This study examines the contemporary cultural phenomenon of fanggu (sic), or "historical relic exploration," which emerged in China early in the twenty-first century and has gained increasing prominence on social media. While echoing traditional literati travel practices, fanggu is more directly shaped by modern heritage tourism and state-driven heritage-making policies. Surrounding these practices is a complex cultural nexus involving online subcultural communities, local conservation groups, heritage tourism enterprises, and professional scholars. This project draws on in-depth interviews with key practitioners, engaged academics, corporate actors, as well as digital ethnography focused on online communities and social media discourse. It investigates how these diverse actors collaboratively produce and circulate heritage knowledge. Applying Michel Maffesoli's theoretical notion of "neo-tribalism," I argue that the dynamic interactions within the fanggu cultural nexus have given rise to innovative, multimodal forms of heritage engagement that integrate cognitive inquiry with affective investment, thereby fostering a new mode of heritage community in contemporary China.
This paper uses the case of Wenheyou, a retro-themed restaurant in Changsha, to examine how the recent built environment is heritagised and junkified in contemporary China. Wenheyou’s deliberate celebration of the dilapidated streetscapes, dirt, and mundane everyday life of the 1980s and 1990s has been widely discussed as a cultural and commercial phenomenon. Situating Wenheyou within Changsha’s broader processes of urban redevelopment and heritage reconstruction, the paper argues that recreated “trash” in Wenheyou operates alongside recreated heritage in the city, stabilising, rather than challenging, the boundary between what can and cannot be preserved. Drawing on scholarship on material culture and trash studies, the paper argues that, in the context of rapid urbanisation following the reform and opening up of the 1980s, the designation of “shantytowns” or “old and dilapidated neighbourhoods” emerged in parallel with the recognition of recent heritage in official listings. These two processes are produced through the same urbanisation mechanism that granted the government the spatial power to determine how the past is materially inscribed onto the cityscape.
This article examines China’s evolving development model amid rising financialisation, focusing on state-sanctioned institutional investors and the rising tensions between state control and business autonomy. Since the early 2010s, as China’s bank-centered development model came under pressure from rising debt, slower growth, and the limits of traditional credit allocation, state-owned business groups leveraged their financial clout and extensive parent-subsidiary networks to channel capital into strategic emerging industries. Traditionally rooted in heavy industries and infrastructure, these groups reshaped financial flows by transforming into State Capital Investment and Operation companies (SCIOs). Enabled by past state-owned enterprises reforms that granted asset ownership, SCIOs now serve as key arms of China’s new industrial policies. After recounting the changes in the financial architecture of these enterprises, this article analyses business registry data to show that while central government SCIOs attract public investment due to their status as state institutional investors, they also contribute to stock overvaluation and market distortions. These dynamics illustrate how financial markets both advance state objectives and disrupt capital allocation, reflecting China’s shifting economic governance models.
After a few years of lull at the turn of the 2010s, the Taiwan Strait is today again the most important security flashpoint in the Indo-Pacific and the focus point of great power competition in the region. To a large extent, Washington’s enduring involvement in the security of Taiwan stems from its defence interests in the region. The United States understands the significant geostrategic value of Taiwan first of all due to the island’s position right in the middle of the first island chain. Second, Washington understands the interdependence of its security commitments in the Indo-Pacific region and that US credibility hinges on the enduring security of Taiwan. For Taiwan, the challenge has been to maintain this dual relevance and ensure that Washington continues to have a maximum stake in the defence of the island.
The development of minjian museum initiatives marks a salient trend in China’s ongoing “museum boom.” Over the past 15 years or so, the number of museums in China saw a phenomenal increase from 1,722 in 2007 to 7,046 in 2024. Conceived and sustained in the nonofficial “people’s sphere” (minjian 民間), these museums offer significant alternatives to state-run museums by evincing moral and ethical concerns as the fundamental inspiration for museum work and re-define museum-making as an efficacious quest for moral well-being, social repair, and historical justice. Through comparative lenses, this ethnographic study explores this emerging phenomenon of minjian museums to contribute grounded and timely insights into the ethics and politics of social remembering in contemporary China and the moral and political implications of museum-making in general.
Great power competition has long been theorised by international relations scholars as a contest for supremacy across multiple domains. But where do great powers compete? What makes a place a critical domain of great power competition? What motivates great powers to compete – and potentially fight – over one domain but not others? This article uses an emerging theory called “neo-offensive realism” to examine how conflicting national interests are currently driving the US and China to intensely compete and potentially fight over Taiwan. By empirically surveying the defence, economic, ideological, and world-order interests of the US and China over Taiwan, this article develops a theoretical framework for mapping the different national interests that structure great power competition over states and quasi-states. The neo-offensive realist analysis of US–China rivalry in Taiwan provides important theoretical and practical insights for the international community.
China's massive anti-corruption campaigns have not eliminated medical corruption; instead, corrupt practices in public hospitals have evolved into more sophisticated and concealed forms. While existing research largely employs quantitative or system-level analyses, ethnographic studies of corruption's everyday mechanisms remain limited. This study addresses this gap through a longitudinal ethnographic study of pharmaceutical procurement corruption in Xi'an (2017-2024). It identifies three mechanisms that have emerged under shifting governance: (1) manipulation of hospital drug listing processes through artificial scarcity and concentrated gatekeeping, (2) exploitation of prescription data via information asymmetries, and (3) misuse of academic conferences through institutional disguise by professional intermediaries. The findings show that while traditional bribery has become prohibitively risky under strengthened oversight, corrupt practices persist by reorganising into targeted, concealed, and strategic forms. These dynamics illustrate corruption's evolutionary intelligence, enabling networks to maintain equilibrium across institutional, temporal, and cultural contexts. The study argues that corruption in China's health sector functions as a resilient adaptive system, challenging deterrence-focused reforms and underscoring the need for policies that address the informal logics and strategic manoeuvres sustaining corruption.
This article depicts women’s uncertain journeys through prenatal testing in the context of routinised use of an advanced genomic testing technology, the chromosomal microarray analysis (CMA), at a prenatal diagnosis centre in Shanghai, China. This article shows how the integration of advanced genomic medicine with prenatal testing has added layers of complexity and uncertainty to the evolving landscape of Chinese women’s encounters with reproductive technologies. While selective reproductive technologies in China have continued to be framed by population quality control within the legacy of the One-child policy, this study suggests that ambiguity and uncertainty increasingly characterise women’s reproductive choices and visions of their reproductive futures during their prenatal genetic testing journeys. This parallels China’s ambiguous transition towards a pronatalist population planning agenda, and the uncertainties faced by healthcare institutions and professionals in managing dilemmas associated with routine use of advanced genomic technologies.
The memory and knowledge production processes of local communities near archaeological sites can be heavily influenced by official heritage management systems. One of the most representative is the so-called archaeological temporary worker system in China. On the one hand, this system incorporates local communities as insiders in archaeological projects, enhancing their connection with the site. On the other hand, the limited scope for local input into official interpretation or protection decisions ensures that these temporary workers remain outsiders. Using the Zhouyuan site as a case study, this article examines how different actors interact within this system and the various connections shaped by it. The internal logic of Chinese rural society must be considered to understand why this system has been able to persist for many years.
