‘Political depression’ (政治性抑郁), first introduced into Chinese online discourse in the summer of 2019, is a term that gained wide circulation during the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, it was associated with anger and despair at the authorities’ mishandling of the Wuhan outbreak and its rapid slide out of control. Later in the prolonged crisis, it […]
The chaos and sheer human density of Kowloon are often synonymous with Hong Kong. Multilevel arcades of little restaurants sit alongside street markets selling keepsake magnets. In these busy streets, up a quiet staircase, hide a few surviving independent bookstores. These bookstores became regular stops on my fieldwork visits in Kowloon. By the door in […]
This essay examines ‘Taobao Villages’ as a lens through which to interrogate the new spatial and labour formations produced by the platformisation of rural China. Focusing on Junpucun in Guangdong Province, it argues that these villages exemplify a process of recursive ruralisation: the cyclical return of capital and technology to the countryside. The article positions the rural not as a peripheral residue of urban modernity, but as an active terrain where global capitalism is absorbed, reworked, negotiated, and contested.
Since the late 1990s, even amid continuing media censorship and sporadic government crackdowns on LGBTQIA+ activism, there has been a boom in queer groups, organisations, and events in urban China. Self-published queer zines, the Chinese queer version of samizdat, have catalogued the rise and fall of these queer communities and cultures. They have also functioned […]
This essay examines how the classical Chinese story of the Rabbit God has been reinterpreted in the global Chinese diaspora in recent years. Using the examples of Andrew Thomas Huang’s 2019 film The Kiss of the Rabbit God, the author’s 2024 poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God, and artist FJ’s Rabbit God performance at the ‘We Are LGBTQIA+ ESEA’ exhibition held in 2025, the article showcases some creative ways in which the Rabbit God story has been reimagined for cultural and political purposes, advocating an open and undogmatic approach to queer Chinese identity and heritage.
The death of Mao Zedong in 1976, followed by the beginning of Reform and Opening Up, sparked a period of intense intellectual energy and literary revival known as ‘cultural fever’ (文化热), when fascination with Western culture mixed with a search for lost roots and collective consciousness gave way to self-expression. During this period, poetry again […]
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