Ling Tang
Ling Tang (they/she) is a lecturer in cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. They research and create progressive practices in the market in post-socialist China. As an activist, artist and academic, they promote feminism, queerness and inclusive Chineseness through research, teaching, artmaking and social engagement.
Made in China Journal: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2026 »
Publication date: August 2026
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 resembles depression, but its aetiology is tied explicitly to political events and structural disenfranchisement. It manifests as hopelessness, a loss of faith in personal agency, and a pervasive sense that hard work and creativity no longer matter. Although the term has a longer history in feminist and affect theory, it gained traction in the United States during Donald Trump’s first presidency. Its resonance has since spread transnationally, with notable uptake in China during the COVID-19 pandemic and in the wake of the 2022 White Paper movement. Significantly, political depression in China does not simply mirror the global far-right turn but rather emerges as a long-standing condition rooted in specific historical traumas and the evolving dynamics of authoritarian rule. It is this condition that the present issue of the Made in China Journal sets out to explore.
Made in China Journal: Volume 10, Issue 2, 2025 »
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.