Publication date: February 2026
Across the world, questions of gender, sexuality, and intimacy have become central to struggles over belonging, citizenship, and moral order. In China, these questions have acquired a particular urgency as the state seeks to stabilise social life through an increasingly narrow vision of family, reproduction, and normative personhood, even as people continue to forge relationships, identities, and communities that exceed those boundaries. Global LGBTQIA+ discourses, meanwhile, circulate widely but often unevenly, translating local experiences into familiar scripts of rights, visibility, and repression that do not always fit. It is within this dense and contested terrain that this issue of Made in China Journal, ‘Queer China’, intervenes, treating queerness as a critical lens for understanding contemporary Chinese politics, culture, and everyday life.