positions politics editorial group, Author at positions politics

November 12, 2025

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih and Inaya Rakhmani, Articulation and Re-articulation of Grassroots Grievances in Indonesia, 2025

Introduction¹

In August 2025, a dramatic wave of demonstrations swept multiple cities in Indonesia. Originating in Jakarta and its surrounding areas, it quickly spread to dozens of other cities across the archipelago. Throughout the month, social media was flooded with visuals of groups that rarely mobilized together; from university students in colored alma mater jackets, ride-hailing motorbike drivers, and mothers donning hijabs, clutching brooms and Indonesian flags. They joined forces in response to announcements made two weeks earlier about a housing allowance amounting to IDR 50 million (approximately USD 3,000) per month that members of parliament were set to receive. This figure is close to ten times Jakarta’s minimum wage of IDR 5.4 million (USD 320). The announcement came out at a time when people were questioning the government’s ability to create secure jobs and deliver basic services.

This commentary situates the late August 2025 grassroots mobilization as a continuation of a series of protests that erupted against democratic de-legitimacy and the deepening of inequalities in the past decades. We argue that as a whole, this series of protests represent a momentary coherent articulation of grassroot grievances where scattered, specific discontents among diverse groups were aligned through collective expressions that provided a shared framework for understanding systemic problems. Yet, as we will show, these articulations ‘from below’ have repeatedly been re-articulated by competing oligarchic factions to advance their own interests through strategies of co-optation, symbolic concessions, and the re-appropriation of movement languages that ended up fracturing the coherence of emerging cross-class coalitions.

We reflect on this recurring pattern of articulation and re-articulation, during which political expressions of solidarity organically form and reach temporary coherence only to be swiftly rearticulated. Rather than consolidating into a productive force capable of sustaining opposition to the hegemonic social order, each wave of protest becomes a fleeting moment of cross-class alignment of short-term interests with little capacity to coalesce and give expression to long-term politics.

We situate this pattern of articulation and re-articulation within the main contradictions of Indonesia’s democracy, where democratization (1998 to 2024) has shaped competitive political terrains while leaving intact the oligarchic social formation consolidated under thirty decades of authoritarianism (1965-1998). Factions within this social formation struggle to concentrate wealth and power within their respective networks, all the while neutralizing oppositional forces. Meanwhile, grassroots grievances are expressed in disjointed ways, shaped by historically constituted processes that inform organizations’ identities, interests, and capacities as well as the divergent ways political subjects understand their own specific struggles. Within these contradictions, articulations of grievances are often re-articulated in ways that benefit the interests of competing elite projects rather than the interests of broad-based counter-hegemonic forces.

Oligarchic Democracy and Inequality

We situate the series of protests that took place in the past decades as a response to the democracy setback in Indonesia. The democracy setback was accompanied by the formation of President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s (2014-2024) political dynasty. It paved the way for the victory of authoritarian President Suharto’s former son-in-law Prabowo Subianto and Jokowi’s son Gibran Rakamuning in the 2024 Presidential Elections, which arguably marks the end of democratization. These processes transformed and entrenched the oligarchic social formation within a political economic system where competitive elections take place and electoral institutions exist.

These transformations intersect with local conditions of uneven development that have fostered the rise of populist leaders in the past decades. This can be seen in the likes of Ridwan Kamil (Bandung, West Java), whose persona was built around being a people-oriented technocrat; as well as Tri Rismaharini (Surabaya, East Java), who is known as a motherly defender of the poor against bureaucratic inertia. But none rose as influentially as Jokowi, “the man of the people,” during his tenure as mayor of Solo, Central Java in 2005, continuing through his victory in the Jakarta gubernatorial elections in 2012, and culminating in his Presidency in 2014. In his final term, this ”man of the people” persona accompanied his extensive infrastructure development and welfare distribution programs. These programs masked his government’s reliance on bond-financed growth that funneled debt through state-owned banks to underperforming state-owned enterprises.

Populist policies and programs have served as vehicles through which meanings associated with uneven development are re-articulated by elites—even at the local level—in their formation of oligarchic social relations. Rather than addressing the structural roots of inequalities that produce crises and discontents, populist projects mainly protect elite interests.

At the same time, many citizens must survive on low and unstable incomes, without adequate access to social protection. New regulations have exacerbated citizens’ vulnerability. One example is Law No. 20/2020 (the Omnibus Law), which encourages the use of flexible labour arrangements to attract foreign investors. New forms of precarity, such as those tied to digitalization and the gig economy have normalized the deprivation of workers’ of basic rights. Dangerous forms of work have become the backbone of state-backed projects, while facilitating rent-seeking arrangements that serve entrenched elite networks.

Subianto’s presidency has introduced several populist policies including “Free Healthy Meals” for students and vulnerable groups, and “Red and White Cooperatives” to promote local community economic empowerment. Nonetheless, income stagnation, especially among the middle class, persists.

The Temporary Coherence

Against this backdrop, the announcement of parliamentary members’ exorbitant allowances in mid-August 2025 exposed the stark gap between the lavish lifestyle of government officials and the shrinking resources devoted to the welfare of citizens. The killing of Affan Kurniawan, a ride-hailing motorbike (ojol) driver by police during a demonstration, followed by further incidents of killings and arrests of citizens and the banning of social media accounts, intensified public outrage over state coercion. This resulted in a temporary moment of popular coherence, where various groups of people managed to piece together fragments of understanding into collective understanding of systemic problems.

In a brief moment of unity, thousands ojol drivers participated in a convoy that escorted Affan to his funeral and chanted demands for justice over the incident. Student groups forged solidarity with ojol drivers to oppose state brutality. Ojol drivers, in turn, joined students and other collectives in voicing discontent over job scarcity, institutional distrust, as well as concerns about police and military power.

The colors “brave pink” and “hero green” emerged across digital platforms (TikTok, Instagram, and X) and street protests (banners, posters). “Brave pink” represents the veil worn by Ibu Anna, an ordinary mother, whose image confronting a police barricade with a stick and an Indonesian flag during a demonstration in front of the parliamentary building, was celebrated online. Meanwhile, “hero green” refers to the helmet worn by the fallen ojol driver Affan, whose death was mourned across online spaces through the phrase dilindas (run over) and ditindas (oppressed).

A group of social media influencers summarized the initially scattered demands of individual activists and academics and students, labour, pro-democracy, women groups into the 17+8 demands. Pros and cons leading up to the formation of the demands reflect the contested ways through which grievances are articulated. The ultimate mobilization of the 17+8 demands as the movement’s slogan facilitated the absorption of the demands of previous protests. This extended the demands of previous protests across diverse groups, thus reflecting a shared framework that helped define commonly shared discontents.

For instance, demands 1, 12-14, all directed toward the president and the military, call for an end to the military’s involvement in civil security and civilian affairs. This echoes concerns over the reassertion of military power in post-authoritarian Indonesia, as articulated, among others, through large-scale protests that took place in March 2025. Demands 15-17 call on the ministries of manpower, finance, and others to ensure decent wages, to prevent mass layoffs and to initiate dialogue with unions. Such demands, along with concerns over the return of military dominance, show continuity with demands that emerged among labour unions and civil society organizations in previous protests, including those against the implementation of the Omnibus Law in 2020.

Re-Articulation of Grievances

Nonetheless, radical theorists remind us that meaning is not inherent but is constructed by linking ideas and social practices in unstable ways. The meanings and understandings of grievances are continually redefined from “below” — across grassroots activists and organizations — and from “above” — by elite networks — within the oligarchic social formation. While this allows diverse movement groups to temporarily coalesce around a coherent articulation, oligarchic factions can diffuse and reorient these articulations to advance their own interests.

We thus witness how expressions of grievances against state coercion and deepening inequality by app-based motorbike drivers, student and other groups were swiftly reappropriated through populist gestures. Subianto himself paid visits to Affan’s family, while publicly announcing donations to compensate for their loss. Meanwhile, ride hailing companies pledged financial support for Affan’s family. Across the region, police forces took part in solat gaib (Islamic prayers for the deceased). Heads of police offices set meetings with protesters, promising justice for the fallen driver. These gestures demonstrate elite re-appropriations of grievances in ways that are intended to pacify the public’s anger, albeit without addressing structural inequalities and the very systemic violence that triggered the protests in the first place.

The deployment of populist programs helps to coop shared grievances. In September 2025, the government announced a 50 percent discount on the state-sponsored employment insurance (BPJS Ketenagakerjaan) premium, with ojol drivers designated as the main target. In October 2025, the Ojol Kamtibmas program — translated roughly as Ojol Drivers For Public Security — was launched, recruiting hundreds of thousands of drivers as civilian auxiliaries to partner with ride-hailing companies and police forces in crime reporting and prevention efforts.

Through the BPJS premium discount, workers’ discontents are absorbed and rearticulated into renewed legitimacy for the state. Meanwhile, the Ojol Kamtibmas program rearticulates workers’ expression of political solidarity against state brutality into support for the police amid ongoing contests among elite networks backed by the police and the military that have intensified in post-authoritarian Indonesia. As major trade unions continue to mobilize against the military’s involvement in civilian life following amendments to the military law that triggered protests in March 2025, the positioning of some ojol drivers as police supporters further strained the already fragile relations between non-unionized gig workers and organized labour. It also sharpened divisions among those aligning themselves against the state’s coercive power, as manifested in the August 2025 protests.

The articulation and the rearticulation of grassroot grievances appears as a recurring pattern, from the 2020 anti-Omnibus Law protests to the March and August 2025 mobilizations. Returning to the 2020 protests, while they were initially sustained by a broad coalition of labour unions, gig workers, students, and youth groups, signs of fragmentation surfaced when several labour unions showed support for the law under the promise of tripartite negotiations despite its detrimental effects on labour and environmental protections. The Constitutional Court’s 2023 ruling to exclude employment regulations from the Job Creation Law likewise reflected intra-elite maneuvering, as legal concessions were granted only after unions leaders pledged support for the president.

Conclusion

Grassroots grievances often produce waves of mobilization in which diverse groups temporarily find shared frameworks to make sense of their marginalization. Yet contestations over the meanings attached to these grievances take place in contexts where marginalized groups, activists and organizations articulate the grievances in disjointed ways, shaped by varied material circumstances. Meanwhile, the populist reorientation of such grievances by elite networks help to consolidate oligarchic social formations.

This leaves us with the task of unpacking how political subjects do not confront structural problems in the abstract but through localized everyday practices within historically shaped spaces and temporalities. Notwithstanding political subjects’ positions within nexuses of multiple, often contradictory forces and relations, it is crucial to trace how new links emerge while old ones dissolve amid moments of coherent and incoherent articulations. The 2025 mobilizations exemplify how fleeting coherence emerged from disjointed articulations of grievances. They materialized through evolving connections that unfolded beyond the mobilizations themselves, within the everyday, historically shaped lives of political subjects.

Diatyka Widya Permata Yasih is assistant professor at Department of Sociology and co-director of Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia (ARC UI). Inaya Rakhmani is associate professor at Department of Communication and inaugural director of ARC UI.

November 5, 2025

Patricia Thornton, Project 2025: China and the United States

On October 2^nd, 2025, Donald Trump dispelled any lingering doubts about his relationship to the überconservative policy positions laid out by the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” Rowing back on his oft-repeated insistence that he “had no idea who [was] behind” the more than 900 page document, Trump announced on his social media platform that he would be meeting with “Russ Vought, he of PROJECT 2025 fame, to determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut, and whether or not those cuts will be temporary or permanent.” The president’s announcement marked a sudden reversal: with the US government shutdown (now in its fourth week and counting), Trump not only openly embraced the same conservative blueprint that he desperately tried to distance himself from during his 2024 campaign, but has furthermore staffed his administration with several of the authors who penned the 900-plus page Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. As of mid-October 2025, the independent online “Project 2025 Tracker” estimates that the second Trump administration has already implemented a stunning 48% of the Mandate’s policy proposals, only seven months after his inauguration.

Chinese media have taken notice. In an oft-cited South China Morning Post article, Orange Wang noted that China was mentioned 483 times (400 times more often than Russia, the next most-oft cited country) in the Mandate, in a manner that she described as “shockingly malicious,” and warned that this was certainly “bad news for Beijing.” She noted that Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts had minced no words in his scathing forward to the Mandate:

“Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe… American factories have closed. Jobs have been outsourced. Our manufacturing economy has been financialised. And all along, the corporations profiting failed to export our values of human rights and freedom; rather, they imported China’s anti-American values into their C-suites.”

Reviving incendiary political language that was rarely seen since the 1980s in the post-Mao era, “China,” Roberts repeated, “is a totalitarian enemy of the United States, not a strategic partner or fair competitor.” (11-12) Meanwhile, in the widely-read Shanghai-based Observer (观察者), Lu Yicheng summed up the new domestic scholarly consensus in the PRC last July: “China needs to be fully prepared” (中国需做好充分准备).

The bulk of the Heritage Foundation’s most incendiary claims about US-China relations in the Mandate are historical. For example, in his chapter entitled “The Case for Free Trade,” Counsellor to the President, Peter Navarro warns of “the broader existential threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in its quest for global dominance,” calling out a pattern of what he sees as “the CCP’s continued economic aggression” against the US, beginning with “tools such as tariffs, nontariff barriers, dumping, counterfeiting and piracy, and currency manipulation.” (798) In addition to benefitting from what Navarro identifies as “unfair and nonreciprocal trade institutionalized in WTO rules” that favour less developed economies, “Communist China” and India are accused of having blocked “American exporters from selling goods at competitive prices to more than one-third of the world’s population” in recent years (770). Navarro enumerates “more than 50 types of policy aggression institutionalized by the CCP across six different categories,” including such market-protective measures as “high tariffs and nontariff barriers, currency manipulation, a heavy reliance on sweatshop labour and pollution havens, the dumping of unfairly subsidized exports, and widespread counterfeiting and piracy.” (783) Other forms of so-called economic aggression include employing a “predatory ‘debt trap’ model of economic development aid…to developing countries” (783); “technology-forcing policies… to force the transfer of the West’s technologies to Communist Chinese soil” (784): and employing “technology-seeking, state-financed Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)” worth close to $20 billion in cutting-edge US firms (786). “Viewed as whole,” Navarro charges, “the extent of Communist China’s aggression is breathtaking.” (783)

Of course, prior to the second Trump administration, such accusations were more commonly levelled against the US in its “quest for global dominance” under the Washington Consensus model of neoliberal globalization. Nobel Laureate and former chief economist for the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, for example, richly documented how the US historically shaped the global economic order to serve its own corporate interests, and in a way that was fundamentally “unfair to the poorest countries of the world.” Robert Wade and Frank Veneroso highlighted a “Wall Street-Treasury-IMF Complex” managing the Asian Financial Crisis that instituted “massive devaluations, IMF-pushed financial liberalization, and IMF-facilitated recovery…[that precipitated] the biggest peacetime transfer of assets from domestic to foreign owners in the past fifty years anywhere in the world, dwarfing the transfers from domestic to US owners that occurred Latin America in the 1980s.” More recently, in December 2022, WTO panels ruled that the US’s steel and aluminium tariffs, allegedly imposed on the grounds of “national security,” violated WTO rules in disputes with four WTO member countries– China, Norway, Turkey and Switzerland. As Richard Falk recently observed, the UN Security Council further institutionalized these mechanisms of economic inequality by exempting the five permanent members from compliance with international law, bolstering double standards through “the global projection of hypocrisy.”

And yet, such polarized projections and accusations by political elites is hardly a new phenomenon. In “The Great Moving Right Show,” Stuart Hall’s 1979 essay on the rise of Thatcherism, he defined authoritarian populism as an exceptional form of the capitalist state. Unlike classical fascism, authoritarian populism largely retained the formal representative institutions of democratic governance by manufacturing active popular consent even as it dismantled the link between class and party in favour of “an alternative articulation: government-to-people.” (17) The “objective contradiction” underlying Thatcher’s authoritarian populist rhetoric embracing “social market values,” Hall argued, emphasized enterprising individualism as a collective value intrinsic to the British national character (17). Although hers was an elite project that harnessed state power from ‘above’ to renegotiate established relationships between the state, capital and labour in the UK, the populist element mobilized grassroots consent “from below” based on the construction of a series of ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ binaries. The “well designed folk-devil” of the “welfare scavenger” was thus discursively pitted against “over-taxed individual, enervated by welfare coddling, his initiative sapped by handouts by the state.” (17) Hardworking Brits with socially conservative values were arrayed in Thatcher-era political discourse against a range of allegedly threatening forces—including young Black men, the gay rights activists and trade unionists—triggering tabloid-fuelled moral panics focussing on “the enemy within.”

Hall’s enabling concept of articulation understood discourses neither as free-floating systems of meaning unconnected to social forces, nor as anchored positions in the relationship between socioeconomic classes and ideology. Instead, he envisioned them as the result of a process through which subjects make sense of the conditions that they encounter by reworking socially produced ideas to render their conditions intelligible:

In his words: “The theory of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects… [It] asks how an ideology discovers its subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it… without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position” (53). This version of ideological process helps explain Thatcherism’s appeals.

Thatcher’s articulation of a meritocratic, competitive individualism was linked to the global economic transition already underway, offering a discursive narrative that conveniently facilitated political elites in shifting away from state managed economies with a suite of policies designed to address the “crisis” of the 1970s. As is well known, these policy responses matured into full-scale assaults on the power of organized labor, the removal of controls on the international movement of capital, and a reliance on successive debt crises to prise open national economies across the global South. As articulated by the British prime minister, neoliberalism flagged an entirely new reality in which, famously, there is no such thing as ‘society’, because the only conceivable social ideal moving forward involved liberated individuals meeting and competing in unfettered global markets. Her vision of neoliberal globalization was facilitated by new developments in information technology that made possible vast transnational supply chains, and new forms of competition enabled by capacious differences in living standards and average wages between developed and developing nations that broke the backs of organized labour and tore through the sinews of the welfare state.

According to historian Gary Grestle, we are now living in an interregnum in which the political order of neoliberalism has been eclipsed, yet before a new political economic order has fully taken shape, but nonetheless one in which defensive protectionist sentiments are profoundly shaping conversations about the future of China-US economic relations. In contrast to the Thatcherite (and Reaganite) state as handmaiden to “self-correcting” markets at the behest of a putatively entrepreneurial citizenry, in the UK we are witnessing the rise of what the current Chancellor has dubbed “securonomics” that takes as its object putatively imperilled national populations requiring protection from external forces. Emerging “from the ashes of the old hyper-globalisation” promoted by the failed Washington Consensus, Rachel Reeves told the Peterson Institute in Washington DC, “securonomics” promises “more active state” apparatus “focus[ed] on the economic security of the nation,” capable of “securing the finances of working people” who are allegedly demanding protection from bad-faith external actors intent on “gaming the system” (emphasis added). Likewise, the Trump 2.0 government, according to Peter Navarro’s contribution to the Mandate, takes the helm of “the globe’s biggest trade loser and victim of unfair, unbalanced, and non-reciprocal trade,” and vows to reverse “the systematic exploitation of American farmers, ranchers, manufacturers, and workers through higher tariffs institutionalized by [granting] MFN [status to China]” (766, 770). This, once again, seems to flag a future of more robust state action in protecting domestic markets and domestic market interests from external bad-faith actors, and, nominally, as in the UK, “securing the finances of working people.”

However, in the PRC, which of course never subscribed to the Washington Consensus, Party leaders are likewise signaling the advent of their own form of “securonomics” against bad-faith external actors and forces. The near-obsessive emphasis in official political discourse on the importance of improving one’s suzhi—a term that, according to Yan Hairong, once marked “a sense and sensibility of the self’s value in the market economy” in a neoliberalising post-Mao China— is rapidly being replaced by official warnings of the need to “adapt to the new normal” (适应新常态) of slower economic growth. Popular discourses reflect widespread worries about the dangers of involution (内卷) in China’s hypercompetitive labour market, as well as the need for domestic companies and working people to be buffeted from the vagaries of increasingly unpredictable and hostile global forces. The May 2025 White Paper on China’s National Security for a New Era (新时代的中国国家安全) implicitly gestures at—without directly naming– the Trump administration:

“Economic globalization is facing headwinds. Unilateralism and protectionism are intensifying, hindering the multilateral trading system. Actions like ‘building walls and erecting barriers,’ and ‘decoupling and disrupting supply chains,’ are undermining the security of global industrial and supply chains. Certain countries are imposing tariffs on others for non-economic reasons, disrupting the global economic order. The momentum for world economic growth remains insufficient, international economic circulation is encountering obstacles, and the global development gap is widening.”

(经济全球化遭遇逆流。单边主义、保护主义加剧，多边贸易体制受阻，“筑墙设垒”、“脱钩断链”等破坏全球产业链供应链安全。个别国家以非经济理由对他国加征关税，扰乱全球经济秩序。世界经济增长动能不足，国际经济循环遭遇阻碍，全球发展鸿沟拉大。)

As a preview of this 2025 position, in a 2014 speech to the Central National Security Commission (中央国家安全委员会), Xi established his “comprehensive national security” concept (总体国家安全观 ) which “takes economic security as the base” (以经济安全为基础), goes so far as to insist that “development is the foundation of security, and security is the precondition for development” (发展是安全的基础，安全是发展的条件). The May 2025 White Paper addresses, first, the need to “maintain the Party’s ruling status and the socialist system” (维护党的执政地位和社会主义制度) and, secondarily, the need to “improve the people’s sense of benefit, happiness, and security” (提高人民群众获得感、幸福感、安全感) in the face of “profound shifts” (深刻变化) in contemporary Chinese society that are impacting “people’s security needs, [which] are becoming stronger and more diverse” (人民群众的安全需求更趋强烈、更加多元). And, in the newly released Communiqué of the Fourth Plenary (which typically deals with matters relating to Party-building, law, and governance issues), official formulations relating to “protection” (保护), “safeguarding” (维护) and “indemnification” (保障) appear a noteworthy fourteen times, perhaps underscoring a new vigilance against the intrusion of potentially destabilizing foreign political orders.

As the expression of post-neoliberal imaginaries sees Trump’s Washington turning increasingly inward, treating opponents and immigrants as security threats while sniping at allies and trading partners alike, the US-China rivalry has not merely intensified: it has fundamentally changed character. It is becoming less coalition-based and more unilateral, more ideological, and infinitely more brittle. It was only eighteen years ago that Niall Ferguson and Morize Schularick announced the “The End of Chimerica,” “a world economic order that combined Chinese export-led development with US over-consumption on the basis of a financial marriage between the world’s sole superpower and its most likely future rival.” Trump’s acceleration of decoupling and embrace of what The Nation’s Jake Werner has christened “permanent belligerence” is eroding the very assets—alliances, talent inflows, bureaucratic competence, and international legitimacy– that would facilitate future constructive engagement.

Editorial Note: This is revised from a talk delivered at the Verso Conference on China, convened in London on 2-4 October, 2025.

Patricia Thornton is Professor in Politics of China, Department of Politics, Oxford University

November 3, 2025

Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Morals and Minorities: Scholarly Publishing and the Lessons of Ramseyer

Editorial Note: This is a summary introduction to a longer essay Prof. Morris-Suzuki wrote in rebuttal to Harvard’s Mark Ramseyer. She has embedded hyperlinks to her original essay.

The international order, globally and in East Asia, is in the midst of a profound and unpredictable transformation. Worldwide, economic instability is increasing and the gulf between rich and poor is deepening. In this context, and in the context of the rapid evolution of online media, waves of nationalism and xenophobia are amplifying around the world. Japan is no exception to this trend, as evident from the rhetoric surrounding the advent of the new Japanese Prime Minister, Takaichi Sanae, who is known for her sometimes inflammatory statements about foreigners in Japan. This wave of jingoism has a long back-story. For thirty years, far right nationalist groups – some with links to fringe religions and/or influential business circles – have been pushing agendas which include historical denialism of some key events of the Asia Pacific War and hostile rhetoric towards foreign or minority groups in Japan.

A more recent participant in these inflamed wars of words is Harvard professor of law and economics J. Mark Ramseyer, whose work until 2019 had focused on the Japanese legal system and corporate law. In the past five or more years, he has become closely engaged with members of Japanese far-right study groups, and has focused much of his energy on championing their views: particularly on disseminating negative stereotypes of minority and vulnerable communities. These communities include the former ‘Comfort Women’, Koreans in Japan [Zainichi Koreans], members of the Hisabetsu Buraku community, Okinawans and most recently Ainu and indigenous minorities more generally. (The links provided here provide brief outlines of the background of each group).

Ramseyer’s approach to these issues typically involves writing papers which begin with a ‘theoretical’ discussion, drawing on an eclectic mix of economic and other theories. This provides an entry into ‘case studies’ of particular minorities or other marginalised social groups: case studies that repeatedly cherry-pick or misquote source material to produce sweeping and demeaning depictions of the target group. The many hundreds of thousands of Koreans in Japan, for example, are dismissed en masse as a ‘dysfunctional’ community with low social capital, high welfare dependence, low education levels and high crime rates: a group hijacked by ‘opportunistic fringe-left entrepreneurs’, who create ‘enormous ethnic tension within Japan’. ‘Comfort women’, we are told, were simply paid prostitutes. Members of the Buraku social minority are re-defined (in contradiction to the existing scholarly literature) as the descendants of ‘a loose collection of unusually self-destructive poor farmers’ with ‘dysfunctional norms’, who have brought social exclusion on themselves by ‘their involvement in crime and their disintegrating family structures’. Okinawan society, too, is ’dysfunctional’ (Ramseyer’s favourite epithet), with families ‘close to collapse’ and people collecting money from the government through ‘nuisance claims’. Most recently, Ainu are described (along with other indigenous societies) as having been people who ‘relentlessly fight each other over resources and women’. After failing to adjust to modernity, Ramseyer tells us, the Ainu have simply ‘disappeared’ from Japan.

I invite readers to imagine the reaction of academic journals if the targets of these articles, described with the same terminology, had been African Americans, Indigenous Americans or other US minority groups. Ramseyer, however, succeeded in having his articles on the ‘comfort women’, Hisabetsu Buraku and Koreans in Japan published in specialised journals in the field of law and economics, where they appear to have been peer reviewed by people without expertise in the relevant field of Japanese social history. Ramseyer’s Ainu paper has been uploaded on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), but has not yet been published any peer reviewed journal – it is unclear whether it has been submitted to one. It may be best to wait until a peer reviewed version appears before downloading, reading and seeking to critique it.

It is worth noting that Ramseyer offers no evidence of having attempted to engage with any members of the groups whom he targets. Why a professor from a prestigious academic institution should choose to spend the final years of his career launching such verbal attacks on groups with whom he seems to have no meaningful connection may always remain a mystery. But the Ramseyer case also raises much wider issues of integrity in scholarly publishing: issues which become increasingly important in an age of declining funding for higher education, the massive online circulation of ‘fake news’, and impassioned and often confused debates over hate speech in a world of free speech.

Articles like Ramseyer’s create a profound dilemma for scholars who have devoted years of their life to studying the histories of the groups whom the Harvard professor targets. Will an effort to expose the many flaws in his writings simply draw more attention to the negative stereotypes that he recycles, thus giving them greater traction? Will ignoring his papers allow misleading information to amplify unchecked? How can we counter the vicious cycle of inter-communal hostility that negative stereotyping provokes? How can we bring academic debate back to the realm of evidence-based research and respect for conflicting opinions, when faced with work riddled with factual errors and couched in pejorative language?

When Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ article appeared, many scholars in Japan, the US and elsewhere devoted great time and effort to highlighting its mass of historical inaccuracies. Some also sought a retraction from International Review of Law and Economics, which published the article. The journal conducted a two-year review, published two rebuttal articles, and chose to retain a statement of concern about possible inaccuracies the article’s content; but the editors did not withdraw the article, stating that they were unable to find evidence of ‘clear data fabrication or falsification’ by the author. A number of leading scholars on the history of the Hisabetsu Buraku community contacted the Review of Law and Economics, which had published one of Ramseyer’s articles on this subject, asking the journal to retract the article, but without success. It is worth noting, though, that other publishers have taken a different approach. Cambridge University Press, for example, decided to publish a chapter by Ramseyer on the privatization of the Japanese police in its Cambridge Handbook of Privatization only after all the (highly problematic) material on minority groups originally contained in the text had been removed.

The response of the European Journal of Law and Economics to criticisms of Ramseyer’s article on Koreans in Japan is discussed in detail in my paper ‘Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly Publishing: A response to Professor J. Mark Ramseyer’, now available on SSRN. As I explain in this paper, I originally wrote this in 2021 as a rebuttal article which I submitted to the journal, but I later withdrew it from publication for reasons explained in this (somewhat updated) SSRN version. Ramseyer’s article on Zainichi Koreans remains in print in the journal with only a very small portion of its mistakes corrected by a subsequent erratum.

My reason for making an updated version of my rebuttal article publicly available now is that, unchecked (or encouraged?) by previous experience, Ramseyer continues to publish papers on minority issues replicating all the flaws pointed out by careful scholarly critiques of his earlier articles. Like others, I am deeply concerned that his work, as well as being full of factual inaccuracies, may be aggravating the prejudice and hostility experienced by minorities and marginalised groups in Japan.

Writing critiques of Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’, Zainichi Korean and Hisabetsu Buraku articles is a time-consuming process which takes scholars away from other important (and much more enjoyable) work. It involves spending many hours tracking down often obscure documents which have been cherry-picked or misquoted. It is, as I have also discovered, an emotionally draining and exhausting process. For those who care about this history and engage with the social groups involved, it is profoundly distressing to repeatedly read demeaning and ill-informed verbal abuse which many of us had hoped were disappearing from public discourse. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) is supposed to be an international body dedicated to debating and advancing publication ethics, but appeals to COPE to provide guidance on Ramseyer’s ‘comfort women’ and Zainichi Korean articles resulted in their essentially leaving the judgment to the discretion of individual journal editors. A request to COPE to look at the Ramseyer case as a whole produced no response.

As I argue in my SSRN paper, it is now crucially important for those concerned with academic ethics and those engaged in scholarly publishing to take a much more serious look at the problems illustrated by the Ramseyer case – problems which are likely to become all the more severe as nationalist tensions and conflicts rise, and as fake news proliferates further in East Asia and worldwide. The large publishing corporations who own and profit from most peer reviewed journals have a moral responsibility to address this issue; so too does COPE. In a world of free speech, there must be room for widely varying views on contentious histories, including the histories of marginalised communities. But there should be no room for repeated misquotation and skewing of source material, nor for the propagation of offensive ethnic stereotypes and the litany of other problems that I outline in my paper ‘Koreans in Japan and Ethics in Scholarly Publishing’.

Tessa Morris-Suzuki is Professor Emerita, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University

October 16, 2025October 16, 2025

Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen, Vietnam and China 2022-2025

Diplomatic developments

The year of 2024-25 has been politically intensive, historic, and ironic to Vietnam domestically and internationally. On April 2^nd this year, when the US President, Donald Trump, announced a 46% tariff rate on major Vietnamese export products, Vietnam became the only country which he described as follows: “Great negotiators, great people! They like me, I like them. The problem is they charge us 90%. We’re going to charge them 46% tariffs.” Shortly afterwards, Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade policy advisor, came out in a televised interview with Fox News denouncing Vietnam as being “essentially a Chinese colony” which was “ripping and cheating us off” through its $125 billion trade surplus with the US.

Although the Vietnamese government had expected to be hit by Trump’s unilateral and expanded trade war during his second presidential term, a tariff rate as high as 46% sent shockwaves throughout the country. This shock was partly rooted in how Trump’s first presidential term had become a source of rocketing economic optimism in Vietnam and “Trump-mania,” as characterised by widespread local admiration for Trump, his oligarchic values, and his containment policies against China.

The initial shocks felt from Trump’s tariff war on Vietnam, as part of an escalated proxy war with China, disclosed a sense of local self-denial and called for a return to sanity and clarity. Public sentiments towards the tariffs have been dominated by disbelief, anger, and disappointment. Official and popular memories of the Vietnam War and revolutionary wartime nationalism have continued to rise ever since. An academic friend of mine, who researches Vietnamese memories of US chemical warfare and South Korean war crimes during the Vietnam War, expressed his rage on social media: “After waging a war on Vietnamese war memories, they are now waging another war against Vietnam 50 years later.”

Only five days after Trump launched his tariff war, the first country that the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, visited in 2025 was Vietnam. At the airport in Hanoi, Xi was received by Vietnam’s president, Lương Cường, and the Standing Secretary of the Secretariat of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) and Vietnam’s anti-corruption tsar, Trần Cẩm Tú. No such top-level airport reception of any Chinese leader had been given by Vietnam since 1991, the year when the China-Vietnam rapprochement took place amid the collapse of the Soviet Union. 1991 was also when Vietnam felt most vulnerable in the world and sought closer ties with China: when Vietnam proposed to China to resume an ideological alliance to salvage socialist internationalism, China rejected it.

The top-level airport reception alone signalled that Vietnam is refusing US pressures to fundamentally turn away from China. In fact, similar dynamics already played out in 2023-24, when Vietnam was the only country in the world to receive the leaders of the US, China, and Russia. When Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, visited Vietnam in September 2023, the US and Vietnam made the historic move to upgrade their relationship to a ‘Comprehensive Strategic Partnership’ (CSP). Excluding Laos, Cambodia, and Cuba, which remain Vietnam’s most important former ideological Cold War allies and which enjoy “a special relationship” category only reserved by Vietnam for these countries, the CSP is the highest-level categorisation of Vietnam’s hierarchy of diplomatic relations with the world. Previously, in 2021, when then-US Vice President, Kamala Harris visited, Vietnam initially rejected US pressures to upgrade their relationship to CSP; by 2023, the relationship had been upgraded.

To dilute the political significance of the US-Vietnam diplomatic upgrade, Vietnam also upgraded their ties with South Korea, Japan, and Australia to CSP in the same year. In the past, the CSP had only been enjoyed by China, Russia, and India. Therefore, its expansion represented Vietnam’s premature break with high-level diplomacy confined to its former ideological Cold War allies. Nonetheless, shortly after Biden’s departure from Vietnam, Xi visited in December 2023. During Xi’s visit, Vietnam at last agreed to embrace China’s “Community with a shared future of humanity” following years of sustained Chinese pressure. However, in Vietnamese declarations, Vietnam continues to subtly refuse evoking the Chinese proposal’s other name, “Community of common destiny for mankind”.

Cautious revolutionary re-kindling?

The fact that Trump launched a tariff war on Vietnam in April this year, the month of the 50^th anniversary since the end of the Vietnam War, served both as a historic and ironic reality for many Vietnamese. Coincidentally, before and after Trump’s tariff war was launched, Vietnam had already made many unprecedented moves in its political and military diplomacy towards its former Cold War allies.

In August 2024, when Vietnam’s new communist party general secretary, Tô Lâm, visited China, he did something that had not been done by any Vietnamese leader since 1979: in Beijing, he paid respect at the Mao Mausoleum, while in Guangzhou, he paid respect at several former headquarters, bases, and memorials where many of the first generation of Vietnamese communist and patriotic revolutionaries, including Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969) and Phạm Hồng Thái (1896–1924), operated or were sacrificed. This was a rare and open recognition of China as an indispensable political and geographical rear base to Vietnam’s 20^th century revolutions. At the same time, in February this year, Tô Lâm became the first ever Vietnamese communist party general secretary to pay respect at the Vị Xuyên Martyrs’ Cemetery, where around 2,000 Vietnamese soldiers from the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979-1989) are buried.

On April 30^th this year, the date of the 50^th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) marched for the first time ever in Ho Chi Minh City alongside the armies of Laos and Cambodia as part of Vietnam’s military parade for the occasion. Ahead of these celebrations, state media disclosed to the Vietnamese public for the first time ever the extent of past Chinese assistance during the Vietnam War, including the presence of over 300,000 Chinese military personnel in North Vietnam. Although Vietnam’s recognition of past Chinese assistance has been a standard diplomatic protocol since 1991, the move to disclose a specific number of Chinese military personnel present during the Vietnam War was unprecedented.

On September 2^nd this year, when Vietnam celebrated the 80^th anniversary of its independence from Japanese and French rule, the PLA marched once again in Vietnam’s largest-ever military parade in Ba Đình Square in Hanoi, alongside the armies of Russia, Laos, and Cambodia. On this occasion, Vietnam’s Ministry of Defence also inaugurated the construction of a 3,000 square-meter park inside Vietnam’s new Military History Museum, commemorating past advisors and volunteer soldiers from the USSR, China, Cuba, Laos, and Cambodia. This park project had been “urgently” requested by Vietnam’s defence minister, state media reported.

These moves would have been impossible only a decade ago, when official and popular Vietnamese nationalism together openly targeted China. Back then, the competition between the party-state and discourses of popular Vietnamese nationalism, once shaped by liberal nationalist dissidents, intellectuals, and civil society, was about who stood for the most ferocious “anti-China patriotism”. Therefore, these latest moves signalled the Party’s increasing but complex internationalization of its official historiography of the Vietnam War, in which past contributions by other communist states, especially China, have become more openly and widely acknowledged. This also shows how the Party has become more confident in controlling popular anti-China nationalism and quelling historical narratives that challenge its official historiography of its revolution and wars. However, due to the lingering memories and legacies of the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979-1989), any official recognition of past Chinese contributions to Vietnam’s reunification and its politics remains a sensitive aspect of the Party’s official historiography and ruling legitimacy.

Intra-party line struggles

Are these diplomatic shifts purely driven by external pressures from great powers? Many are already familiar with the historical and contemporary tensions between China and Vietnam on a wide range of issues. I would therefore like to dedicate some attention to the role of Vietnam’s domestic politics in recent years behind recent diplomacy.

In 2024, in the months before and after the passing of the late communist party secretary, Nguyễn Phú Trọng (1944-2024), a dramatic power struggle took place: since the 13^th CPV national party congress in 2021, six members of the original 18-member Politburo, the highest-level political body in Vietnam, have been purged, with four members purged only months before the passing of Nguyễn Phú Trọng. Two of them alone were incumbent presidents purged within a year. Many of the purged members were close to Nguyễn Phú Trọng.

While Nguyễn Phú Trọng passionately advocated for Vietnam’s “Path towards socialism”, Tô Lâm, upon assuming the CPV leadership from August 2024, has rapidly replaced Trọng’s doctrine with his own slogan of Vietnam’s “Era of national rise”. Formal evocations of socialism have drastically diminished ever since. Moreover, these latest power transitions and struggles have given way to the public security and the military, two competing forces, to dominate Vietnam’s most important political leadership positions.

This situation has amounted to an unprecedented take-over of the CPV leadership by the Party’s security arms, which represents a deviation from the CPV’s leadership structure which has historically been led by figures hailing more directly from a combination of ideological, party-building, and military work. This current situation stems partly from how the Party has become ever-more divided about the party-line on various issues, including on its ideological directions and foreign policy. While these divisions had already grown deep by the end of Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s second term in power (2016-2021), when he failed to promote his preferred successor to the CPV leadership, the divisions have only escalated since his sudden demise in July 2024.

The Party has been unable to conceal these divisions. For instance, while Tô Lâm hails from public security, Lương Cường, the current president (2024 – present), hails from the military and it is he who has been mostly tasked with political work and party-building within the military throughout his life. At the 80^th session of the UN General Assembly in September 2025, Lương Cường was surprisingly seen accompanied by Major General Hoàng Kiền at a gathering of American and Vietnamese war veterans, which celebrated the acclaimed success of post-war reconciliation between the US and Vietnam.

Since 2018, Major General Hoàng Kiền has been the face of a vigorous intra-party struggle that has been openly and vocally waged by prominent generals and war veterans. They do not regard themselves as dissidents, but rather as party members and sympathizers who struggle over what they believe should be the ideologically correct party-line. They commonly rail against the deepening US influence in Vietnamese politics and society, and against a growing sense of official deviation from socialism. They often accuse these processes of being facilitated by powerful segments within the party-state. They also advocate for increasing ties and solidarity with old Cold War allies as Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Russia, and China.

Up until 2024, these prominent generals and war veterans had mostly been silenced. Therefore, Hoàng Kiền’s presence at the UN with the President affirmed the growing influence and assertiveness of party “conservatives” within both the Party and the military. This has also become more manifest in the ever-rising popular online nationalism that increasingly targets the US, in part to exert pressure on Tô Lâm’s leadership.

For instance, amid the 79^th Session of the UN General Assembly in September 2024, Tô Lâm toured the US and affirmed his support for Fulbright University Vietnam (FUVN), Vietnam’s first US-affiliated university based in Ho Chi Minh City, as a symbol of deepening cooperation between the US and Vietnam on education. Domestically, military-affiliated media fomented a large-scale online nationalist backlash against FUVN. These military-affiliated sources and their supporters accused the FUVN of negating the Party’s official historiography of the Vietnam War. Suspicions of the official historiography of the Vietnam War being changed and altered by the deepening diplomatic relationship between the US and Vietnam in recent decades has been the most long-standing subject of party-line struggle waged by prominent generals and war veterans in recent times. Shortly after the struggle against FUVN, however, military-affiliated media were forced to roll back on their nationalist campaigns against the university and instead to express fondness about the deepening cooperation between the US and Vietnam on education. This episode disclosed growing rifts within the public security and military-dominated CPV leadership now in power.

The rise of red youth nationalism

Public sentiments in Vietnamese society towards China and the US in the 2020s are drastically different from the 2010s. Throughout the 2010s, when liberal nationalist dissidents and intellectuals dominated public debates, many in the Vietnamese public and diaspora called for Vietnam to move towards a formal alliance with the US to contain China, especially in relation to China’s steady expansion into the South China Sea. The Party was often criticized for not moving closer and quickly enough towards the US. These years were marked by extremely high pro-US sentiments throughout society. Trump’s latest tariff war has even been regarded by some Vietnamese as an opportunity for “liberation” from China.

Since 2020, the broader trend has nevertheless been that of rising red nationalism throughout society. Following Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s visit to China after the latter’s 19^th Party Congress in November 2022, which was hailed by both the CCP and the CPV as a new “historical milestone” in the bilateral relationship, and with the ongoing ramifications of the Russia-Ukraine War reverberating widely, Vietnam has accelerated its rapprochement towards China and Russia while maintaining strong ties with the US. Red nationalism, which views the Vietnamese revolution and the leadership of the CPV overall more favourably than in previous times, has manifested especially sharply among Vietnamese millennials and Gen Z. This nationalism is both critical of and selectively embracing towards both China and the US. In this ambiguity, the 2020s contrasts greatly with the 2010s, when anti-party, anti-China, and pro-US nationalism once proliferated.

And yet, the dramatic rise in red nationalism has not been monolithic in its ideological composition. Left-wing political discourses, activism, and solidarity campaigns by segments of Vietnamese Gen Z have emerged quite energetically in recent times. This has been especially triggered by the genocide in Gaza and the latest youth uprisings in Indonesia against capitalist inequalities. The ongoing Vietnamese youth activism against the genocide in Gaza is the first and most sustained practice of anti-war activism in Vietnam since the end of the Vietnam War.

These emerging Vietnamese left-wing youths do not only question and criticize China and the US’ treatments of Vietnam, but they also question the party line on various political issues from both a class and national perspective. Unlike the more plentiful state-affiliated red young nationalists these days, who often adopt whatever position the Party endorses and implements, the red left-wing youths are evoking and re-invigorating Vietnam’s historical legacy of socialist internationalism.

As part of my own research on the intimate afterlives of the Vietnam War and the Sino-Vietnamese War, as historical events that symbolize the politically violent transition from communist to intra-communist warfare, I visited a Chinese martyrs’ cemetery in the outskirts of Hanoi for the first time ever in December 2023. Beforehand, I had been cautioned by friends to not tell anyone that I had visited the cemetery. In fact, I found no written sign at the entrance of this cemetery which might have indicated that this is where around 40 Chinese martyrs from the wars against France and the US are buried. These enduring sensitivities remind me of the question a former member of Vietnam’s parliament once asked: “Vietnamese war veterans often meet with American and French war veterans. Why can’t such take place between the Vietnamese and Chinese war veterans?”

As scholars and students, we ought to bypass naturalised “enemy lines” through our own works and everyday lives, politically and empathetically. This is the silent message behind each incense I offered to the deceased and for the ideals that stubbornly continue to awaken us.

Note: This was originally delivered as a talk at the Verso China Conference in London, October 2-4, 2025. We asked Chelsea to adapt and revise for publication on praxis, which she had obligingly done. RK & FL

Chelsea Ngoc Minh Nguyen is Postgraduate Student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge

October 14, 2025October 14, 2025

Nick Bartlett reviews I-Yi Hsieh’s Flora and Fauna

I-Yi Hsieh, Flora & Fauna: Domestic Nature and Private Collecting in Reform Era Beijing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

“The Customer”, a prize-winning painting from 1990, depicts a middle-aged man holding a glass fishbowl. A young shopkeeper, family members and the budding aquarium hobbyist himself all appear transfixed by two goldfish swimming in the bowl at the center of the image. Judith Farquhar characterizes this artwork as an example of an “apolitical hobby” that replaced the epic depictions of collective labor favored by artists in Maoist China. I-Yi Hsieh’s delightful Flora and Fauna: Domestic Nature and Private Collecting in Reform Era Beijing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025) offers a very different understanding of the significance of human and non-human relations forged in China’s “insect-flower-fish-bird” markets.

Hsieh’s book is, first and foremost, an ethnography of Old Beijing collecting (shoucang). The shop owners featured in this account do not belong to the wealthy urban elite or the migrant communities who are periodically expelled from the city. Instead, the congregation of connoisseurs who rent stalls in massive state-supported markets include former taxi drivers, grocers, handymen and others who hail from “down below” but nevertheless understand themselves as heirs to Old Beijing cultural history. In creating collaborative multisensory worlds with the help of goldfish, insect gourds, literati walnuts, and crickets, this group embraces the labors of breeding, tuning, feeding, and housing a range of non-human objects. The reward for excelling in these arcane pursuits is significant: connoisseurs who raise prized crickets emitting a refined hum that sounds like spring water can make hundreds of US dollars for the sale of a single insect. Hsieh, however, insists that these collectors are “obsessed” not with the money such business might bring, but rather, their commitment to cultivating multispecies milieu that serve as a shield against the harsh, frenetic environments they navigate in 21^st century Beijing.

The book makes the case that documenting Old Beijing-inspired human-nonhuman relationships can help to dispel the Euro-American “natural order of things” that continues to insist on a separation of nature and culture. In conversation with the writings of Benjamin, Descola, Latour, Lefebvre, Mol, Merleau-Ponty, Munn and Winnicott, Hsieh works to destabilize purportedly universal categories. Her discussion of the collectors’ multispecies urban worldmaking engages two broad types of materialism—Marxist scholarship and recent object-oriented ontology—to elucidate collectors’ distinct set of ethical and ontological commitments. An accomplished curator as well as anthropologist, Hsieh’s theoretical agenda is complemented by the care and fascination with which she approaches these Beijing connoisseurs and their objects. Her vivid ethnographic descriptions of collecting practices are bolstered by the incorporation of Ming and Qing archival records, descriptions of street scenes, as well as the literary commentary of 20^thcentury writers such as Lao She. The result is a compelling documentation of how the reconfiguration of objecthood offers practitioners new ways of situating themselves in continually transforming urban space.

Chapter Three, “Tanked Fish and Aquatic Happiness” offers a particularly powerful illustration of Hsieh’s project. The chapter starts with a vision of Chinese domestication that ties together “human, water, and fish as a system” (77). A dialogue between Zhuangzi and Huizi about the possibility of knowing “the happiness of the fish” grounds the subsequent exploration of the ecology required for the successful cultivation of prized red-goose head imperial goldfish in contemporary Beijing. In delineating the ecological system that supports this collective thriving, Hsieh moves from a discussion of the “metabolic labor” of the fish to the water-filled barrels preferred by prize-winning vendors, to the city’s distinctive centuries-old aquatic infrastructure. She then describes a visit to an urban village on the outskirts of the city where 187 breeding stations are staffed by migrant workers engaging in a painstaking labor of caring for the young fish that subsequently make their way to shops and collectors’ homes. The chapter powerfully conveys the appeal of“aquatic happiness” through domesticating nature in the city while revealing stark inequalities in the treatment of human workers who help to create and maintain this aesthetic world.

In the penultimate chapter, Hsieh shifts her focus from collectors to street performers. Initially celebrated as the freakish “Eight Great Marvels” in the last decades of the Qing empire, generations of performers have been subjected to shifting narratives and accompanying transformations to public spaces. In the Republic era, the performers were depicted as members of an abject lumpen proletariat before CCP media celebrated them as liberated workers in the first years of the People’s Republic. Today, wrestlers, xiangsheng comedy duos, dancers, and musical artists are feted as state-sanctioned ambassadors of the capital city’s intangible cultural heritage. Hsieh reads in their performances “historical hiccups” that unsettle their current status by revealing the historicity of earlier attempts to domesticate their marginalized traditions in China’s diverging projects of national becoming. The book culminates with a powerful critique of the contemporary “Chinese dream” as producing a chaotic and precarious existence for workers in the city that these worldmaking practices subtly subvert.

One nagging question I am left with after finishing the book involves the status of the feelings that the collectors and other figures in the text hold towards contemporary Chinese state actors. Despite Hsieh’s stated intention of avoiding an overly stark framing of Chinese citizens as “either collaborating with or resisting state power” (13), the book consistently insists that private collecting is an “implicit way of resisting” (101) and that expressive poetic worldmaking is one of “the only ways of being political within authoritarian censorship” (178). These characterizations don’t seem to allow for the possibility that collectors might hold a complex, contradictory feelings towards state actors. Silences that Hsieh reports exist among the collectors at certain points in her research might be less a direct fear of state reprisals than a hesitancy to articulate positions that diverge from those of the politically engaged Taiwanese anthropologist who is asking the questions. I was curious, too, about the relationships between the collectors and migrant laborers who supported their shops. These minor quibbles do not detract from the success of this exquisitely rendered ethnography of contemporary life in the capital. Moreover, Hsieh might respond by arguing that protecting a space for the “dialectics of self-making and world changing” in her account of Beijing collector aesthetic practices leaves open the possibility of making thecity a more inclusive, equitable place for all of its inhabitants.

Nick Bartlett is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Asian and Middle East Cultures, Barnard College

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