Ivan Franceschini

@ivanfranceschini.bsky.social

260 followers 150 following 2 posts

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.

Videos

Political science 58%

Sociology 19%

Posts Replies Media Videos

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 1d

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 5d

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 7d

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 · 13d

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 19d

||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

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 22d

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 23d

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · 27d

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

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....

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

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

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

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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Reposted by Zhang, Ivan Franceschini

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

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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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

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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Reposted by Zhang, Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 18

In this essay, Ida Huang explores how LGBTQ+ student groups in China carve out 'queer heterotopias', fragile yet powerful spaces of care, imagination, and play within authoritarian structures. By centring these practices, she invites us to rethink what activism under constraint can look like.

Queering the University: Student Activism and Heterotopia | Made in China Journal

One summer a few years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I had the opportunity to attend an LGBTQ+ youth camp in a city in southern China, where I made many friends. After each day of classes, we hung...

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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 17

|| UPDATED PROFILE || Sri Lanka has long been one of China’s closest partners in South Asia, with ties spanning diplomacy, trade, and massive infrastructure projects. But this partnership also sparks debate over debt, sovereignty, and who really benefits. A profile by Yihao Li and Thiruni Kelegama.

Sri Lanka - The People's Map of Global China

China regards Sri Lanka as an ‘all-weather friend’—a term reserved for only a handful of China’s most trusted bilateral partners. Sino-Sri Lankan relations have been characterised by frequent high-lev...

thepeoplesmap.net

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 13

How did radio and the circulation of news transform modern China? In his new book 'Seeking News, Making China', John Alekna traces how emerging technologies reshaped politics, community, and state–society relations in the twentieth century. Read the conversation with Laura De Giorgi.

Seeking News, Making China: A Conversation with John Alekna

In Seeking News, Making China: Information, Technology, and the Emergence of Mass Society (Stanford University Press, 2024), John Alekna explores how the rise of radio and the circulation of news tran...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 9

Neither fully accepted nor entirely apart, the descendants of foreigners in China embody the tensions of identity in a globalised yet nationalistic age. Chengzhi Zhang traces their struggles for belonging and what this reveals about the boundaries of Chineseness.

Flowing without Roots: The Identity Crisis of Foreigners’ Descendants in Mainland China | Made in China Journal

In 2009, a woman named Lou Jing, born to a Chinese mother and an African American father, went on a TV show in China and declared herself a proud and patriotic Chinese person (Leung 2015). Her remarks...

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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Sep 4

From Sanmenxia and Three Gorges to the Yarlung Tsangpo Dam, China has long relied on monumental hydropower to prove state capacity. @zenel25.bsky.social and @pguer.bsky.social show how such projects, while promising development and security, often deepen the very insecurities they claim to resolve.

The Technopolitics of China’s Yarlung Tsangpo Dam Project and the Paradox of Hydropower | Made in China Journal

Three years after announcing their intent to construct a mega-dam along the Yarlung Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River as part of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, Chinese officials gave their approval to proce...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 27

Decades after it was assumed lost, the first Chinese typewriter with a keyboard reappeared in a NY basement. For Ep.3 of 开门见山|Gateway to Global China, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social talks with historian @tsmullaney.bsky.social about the legendary MingKwai and the century-long effort to type in Chinese.

Episode 3 | Typing Chinese | Made in China Journal

In 1947, the acclaimed Chinese writer and linguist Lin Yutang stunned the world with an invention: the first Chinese-language typewriter with a keyboard. Lin poured years of effort and his life’s savi...

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Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 27

Hardship has long been praised in China as the road to virtue and success. Today’s youth are beginning to question this tradition, linking the pressures of school with the exploitation of labour and asking whether hardship should still be seen as a moral ideal. An essay by @humayun.bsky.social.

In Praise of Hardship, or the Labour-Schooling Poetics of Chinese Youth | Made in China Journal

In January 2025, I was chatting online with a few friends about the ongoing controversy surrounding the construction of a factory for Chinese carmaker BYD in Brazil, which had just come under scrutiny...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 21

|| NEW PROFILE || Mexico’s ties with China date back to the sixteenth-century Manila Galleon trade, when Mexican silver became central to China’s economy. Today, Mexico navigates growing Chinese trade and investment while balancing its strategic dependence on the US, writes Enrique Dussel Peters.

Mexico - The People's Map of Global China

Mexico’s ties with China date back to the sixteenth-century Manila Galleon trade, when Mexican silver became central to China’s economy. Today, Mexico navigates growing Chinese trade and investment wh...

thepeoplesmap.net

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 19

How does basketball shape youth and masculinity in China?
In this new essay, Selina Kötter and Gil Hizi trace its role in TV dramas and the rise of 'village NBA' competitions, showing how sport negotiates gender ideals, market ambitions, and young people’s disillusionment.

Basketball Masculinities in Chinese Television Dramas and Rural Competitions | Made in China Journal

‘I am a pig’—these are the words that interrupt Chu Yuxun as she peacefully writes her first impressions of the new school. Looking up, she sees a male student in a basketball jersey stammering the hu...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 12

What happens when airspace becomes an economic frontier? In Shenzhen, a booming low-altitude economy is turning the skies into a new arena for innovation and profit, writes @fanfanyang.bsky.social. Discover how drones are remapping the city’s horizons and reconfiguring tech, capital, and urban life.

City in the Sky: Drones, Shenzhen, and the ‘Low-Altitude Economy’

Imagine this scenario: you ordered takeout during lunch rush hour, but the delivery bros were overbooked, so a drone dropped from the sky to deliver your meal; on your commute, while ground traffic wa...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Zhang, Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Aug 5

What is Sinopessimism? From lying flat to runology, Dino Ge Zhang explores a grassroots lexicon of disillusionment in China. Not just youth disengagement but a low theory of coping, refusing, and imagining alternatives amid economic and social pressures.

On Sinopessimism, or Junkies of Futility | Made in China Journal

This essay is written precisely so that it could be dismissed. —Paul Mann (1991: 141) Gary Gexi Zhang (2021) first coined the term ‘Sinopessimism’ as a speculative counterpart to Afropessimism, imag...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Jul 31

In Episode 2 of our 开门见山 | Gateway to Global China podcast, @yangyangcheng.bsky.social speaks with journalist-turned-academics @roseluqiu.bsky.social and @fangkc.bsky.social about the state of journalism in China, delving into censorship, commercialisation, and the evolving role of diasporic media.

Episode 2 | Being a Journalist in China | Made in China Journal

For some in the West, being a journalist in China—especially one at a state media organisation—is seen as little more than parroting party propaganda. This caricature not only disregards the courage a...

madeinchinajournal.com

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Jul 29

The new issue of Global China Pulse is now live! What does it mean to do fieldwork on Global China? This issue explores the methodological, ethical, and political challenges researchers face when studying China’s global presence from the ground up. Download here: globalchinapulse.net/download/glo...

Reposted by Ivan Franceschini

Made in China Journal @madeinchinajournal.com · Nov 29

We are now on Bluesky too! In our latest issue, you will find a focus on pandemic governance and the subjective experiences of living through lockdowns in China, a forum on Chinese civil society, and assorted essays and conversations. Download it FOR FREE at madeinchinajournal.com/2023/11/21/out

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