Today there are two great peoples on earth who, starting from different points, seem to advance toward the same goal … —Alexis de Tocqueville (2012: 655)   In 1919, after visiting Bolshevik Russia, the American journalist Lincoln Steffens famously declared: ‘I have seen the future, and it works’ (Reed 2023). A century later, a related […]

On a clear October morning in 2025, two massive cranes rolled up to a middle school in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Workers prised off the large Chinese and Mongolian signs running along the roofline of the main teaching building and replaced them with a new sign that erased the Mongolian name from the […]

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation—one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet […]

The executive ignored widespread dissent to force through an illiberal agenda. Violent confrontations between protesters and police brought forth increased repression. In less than a year, new policies all but outlawed any form of substantive criticism of the government. On the surface, life appears normal, as journalists, academics, researchers, and others continue to show up […]

A week after the devastating fire that claimed at least 159 lives in Hong Kong on 26 November, people were still queuing daily for hours until after midnight to join the mourning. As flowers, gifts, and Lennon Wall–style post-it notes evolved into a landscape, residents also expressed anger and requested independent investigations into the tragedy. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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), […]