An industrial policy renaissance, trade controls, and geopolitical challenges are further complicating the permanent features of the current global (dis)order that is already facing a polycrisis: economic stagnation, climate crisis, and interstate war. The era of neoliberal globalisation—often seen as being synonymous with the Washington Consensus—that has long been a central feature of the international […]

The Prince Claus Fund is a Netherlands-based independent organisation dedicated to the advancement of culture and development, particularly in places where culture is under pressure. Every two years, it gives out six Impact Awards to outstanding cultural practitioners and artists worldwide. One of the 2024 laureates was Chinese poet and fiction writer Mu Cao (墓草), […]

‘Northern frontier culture’ (北疆文化, umrat khiliin soyol) has recently become a trendy term in propaganda texts and academic publications in and about Inner Mongolia. Numerous activities, including cultural festivals, archaeological discoveries, intangible heritage exhibitions, and academic conferences, are organised under the banner of or carry the tag ‘northern frontier culture’. For instance, the newspaper Inner […]

On 14 June 2024, the verdict in the case of Chinese feminist activist and independent journalist Huang Xueqin and labour activist Wang Jianbing (hereinafter referred to as the ‘XueBing case’) was finally announced. Both had been accused of ‘inciting subversion of state power’. After nearly 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, Huang was sentenced to five […]

In one of the opening scenes of Surveillance State, Josh Chin and Liza Lin (2022: 41) describe how then Xinjiang party secretary Chen Quanguo tested the response time of local police in front of a market in the Ürümchi Uyghur neighbourhood of Dawan in early 2017. In less than 54 seconds, a team from the […]

Laohuasi (清真老华寺) is a Sufi mosque in Linxia, a city in China’s Gansu Province. Standing on a raised platform the length and breadth of a football field, it has four floors and two large prayer halls that can accommodate more than 6,000 worshippers. A colour image of it in a book titled Chinese Islamic Architectural […]

It was a busy Thursday afternoon when I received a text message that a human rights group in the United States, the Duihua Foundation, had confirmed that Rahile Dawut had been given a life sentence by a court in China. When I saw the message, everything went silent for a moment, just as it had […]

Where does the future of our movement lie? This question has surely troubled many Chinese feminists like me in the past year or two. Against all odds, the feminist movement had been making progress in China. From 2018 to 2020, when critical public spaces in the country were closing, the explosive emergence of the #MeToo […]

It was never quite her decision. ‘I wasn’t ready to be a mother, but it was impossible not to,’ Hui (a pseudonym) said during our interview in 2016, not long after China’s decades-long One-Child Policy ended. Her husband had made it clear to her that the ‘DINK’ (Double Income, No Kids) life—which Hui had long […]

The closure of the Beijing LGBT Centre (北京同志中心) on 15 May 2023, only three months after its fifteenth anniversary, caused shock and heartbreak among the Chinese queer community both within China and abroad. One of the largest and longest-running LGBTQ non-profit organisations in the country, the centre had operated as a physical gathering space, a […]