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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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, ...

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...

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, ...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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…

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 sp...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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

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...

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 […]

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

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...

In a town on the edge of a desert, a holoparasitic plant threads together memories of hardship, dreams of prosperity, and the feeling that development has come to a halt. Following centuries of human–...

‘Many of us who came and stayed here for more than two years are still stuck in Chinese-speaking communities.’ A Chinese asylum-seeker shared this with us during a conversation in late 2024. The senti...

‘Political depression’ (政治性抑郁), first introduced into Chinese online discourse in the summer of 2019, is a term that gained wide circulation during the Covid-19 pandemic. At first, it was associated w...