Ivan Franceschini
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ivanfranceschini.bsky.social
Ivan Franceschini
@ivanfranceschini.bsky.social
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Founder and chief editor of the Made in China Journal, The People's Map of Global China, and Global China Pulse. Researching ethnic Chinese transnational crime, especially in the online scam industry.

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Political science 58%
Sociology 19%
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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

madeinchinajournal.com
Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 8d
|| NEW PROFILE || Although Mauritius has not formally joined the Belt and Road Initiative, its close trade and investment ties with Beijing have prompted scholars and the press to question the motivations and impacts of China’s growing presence in the country, writes Sheng Xuan.
Mauritius - The People's Map of Global China
Since the establishment of formal diplomatic relations in 1972, China and Mauritius have generally maintained a stable and cooperative relationship. While Mauritius has not formally joined the Belt an...
thepeoplesmap.net

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 11d
Blending archival research, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s 'Queer Chimerica' explores how queer culture, politics, and institutions circulate through the antagonistic interdependence of China and the US. A conversation with Qing Shen.
Queer Chimerica | Made in China Journal
Blending archival work, ethnography, and cultural analysis with memoir, graphic art, and science fiction, Shana Ye’s Queer Chimerica: A Speculative Auto/Ethnography of the Cool Child (University of Mi...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 14d
The American China Studies field is facing an existential threat under the Trump administration. To protect its integrity, we should infuse our work with a critical, comparative, and intersectional analysis of authoritarianism in the United States and China, argues @arthurkaufman.bsky.social.
What Is the Purpose of ‘China-Watching’ in the United States Today?
The executive ignored widespread dissent to force through an illiberal agenda. Violent confrontations between protesters and police brought forth increased repression. In less than a year, new policie...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 16d
When the Hong Kong fire occurred, initial international media coverage focused on bamboo scaffolding. This Orientalised and exoticised the tragedy, obscuring the fact that it was not just an accident, but an outcome shaped by long-term neglect and inequality, writes @tingguowrites.bsky.social.
The Distance Between Us | Made in China Journal
A week after the devastating fire that claimed at least 159 lives in Hong Kong on 26 November, people were still queuing daily for hours until after midnight to join the mourning. As flowers, gifts, a...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 17d
This Thursday, join us for the final webinar in our series on online gender-based violence in China. This session turns to the global stage, looking at how journalists, activists, and policymakers around the world are responding. Register here: globalchinalab.org/confronting-...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 18d
In this piece originally published in @initiummedia.bsky.social and translated by Yiwen Liu, Lee Wai Kwan describes how, in the wake of the HK fire, strangers came together through grassroots relief efforts to contribute their time and talents, before the authorities imposed their own bureaucracy.
The Fire of the Century | Made in China Journal
Editors’ introduction: The following piece, written by Lee Wai Kwan and translated by Yiwen Liu, originally appeared in Initium Media on 28 November 2025. In republishing it here in the Made in China ...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 22d
||NEW PROFILE|| The Vientiane Saysettha Development Zone is China’s only national-level economic and trade cooperation zone in Laos. Framed as a low-carbon demonstration zone, the SDZ nonetheless faces persistent challenges related to labour, land, and the environment, write Ellen Li and Juliet Lu.
Vientiane Saysettha Development Zone - The People's Map of Global China
The Vientiane Saysettha Development Zone (SDZ) is China’s only national-level overseas economic and trade cooperation zone in Laos. Established through a ‘land-for-funding’ arrangement, it was develop...
thepeoplesmap.net

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 24d
How did China’s early foreign student programs balance socialist solidarity with a climate of surveillance and distrust? In this essay, Yimei Liu traces how foreign students in the early PRC navigated state-managed hospitality, restricted mobility, and pervasive monitoring.
Political Depression and China’s Foreign Student Programs, 1950–1966 | Made in China Journal
China’s foreign student programs, many initiated under the banner of the unity of socialist countries and Afro-Asian solidarity, were originally designed to project international recognition of the ne...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 25d
||EVENT|| Join us this Thursday for the second webinar in our series on online gender-based violence in China. This session will shine a light on groups whose experiences are often pushed further into invisibility, especially LGBTQ+ individuals and women with disabilities. Registration is essential.
Confronting Online Gender-Based Violence in China: Voices, Vulnerabilities, and Global Solidarity - Global China Lab
Join us for a three-part webinar series organised by the Global China Lab and the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne as
globalchinalab.org

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 26
|| NEW EPISODE || Six years after Hong Kong’s mass protests, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social talks with sociologist Ching Kwan Lee and historian @jwassers.bsky.social about the struggle’s enduring significance, its transnational afterlives, and what it teaches us amid today’s democratic backsliding.
Episode 6 | Hong Kong in Protest, Redux
In 2019, more than a million people poured onto the streets of Hong Kong, with many returning week after week. The song ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ soon emerged as the movement’s unofficial anthem. What bega...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 25
|| NEW PROFILE || Chinese migration to Madagascar began more than a century ago and the new arrivals evolved into a deeply integrated community. However, bilateral ties have experienced ebbs and flows, with China’s image in the country impacted by recent controversies, writes Xuefei Shi.
Madagascar - The People's Map of Global China
Chinese migration to Madagascar began more than a century ago and the new arrivals evolved into a deeply integrated community. However, bilateral ties have experienced ebbs and flows, with China’s ima...
thepeoplesmap.net

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madeinchinajournal.com
Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 24
Don’t miss the first in our three-part webinar series on online gender-based violence in China, happening this Thursday. The event will be held in English and Chinese, with simultaneous interpretation. Register and help us spread the word:
globalchinalab.org/confronting-...

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 24
How do pregnant women in China navigate empowerment amid shifting gender norms? Mingxuan Li and Anna Lora-Wainwright show how women challenge patriarchal expectations through two intertwined strategies: seeking greater support from partners and asserting autonomy to protect their own agency.
Pathways to Empowered Motherhood in Contemporary China
An essay on how pregnant women in China negotiate empowerment, balancing support, autonomy, and resistance to patriarchal norms.
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 13
China’s achievements at scale are undeniable—but scale is not system. Responding to @kaiserkuo.bsky.social’s call to judge by delivery, @messingschlager.bsky.social argues that durable performance depends on independent measurement, contestable feedback, and system integration, not size alone.
Scale Is Not a System: Learning from China without Mimicry
A reply to Kaiser Kuo that weighs China’s achievements against the limits of performance legitimacy and the value of democratic institutions.
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 11
When the MaskPark case broke on China’s internet, it exposed a vast online trade in non-consensual images of women. As censorship buried the story, victims were left to navigate trauma, stigma, and official neglect on their own. Ling Li reflects on what this says on gendered violence in China today.
MaskPark and the Silence around China’s Gender-Based Violence Online | Made in China Journal
When the MaskPark incident broke in mid-2025, it jolted the Chinese internet (Hawkins 2025). Hidden behind the encrypted walls of Telegram—a platform officially blocked in China but accessible through...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 6
In her work, C. Pam Zhang explores Chinese diasporic subjectivities across shifting temporal and geographic terrains. Adopting a queer counter-perspective, she unsettles racist, classist, and heteronormative narratives of ‘Chineseness’, ‘manhood’, and ‘womanhood’, writes Kimiko Suda.
Queer-Feminist Journeys as Critical Counter-Frame
Queer Chinese diaspora in C. Pam Zhang’s novels, with a focus on trauma, counter-narratives, pleasure, and global responsibility.
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 4
Drawing on one month of residence in a retirement community outside Beijing, Brian DeMare examines the Chinese silver-hair market, tracing everyday experiences of retirees and highlighting the interplay between personal memories of PRC history and the commodification of elder care in today's China.
A Grey Beard in the Silver-Hair Market: One Month in China’s Retirement City
Laoye left Louisiana like an outlaw cowboy, abandoning all his earthly possessions, and hitting the road. The flat-screen TVs, the piles of clothes, the closet full of USB cords? No longer needed. Jus...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 30
Why did Western firms move manufacturing to East Asia? Who are the workers behind the region's industrial rise, and what are the social costs? For our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social spoke with Anru Lee and Ya-Wen Lei on gender, labour, and (de)industrialisation in China and Taiwan.
Episode 5 | Labour and (De)Industrialisation in East Asia | Made in China Journal
Over the past few years, industrial policy and manufacturing capacity, especially in the high-tech sector, have been at the centre of great power rivalry between the United States and China. The White...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 24
||NEW PROFILE|| Venezuela–China ties go back to 1974, but it was under Chávez that the relationship deepened through oil-backed loans and cooperation deals. Today, despite sanctions and economic collapse, Beijing remains a central, if more cautious, pillar of Caracas’ foreign and development policy.
Venezuela - The People's Map of Global China
Venezuela established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China in 1974, but it was under Hugo Chávez that ties deepened through oil-backed loans and extensive cooperation agreements. I...
thepeoplesmap.net

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madeinchinajournal.com
Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 21
In this essay, Qing Shen examines how older gay men in Shanghai reflect on their heterosexual marriages amid public debates that brand such unions as 'marriage fraud'. In doing so, he unsettles the moral certainty behind that label and shows why these arrangements cannot be reduced to deception.
‘Marriage Fraud’? Reflections on Marriage of Older Queer Men in Shanghai | Made in China Journal
In April 2025, Aqiang, a renowned gay rights advocate, published an online article titled ‘Condemning Gay Elders for “Marriage Fraud” Is as Absurd as Blaming Ancient People for Not Using the Internet’...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 20
In this essay, Ling Tang examines gender-critical currents in Chinese feminist scholarship: one revives socialist legacies to unsettle Western feminist paradigms, the other rejects both socialist and liberal frames in favour of grounded documentation within China’s historical and cultural contexts.
Gender-Critical Chinese Feminisms: From Critical Socialism to Post-Utopia | Made in China Journal
Since the 2010s, the debate about anti-gender politics has centred on the rise of right-wing forces and ideologies that are trans-exclusionary, queerphobic, and anti-feminist—particularly hostile to q...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 15
In this essay, Alex Taek-Gwang Lee argues that China no longer mirrors Western modernity but transforms it from within, forcing us to rethink the very categories through which we understand capitalism, socialism, and the modern world, and to confront the limits of the West's theoretical imagination.
The Repetition of China | Made in China Journal
Chinese scholars who have engaged with Fredric Jameson often observe—sometimes with admiration and sometimes with a degree of irony—that he appears ‘more Marxist than any Marxist in China’. Jameson’s ...
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aunz.theconversation.com
The Conversation AUNZ @aunz.theconversation.com · Oct 12
New book drop 📚 Scam: Inside Southeast Asia’s Cybercrime Compounds

Our visual feature created with authors @ivanfranceschini.bsky.social‬ and Ling Li details life inside huge scam factories using modern slavery to staff their secret compounds.

👉 scam-factories-life-inside....

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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 9
|| NEW PROFILE || A key node of the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor, the Kyaukphyu Deep-Sea Port was meant to anchor China’s access to the Indian Ocean. Yet, 12 years on, the project faces mounting obstacles—from armed conflict to debt concerns—casting doubt on its future, writes Linda Calabrese.
Kyaukphyu Deep-Sea Port - The People's Map of Global China
The Kyaukphyu Deep-Sea Port, a cornerstone of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the China–Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), is a proposed deepwater seaport in Rakhine State, Myanmar. Intended...
thepeoplesmap.net

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madeinchinajournal.com
Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 8
Thirty years after the 1995 Beijing Women’s Conference, the Chinese government is once again calling on women to serve the nation, this time in science and technology. In this essay, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social revisits a century of women in science in China, tracing their struggles and achievements.
Beyond Representation: On Being a Woman in Science in China | Made in China Journal
In the autumn of 1995, Ye Shuhua made a speech. During the NGO Forum at the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing, the 68-year-old astronomer took to the microphone and cal...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Oct 6
What does it mean to speak of decriminalisation or depathologisation of homosexuality in China? In his new essay, Petrus Liu challenges Western narratives of queer progress, arguing that same-sex desire was never criminalised but rendered unintelligible within prevailing legal and cultural norms.
Queer Unintelligibility in China | Made in China Journal
It has become something of a truism, in both academic discourse and everyday conversation, that invisibility is a central form of queer oppression. In a culture in which queer lives are erased—whether...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 30
How should we understand Jin Xing, China’s most famous transgender celebrity? In this new essay, Yahia Ma unpacks her embrace of gender binarism not as a paradox, but as a strategy that secures mainstream visibility while opening space to imagine cultural and political otherness in China and beyond.
Only Two Genders? On Jin Xing’s Reaffirmation of Gender Binarism and Heteronormativity
Jin Xing 金星 (literally, ‘golden star’, or ‘Venus’ in English) is a household name in mainland China. Since undergoing gender-affirmation surgery in 1994, she has established herself as a dancer, telev...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 25
Southeast Asia is now a global hub for online scams. But who works in these compounds, and under what conditions? How should authorities respond? In this episode of our podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with @ivanfranceschini.bsky.social and Ling Li about their new book 'Scam' (Verso 2025).
Episode 4 | Inside Southeast Asia’s Scam Compounds | Made in China Journal
Rejecting calls from an unknown number, blocking suspicious accounts on social media, turning down a job offer too good to be true: these days, almost all of us have had some interactions with online ...
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Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 24
What happens when queer desire, religion, and science fiction collide in space? In Jesus on Mars, Cui Zi’en offers a haunting, dreamlike story that moves between faith and fantasy. One of China’s most daring queer voices brought to new readers in Yahia Ma's translation.
Jesus on Mars | Made in China Journal
(Translated and introduced by Yahia MA) I first experienced Cui Zi’en’s work in mainland China in the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate at a university in the country’s northwest and was becomi...
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