Chenchen Zhang 🤦🏻‍♀️

@chenchenzhang.net

9116 Followers 371 Following

migrant & researcher interested in politics and other things. currently: digital narratives, postcolonial nationalism, the global right, China stuff. neurodiversity-affirming parenting. she/her. 不必等待炬火. https://chenchenzhang.net/book

Instagram screenshot showing a tiny 3 square meters closet room
photo of me standing in front of a university dorm building, wearing a tshirt that says "the worst part of censorship is ⬛⬛"
https://jacobin.com/2026/07/world-cup-argentina-geopolitics-soccer
@bonmatimessi: watch the "woke" crowd support the 3 horsemen of colonialism and genocide over Argentina just because it's trendy
Kemi Badenoch: Britain is multiracial, but we must never become multicultural. We need to be proud to be British and understand what that means
website stats, showing referrers ranking: bsky 116, X 32, LinkedIn 13, Facebook 6.
scanned image of an old photo, showing a student sitting behind piles of books in a worn-out classroom.
a meme that uses an AI generated picture of EU president von der Leyen enjoying cooling from Midea AC unit
photo of me & husband on wedding day, making the scream emoji face
However, though I wrote a lot about “identity,” I always refused the notion that a whole politics could be identified with any single identity position. I have tried to say that identity is always the product of a process of identification. It is the product of taking a position, of staking a place in a certain discourse or practice. In other words, of saying, “This is, for the moment where I am, who I am and where I stand.” This positional notion of identity enables one then to speak from that place, to act from that place, although sometime later in another set of conditions, one may want to modify oneself or who it is that is speaking. So in that sense, identity is not a closed book any more than history is a closed book, any more than subjectivity is a closed book, any more than culture is a closed book. It is always, as they say, in process. It is in the making. It is moving from a determinate past toward the horizon of a possible future, which is not yet fully known.
screenshot of bilibili video. text reads: You brought it on yourself. Five barbarians disrupting Britain. 自作自受，五胡乱英.
screenshot of Facebook page "Xi's moments"
The Spectator · Follow 2d Why Japanese students aren’t woke PHILIP PATRICK THE SPECTATOR > One of the joys of living in Japan is the lack of wokeness. It is not that it doesn't exist — there is a Tokyo Pride, the odd Gaza protest, and gender equality is increasingly discussed — it's simply that the concept doesn't quite translate. Like the strikes that only take place at the weekend so as not to inconvenience customers, woke protesters here are tiny in number, generally polite and devoid of the threatening aggressiveness of the West
Screenshot of Nigel Farage post on Facebook: white working-class boys are currently lowest-performing group in the country's education system thanks to the Equality Act. Reform will scrap it and return Britain to a meritocracy.
photo of a page in my book... discussing ruguanxue
Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen @C_NMNg It’s Vietnam’s national high school exam season. One essay question in literature praised Elon Musk, Steven & Mark Zuckerberg as ‘technological innovators’ and asked students to respond how a ‘Vietnamese Steve Jobs’ can be made. Such primitive worship for oligarchy & capitalism.
Branko Milanovic: I spoke of it very briefly at my book promotion yesterday in Paris--I think it is an important if somewhat speculative point. The Sinification of Marxism may, for the first time in history, create a unified Euro-Asian ideology that would bring together ancient Greek and ancient Chinese influences. Plato & Confucius through Marx. The ideological implications of China’s economic success Sinified Marxism and its future
photo from the 1989 protests in China. A banner says: 看谁活得长
lecture room packed with people
No money, and too lazy to earn any. Send me some shelves to put my teeth on. But I shall keep my word: I'll laze through May, and from the 1st of June I'll sit down and get to work.
Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank Show navigation Search Panel Chatham House Debate: Is China the primary threat to global stability in the next decade? A moderated debate under the Chatham House Rule examining competing views on China’s role in shaping global stability in the years ahead. Event date and time:21 May 2026 — 17:00 TO 18:00 BST Event location:In person — Chatham House As global power balances shift, China’s rise has emerged as one of the defining geopolitical questions of the 21st century. Beijing’s expanding diplomatic reach, rapid military modernisation, technological ambitions and growing assertiveness, from the South China Sea to the Taiwan Strait, have fuelled concerns that China poses a fundamental challenge to the international order.
photo of me sitting in the garden
screenshot showing weather forecast in Brighton... showing that it's sunny and warm right until the day before BISA, then it will become cold and wet
cold noodles with chicken, tomato, zucchini. 鸡丝凉面
photo from a rowing boat in a quiet river
map showing high temperatures across the UK
“One could say that [Trump] does understand manners – he simply did not think countries like Britain or Japan warranted that level of courtesy." (Link in comments) #xitrumpmeeting #xitrumpsummit #xijinping #trump #diplomacy
X post: President Xi of China recently showed Trump 300-year-old trees during his visit. Neither Trump nor US media understood the message, namely that they are older than the foundation of the USA. Instead, Trump demanded to know if Xi thought he was special, whereupon Xi confirmed he thought Trump was a very special guest. Handled like a child!
photo of Xi & Trump inside Qinian Dian
A split image comparing two visits to the Temple of Heaven in Beijing: the top black-and-white photo labeled “1975” shows officials and visitors gathered in front of the temple, while the bottom color photo labeled “TODAY” shows two political leaders standing together in the same location.
Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun takes a selfie with Elon Musk
Black-and-white photo of a large circular Chinese temple with three tiered roofs, elevated on a stone platform with staircases.
photo of Trump & Xi in front of the temple of heaven
News anchor: apologize to the west? Kneel
Host Organization Representatives Mr. Marc N. Casper Chair, US-China Business Council Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer, Thermo Fisher Scientific Mr. Evan Greenberg Chair, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Chubb Limited/Chubb Group The Honorable Craig Allen President, US-China Business Council Mr. Stephen A. Orlins President, National Committee on U.S.-China Relations John L. Thornton Co-Chair, Asia Society The Honorable Michael Froman President, Council on Foreign Relations Ms. Suzanne P. Clark President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce --- Representatives of Corporate Sponsors Mr. Milind Pant CEO, Amway Mr. Tim Cook CEO, Apple Mr. Laurence Fink BlackRock Mr. Stephen Schwarzman CEO and Chairman, Blackstone Mr. Stanley A. Deal Executive Vice President, The Boeing Company; President and CEO, Boeing Commercial Airplanes Mr. Hock Tan President & CEO, Broadcom Inc. Mr. Ming Hsieh Chairman and CEO, Fulgent Genetics Mr. Daniel O’Day Chairman and CEO, Gilead Sciences Mr. Darius Adamczyk Executive Chairman, Honeywell Mr. Joseph Y. Bae Co-Chief Executive Officer, KKR Mr. Robert G. Goldstein Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Las Vegas Sands Ms. Merit Janow Chair, Mastercard
The epilogue first considers shifting repertoires of Sinophobia and Sinofantansy in the postliberal conjuncture and emerging spaces of transnational Chinese activism. Assumed ethnocultural coherence, authoritarian competence, and a desirable resistance to ‘liberal moralism’ make China an object of both fear and envy in postliberal imaginations. If reaction is transversally aligned, it follows that transnational solidarity must disrupt conventional binary frameworks and build on interconnections between different structures of injustice. This is illustrated through examples drawn from diasporic Chinese engagement in transnational feminism and Palestine solidarity movements. The contributions of the book are then summarized. It illuminates the co-production of hierarchical difference between the ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ of the international social order; it deepens understanding of transversal alignment and the repurposing of critique in digital reactionary formations; the book contributes to the deconstruction of Westernness by tracing how it becomes available for appropriation and resignification elsewhere.
Abstract This chapter focuses on two interrelated themes—the appropriation of the anticolonial and competing narratives of civilization—through three vignettes in post-pandemic digital China. These are the politics of naming in the circulation of zhiren as a political slur; the representations of the Paris Olympics opening ceremony, where the labelling of favourable viewers of the performance as zhiren is pervasive; and ruguanxue as a form of vernacular geopolitical theorizing. The analysis of zhiren and ruguanxue shows that the rejection of hierarchies—external and internalized—through ostensibly anticolonial language can be weaponized to advance a reactionary politics of postcolonial ressentiment. It frames difference as betrayal, equates dissent with colonial subservience, and resorts to imperial fantasies to absorb the frustration with non-recognition. The chapter also reflects on what competing narratives of civilization formulated in online discussions of the opening ceremony could tell us about postliberal civilizational politics.
This chapter examines the anti-baizuo discourse within local ideological constellations and postliberal convergences in global reactionary politics. The neologism enables internet users to discursively construct the Chinese self against a dehumanized ‘non-Western’ other, exemplified by the figure of racialized minorities and Muslims, and a declining yet hegemonic Western other through narrating and imagining the existential threats posed by diversity and baizuo or ‘woke’ ideologies to ‘the West’. Situating the material within the global discursive economy of reactionary Occidentalism, this chapter also reflects on similarities and differences between conservative techno-nationalism in Chinese cyberspace and other ideological currents of the global right. The discourse exemplifies a symptomatic inversion of critique—of ‘liberal hypocrisy’ in both domestic and international contexts—in postliberal digital cultures. Discontents with liberal moralism and global inequalities are redirected into reactionary resentment against racialized and marginalized groups, legitimating ethnonationalist and authoritarian visions of politics and society.
This is a scene-setting chapter that outlines the political context, socio-technical dynamics, and methodological considerations necessary for understanding the changing representations of self, other(s), and the international in contemporary digital discourse. The postliberal condition is marked by a selective rejection of certain aspects of liberal universalism alongside a reassertation of postcolonial claims to difference articulated in political, cultural, and civilizational terms. Indispensable to the ‘Sinicization of everything’, Westernness is constructed and invoked to perform various political functions through arguments about victimhood, indigeneity, and security. Situating the study of digital narratives within research on the everyday (geo)political, this chapter introduces methods, platforms, and ethical considerations, as well as the messy world of signification when it comes to ‘left’, ‘right’, and other digital jargon. This is followed with an exploration of the intersecting master frames of the China/West dichotomy in digital space, considering also differentiations between the representation of Europe and that of the United States.
This chapter examines how the Cold War reinvented the meaning of the West and reshaped the articulation of China/West difference – now geopoliticized and ideologized – both globally and, in more detail, in Chinese discourse. It scrutinizes the transnational travelling of ideas from ‘peaceful change’ to heping yanbian, operative as a malleable myth of foreign conspiracy that serves to delegitimate oppositional voices as agents of ‘Western influence’. It also looks at the revival of Occidentalism and self-Orientalization in the ‘New Enlightenment’ of the 1980s, which resorted to the idealization of the West and cultural essentialism, risking glossing over colonialism as a modernizing mission, to critique authoritarianism and call for democratic reforms. The Cold War thus reshaped the configuration of both ‘anti-Westernism’ and ‘pro-Westernism’ in China by rendering the zhong/xi opposition a geo-ideological one (Master Frame II), a constraining binary that has been sustained by both supporters and critics of the Chinese regime.
Abstract This chapter examines the emergence of zhong/xi as a paradigmatic dichotomy, along with the universalization of concepts such as race, civilization, and evolution in Chinese intellectual discourse at the turn of the twentieth century. It does so by revisiting the works of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao as well as the East and West Culture Debate in early Republican China. The chapter draws attention to the constitutive contradictions of postcolonial nationalist discourse that appropriates the very imperial knowledge while at the receiving end of its violence, shifting ambiguously between challenging Eurocentric universalism and reifying racialized hierarchies. The East and West Culture Debate exemplified competing essentialisms, and May Fourth Occidentalism crystallized the spatio-temporal hierarchy of the advanced and the lagging behind as a master frame in narrating China/West difference. It also shows that the discourse of civilizational standards is globally co-produced and strategically negotiated by local actors for historically contingent projects.
This book is positioned at the intersection of two lines of inquiry: the co-production of hierarchical difference in world politics and reading the postliberal conjuncture from digital China. The introduction begins by situating this study within debates in poststructuralist and postcolonial IR, deepening the existing criticism of cultural essentialism in attempts to globalize the discipline. It then builds on the concept of Occidentalism as an analytic, which allows for a consideration of strategic and contradictory processes through which civilizational binaries are co-produced in ‘non-Western’ geographies. It outlines interlinked master frames in narrating China/West difference in contemporary digital discourse, as well as their historical genealogies: the advanced and the lagging behind, the aggressor and the victimized, and the declining and the ascendent. Finally, engaging with the literature on the global right and contestations of liberal ordering, the chapter illuminates what insights studying digital China could offer for understanding the postliberal conjuncture.
a poster says: online access available now. QR code for the link in post.
Zhongyi J. used anesthetics normally administered in an operating room – under the supervision of an anesthesiologist, where the patient is connected to monitors measuring blood pressure, oxygen levels, and heart rate. Instead, Zhongyi J. used these drugs to anesthetize his neighbor in his student apartment, sometimes even leaving her unconscious. He also overdosed on the medications, as an anesthesiologist testified during the trial. The court classified six cases as particularly serious rape, and Zhongyi J. was convicted of attempted murder in two instances. In these two cases, the videos prove that Zhongyi J. abused his drugged neighbor for two and a half and three and a half hours, respectively. The recordings show her gasping for air. Her tongue had slipped back, obstructing her airway. But instead of stopping, Zhongyi J. continued. "In all cases, it was extremely fortunate that the victim did not die," the judge stated.
Consequently, the disagreement is not about the lack of ethics and morality in social life. Everyone agrees on that. The question is how should one react in the face of such an ethical vacuum. The small- “|” liberals see themselves as courageously fighting to maintain a glimmer of ethical life within society. The incredibly pragmatic neo-tough conservatives condemn the soft liberals for being naive. Considering themselves very ‘ordinary’ despite their highprofile middle-class jobs (and in a way they are often right on this point), these conservative populists like to portray themselves, like John Howard, the Prime Minister they support, as incredibly in touch with ‘ordinary’ people (it is rumoured that they actually imagine themselves to have encountered such people in the streets from time to time). As such, they are particularly down on the small-“1” liberals, whom they see as being from privileged class backgrounds and unable to see the relationship between their pompous airs of tolerance, compassion and hospitality and their comfortable lifestyles. But it is not clear why the assertion that a certain ethical point of view is the product of middle-class comfort makes such a view less ethical. It is more ethical to be hospitable to needy people than not to be. It is more ethical not to be racist (that is, to consider a group of people as less ‘human’ in one way or another than you are) than to be one. It is also more ethical to be a racist and acknowledge it than to be one and deny it. The list is a long one ...
A narrow indoor hallway lined with small restaurant stalls, menus, posters, and string lights, with a person visible at the far end.
photo of people waiting outside of a building
an old analogue photo with two young people smiling, one riding a bicycle while the other stands behind with an arm around them on a quiet street.
poster of "when Marx meets Confucius"
screenshot: A few specific observations for your work A few things that might be useful for thinking about reactionary political discourse in Chinese digital culture specifically: The baizuo discourse is doing very heavy ideological work, because it lets Chinese reactionary speakers position themselves as critical of both Western liberalism and Chinese progressives in a single move, without having to develop a positive ideological program. They just need to identify their target as baizuo and the rest of the framing falls into place. This is structurally similar to how "woke" functions in American right discourse, but with the additional civilizational layer (the baizuo are betraying not just American but Chinese civilization by importing foreign moral frameworks).
screenshot of a Facebook video. someone films tourists and asks why they squat
Abstract Drawing on a range of regional expertise and perspectives from international relations, political economy, political theory, and sociology, this collective discussion makes the following contributions to research on global reactionary politics and discussions of decolonization. First, we argue that the erosion of the legitimacy of liberal orders renders the anti-colonial language available for authoritarian and conservative projects in both the Global South and North to articulate a selective rejection of universalism. While framing liberal universalism as imperialist, they remain embedded within neoliberal structures and embrace a market universalism in tandem with claims of cultural particularity. Secondly, the contributions explore a series of ironies, reversals, and convergences not only across regional divides, but also across conventional ideological boundaries. This includes conceptual affinities between the radical right’s emphasis on ontological difference and the nativist temptation within the history of anti-colonial nationalism, as well as the confluence between the radical conservatives, the postcolonial authoritarians, and a certain strand of decolonial discourse in their envisioning of a multipolar civilizational order. Finally, we suggest that for international political sociology, this urges us to deepen engagement with anti-colonial traditions that are radically incompatible with the far right and to center forms of vernacular anti-colonial theorizing from marginalized places.
The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the pub, and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt—your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Karl Marx
photo of a porcelain cup with the said quote: 从来如此，便对吗？
ad from headway_app: how to become well spoken about global politics