Made in China Journal: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2026
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
, Ling Tang, Yihuan ZhangPlease read Conditions of use before downloading the formats.
Description
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.
Details
- ISSN (print):
- 2652-6352
- ISSN (online):
- 2206-9119
- Publication date:
- Aug 2026
- Imprint:
- ANU Press
- DOI:
- http://doi.org/10.22459/MIC.11.01.2026
- Journal:
- Made in China Journal
- Disciplines:
- Arts & Humanities: Cultural Studies; Social Sciences: Politics & International Studies
- Countries:
- East Asia: China
PDF Chapters
Made in China Journal: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2026 »
Please read Conditions of use before downloading the formats.
If your web browser doesn't automatically open these files, please download a PDF reader application such as the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.
To copy a chapter DOI link, right-click (on a PC) or control+click (on a Mac) and then select ‘Copy link location’.
Op-Eds
- Is It Possible to Be an Independent Scholar in China Today? (PDF, 735 KB) – Mengzhu An doi
- Ten Years After the Charity Law: Whither Chinese NGOs? (PDF, 1.2 MB) – Di Wu doi
China Columns
- Beyond Zouxian: The Making of Chinese Asylum-Seeking Workers in the US Platform Economy (PDF, 721 KB) – Zoe Zhao and Haoju Lu doi
- From Revival to Erasure: Ebbs and Flows of Judaism in Kaifeng (PDF, 2.8 MB) – Jordyn Haime doi
- Pedagogy of Absence: Sexuality Education and Social Inequality in China (PDF, 919 KB) – Chong Liu doi
- Rethinking Comrade and Foreigner: Joan Hinton and the Boundaries of Belonging in Maoist China (PDF, 1.4 MB) – Henry Cheng doi
- The Pacific as a Mirror (PDF, 2.7 MB) – Yangyang Cheng doi
Focus
- Political Depression and the Afterlives of Neurasthenia (PDF, 4.5 MB) – Hsuan-Ying Huang doi
- Tracing the Unfinished: Human–Plant Encounters and Their Echoes in China’s Interior Frontier (PDF, 1.9 MB) – Yadong Li doi
- Political Depression and China’s Foreign Student Programs, 1950–1966 (PDF, 2 MB) – Yimei Liu doi
- The Ugly Beauty of Boys’ Love in the Ruins: Extraction, Betrayal, and Everyday Political Depression in the Haitang Incidents (PDF, 1.2 MB) – Liang Ge doi
- The Decline of Pity Party: Lessons from Grassroots Mental Health Activism in China (PDF, 1.6 MB) – Mengyuan Chen doi
- No-One Signed Up: Fatigue, Failure, and Fragile Optimism in Chinese Trans Advocacy (PDF, 774 KB) – Tianyi Bai doi
- From Political Depression to Creative Praxis: Modes of Diasporic Queer World-Making (PDF, 1.1 MB) – Tori Shucheng Yang and Yuxin Yang doi
- Aspiration, Imagination, and Praxis: Artists Reconstructing the Leftist Political Imaginary (PDF, 1.2 MB) – Li Jia doi
- Navigating Hope and Exhaustion through the Art of Publishing: A Conversation with Yun Chen from 51 Personae (PDF, 1.1 MB) – Yun Chen, Faye Linfei Xu and Jingzhe Zhang doi
- Repetitive Cycles: Intergenerational Perspectives on Historical Stock Market Failures in China (PDF, 1.1 MB) – Hairuo Jin doi
- Custodianship in a Time of a Political Depression: Soft Resistance, Retention, and Commemoration in Post-NSL Hong Kong (PDF, 884 KB) – Daniel Herszberg doi
- Temporal Fugitives and Anita Mui: Cultural Memory amid Political Rupture (PDF, 1.2 MB) – David Kwok Kwan Tsoi doi
- Affective Encoding: Coping with Political Depression through Urban Wall Writing in Post-2020 Hong Kong (PDF, 3.2 MB) – Ng Sum Leung doi
Conversations
- The Death and Life of Chinese Civil Society: A Conversation with Mujun Zhou (PDF, 580 KB) – Bin Xu and Mujun Zhou doi
- Chinese Platforms: A Conversation with Wilfred Wang and Jian Lin (PDF, 618 KB) – Joyce Cheng, Wilfred Yang Wang and Jian Lin doi
Other publications that may interest you
