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Made in China Journal: Volume 11, Issue 1, 2026 »
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
Publication date: 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.
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The Digital Transformation in China »
Edited by: Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou
Publication date: 2026
China stands at a pivotal moment in its economic history. Ageing demographics and the erosion of traditional low-cost advantages are necessitating a shift away from factor-driven growth toward innovation and productivity. The digital economy — powered by artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and fintech — has emerged as the central force reshaping how China produces, trades and governs.
China Update Book 2026 brings together leading economists and policy analysts to examine this transformation in depth. Drawing on rigorous empirical research, the volume traces how ICT industries have driven output and productivity growth, how digital innovation interacts with China’s broader innovation system, and how AI is modernising China’s industrial structure. It investigates the rapid but uneven expansion of digital finance — from mobile payments that have largely displaced cash in urban everyday life to fintech services reshaping rural credit markets — and asks whether China’s financial system has achieved inclusive depth or merely impressive reach.
The volume also examines data as a distinct factor of production in regional growth, the use of digital technology to transform rural governance, and the policy frameworks governing data-driven economies. Chapters on China’s international balance sheet, its rising current account surplus, and the resilience of its export sector, as intermediate goods push it up global value chains, situate digital transformation within the wider macroeconomic landscape. Further contributions address the impact of US technology export controls, China’s data localisation laws, the digitalisation of production and trade, and the promise of digital agriculture.
Authoritative, timely and wide-ranging, China Update Book 2026 is essential reading for scholars, policymakers and anyone seeking to understand how digital transformation is redefining China’s economic future.
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International Review of Environmental History: Volume 12, Issue 1, 2026 »
Edited by: James Beattie, Ruth Morgan
Publication date: 2026
This issue of the International Review of Environmental History is planted firmly in Asia and the Pacific, tracing the rise and politics of local environmental knowledge and place-making from the seventeenth century. Shifting cultures of disaster management along the Yangtze River and the sponsorship of post-colonial botany in Indonesia meet conservation tourism and arboreal remembrance in twentieth-century Aotearoa. Threaded through the contributions, the lives and afterlives of imperialism and colonialism gesture to the possibilities of environmental history for shedding light on the enduring role of the state in the mediation of culture, politics, and environmental change.
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Reshaping the State »
Chinese Political Institutions under Xi Jinping
Authored by: Wen-Hsuan Tsai
Publication date: February 2026
‘Based on extensive fieldwork and impressive analytic skills, Wen-Hsuan Tsai has produced the most detailed and informative account of the evolving political system in Xi Jinping’s China that I have ever read. It is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the management and deployment of political power in contemporary China. The book convincingly shows that even though Xi Jinping may have centralized power in his own hands, institutions still matter. Indeed, they are holding China together.’
—Kjeld Erik Brødsgaard, Copenhagen Business School
‘This engaging and thought-provoking academic work reflects the scholar’s dedication to enhancing our understanding of Chinese governance. It blends institutional resonance with leadership dynamics, addressing the knowledge gap in the West about the complexities of the Chinese Communist Party’s resilience and institutions. By examining the idiosyncrasies, risks and challenges of contemporary China—both a major global influence and the world’s second-largest economy—it encourages readers to reflect deeply on its governance and implications.’
—Hon S. Chan, City University of Hong Kong
‘As a leading scholar on China’s elite politics, Dr Wen-Hsuan Tsai reveals how Xi Jinping reshaped the party-state to achieve institutional centralization and made and implemented domestic and foreign policy as the supreme leader of China. This book opens the “black box” of Chinese leadership politics, policymaking and implementation. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to gain deep knowledge about political dynamics in contemporary China.’
—Suisheng Zhao, University of Denver
Format: Hardback
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.
The Great Energy Transformation in China »
Edited by: Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou
Publication date: November 2025
In 2020, China started the drive to commence a reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060, setting in motion a transition to a green, sustainable and clean economy. China has ambitiously developed clean energy alternatives to coal. This transformation encompasses multifaceted strategies ranging from investment in renewable energy and the development of low-emission technologies to more stringent policy regulations on emissions. Renewable energy sources like hydroelectric power, wind, solar and biomass have received substantial attention and investment, with China emerging as a global leader in renewable energy capacity.
In the technology space, China’s transitioning to electric vehicles (EVs) has catalysed the development of a robust EV market, fostering innovation in battery technology and charging infrastructure. China has now become the largest exporter of EVs in the world market. These developments have the potential to materially help curb the world’s carbon footprint and mitigate environmental degradation.
Nevertheless, challenges persist domestically, including the need for grid modernisation to accommodate intermittent renewable energy sources and addressing the socio-economic impacts on coal-dependent regions. In the international market, China’s efforts towards a cleaner and more sustainable energy landscape have helped position it as a leader in sustainable economic development. This could enhance trade of green products, the development of global renewable energy and international investments in energy transformation. However, global trade and investment in green technologies and products are faced with rising geopolitical tensions and trade protectionism. This book discusses China’s achievements in its transition towards renewable energies and identifies new opportunities and challenges for deepening energy transformation in China.
Made in China Journal: Volume 10, Issue 1, 2025 »
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
Publication date: October 2025
What does it mean to come of age in a society where the paths to adulthood are increasingly uncertain, yet the pressure to succeed remains relentless? In today’s China, youth navigate the fading promise of reform-era mobility, the grind of economic slowdown, and a moralising narrative that glorifies hardship. Two expressions have come to define this generational mood: neijuan (内卷, ‘involution’), the feeling of being trapped in endless competition with little reward, and tangping (躺平, ‘lying flat’), a quiet refusal to play by those rules. In response to these pressures, young people are experimenting with new ways of living, working, and imagining the future, even as that future grows more precarious. This issue of Made in China Journal explores how these dynamics unfold across schools, homes, workplaces, digital platforms, and creative spaces. Rather than casting youth as rebels or victims, the contributions examine the everyday strategies and compromises that define life under constraint.
Globalising Chinese Actors and Internalising the Belt and Road »
Implications for Global and Domestic Governance
Edited by: Miwa Hirono
Publication date: June 2025
The literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) points out either its negative or positive impacts on global and domestic governance. However, such a dichotomy is too simplistic, not least because it tells us little about the complexity of change in the nature of the BRI as it is implemented. This book argues that the BRI manifests an intricate dynamic comprising two contradictory tendencies: Xi Jinping’s top-down and centralised approach to policymaking, with its focus on producing robust Chinese actors who can succeed in a competitive global economy; and a fragmented and decentralised reality made up of an expanding range of actors engaged in realising myriad BRI projects on the ground. The co-existence of these two contradictory tendencies implies that the BRI has a multidimensional impact on global and domestic governance in general, and on the role of Japan in countries where BRI projects take place. Japan matters because of its ‘in-between’ position between non-Western donors and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a position that offers a unique dimension to a frequently dichotomous discussion of the BRI. Globally, China’s promotion of the BRI has strengthened an aspect of global governance, the ‘open economy’, while at the same time fostering the Chinese nuance of a ‘planned economy’. Domestically, a Chinese-style approach to state management and investment without political conditions may set back democratisation efforts in emerging countries, but the BRI has also given rise to a renewed sense of democracy in those countries. These multidimensional impacts enable China and Japan to find an on-the-ground complementarity in their approaches to development aid in relation to future cooperation.
Made in China Journal: Volume 9, Issue 2, 2024 »
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
Publication date: May 2025
Chinese journalism is dead—long live Chinese journalism! The dramatic transformations in China’s media landscape over the past decade have led many to declare the death of quality journalism in the country. The Party-State’s tightening grip on information, the dismantling of once vibrant investigative outlets, and the growing precarity of media professionals seem to confirm this narrative. And yet, as traditional spaces for critical reporting shrink, new modes of journalistic practice continue to emerge, often in dispersed and unexpected forms. From citizen-led investigations and social media exposés to transnational collaborations, Chinese journalism has not disappeared—it has adapted. This issue of the Made in China Journal explores the shifting terrain of journalistic production in and about China, tracing the resilience, reinvention, and risks that define the profession today.
China: Regaining Growth Momentum after the Pandemic »
Edited by: Ligang Song, Yixiao Zhou
Publication date: December 2024
The slower growth of the Chinese economy in the aftermath of the pandemic has prompted the Chinese Government to adopt measures to boost domestic consumption and deepen structural reform, with the effectiveness of such policies beginning to be felt. However, China still faces challenges that will affect its growth dynamics down the track. These include the slowdown of its real estate sector, the complex internal and external environments for macroeconomic policy, the high level of income inequality, weak growth in investment by the private sector, negative population growth, high levels of debt, deglobalisation, weakness in the financial sector and equity markets, the inadequacy of its fiscal system and the imperative to decarbonise the economy. China must confront these challenges to maintain growth momentum and achieve higher levels of income and living standards.
The theme of the 2024 China Update book is China: Regaining Growth Momentum after the Pandemic. It discusses some of the challenges and policy issues that are being watched with keen interest by decision-makers and markets alike, including: What are the obstacles to economic growth in the aftermath of the pandemic and how can these be overcome? What are the key challenges and opportunities for China to move to the next level of development against the backdrop of negative population growth? Is it time for a Tax-Sharing System Reform 2.0 to consolidate China’s fiscal position? What are the challenges facing China’s small and medium enterprises? How is China’s business environment faring, and what are the implications for investment? How does China’s urban housing affordability impact its low fertility rate? How will the trade conflict between China and the United States play out regarding semiconductors and other high-tech products? How does China–Africa bilateral agricultural trade impact on African rural transformation?