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Made in China Journal

@madeinchinajournal.com

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 · 3d ago

In this essay, @lenakaufmann.bsky.social argues that China's farming drones aren't a clean break from the past. The Mao-era Green Revolution is still there in the reservoirs, fields, seeds, and chemicals these machines fly over, with the old political projects shaping new tech.

Agricultural Drones: Material Afterlives of Mao’s Green Revolution | Made in China Journal

The four propellers begin to spin. A gust of wind presses down the surrounding rice plants as a pulsing rotor-whir fills the air. The drone, carrying its battery and a tank of pesticides, lifts off an...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2w ago

China’s approach to AI governance is best understood as ‘infrastructural statecraft’ combined with managed pluralism: the Party-State builds the layered infrastructure (energy, compute, chips, talent, and governance), then invites firms to compete in developing applications, writes Haiqing Yu.

China’s Approach to AI: Infrastructural Statecraft, Managed Pluralism | Made in China Journal

China’s artificial intelligence (AI) trajectory is often characterised as ‘frugal innovation’ (Waters 2025), ‘self-reliance’ (Wang et al. 2025), or a state-controlled approach to innovation and diffus...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2w ago

Fresh meals and fancy gadgets delivered to your doorstep instantly, at rock-bottom prices, are among China's top draws. But at what cost? For our podcast, Lizhi Liu and Jack Linzhou Xing join @yangyangcheng.bsky.social to unpack the rise of China's e-commerce giants and the politics behind them.

Episode 12 | Entrapped by E-Commerce | Made in China Journal

Life before e-commerce can feel like a foreign country. For the ‘Chinamaxxing’ crowd, fresh meals and fancy gadgets delivered to your doorstep almost instantly, at astonishingly low prices, are among ...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2w ago

Hi all, only a few days left to pitch ideas for the upcoming issues of Made in China Journal (on Hong Kong) and Global China Pulse (on the new geopolitics of knowledge production). Short pitches are due September 30. 1/

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3w ago

Drawing on her fieldwork at Longquan Tanhua Monastery, a Chinese Buddhist institution in Tanzania, Mingyi Xiao argues that language plays a constitutive role in reshaping Chinese Buddhism in Africa, both in how it reaches out to local communities and in how it articulates its teachings.

Buddhism Reconfigured through Language: Reflections from a Chinese Temple in Tanzania

This article is based on my fieldwork at Longquan Tanhua Temple, a Chinese Buddhist institution in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Focusing on two aspects of my visit—the Mandarin education offered to Tanzan...

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3w ago

In Nigeria’s Ibeju-Lekki area, Chinese-led industrialisation is producing gendered dispossession. Local women got hit from three sides: farming is gone, fishing is gone, and most new jobs went to migrant men. Meanwhile they are still doing all the care work at home. An essay by Soumya Mishra.

When the Factory Comes to the Farm: Gendered Impacts of Chinese-Led Industrialisation in Lekki, Nigeria

In Nigeria’s Ibeju-Lekki area, dispossession driven by the Chinese-funded Lekki Free Zone (LFZ) and the larger Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ) produces gendered outcomes. Drawing on interviews, this essa...

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 4w ago

Since the 2010s, ballroom culture has begun to flourish in China. In this conversation with @ianliujiatian.bsky.social, three ballroom participants discuss how this still-emerging scene has become a vital venue for trans and nonbinary people to build community and alternative kinship.

Making Transnational Ballroom in China | Made in China Journal

Ballroom culture emerged in Black and Latinx communities in the United States in the twentieth century as drag balls (Jones 2017). In the middle of the century, it developed into a comprehensive syste...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 4w ago

The new issue of Global China Pulse is out! Guest-edited by Mingwei Huang & Robert Wyrod, it addresses a key gap in Global China Studies: gender and sexuality. Contributors draw on research from Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, Europe, China to examine dispossession, precarity, labour, and intimacy.

Global China Pulse 1, 2026

This issue of Global China Pulse addresses a gap in the flourishing field of Global China Studies: attention to gender and sexuality. Drawing on research from Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, Europe, ...

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · last mo.

||NEW PROFILE|| COFCO, China's state-owned agribusiness giant, is now a major player on the Paraná–Paraguay River corridor, a 3,442km waterway across 5 countries vital to global soybean exports. Via its Nidera & Noble Agri buys, it controls ports, crushing plants, and storage around the Rosario hub.

COFCO in the Paraná–Paraguay agribusiness corridor - The People's Map of Global China

COFCO (China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation) is a Chinese state-owned agribusiness company operating across the Paraná–Paraguay River corridor, a 3,442-kilometre transnational waterway and key logisti...

thepeoplesmap.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · last mo.

Historian Dayton Lekner engages artist Zhang Hanwen about his 'Hostile Landscapes' (不明的风景, 2025), a two-channel film retracing North Korean defector Ju Hyeongeon's 40-day escape through Northeast China. They discuss terrain as unstable archive, and how to tell a story that resists confirmation.

Hostile Landscapes: A Conversation with Zhang Hanwen | Made in China Journal

In October 2021, Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健), a North Korean defector held in Jilin Prison in Northeast China, broke out of the facility and spent 40 days on the run before he was caught near the Fengman Dam, ...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · last mo.

The future of Global China Studies depends very much on how we produce knowledge. Drawing on ethnography in China, Rwanda, and the UK, @xiananj.bsky.social develops 'un-whitening' as a practice for confronting the racial, geopolitical, and epistemic hierarchies shaping transnational knowledge.

Not White, Too White, ‘Un-Whitening’:On Becoming Postcolonial in Transnational Knowledge Production

This essay argues that the future of Global China Studies depends not only on what we study but also on how we produce knowledge. Drawing on feminist ethnography in Beijing, London, and Kigali, I deve...

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · last mo.

||NEW PROFILE|| Since the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Armenia has sought to diversify its foreign policy, economic, and security partnerships, with China playing an increasingly important role in this diversification, writes Anna Vardanyan in the People's Map.

Armenia - The People's Map of Global China

Armenia is a small landlocked country in the South Caucasus, at the crossroads of Europe and Asia and bordering Türkiye, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. With a population of about three million, the co...

thepeoplesmap.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

In 'Burnout Market Feminism', Ling Tang adopts a bottom-up approach to feminist theorising to explore the aspirations and everyday struggles of women at the forefront of China's digital economy, where gender and sexuality meet entrepreneurship and digital capitalism. A conversation with Xumeng Xie.

Burnout Market Feminism: A Conversation with Ling Tang | Made in China Journal

In Burnout Market Feminism: Urban Chinese Businesswomen in the Internet Age (MIT Press, 2026), Ling Tang invites readers to explore the aspirations, achievements, and everyday struggles of women at th...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

How did Black Myth: Wukong become a flashpoint for reactionary politics across borders? Dino Ge Zhang and Nathanel Amar trace how reactionary gaming discourse travels between Western and Chinese online spheres, with anti-'woke' and nationalist anti-feminist currents feeding each other.

‘Keep Politics in Games’: Reactionary Circuits between the Anglo-European Sphere and China | Made in China Journal

Black Myth: Wukong (黑神话: 悟空; hereinafter BMW), an action role-playing game developed by the Chinese studio Game Science (游戏科学), became both a commercial and a cultural phenomenon after its release on ...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

The new issue of the Made in China Journal is out! Over the past decade, we have watched hopes for a more pluralist China fade, with activists describing growing feelings of dejection and powerlessness. There is a term for it: political depression. In this issue, we explore this condition.

In the Woods | Made in China Journal

In recent years, political depression has emerged not only as a psychological condition but also as a culturally embedded affective response shaped by broader socio-political forces. Clinically, it re...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

'Reshaping Identity' is a Chinese contemporary dance work bringing together dancers of different ethnic backgrounds. In this essay, performer Yijie Chen takes the show as a lens to discuss the tension between ethnic folk dance as a state-defined form and the individual bodies it claims to represent.

To Whom Does Ethnic Folk Dance Belong? | Made in China Journal

Dance from and by ethnic minorities constitutes a significant part of how people perceive both ethnic minority cultures in China and Chinese dance at large. However, observers often miss how the stagi...

madeinchinajournal.com

Maura Elizabeth Cunningham @mauracunningham.bsky.social · 2mo ago

At @madeinchinajournal.com, Brian DeMare examines the original manuscript for FANSHEN and discusses how omitted passages drastically change (and, in his opinion, improve) William Hinton's classic work on land reform.

Secretary Wang’s American Friend: William Hinton and the Long History of ‘Fanshen’ | Made in China Journal

The road to Long Bow used to be much longer. When American agronomist and author of Fanshen (1966), William Hinton, made the journey to this seemingly unremarkable village in the autumn of 1947, he…

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

No book shaped Western understanding of the Maoist revolution more than William Hinton's Fanshen. Drawing on Chinese-language sources and an unpublished draft of Fanshen, Brian DeMare explores the outsider/insider relationship in rural China, as well as Hinton's struggles in documenting it.

Secretary Wang’s American Friend: William Hinton and the Long History of ‘Fanshen’ | Made in China Journal

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

China's 'dormitory labour regime' is going global. Comparing SEZs in India and Uganda, Charlotte Goodburn shows how Chinese-inspired industrial zones build gendered workplace–residence systems that discipline migrant women's fertility and daily lives, while externalising the long-term costs.

Reproducing Gendered Labour Control in Special Economic Zones beyond China: The Dormitory Labour Regime in India and Uganda

This essay examines the global reproduction of China’s ‘dormitory labour regime’ (DLR) through a comparative analysis of special economic zones (SEZs). It argues that Chinese-inspired SEZ-based indust...

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

Few subjects have stirred as much nationalistic debate across the Pacific as biotech. For our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks to Abigail Coplin and Chenjian Li about the power and limits of biotechnologies, and how the body becomes a geopolitical battleground and site for profit.

Episode 11 | To Feed and to Cure | Made in China Journal

The need for food and medicine is universal. Yet, few subjects have stirred as much nationalistic debates on both sides of the Pacific as the development and application of biotechnologies. Why, in a ...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

In 'The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society', Mujun Zhou provides an ambitious and insightful account of the concept of ‘civil society’ (公民社会) as an ideational movement that informs, inspires, and at times conflicts with the development of Chinese civil society. A conversation with Bin Xu.

The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society | Made in China Journal

In her new book, The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society (University of Michigan Press, 2026), Mujun Zhou provides an ambitious and insightful account of the concept of ‘civil society’ (公民社会) as a...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 2mo ago

Environmental historians of modern China often examine how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In 'Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People', @mmuscolino.bsky.social shifts focus to the people whose labor enabled those transformations.

Remaking the Earth, Exhausting the People | Made in China Journal

Environmental historians of modern China have often examined how states transformed landscapes in pursuit of economic development and ideological visions of remaking nature. In Remaking the Earth, Exh...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

Ten years after China's Charity Law, what did it actually accomplish? Registered NGOs are declining and donations are lower, but according to Di Wu the law's real work was discursive: 'charity' was deployed to displace 'civil society', recasting NGOs as mere depoliticised service providers.

Ten Years After the Charity Law: Whither Chinese NGOs? | Made in China Journal

Since the promulgation of the Charity Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2016, the relationship between the state and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) in China has undergone profound changes...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

||NEW CfP|| China's 'Science Silk Road' invests in research cooperation with countries along the new Silk Road. But does this create distinct ways of doing science? How does it address local-global development challenges? And is it reshaping the global science system? Visit our website for details.

Calls for Papers - Global China Pulse

Here you can find the call for papers for the journal issues we are currently working on. The initial pitches should be no longer than 300 words and explain

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

From dockside London and Liverpool to colonial HK, US border control, and Afro-Chinese Caribbean returnees, in 'Archives of Intimacy', Nadine Attewell offers a humane account of Eurasian lives and multiracial encounters at the margins of early 20th-century empires. A conversation with Kun Huang.

Archives of Intimacy: A Conversation with Nadine Attewell

Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905–1949 (Stanford University Press, 2026) offers a carefully researched and

globalchinapulse.net

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

In 'Easting the West', @chenchenzhang.net stares into the abyss of digital reactionary discourse in China, showing how the Chinese right appropriates the language of postcoloniality to reproduce racial and civilisational hierarchies and justify exclusion. A conversation with @clydewang.bsky.social.

Easting the West: A Conversation with Chenchen Zhang | Made in China Journal

At a time when right-wing populism appears to be rampaging through global politics, studies about its discourses and strategies remain thin and even marginal in the field of international relations. T...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

|| NEW CALL FOR PAPERS || To mark 30 years since the Hong Kong handover, we welcome scholarly work and practitioners' recollections that revisit overlooked experiences, question established interpretations, or reflect on what lessons may be drawn from the city's history. Pitches due 30 September.

Calls for Papers

Calls for Papers Here you can find the call for papers for the journal issues we are currently working on. The initial pitches should be no longer than 300 words and explain the key argument of your p...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

What drives Chinese children to study overseas, and how do they and their parents plan around shifting immigration regimes? For the our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with sociologists @coralinglingxu.bsky.social and Mengwei Tu about education and mobility in and out of China.

Episode 10 | The Race for Education | Made in China Journal

For millions of children in China, life has been a race against time since the day they were born. They are blasted with advertisements that warn ‘Do Not Lose at the Starting Line’, and handed by thei...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 3mo ago

In this new essay, Chong Liu shows how sex-ed in China works as a form of classed and gendered governance. In Chinese classrooms, sexuality is sidelined or stigmatised in ways that steer young people toward different class futures while reinforcing gendered double standards and heteronormativity.

Pedagogy of Absence: Sexuality Education and Social Inequality in China | Made in China Journal

One night during my fieldwork in 2019, I was hanging out with friends in Beijing. Shortly after we sat down at a street food hall, the waitress offered us some packets of hand wipes that were packaged...

madeinchinajournal.com

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 4mo ago

Jian Lin, Wilfred Wang, and Ping Sun’s 'Chinese Platforms: A Critical Introduction' is one of the first English-language books to offer a systematic examination of Chinese digital platforms across technology, geopolitics, culture, gender, labour. Read the conversation with @joycecontact.bsky.social.

Chinese Platforms: A Conversation with Wilfred Wang and Jian Lin | Made in China Journal

Jian Lin, Wilfred Yang Wang, and Ping Sun’s Chinese Platforms: A Critical Introduction (Polity Press, 2025) is one of the first English-language books to offer a systematic examination of Chinese digi...

madeinchinajournal.com