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Made in China Journal

@madeinchinajournal.com

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The Made in China Journal is an independent #openaccess publication that seeks to facilitate critical discussion about Chinese politics and society. Visit us at https://madeinchinajournal.com. A Global China Lab initiative (https://globalchinalab.com).

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 25

With lots of new people joining Bluesky, we thought it would be a good idea to introduce the projects falling under the umbrella of the Global China Lab, a new non-profit we established this year with the aim of advancing open knowledge about China. 1/

Global China Lab

Global China Lab is a non-profit organisation established by researchers and practitioners with the aim of advancing knowledge of contemporary China.

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 19h

Thirty years after the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the Chinese government is once again calling on women to serve the nation, this time in science and technology. In this essay, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social revisits a century of women in science in China, tracing their struggles and achievements.

Beyond Representation: On Being a Woman in Science in China | Made in China Journal

In the autumn of 1995, Ye Shuhua made a speech. During the NGO Forum at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the 68-year-old astronomer took to the microphone and cal...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2d

What does it mean to speak of decriminalisation or depathologisation of homosexuality in China? In his new essay, Petrus Liu challenges Western narratives of queer progress, arguing that same-sex desire was never criminalised but rendered unintelligible within prevailing legal and cultural norms.

Queer Unintelligibility in China | Made in China Journal

It has become something of a truism, in both academic discourse and everyday conversation, that invisibility is a central form of queer oppression. In a culture in which queer lives are erased—whether...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 8d

How should we understand Jin Xing, China’s most famous transgender celebrity? In this new essay, Yahia Ma unpacks her embrace of gender binarism not as a paradox, but as a strategy that secures mainstream visibility while opening space to imagine cultural and political otherness in China and beyond.

Only Two Genders? On Jin Xing’s Reaffirmation of Gender Binarism and Heteronormativity

Jin Xing 金星 (literally, ‘golden star’, or ‘Venus’ in English) is a household name in mainland China. Since undergoing gender-affirmation surgery in 1994, she has established herself as a dancer, telev...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 13d

Southeast Asia is now a global hub for online scams. But who works in these compounds, and under what conditions? How should authorities respond? In this episode of our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with @ivanfranceschini.bsky.social and Ling Li about their new book 'Scam' (Verso 2025).

Episode 4 | Inside Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds | Made in China Journal

Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online ...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 14d

What happens when queer desire, religion, and science fiction collide in space? In Jesus on Mars, Cui Zi’en offers a haunting, dreamlike story that moves between faith and fantasy. One of China’s most daring queer voices brought to new readers in Yahia Ma's translation.

Jesus on Mars | Made in China Journal

(Translated and introduced by Yahia MA) I first experienced Cui Zi’en’s work in mainland China in the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate at a university in the country’s northwest and was becomi...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 20d

In this essay, Ida Huang explores how LGBTQ+ student groups in China carve out 'queer heterotopias', fragile yet powerful spaces of care, imagination, and play within authoritarian structures. By centring these practices, she invites us to rethink what activism under constraint can look like.

Queering the University: Student Activism and Heterotopia | Made in China Journal

One summer a few years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to attend an LGBTQ+ youth camp in a city in southern China, where I made many friends. After each day of classes, we hung...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 21d

|| UPDATED PROFILE || Sri Lanka has long been one of China’s closest partners in South Asia, with ties spanning diplomacy, trade, and massive infrastructure projects. But this partnership also sparks debate over debt, sovereignty, and who really benefits. A profile by Yihao Li and Thiruni Kelegama.

Sri Lanka - The People's Map of Global China

China regards Sri Lanka as an ‘all-weather friend’—a term reserved for only a handful of China’s most trusted bilateral partners. Sino-Sri Lankan relations have been characterised by frequent high-lev...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 26d

How did radio and the circulation of news transform modern China? In his new book 'Seeking News, Making China', John Alekna traces how emerging technologies reshaped politics, community, and state–society relations in the twentieth century. Read the conversation with Laura De Giorgi.

Seeking News, Making China: A Conversation with John Alekna

In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news tran...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 29d

Neither fully accepted nor entirely apart, the descendants of foreigners in China embody the tensions of identity in a globalised yet nationalistic age. Chengzhi Zhang traces their struggles for belonging and what this reveals about the boundaries of Chineseness.

Flowing without Roots: The Identity Crisis of Foreigners’ Descendants in Mainland China | Made in China Journal

In 2009, a woman named Lou Jing, born to a Chinese mother and an African American father, went on a TV show in China and declared herself a proud and patriotic Chinese person (Leung 2015). Her remarks...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 4

From Sanmenxia and Three Gorges to the Yarlung Tsangpo Dam, China has long relied on monumental hydropower to prove state capacity. @zenel25.bsky.social and @pguer.bsky.social show how such projects, while promising development and security, often deepen the very insecurities they claim to resolve.

The Technopolitics of China’s Yarlung Tsangpo Dam Project and the Paradox of Hydropower | Made in China Journal

Three years after announcing their intent to construct a mega-dam along the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River as part of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, Chinese officials gave their approval to proce...

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Yangyang Cheng @yangyangcheng.bsky.social · Aug 28

What makes a language "modern"? How do technologies reflect power and shape our relations with the written word? So glad to discuss these and more with @tsmullaney.bsky.social for 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, a @madeinchinajournal.com podcast, starting with a legendary typewriter lost and found:

Episode 3 | Typing Chinese | Made in China Journal

In 1947, the acclaimed Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang stunned the world with an invention: the first Chinese-language typewriter with a keyboard. Lin poured years of effort and his life’s savi...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 27

Decades after it was assumed lost, the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard reappeared in a NY basement. For Ep.3 of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social talks with historian @tsmullaney.bsky.social about the legendary MingKwai and the century-long effort to type in Chinese.

Episode 3 | Typing Chinese | Made in China Journal

In 1947, the acclaimed Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang stunned the world with an invention: the first Chinese-language typewriter with a keyboard. Lin poured years of effort and his life’s savi...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 27

Hardship has long been praised in China as the road to virtue and success. Today’s youth are beginning to question this tradition, linking the pressures of school with the exploitation of labour and asking whether hardship should still be seen as a moral ideal. An essay by @humayun.bsky.social.

In Praise of Hardship, or the Labour-Schooling Poetics of Chinese Youth | Made in China Journal

In January 2025, I was chatting online with a few friends about the ongoing controversy surrounding the construction of a factory for Chinese carmaker BYD in Brazil, which had just come under scrutiny...

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Maura Elizabeth Cunningham @mauracunningham.bsky.social · Aug 22

"[D]oes China have an LGBTQ+ movement that also foregrounds economic justice?" At @madeinchinajournal.com, @ianliujiatian.bsky.social shares their ethnographic research among LGBTQ+ migrant workers in southern China.

Between Pleasure and Precarity: Surviving Love and Labour in Southern China’s Urban Villages | Made in China Journal

This essay tells stories of gender and sexually nonconforming rural-to-urban migrant workers in two urban villages in Southern China. Based on an ethnography of their community-making through…

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 21

|| NEW PROFILE || Mexico’s ties with China date back to the sixteenth-century Manila Galleon trade, when Mexican silver became central to China’s economy. Today, Mexico navigates growing Chinese trade and investment while balancing its strategic dependence on the US, writes Enrique Dussel Peters.

Mexico - The People's Map of Global China

Mexico’s ties with China date back to the sixteenth-century Manila Galleon trade, when Mexican silver became central to China’s economy. Today, Mexico navigates growing Chinese trade and investment wh...

thepeoplesmap.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 19

How does basketball shape youth and masculinity in China?
In this new essay, Selina Kötter and Gil Hizi trace its role in TV dramas and the rise of 'village NBA' competitions, showing how sport negotiates gender ideals, market ambitions, and young people’s disillusionment.

Basketball Masculinities in Chinese Television Dramas and Rural Competitions | Made in China Journal

‘I am a pig’—these are the words that interrupt Chu Yuxun as she peacefully writes her first impressions of the new school. Looking up, she sees a male student in a basketball jersey stammering the hu...

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Fan Yang 楊帆 @fanfanyang.bsky.social · Aug 12

My first take on the "low-altitude economy" in Shenzhen!

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 12

What happens when airspace becomes an economic frontier? In Shenzhen, a booming low-altitude economy is turning the skies into a new arena for innovation and profit, writes @fanfanyang.bsky.social. Discover how drones are remapping the city’s horizons and reconfiguring tech, capital, and urban life.

City in the Sky: Drones, Shenzhen, and the ‘Low-Altitude Economy’

Imagine this scenario: you ordered takeout during lunch rush hour, but the delivery bros were overbooked, so a drone dropped from the sky to deliver your meal; on your commute, while ground traffic wa...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 12

What happens when airspace becomes an economic frontier? In Shenzhen, a booming low-altitude economy is turning the skies into a new arena for innovation and profit, writes @fanfanyang.bsky.social. Discover how drones are remapping the city’s horizons and reconfiguring tech, capital, and urban life.

City in the Sky: Drones, Shenzhen, and the ‘Low-Altitude Economy’

Imagine this scenario: you ordered takeout during lunch rush hour, but the delivery bros were overbooked, so a drone dropped from the sky to deliver your meal; on your commute, while ground traffic wa...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 8

China’s most expensive state-building infrastructure project is rising in Tibet: the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo hydropower dam. @stellahongzhang.bsky.social explores how this dam—framed as green progress—advances with little public scrutiny despite huge environmental, technical, and geopolitical stakes.

Infrastructure and State-Building: China’s Ambitions for the Lower Yarlung Tsangpo Project | Made in China Journal

19 July 2025, Nyingchi, Tibet. Against a bold red backdrop with snow-capped mountains looming in the distance, China’s Premier Li Qiang—flanked on both sides by four senior officials and leaders of ma...

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Che-boo!-rashka @leshij.bsky.social · Aug 5

This is an impressive rundown of all the various non-“positive energy” threads in Chinese society over the past few years

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 5

What is Sinopessimism? From lying flat to runology, Dino Ge Zhang explores a grassroots lexicon of disillusionment in China. Not just youth disengagement but a low theory of coping, refusing, and imagining alternatives amid economic and social pressures.

On Sinopessimism, or Junkies of Futility | Made in China Journal

This essay is written precisely so that it could be dismissed. —Paul Mann (1991: 141) Gary Gexi Zhang (2021) first coined the term ‘Sinopessimism’ as a speculative counterpart to Afropessimism, imag...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 5

What is Sinopessimism? From lying flat to runology, Dino Ge Zhang explores a grassroots lexicon of disillusionment in China. Not just youth disengagement but a low theory of coping, refusing, and imagining alternatives amid economic and social pressures.

On Sinopessimism, or Junkies of Futility | Made in China Journal

This essay is written precisely so that it could be dismissed. —Paul Mann (1991: 141) Gary Gexi Zhang (2021) first coined the term ‘Sinopessimism’ as a speculative counterpart to Afropessimism, imag...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Made in China Journal

Lena Kaufmann @lenakaufmann.bsky.social · Aug 1

Delighted to be part of this #OpenAccess issue on researching #Global #China!

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Jul 29

The new issue of Global China Pulse is now live! What does it mean to do fieldwork on Global China? This issue explores the methodological, ethical, and political challenges researchers face when studying China’s global presence from the ground up. Download here: globalchinapulse.net/download/glo...

Reposted by Made in China Journal

Yangyang Cheng @yangyangcheng.bsky.social · Jul 31

Cannot overstate how honored I was to have 閭丘露薇 @roseluqiu.bsky.social and 方可成 @fangkc.bsky.social on Ep.2 of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, a podcast
@madeinchinajournal.com, to discuss the state of journalism in China. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did!
madeinchinajournal.com/2025/07/25/e...

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Jul 31

In Episode 2 of our 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with journalist-turned-academics @roseluqiu.bsky.social and @fangkc.bsky.social about the state of journalism in China, delving into censorship, commercialisation, and the evolving role of diasporic media.

Episode 2 | Being a Journalist in China | Made in China Journal

For some in the West, being a journalist in China—especially one at a state media organisation—is seen as little more than parroting party propaganda. This caricature not only disregards the courage a...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Jul 29

The new issue of Global China Pulse is now live! What does it mean to do fieldwork on Global China? This issue explores the methodological, ethical, and political challenges researchers face when studying China’s global presence from the ground up. Download here: globalchinapulse.net/download/glo...