This article explores China’s responses to the international pressure regarding the mass detention of Uyghurs in re-education detention camps in Xinjiang. To understand the evolution of China’s responses to the mounting international pressure, the article employs a process-tracing method based on a qualitative analysis of Chinese official documents, reports, leaked files, and media articles. China’s official narrative is also traced through a content analysis of articles from Chinese official media. The article argues that the shifts in narratives, and even in policies, were shaped not solely by domestic considerations but also by international pressure. In response to growing international pressure, the authorities moved through several stages: initially showing lax control over the narrative, then concealing the camps’ existence, subsequently acknowledging and justifying them, followed by downsizing and reframing the policy, and eventually partially abandoning the practice. The article contributes to the underresearched area of authoritarian regimes’ responses to international pressure regarding their domestic political repression.

On April 9, 1939, Cheng Xigeng, a collaborator of the newly established puppet Provisional Government of the Republic of China, was assassinated at the Grand Theatre in the British Concession of Tianjin. When the Chinese suspects in his murder were caught and questions arose over the legitimacy of their trial, the case sparked an international crisis that involved Britain, Japan, and the Nationalist government in Chongqing. This article investigates the neglected Anti-Japanese Traitors Assassination Corps (AJTAC), who were the real murderers of Cheng. While the coexistence and rivalry of different layers of imperialism in China provided opportunities for the Chinese to “use barbarians against barbarians,” Japan countered by “using Chinese against Chinese.” Composed of scions of the elite, the AJTAC, initially driven by a sense of righteousness, became embroiled in diplomatic disputes and an intelligence war between the Chongqing government and the collaborationist Wang Jingwei regime. Ultimately, it was the intelligence rivalries rooted in the clique culture of the Nationalist Party that led to the downfall of the AJTAC. By tracing the development of the corps and its involvement in Cheng’s case, the article seeks to reveal the multi-layered struggles between foreign and domestic powers in wartime Tianjin.

Around 1745, Magistrate Xie Shenglun arrived in Tianzhu county in southeastern Guizhou, intent on transforming the kinship and marriage practices of the local Miao. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, local families adopted markers of formal lineage, including graveyards, genealogies, and ancestral halls, aligning themselves with Neo-Confucianism and the imperial state. However, other aspects of Neo-Confucianism were adapted or ignored. Records of wives and daughters in the Pan genealogy present evidence of practices such as widow remarriage, cross-cousin marriage, and delayed-transfer marriage. Attention to affinal relations reveals an alternate kinship system recorded alongside patrilineal descent. Families adopted formal lineage to protect their political and economic interests, but instead of reforming or replacing local kinship and marriage practices, they reinforced them. Even as the Pan genealogy confirmed the family’s status as imperial subjects, the marriage practices and networks it recorded helped maintain an ethnic identity separate from state categories and grounded in the local community.

The Spring Festival Gala is China’s most important annual television show. Produced and broadcast by China Central Television (CCTV), it provides a lens through which to analyze the evolution of masculine ideals sanctioned by the party-state. The Gala’s comedic skits present various male images for analysis. The changing presentation of “soft” or less masculine male characters in Gala skits—from such roles being mocked in the 1980s to becoming positively coded protagonists in the 2010s—mirrors the changing concepts of Chinese masculinities against the background of economic growth, consumer society, and women’s rising social status. Considering the recurrent criticism of “feminine” young men and the moral panic over a “masculinity crisis” in China that has emerged since the 1980s, this article examines the subtle interdependency between the official masculinity discourse and the rising popularity of “soft masculinity.”

In the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960), a limited free market was licensed across China to help repair the devastated economy. In the southern city of Nanjing, thousands of peddlers and other private merchants took full advantage of a temporary boom in private commerce. The window was brief. During the early 1960s, new or expanded policies promoted the rationalization of the state workforce, the reduction of China’s urban population, and a strengthened system of household registration. Collectively, these programs pushed small merchants to the margins of the urban economy, where they operated by the grace of city authorities and were subject to crackdowns and harassment. Using archival and newspaper evidence from Nanjing, this article explores the evolving power dynamic between small merchants and local communist officials and cadres, offering new insights into the creation of danwei- centered urban culture and economy in China.

This article examines how the masses documented their experiences through writing by focusing on the Write Factory History Movement from the mid-1950s to the early 1960s. It traces how factory workers and grassroots writers, under the coordination of the Chinese Writers’ Association and its local branches, collaborated to produce novels, prose, wall paintings, and other literary forms. Drawing on factory history manuscripts, work group reports, literary magazine commentaries, and other local sources, I analyze the processes, strategies, and consequences of this mass writing endeavor for narrating China’s industrial transformation. I argue that these writing efforts, by weaving workers’ literary labor into the complex processes of China’s industrialization, reshaped Chinese historiography and literature from below. Through their literary production, workers contributed to the rise of a new socialist genre known as “mass history” that intertwined individual accounts with collective experiences, factuality with narrativity, and historical records with literary imagination. By foregrounding factory history writing as both a cultural practice and a historiographical intervention, this article reveals the tensions and compromises embedded in mass literary authorship and offers new insights into the politics of writing history in socialist China and its enduring legacy.

The study of women’s history in Chinese academia is undergoing a shift from narratives centered on the nation to narratives centered on gender, a shift that represents an effort to break free from the long-standing dominance and control of nationalist discourses over understandings of gender. Gender narratives critique the portrayal of women as mere victims in nationalist accounts, advocating instead for the restoration of women’s historical identities, emotions, and agency to reveal the complexities of women’s history that nationalist frameworks have obscured. In deconstructing nationalist narratives, however, the focus on discursive representation in gender narratives often reduces gender solely to relationships of power and domination, neglecting an analysis of the social structures that have historically restricted women and their rights. To construct a more inclusive narrative of women’s history, our research must be situated within the context of social history, examining the interplay between discursive representation and social structures. This approach will create broader, more inclusive gender narratives that will further advance the study of women’s history.

This article examines the intersection of established traditions and emerging novelties in contemporary Chinese grassroots governance reforms through a historical and ethnographic study of the Fengqiao Model, a Mao-era policing discourse that has now been digitally revived. Drawing on the concept of iteration 迭代, we identify three phases of the Fengqiao Model from its inception. Contrary to perspectives emphasizing “window dressing” in studies of Chinese politics, we provide evidence that the iterations of the Fengqiao Model involved genuine intellectual work, relying upon bottom-up forms of knowledge “bricolage” for improvisation and problem solving. We argue that these processes sustain a distinctive mode of revolutionary governmentality characterized by political commitments to continual innovation and refinement, resulting in knowledge production with endless potential for renewal. This iterative character provides useful insights into the inner workings and consequences of bureaucratic practices for knowledge production in China’s “New Era” under Xi Jinping.

This article argues that researchers should take gender more seriously when examining infancy and childhood and take infancy and childhood more seriously when researching gender. Infancy and childhood attract only intermittent scholarly attention from China scholars, and in the few instances where they do, gender is rarely a central frame for analysis. I argue that by considering gender in conjunction with infancy and childhood, new avenues for understanding China’s past, present, and future are opened across multiple disciplines. Infants and children are gendered humans even prior to puberty and are key influences on the ways that the adults around them perform gender across their own life courses. Gendered babies, toddlers, and children are regularly deployed in public discourse and shape national ideologies, family morality, and personal identities. To understand China better, we need to understand the gendered child.

Based on foreign trade archives at the grassroots level, this article contends that the Maoist state approached markets using strategies of adaptation and containment. It adopted market price and sales reward policies to address the challenges posed by the free market when procuring goods. For capitalist markets, Maoist China exported goods at prices set by current market conditions, imposed a quota system on daily export volume, and to some degree shaped export activities to serve market needs. Meanwhile, the state prohibited local commercial companies from procuring goods at market prices; used the sales reward policy to contain the market; and greatly limited the influence of foreign capitalist markets on local export activities via the planned economy system. Overall, the rural economy in Maoist China featured a deep intertwining of planning and market mechanisms, as well as limited interactions with the global market instead of complete isolation.