Special Issue
Global Intimacies: China and/in the Global South

In recent years, people all over the world have become ever more aware of being drawn into intimate — and unequal — relations with one another, whether through environmental crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, global economic commodity chains, violent conflicts, forced displacements, or political protests and social movements. This special issue features China’s so-called rising presence as one of the key nodes in these global intimacies. The essays by Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang, Sealing Cheng, and Wei Wei contribute new approaches to migrant intimacies across borders through their ethnographically rich analyses. Chen and Wang explore cross-border marriages and sex work between Taiwanese men and Mainland Chinese and southeast Asian women; Cheng investigates refugee marriages and the difficulties men from various African nations face in seeking asylum in Hong Kong; and Wei analyzes Mainland Chinese queer reproduction that uses transnational Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) to enable queer parents to have a genetic link with their children and to be more accepted in Chinese society. In his essay, Petrus Liu pushes us to move beyond the idea that a theory of gender construction traveled to China from the West and was wholly adopted there, instead demonstrating the complexities of gender theories in China in the age of the Beijing Consensus. Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland explore a broad range of artworks that critically reflect on China’s efforts to create a China-centered global trading network. Paul Amar offers a “deimperial queer analysis” of the all-time top-earning Chinese film, Wolf Warrior 2, illuminating how it both buttresses China’s extractive and militarized investments in African nations and manifests anti-imperialist and utopian impulses. Poems by Zhai Yongming and Xu Lizhi feature the gendered and sexualized precarity and violence of recent social transformations in China resulting from China’s intimate linkages with the global capitalist economy. Finally, Cai Yiping’s News and Views offers a nuanced engagement with the Chinese government’s formal proclamations on women’s rights.

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Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang
Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy:
Evidence from Taiwan’s Cross-Border Marriages
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Sealing Cheng
Choreography of Masculinity: The Pursuit of Marriage by African Men in Forced Displacement in Hong Kong
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Wei Wei
Queering the Rise of China: Gay Parenthood, Transnational ARTs, and Dislocated Reproductive Rights
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Petrus Liu
Thinking Gender in the Age of the Beijing Consensus
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Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland
Wandering Geographies: Aesthetic Practice along China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Art Essay)
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Paul Amar
Insurgent African Intimacies in Pandemic Times: Deimperial Queer Logics of China’s New Global Family in Wolf Warrior 2
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Cai Yiping
What Do Gender Equality and Women’s Rights Have to Do with China’s Global Engagement? (News and Views)
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Creative Writing
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Zhai Yongming
A Report on Underage Prostitutes (Poetry)

Xu Lizhi
I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron (Poetry)