marriage Fraud” Is as Absurd as Blaming Ancient People for Not Using the Internet’ (谴责老年gay‘骗婚’, 与骂古人不上网一样搞笑). By marriage fraud (骗婚 pianhun), Aqiang was referring to the practice of gay men marrying unwitting straight women, who then become […]
Since the 2010s, the debate about anti-gender politics has centred on the rise of right-wing forces and ideologies that are trans-exclusionary, queerphobic, and anti-feminist—particularly hostile to queer and intersectional feminisms (Butler 2024). These movements often weaponise victimhood to uphold existing structures of power: cisgender women are portrayed as victims of transgender rights under cis-sexism; men […]
Chinese scholars who have engaged with Fredric Jameson often observe—sometimes with admiration and sometimes with a degree of irony—that he appears ‘more Marxist than any Marxist in China’. Jameson’s Marxism, and, by extension, that of Althusser, Badiou, Žižek, and other Western leftist theorists, serves as a powerful reminder of the impossibility of any cultural essentialism […]
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