The political speech of the Chinese diaspora has a long history as a site of critique and co-optation by U.S empire and its enabling discourses. Amidst a new apex in Cold War Sinophobia, we trace the discursive circumscription of “overseas Chinese” as a political category, from Qing-era anti-colonialism to 20th century Cold War liberalism and beyond.

On the occasion of the 100 year anniversary of the Communist Party of China’s founding, we share comments solicited from our Weibo followers reflecting on the historic juncture.

As rich nations stockpile COVID-19 vaccines, China is providing a lifeline to Global South nations spurned by Western pharmaceuticals and excluded by the West’s neocolonial vaccine nationalism. So why is China being smeared for its efforts?

Yu Kuang unpacks the tragic February 2021 Texas snowstorm through a socialist lens. Far from a “natural” disaster or an exceptional state failure, Yu reads the tragedy as the logical outcome of a superstitious U.S. devotion to small government, “state’s rights,” and the abdication of political responsibility under a diffused federalist system.  

Recent discourse within the U.S. and Singaporean liberal-left has championed “Chinese privilege” as an analytic of power within Singapore and Asia at large. By invoking a Chinese equivalence to whiteness, analyses of “Chinese privilege” not only disavows the material history of racial capitalism in Asia, it appropriates Black and Indigenous critiques of white supremacy to bolster a long history of Singaporean anticommunism in service of U.S. military and ideological supremacy over Asia.

Can fintech be corralled in service of China’s people-centered development? With Jack Ma’s Ant Group as a case study, Chinese blogger Li Xuran offers a compelling analysis of the role of capital in modern China. The halting of Ant’s bombshell IPO in November 2020, Li argues, must be seen in the context of the socialist state’s role in restraining the “wild beast” of capital for the sake of socialist development.