Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️
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chenchenzhang.net
Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️
@chenchenzhang.net
8.6K followers 350 following 1.7K posts
migrant & researcher interested in politics and other things. based @durham.ac.uk
currently: digital narratives, postcolonial nationalism, the global right, China stuff. neurodiversity-affirming parenting. she/her. 不必等待炬火.

https://chenchenzhang.net
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chenchenzhang.net
was reading about YouTube’s origin story and even though we all know the tech bro culture is weird, I still wasn’t ready for how much of the digital infrastructure that shapes our life (and politics) today began because tech bros were horny and bored
Karim said the inspiration for YouTube came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy when Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show. Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video-sharing site.[18][19] Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not.[17][20] They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.[21] Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any video.[
January 9, 2026 at 8:56 PM
chenchenzhang.net
the cost of clean air in Beijing: people in rural Hebei suffer from not being able to afford heating for the 8th winter.
gas is too expensive, coal is banned. rural Hebei's plight has recently drawn widespread attention and gone viral on social media
aquariuseras.substack.com/p/hebei-meig...
a red banner in rural Hebei that reads: Arrest anyone who burns coal
January 8, 2026 at 9:09 AM
chenchenzhang.net
love it when I asked a geographer friend if Beijing still allows this kind of outdoor seating (photo taken in 2014), they not only said no, but also sent me a paper they wrote on this exact topic...
photo of a lively street at night with many people dining outside
January 2, 2026 at 9:12 PM
chenchenzhang.net
spending the last day of 2025 taking a photo walk in Newcastle with my new camera📷
A brick railway bridge arches over a street and canal, with colorful graffiti on nearby buildings and people walking along the path on a sunny day. A tall stone building beside a narrow canal, with its reflection in the water on a clear, sunny day. Two people sit at a café window, sharing food at a counter decorated with festive garlands and hanging ornaments. An adult and a child stand on a sunny canal-side path, smiling and leaning toward each other near a railing with boats in the water.
December 31, 2025 at 3:19 PM
chenchenzhang.net
for better or worse, ChatGPT tells me I'm blending China analysis with existential reflection 🤪
screenshot: If 2025 gave out awards, you'd get: The Dissertation Whisperer Award For turning every casual chat into a micro–peer-review, blending China analysis, pedagogy hacks, and existential reflection with terrifying efficiency.
December 31, 2025 at 9:09 AM
chenchenzhang.net
have a thing forthcoming on the role of meritocratic discourse in the construction of ethnic-majority male victimhood & narrative of "reverse racism"... think you might be interested
December 27, 2025 at 6:57 AM
chenchenzhang.net
in the same spirit
photo of a Chinese neighbourhood. A woman selling fruit from a small street cart sits directly on a red roadside sign that reads “No Street Vending,” using it as a seat while she operates her fruits stall on a busy urban sidewalk with cars, shops, and apartment buildings in the background.
December 17, 2025 at 9:27 AM
chenchenzhang.net
stumbled upon another Very Short Introduction that made me feel much more sympathetic with that French academic's reaction
Is Chinese society modern? Abstract Equality is a modern goal of many societies, both dictatorships and democracies. Chinese society has changed profoundly in many ways in recent decades. ‘Is Chinese society modern?’ analyses relations between men and women, countryside and city, and duties and obligations of the state and people in order to see how far Chinese society has modernized and whether this is at odds with the maintenance of the Chinese identity. There are aspects of contemporary Chinese society that have not changed: religious practice, preferences for male children in the countryside, and stress on hierarchy. Other aspects have seen massive change: a globalized economy, the language of equality and rights, and the closeness of the state and the people.
December 16, 2025 at 9:55 AM
chenchenzhang.net
have a paper on meritocratic nationalism that's under review and hopefully can be out before too long. because I do think the role of meritocratic discourse in reactionary politics is not looked at enough yet. when you say merit matters and when you say it stops mattering.
US NSS: "The success of radical ideologies that seek to replace competence and merit with favored group status would render America unrecognizable and unable to defend itself. At the same time, we cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding “global talent” that undercuts American workers".
December 10, 2025 at 2:29 PM
chenchenzhang.net
mom admiring our colour television. judging from the outfit, it should be taken the same day as the one before. colour television and Haier fridge were really luxurious for semi-rural 1994!
December 9, 2025 at 5:26 PM
chenchenzhang.net
this is a fashionable cadre of the 1990s
I don't remember who he is but I DO remember he brought me a set of illustrated The Wizard of OZ books from Beijing (the mysterious capital only important people can go), which I really loved!
A smiling man wearing large sunglasses holds a cheerful young girl in front of a bright, scenic backdrop of trees and flowers.
December 9, 2025 at 5:22 PM
chenchenzhang.net
P1 is in grandpa's house in a rural village; P2 is our home, it seems. And it's got a date! from 1994.
mother and two children in rural courtyard A man reads a newspaper while sitting on a bed beside a smiling woman and a young girl who is looking up at her, inside a modest room with a barred window and a small desk.
December 9, 2025 at 5:22 PM
chenchenzhang.net
discovering some nice childhood photos from my portable drive
Two smiling children sit closely together on a patterned sofa, with a table in front of them holding a vase of yellow paper flowers and a small bag of candies. two smiling children in front of some flowers
December 9, 2025 at 5:22 PM
chenchenzhang.net
not pragmatist, not realist, not idealistic, not hawkish, not dovish. 写稿子的人真的辛苦了.
President Trump’s foreign policy is pragmatic without being “pragmatist,” realistic without being “realist,” principled without being “idealistic,” muscular without being “hawkish,” and restrained without being “dovish.” It is not grounded in traditional, political ideology. It is motivated above all by what works for America—or, in two words, “America First.”President Trump has cemented his legacy as The President of Peace. In addition to the remarkable success achieved during his first term with the historic Abraham Accords, President Trump has leveraged his dealmaking ability to secure unprecedented peace in eight conflicts throughout the world over the course of just eight months of his second term. He negotiated peace between Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the DRC and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, and ended the war in Gaza with all living hostages returned to their families.
December 7, 2025 at 10:25 PM
chenchenzhang.net
random find. TIL some of the most iconic university campuses in China were all shaped by American architect Henry Murphy. he designed the campus of Yenching, now occupied by PKU. he also designed Uni of Shanghai, early buildings of Tsinghua & Fudan, Ginling colllege in Nanjing.
photo of Peking university campus
December 7, 2025 at 9:05 AM
chenchenzhang.net
likely the first line of poetry the 4yo has written
top top uauauau own own potato
December 6, 2025 at 3:20 PM
chenchenzhang.net
when you thought you'd seen the wildest racial discourse online and there's always something more. saw this on X and FB today.
so it's saying - racism depends on perceived attractiveness or lack thereof
- physiognomy of imaginary subgroups of Han Chinese,
A collage of five illustrated side-profile portraits of East Asian men labeled by Chinese regions: "Northwest," "Southwest," "Northeast," "Southeast (Greater Guang)," and "Xinjiang." Each portrait depicts subtle differences in facial features. Above the collage, a caption reads: “The Han’s reputation got ruined in the West because most of the earliest Chinese movements to the US and the west in general were Cantonese like the guy at the bottom right. Had whites initially interacted with northern Han, the opinions may have been drastically different.”
December 5, 2025 at 2:42 PM
chenchenzhang.net
their departments are: printing and publishing, journalism and comms, art and design, and management.
information in original Chinese. translated in the op.
December 4, 2025 at 1:07 PM
chenchenzhang.net
the economist, making racist cover images for over a century and still exceeding itself
the great wall as robot conveyor belt, can you get more techno-orientalist than this?
Cover of The Economist showing cartoon robots and machines producing large capsules and an autonomous car along a conveyor belt built into the Great Wall of China, with the headline “What China will dominate next.”
December 3, 2025 at 9:06 AM
chenchenzhang.net
there are two Chinese terms for vitreous enamel 搪瓷 tangci and 珐琅 falang. and the cultures associated with each can't be more different.
tangci is symbolic of proletariat, revolutionary culture, widely used as everyday household items before the 2000s. now they have a comeback as part of the retro
photo of enamel mugs from Maoist era photo of blue enamelware probably from the Ming dynasty
November 29, 2025 at 12:31 PM
chenchenzhang.net
🚨new open-access article!🚨
what do drastically different representations of the Paris Olympic opening ceremony on Chinese social media tell us about competing narratives of civilization & transversal alignment in digital reactionary politics?
academic.oup.com/isagsq/artic...
Abstract: Scholarship on “non-Western” civilizational discourse in international relations remains largely limited to the versions crafted or endorsed by the state. This paper takes the representation of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony on Chinese social media as an entry point to exploring vernacular and competing narratives of civilization in global cultural politics. Drawing on data from multiple platforms, I scrutinize visions of civilizational progress, decay, and betrayal, interlaced with contested imaginaries of “China”, “France”, and “the West”, in celebratory and demonizing discourses on the spectacle. First, I argue that ideas of “civilizational standards” have always been co-produced, appropriated, and negotiated by actors from the peripheries, rather than monopolized by the centre. A nuanced and situational reading of the celebratory discourse shows how users employ civilizational and universalist vocabularies to contest locally hegemonic structures, which may simultaneously reproduce and challenge homonationalist logics. Secondly, the paper contributes to the emerging literature on the co-opting of the anticolonial language in reactionary politics, showing that in this case, the accusation of coloniality is turned inwards to target the internal other, whose identification with progressive values is recast as colonial subservience and betrayal. Finally, I show that the trope of “Western civilizational decay” and certain constructions of difference/affinities are instrumental to queerphobic nationalist narratives. However, civilizational signifiers such as “West” and “East” function in digital reactionary discourse less as a tool for narrating cultural distinctiveness than as flexible transnational codes, allowing for transversal alignment to emerge across conventional geopolitical and ideological boundaries.
November 24, 2025 at 10:09 AM
chenchenzhang.net
oh no
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Matsuoka Yosuke, a leading architect of Japanese colonialism in Manchukuo who later became the Ministry of Foreign Affairs during the wartime period, Du Bois described Matsuoka as a person “with the responsibility of proving to the world that colonial enterprise by a colored nation need not imply the caste, exploitation and subjugation which it has always implied in the case of white Europe” (Du Bois Citation1937a). The favorable impressions of Japanese bureaucrats in Manchukuo were naturally linked to his overall evaluation of the colonial empire.
November 21, 2025 at 5:10 PM
chenchenzhang.net
making unfortunate arguments when American leftists project their racial politics onto the rest of the world. as early as Du Bois.
Notably, the growing gap between the reality of white dominance and Du Bois's frustration that China was in economic and social disarray reconfirmed his previously held belief that China must cooperate with Japan, and Du Bois contended that this was the only solution for the “China problem.” Du Bois acknowledged that a clear path for the future of Asia faced obstacles. He asked: “Why it is that you [the Chinese people] hate Japan more than Europe when you have suffered more than England, France, and Germany, than from Japan?” (Du Bois Citation1937b).
November 21, 2025 at 5:07 PM
chenchenzhang.net
left: BBC, used hyphens & en dashes for linking sentences
right: Guardian, used en dashes for linking sentences
outside of AI you really don't see em dashes that often, which is why they stand out.
screenshot of BBC news screenshot of Guardian article
November 21, 2025 at 9:22 AM
chenchenzhang.net
that's my rainy-and-dark-at-3-pm-November comfort food
noodle broth with green salad & 酥肉
November 13, 2025 at 5:49 PM