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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 · 18h 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 · 5d 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 ...

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Made in China Journal@madeinchinajournal.com · 7d 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 · last wk.

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 · 2w 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 · 2w 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 · 3w 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 · 3w 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 · 4w 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 · last mo.

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 · last mo.

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 · 2mo 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

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

What if depression isn't a private medical problem, but a political and collective one? In this essay, Mengyuan Chen traces Pity Party, a grassroots art project that turned mental health into a shared, dialogical space. She asks what its exhaustion reveals about doing this kind of work in China.

The Decline of Pity Party | Made in China Journal

This essay examines the rise and fall of Pity Party, a series of grassroots mental health art exhibitions that sought to challenge the individualisation and medicalisation of depression while creating...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

|| NEW PROFILE || China barely engaged with Dominica until 2004, when the island dropped Taiwan for Beijing, triggering a wave of Chinese-financed infrastructure. Two decades on, Chinese contractors are a permanent, if contested, fixture on the island, writes Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente.

Dominica - The People's Map of Global China

China’s engagement with Dominica was virtually non-existent until 2004, when the small Caribbean island severed its diplomatic ties with Taiwan in favour of Beijing, triggering a wave of Chinese grant...

thepeoplesmap.net

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

What does it feel like to do advocacy work when no one signs up and the state offers neither support nor prohibition? Tianyi Bai reflects on trans advocacy in China, tracing what they call 'fragile optimism', the affective orientation that sustains a movement through fatigue and burnout.

No-One Signed Up: Fatigue, Failure, and Fragile Optimism in Chinese Trans Advocacy | Made in China Journal

This essay examines how a liminal state of uncertainty and disorientation shapes the trajectory of a trans-advocacy organisation in contemporary China. By situating the group’s current struggles withi...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

What does techno-modernity look like from inside the Great Firewall? On the 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social discusses creativity and self-expression at the edge of what's permissible with journalist @yilingliu95.bsky.social and writer @afrawang.bsky.social.

Episode 9 | Dancing in China's Digital Space | Made in China Journal

For years, Anglophone coverage of the Chinese internet has emphasised the Great Firewall. The focus on censorship and surveillance collapses information production and access into a false binary betwe...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

How do Chinese retail investors make sense of repeated market failures across generations? Based on ethnographic research, Hairuo Jin argues that memories of loss don't discourage participation but reinforce it, with failures reframed through narratives of national development and self-improvement.

Repetitive Cycles | Made in China Journal

This essay examines how Chinese retail investors make sense of repeated stock market failures across generations. Drawing on ethnographic research, it analyses the recurring discourse of ‘defending th...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

In the early twentieth century, tin extraction on the island of Bangka, Indonesia, rested on Chinese workers. Koen van der Lijn argues that their labour was not a temporary expedient but the structural foundation of Dutch colonial mining, central to both its profitability and long-term viability.

Chinese Labour, Dutch Empire: Tin Extraction on Bangka in the Early Twentieth Century

Seen from above, the island of Bangka is etched with scars: open pits and flooded craters that bear witness to centuries of tin extraction. This landscape is

globalchinapulse.net

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

How does independent publishing survive in China when ISBNs are state-controlled and a single anonymous tip can shut you down? 51 Personae founder Yun Chen speaks with Faye Linfei Xu and Jingzhe Zhang about the end of the 'golden years' of Chinese art book fairs and finding new readers abroad.

Navigating Hope and Exhaustion through the Art of Publishing | Made in China Journal

The Chinese Government imposes strict controls on publishing through both formal legal mechanisms and informal, arbitrary enforcement. Within this institutional context, independent publishing that do...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

How to find solace in a politically turbulent present? In a new essay, David Kwok Kwan Tsoi examines the case of Anita Mui's cultural afterlife in post-2019 Hong Kong to introduce the concept of 'temporal fugitives': those who cope with political depression by retreating into a reconstructed past.

Temporal Fugitives and Anita Mui | Made in China Journal

This essay examines how collective memory of the singer Anita Mui unfolds across cultural productions in post-2019 Hong Kong. It begins with an analysis of memorial narratives associated with the 2021...

madeinchinajournal.com

Yangyang Cheng@yangyangcheng.bsky.social · 3mo ago

144 years ago this week, the Chinese Exclusion Act became law. Restrictions at both the border and the interior shaped Chinese lives in the US for generations. Their lasting impacts are still felt on both sides of the Pacific. Four new books explore the complexities. I write @madeinchinajournal.com:

The Pacific as a Mirror | Made in China Journal

One evening in the early 1960s, physicist Chen Ning Yang took a train from New York City to Long Island. An elderly Chinese man sat next to him and the two struck up a conversation. Born in the centra...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

Four books explore Chinese lives in the US from the 19th century to the present, laying bare the shifting boundaries between the citizen and the alien, the criminal and the law. The colour line and class divisions are barriers more formidable than national borders, writes @yangyangcheng.bsky.social.

The Pacific as a Mirror | Made in China Journal

One evening in the early 1960s, physicist Chen Ning Yang took a train from New York City to Long Island. An elderly Chinese man sat next to him and the two struck up a conversation. Born in the centra...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

From ancient deities to modern poets, queer life has shaped Chinese culture for centuries. In our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social sits down with @queercomrades.bsky.social and @dariuslongarino.bsky.social to explore queer Chinese activism, literature, and why poetry can reign when courts fail.

Episode 8 | The Poetic Justice of Queer China | Made in China Journal

From royal court legends to a seventeenth-century deity, gay people have been part of Chinese life and literature for millennia. Since the 1990s, legal reforms and deeper integration into global capit...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

|| NEW PROFILE || Funded by China Eximbank and built by Sinohydro, Uganda's 600MW Karuma Dam is one of sub-Saharan Africa's largest hydro projects. Yet it has been plagued by construction delays, quality issues, labour abuses, and land disputes, write Robert Wyrod and Casondra Heiss.

Karuma Hydroelectric Power Station - The People's Map of Global China

Funded through the Export–Import Bank of China and constructed by Chinese state-owned firm Sinohydro, the 600-megawatt Karuma Dam is one of the largest hydroelectric projects ever developed in sub-Sah...

thepeoplesmap.net

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

What does digital capitalism look like beyond Silicon Valley? Andrea Pollio talks to Tinhinan El Kadi about the five years he spent among renegade Chinese entrepreneurs, Kenyan state planners, VC analysts, and engineers in Nairobi's Silicon Savannah, the subject of his new book, 'Silicon Elsewhere'.

Silicon Elsewhere: A Conversation with Andrea Pollio

What does digital capitalism look like beyond Silicon Valley? Andrea Pollio’sSilicon Elsewhere: Nairobi, Global China, and the Promise of

globalchinapulse.net

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

In this new essay, Cai Chen recovers the queer lives hidden inside Chinese migration to Africa. Following three gay men across multiple countries, he develops the idea of 'unintended sexual migration', journeys where sexuality wasn't the motive but reshaped the path. Global China can be queer.

Queering Chinese in Africa: The Unintended Sexual Migration of Chinese Gay Men

Are there any Chinese gays in Africa? This is a question I am frequently asked—by colleagues, friends, and especially those familiar with my earlier research

globalchinapulse.net

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

How did Kaifeng's old Jewish community go from revival to erasure? @jordynhaime.bsky.social traces the forces that recast Judaism as foreign in China, from missionaries to rising nationalism to CCP ethnic policy, asking whether any revival is possible without rethinking the Chinese nation itself.

From Revival to Erasure: Ebbs and Flows of Judaism in Kaifeng | Made in China Journal

Foreign missionary contact, the rise of nationalism, and ethnic identification work undertaken under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party culminated in the construction of ‘Jews’ as an ethnic ident...

madeinchinajournal.com

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

What does it mean to become an independent scholar in China today? In this essay, Mengzhu An reflects on her decision to leave the university system as an opportunity to critically interrogate the infrastructure of knowledge production in the Chinese context.

Is It Possible to Be an Independent Scholar in China Today? | Made in China Journal

At the end of 2024, as my postdoctoral appointment at a Chinese university was ending, I found myself at a professional crossroads. During the previous two years, based in mainland China as an anthropologist, I had experienced at first hand the constraints that institutional academia imposes on writing and public speaking. This led me to […]

madeinchinajournal.com

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

In this new essay, Hasan Karrar traces how extractivism, infrastructure, and security politics became intertwined in post-9/11 Pakistan. Money came first through the Global War on Terror, then through Chinese investment, but both waves were shaped by the same securitised logic, he argues.

Extractivism, Infrastructure, Securitisation: New Entanglements in Post-9/11 Pakistan

In the post-9/11 era, the first wave of capital inflows into Pakistan began as the country joined the Anglo-American–led coalition to oust Afghanistan’s

globalchinapulse.net

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

The new episode of our 开门见山 podcast is out! In the wake of the adoption of the new 'ethnic unity law', @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with @dbyler.bsky.social and @rianthum.bsky.social on centuries of Islamic life in China, the repression in Xinjiang, and how identities survive state violence.

Episode 7 | Being Muslim in China | Made in China Journal

This month, China’s National People’s Congress held its annual meeting and passed a new law on ‘promoting ethnic unity and progress’. The legislation further codifies the suppression of non-Han langua...

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