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This article discusses minor transnationalism in China through a case study of mainland students' emotional conflicts in the recent Hong Kong protests. Examining the emotional representations and experiences of mainland students through analysis of media texts and interviews, the article explains how their experiences are a product of tensions between two competing Chinese transnationalisms in Hong Kong against a backdrop of China's rise. Further unpacking the ways in which mainland students negotiate both nationalist and localist politics through their cross-border mobility, the article reflects on the possibility of a minor transnational positionality that decenters statist configurations of identity. It argues that the case of mainland students in Hong Kong illuminates how a hybridized political subject could emerge amid the effects of the new, Sino-centric version of Chinese transnationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The TV drama A Love for Dilemma (2021) has sparked widespread debates on motherhood and gender in China. This article explores the intricacy of the show's representation of "bad mother." While conventional perspectives often view motherhood as a realm of private intimacy, insufficient attention has been given to the distinctiveness of Chinese-style motherhood and its intersection with family, neoliberalism, and state politics. This article addresses the importance of analyzing the televisual representation of motherhood to gain insight into how the interplay between patriarchy, the market and the state configures maternal subjectivity, particularly under the leadership of Xi Jinping. By examining the emotional meaning of motherhood produced by the TV series, this study unveils the inherent contradiction of mother love as a site of political investment. It argues that the ambivalence surrounding mother love stems from its entanglement with patriarchal expectations, the burdens of emotional labor, and the state's vested interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the platformisation of a popular short-video platform Kuaishou and its impact on Chinese migrant youth. Based on 4 years of field observations, this study examines how Kuaishou 's platformisation process has paradoxically empowered and constrained the agency of migrant youth through the construction of 'hope labour'. This hope labour seeks to benefit from Kuaishou 's attention economy at the expense of growing uncertainty and precarity. In particular, with the intervention of the state and fierce market competition, Kuaishou 's operation is moving towards a Douyin model to attract more urban youth, resulting in less diversity and more uniformity. This article illustrates how the joint forces of the market and the state push the platforms towards increased homogeneity. It shows how Kuaishou configures a digital assembly line for migrant youth, reproducing the precarious hope that everyone can become his or her boss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Since the recent state crackdown on effeminate stars labeled as niangpao (sissy pants), "insufficient" masculinity has once again become a focus of political controversy in China. Among these stars, Zhou Shen, a male pop singer known for his feminized voice and image, continues to enjoy immense popularity and perform in official programs. His growing fame and tolerance by the state call into question his cultural-political strategy. Conceptualizing Zhou's androgynous performance as a political effect of a series of co-optation, compromises and negotiations, this essay offers a contextualized reading of the complex ways in which competing and contradictory influences shape his expression. In tracing the practices that configure his stardom, we investigate how Zhou's androgyny paradoxically reaffirms and unsettles hegemonic norms in non-antagonistic ways. We describe how his engagement with Xi Jinping's China Dream creates an ambivalent space for negotiating established norms. We argue that Zhou's phenomenal success rests with the fusion of contradictory elements into his performances and his ability to cut across binary classifications. This process has nurtured a politics of ambivalence marked by ambiguity, confusion and contingency. It also sheds light on the limit and possibility of doing gender politics in an increasingly illiberal setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Talking about rape is taboo in Japan, where sexual assaults are rarely reported. Shiori Ito, a #MeToo symbol in Japan, broke the silence on rape by disclosing her victimization experience against the public backlash. This article conducts a feminist critical discourse analysis of popular online responses to Ito's case in Yahoo's news comment sections to explore the public witnessing of personal rape stories in Japan. Our findings demonstrate that three different discursive positions—victim-blaming, feminist, and reformist in orientation—negotiate and contest the notions of rape. These footprints are characterized by conflicting attitudes toward Japan's rape culture and patriarchy. The contradictory interpretations generated by witnessing reveal how the Japanese socio-political context restricts and enables critical possibilities for the #MeToo movement. This study conceptualizes these heterogeneous, fragmented, and multifaceted popular discourses as constituents of the digital footprints of #MeToo. These footprints offer insights into the possibilities and challenges of Japanese gender politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reality TV sensation Sisters Who Make Waves has recently garnered public attention in China while sparking critical debate about middle-aged women. This article reexamines the politics of popular feminism by analyzing the visibility of tears within the show. Viewing tears as a signifying practice, this article investigates how they reveal the paradox of contemporary Chinese popular feminism to expose its ambivalence and contradictions. We suggest that tears signify popular feminism’s ambiguous stance toward patriarchal values, neoliberal principles, and state control. This study contends that the show’s popular feminism presents critical possibilities despite its inherent limitations, such as refraining from directly challenging patriarchal dominance and systematic gender inequalities. While tears reveal middle-aged women’s aspirations for self-realization, recognition, and empowerment, they also expose how neoliberalism emotionally exploits women through pursuing personal achievement. Tears enhance the visibility of women’s struggles and illuminate the formation of sisterhood within a male-dominated society. They also intertwine with state-promoted notions of sisterhood, which ultimately reinforce political allegiance to nationalism. Therefore, this study proposes that popular feminism in Sisters Who Make Waves acts as a double-edged sword. It reinforces hegemonic power while exposing its emotional disturbances. Such ambivalence creates a space for reimagining popular feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines China's emotional governance by analysing the emotional politics behind the wide circulation of the Fang Fang diaries during the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak. By highlighting the flexible and creative reorientation of online emotions in the Chinese state's governance approach, the article investigates how the diaries' reverberation of negative feelings – such as grief and indignation – engendered contentious affective publics and amounted to a moment of dissent. The article also explores how the state used multi-layered strategies to demobilise and reorient public sentiment and opinion into regime-supportive nationalism. In doing so, the article offers a more nuanced understanding of state–society relations, online expression and authoritarian resilience in China than interpretations that emphasise suppression and censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an interpretation the film Wolf Warrior II in the geohistorical context of the Chinese Dream, which is advocated by China's President Xi Jinping, and considers the psychological domains that produce a new national subject. Focusing on the emotional energy of pride articulated in the film, this article shows that it constitutes the most essential emotional element in the formation of contemporary Chinese nationalism. We argue that the film interpellates the desiring subject for participation in a nationalist position that is locked in binary opposition with the West. We elucidate the emotional politics of pride by comparing the films produced in the eras of Mao and Deng, and we conclude that the emerging national subjectivity is a psychic transformation and reinvention of previous nationalist fantasies in the new context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A march that was taken by the workers on May Day in 2007 for the resignation of Macau's chief executive Edmund Ho Hau-Wah as there was corruption, influx of illegal labor and not proper rights for housing and earning one livelihood is described. The various transitions experienced by the residents of Macau after it came under the Portuguese rule, gambling that was considered legal in Macau and how the policies in Macau differed from those in the People's Republic of China are presented.

As China’s economy continues to slow down after two decades of breakneck growth, strikes and labour protests have erupted across the world’s most populous workers state. In the face of slumping demand, frequent lay-offs, factory relocations and shutdowns have triggered wildcat strikes and disruptive protests over wages, jobs and social protection. These mobilizations are escalated by the failure of local governments to enforce labour laws; however, these disruptions do not attempt to make broad-based demands or attack the ruling Communist Party. During the economic crisis, factory occupation has re-emerged as a protest tactic and created ad hoc spaces of collective discussion, self-management and worker solidarity. Yet since factory occupation is physically bounded and isolated from other struggles, it is more vulnerable to state repression. As the crisis deepens, it remains to be seen if workers’ frustration with state governance can still be limited to purely survival issues, without leading to a new politicization and the formation of a generalized opposition to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since being returned to China in 1999, Macau's government has actively cooperated with transnational companies to insert casino capitalism into the territory. This paper asks: How is this latest Macanese version of ‘modernization’ being experienced and imagined at the individual level? This research investigates young dealers, the main labor subjects in Macau's gambling industry, to reveal the contradictions unleashed in the city's neoliberalization process. We use dealers' interviews as examples to illustrate how casino capitalism has become deeply entrenched in the fabric of Macau life, and the risks being proliferated across the body in new material conditions. The study focuses on how these individuals respond to and negotiate the specific disposition of casino capitalism that affects the daily experiences, emotions and desires associated with the expansion of the gambling sector. It investigates the techniques adopted by the casino regime and how the new government has come to construct the individual as a subject of interest, and identifies a form of exploitation and control characterized by voluntary consent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]