Ivan Franceschini

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...

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.

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...

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.

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 ...

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).

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

|| 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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

|| 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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

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.

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...

Demystifying China’s Global ‘Digital Empire’: Data Infrastructure, Platforms, and AI Power The tech rivalry between China and the United States is often portrayed as a battle for control over the future of the internet. Media and political discourse fuel the idea of two competing cyberworld...

What does China’s global information system really look like? Despite building its own digital ecosystem, China’s tech expansion still relies on US platforms—and is shaped by local contexts abroad. In this essay, Weidi Zheng unpacks the triangulation between China, the US, and recipient countries.

Ethnography in the Shadow of Suspended Sovereignty: Navigating Geopolitical Tensions and Indigenous Claims in Taiwan What does it mean to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in a territory where sovereignty is not only contested but suspended—where diplomatic ambiguity, imperial entanglements, and historical wounds satur...

How do you do ethnography in places of suspended sovereignty? Richard Nyelade draws on his fieldwork in Taiwan to explore how researchers navigate legal ambiguity, geopolitical tension, and fragile alliances, proposing 'ethnographic diplomacy' as a mode shaped by silence, suspicion, and performance.

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 ‘cruisin...

What does queer life feel like on the margins of China’s cities? In this essay, Ian Tian traces the stories of gender- and sexually nonconforming migrant workers in urban villages, exploring how queerness is shaped by class and space and why the LGBTQ+ movement must reckon with its own exclusions.

Doing Fieldwork at the Margins: Methodological Reflections from Researching Crime, Violence, and Exploitation When I first arrived in Sihanoukville, Cambodia, in 2022, I quickly began to feel that no-one was willing to speak openly with me. More precisely, no-one was willing to tell the truth. At the time, th...

What does it mean to do fieldwork on the edge, where violence, fear, and trust collide? In this essay, Ling Li dives into the messy realities of researching trafficking and gender-based violence in China and Southeast Asia. Access is hard. Ethics are harder. Representation? That’s the real test.

‘What if She Is a Spy?’: Gatekeeping, Trust, and Access in Global China Research I was kicked out of a WeChat group just a few hours after joining. ‘I’m sorry, but I have to,’ the group administrator messaged me before removing me—even though I had paid to join and had been vetted...

In this essay, @stellahongzhang.bsky.social draws on her fieldwork experiences in Pakistan and Nigeria and on digital platforms like WeChat to unpack issues of trust, gatekeeping, and the geopolitics of access in Global China research. Reflexivity isn’t optional—it’s foundational.

Nigeria - The People's Map of Global China Nigeria and China’s relationship has evolved over time from political solidarity in 1971 to a comprehensive strategic partnership in 2024. Nigeria maintains diplomatic flexibility, balancing ties with...

|| NEW PROFILE || Vincent Ibonye charts Nigeria–China ties from Cold War solidarity to today’s strategic partnership, showing how Nigeria has navigated Chinese investment, military cooperation, and ‘debt trap’ allegations—while balancing relations with both China and the US.

Episode 1 | Legacies of Covid-19 | Gateway to Global China Podcast For the inaugural episode of 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, Yangyang spoke with Jing Wang and Christian Sorace about the legacies of Covid-19, five years after the novel coronavirus upended all of ou...

In the first episode of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with @jingwang.bsky.social and Christian Sorace about the legacies of Covid-19 five years after the virus upended our lives. What has changed, what hasn’t, and what does it all mean for China and the world today?

Positioning the Researcher in Global China: Interpretivist Tools for Knowledge Production from the Field Researching Global China often requires navigating politically sensitive environments to which access is restricted, where narratives are contested, and where researcher identity may shape fieldwork d...

How can interpretive methods help us study Global China in politically sensitive contexts? In this essay, @julieradomski.bsky.social draws on her experience of ethnographic research on a contested infrastructure project in Ecuador to reflect on how positionality influences access and insight.

A few of us at the Made in China Journal have been working on a very exciting new project. Stay tuned for the launch of our podcast, 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China, a monthly interview series hosted by @yangyangcheng.bsky.social. The first episode drops next week, wherever you get your podcasts.

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...

||NEW CFPs|| The Made in China Journal invites submissions for an issue on how political depression is navigated and negotiated in China. We’re especially interested in lessons for activists confronting democratic backsliding, authoritarian populism, or political disengagement around the world. 1/2

Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China: A Conversation with Ting Guo | Made in China Journal Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) examines how the language of love (愛 ai) has been appropriated and politicised by Chinese pol...

Can love hold a nation together—or hold it down? In her new book, @tingguowrites.bsky.social uncovers how Chinese leaders from Sun Yat-sen to Xi Jinping have harnessed the language of love—universal, ardent, paternal—to stir hearts, shape ideology, and legitimise power across a century.

A History of Uyghur Buddhism: A Conversation with Johan Elverskog In the past decades, the Uyghurs in China have become known as an oppressed ethnic and religious minority in their homeland, today’s Xinjiang. Islam and Islamophobia are central to that story, but vis...

Before Islam, the Uyghurs were Buddhists. In his new book, Johan Elverskog traces how the Uyghur Buddhist world emerged and thrived in the multi-confessional landscape of medieval Central Asia. A story of memory, forgetting, and what gets written into history. A conversation with Sam Bass.

Living the Field: How Accommodation Choices Shape Research on Global China in Africa The field of Global China studies burgeoning over the past two decades proclaims that China must be analysed as an integral part of the global capitalist system (Franceschini and Loubere 2022). China’...

How do where we live and who we live with shape what we learn in the field? In this essay, based on fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cai Chen explores how living arrangements impact research on Global China and Chinese migration in Africa. Fieldwork begins at home.