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Alessandro Russo, A Text by Qian Zhongkai on Maoism in China that Deserves Attention

In reviewing a book on the relationship between Chinese intellectuals and the Maoist past, Fabio Lanza emphasized the need to ‘take the politics of the Maoist revolution seriously as politics, and not only as memory, trauma, or emotional attachments’.

The ‘traumatic’ view of the revolutionary era is, in fact, a leitmotif, obligatory, I would say, in much Chinese fiction and cinema since the ‘literature of wounds’, which has always functioned as a decorative element of the much more peremptory anathema of ‘total denial’, has been a crucial pillar of Chinese government discourse for half a century. However, this is not just a matter of historiographical censorship or self-censorship, so to speak, but of a highly topical prescription. ‘Complete denial’, in fact, essentially concerns a judgement not on the past, but on the present and the future. In other words, it denies in advance that the masses can play a role in politics and affirms just as completely that politics concerns the capabilities of the state and its officials exclusively.

To address politically the Maoist era, especially the Cultural Revolution, it is therefore necessary to affirm first and foremost the possibility that there exists today a politics capable of meeting the challenges of that era, capable of grasping its essential innovations without repeating the mistakes and dead ends that led to its failure.

Those who study modern and contemporary Chinese politics without subscribing to ‘total negation’ wonder, sometimes anxiously, whether there are new arguments in China today capable of affirming this possibility. The general picture of Chinese intellectuals today seems sadly caught up in a desperate fatalism, not unlike the disorientation that prevails elsewhere in the world. A more particular characteristic of the Chinese case, however, is the elimination of all political reflection on a crucial period in Chinese political history, the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist era. Chris Connery has written that critical thinking in China today, however one understands it, is at its lowest level in 120 years. The situation is confirmed by books on 20th-century China written by the New Left, which do not even mention the Cultural Revolution.

Yet despite a cultural establishment that is firmly aligned with the government’s agenda, there are new political arguments in China that deserve attention. There is certainly a level of informal reflection and discussion based on personal relationships, especially among young intellectuals, who are looking at both the present and the past with fresh eyes.

Qian Zhongkai’s text on Maoism, published in the latest issue of PRC History Review, has the potential to spark a debate that, I hope, will develop both in China and abroad. The most significant originality lies in its starting point: the most recent significant political event (albeit dating back to 2018), the struggle of the Jasic workers in Shenzhen and the students who went to show their solidarity. For Qian, the painful but instructive outcome of their defeat provides the basis for a political rethinking of Maoism.

Among the stylistic merits of the text is the theatrical dialogue between two characters, which introduces and accompanies the theoretical reflection. They are, not coincidentally, two political activists from two contiguous generations who, starting from a divergent assessment of the Jasic affair, discuss the political value of Maoism today. They are an old Maoist, rich in experience but cautious, risking immobility, and a young militant who went to support the Jasic workers, whose ardent desire to engage in revolutionary politics spills over into a tendency towards martyrdom as a testimony of faith.

The dialogues effectively outline the two poles of revolutionary political subjectivity in China today. On the one hand, the old Maoist reflects the sense of an epochal defeat, but is unable to examine its causes; on the other, the enthusiastic young man does not even consider the possibility that an epochal political defeat lies behind us. And yet, despite their subjective limitations, the two characters’ strength of conviction lies in speaking as militants, with authentic pathos, animated by a disinterested political desire, rather than as mandarins who calibrate every syllable to maintain their position in the bureaucratic hierarchy.

The two characters are debating the core of Maoism, namely the ‘mass line’, whose central internal contradiction concerns how to reconcile trust in the masses with the need for political organization. These are, in essence, the two poles of Mao’s position during the Cultural Revolution. In the Sixteen Points of August 1966, Mao fully articulates the fundamental issue at stake: ‘The masses are capable of liberating themselves, and no one can act on their behalf or in their place’. In February 1967, in a discussion with Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan on the Shanghai Commune, he asks, ‘What to do with the party?’

The strength of Qian’s text lies in its examination of the Jasic struggle and its defeat through this question. Conversely, it rethinks fundamental questions of the history of Maoism in light of the dilemmas of a significant moment in contemporary Chinese politics. Much work remains to be done, but Qian’s contribution is an essential first step in the right direction.


Qiang Zhongkai, “Maoism Moving as a Political Machine:  A Reflection” was published on the  PRC History Review, available here

Alessandro Russo is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bologna and author, among others, of Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture (Duke University Press, 2020).

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Zexu Guan and Tingting Hu, Are Chinese Rural Women Empowered as Platform Labor?

On October 13, 2025, Xinhua Net published a commentary celebrating Xi Jinping’s speech at the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women. Confirming that “Women play an important role in creating, promoting and carrying forward human civilization,” Xi reflects on the severe status quo: “the gender digital divide is widening, and equality between men and women remains a lofty yet arduous task.” How is the gender digital divide widening if supposedly the digital system is becoming more affordable and accessible with the deepening of initiatives on gender equality? One of Xi’s crucial proposals hinges on women’s participation in “the new wave of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation” and the goal to “empower women’s high-quality development through innovation” (Xinhua, 2025). This leads to the key momentum of commentary: Are Chinese rural women empowered by participating in the platform economy, one of the fastest-growing fields of the contemporary economic system within and beyond China? Below, we tease out three important forms of engagement regarding contemporary rural women’s involvement in platform labor: rural women’s participation in e-commerce, rural women’s vlogging, and female migrant workers as delivery couriers. Rural women’s participation in the burgeoning economy mirrors the subaltern condition of both the female and the rural as precarious labor, the intersection of which hints at the increasing wealth and labor gap that gradationally divides our world.

Karl Marx (1904) theorized that productive power, oftentimes represented by technology, promotes productive relations, including ownership and human relationships, in the production of value. Later Marxists, including Mao Zedong, revised such a view, arguing that much attention should be paid to productive relations to promote productivity and social development. In the case of digital platforms, technology has advanced vastly, while the production relations, including urban-rural and gender dichotomies, lag behind. In highlighting rural women’s platform labor, we intend to highlight women’s often neglected and marginalized roles in the modern (patriarchal) economic model of development. We argue that enhanced attention to the intersection between productive relations and productive power is necessary to promote a more just world for all laborers. 

Women’s general participation in the e-commerce economy shows the persistence of patriarchal gender norms.While Chinese Internet companies gain enormous attention for their success in e-commerce, many rural women participating in e-commerce remain outside the spotlight. Since the official “mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation” campaign started in 2015, e-commerce has been seen in the eyes of the State as a crucial channel to raise the employment rate and stimulate China’s economy. Digital platforms such as Alibaba mobilize rural residents to participate in e-commerce as producers, operators, and consumers. Based on the courtyard economy that has driven China’s rural economy for hundreds of years, Chinese peasants construct a supply chain with a cheap household labor force. Many rural women gain economic empowerment from e-commerce, yet this comes with clear limitations.

Economically, a lot of rural women participating in e-commerce gain more income and autonomy of consumption (Yu and Cui, 2019; Zhang, 2023). Before the mushrooming of e-commerce, rural women were left behind in villages to shoulder the burdens of agricultural labor and care of the young and elderly. E-commerce production in villages allows them to earn a salary from local work and reduces their dependence on their husbands. Accordingly, many rural women face fewer complaints and accusations of being “useless” or making no money within the family. Working for e-commerce also breaks down the social predicament rural women have long encountered, in which they have a weak social network after marrying into their husbands’ villages. Working for e-commerce workshops brings them opportunities to develop social connections of their own, leading to affective empowerment (Liu, 2025, p.28-30). In many cases, rural women become the actual heads of family-run e-commerce and they gain honors in the public sphere thereby. For example, some of them win titles of “role model” or get invited to present at political or formal occasions (Yu and Cui, 2019, 11). Rural women in e-commerce acquire a higher status than before because of their role in stimulating the domestic and public economy. 

The economic empowerment of rural women, however, does not naturally activate the consciousness of gender equality, as it does not necessarily translate into political and cultural empowerment. Many female entrepreneurs allow their husbands to be the sole legal representatives of their business in formal documents, despite their major contribution to the family-run e-commerce. Few women gain places in local governmental organizations, even while their husbands do. Despite women’s successful management of family e-commerce, many rural residents commonly think that “going out in the public or spotlight” is “unwomanly” (Yu and Cui, 2019, p.11). Rural women’s participation in e-commerce platforms does not consequently challenge traditional gender roles of household labor. Instead, their participation is constrained by gender roles. Moreover, e-commerce does not benefit rural women equally. For example, while younger women usually manage e-stores and communicate with customers, older women are likely to take on manual crafting and get paid by the piece, or they do household chores, which is essentially free labor (Zhang, 2023). In comparison with the younger generation, older women are further marginalized in rural e-commerce. Overall, e-commerce platforms bring rural women more economic opportunities, but they do not necessarily bring more gender equality. Reforming production relations might alter that dynamic.

Upon the rise of the short-video economy, the so-called wanghong (网红 internet red) phenomenon, along with state-led rural revitalization, many left-behind rural women have been mobilized to become vloggers on short video platforms, with their rural lives becoming one of the many spectacles that can be monetized for an urban-centric viewership. This wave of rural spectacle consists of two forms of visualization. One is represented by the leading vlogger Li Ziqi, who’s a top-notch influencer both globally and domestically, with nearly 30 million subscribers on YouTube and 50 million subscribers on domestic short-video platforms. Li Ziqi specializes in an aestheticized representation of rural life, showing a “beautiful China” that is self-sustaining, ecologically balanced, and culturally enriched in remote mountain villages. Such visual representation fulfills the urban and international viewers’ imagination of rural China as an unpolluted utopian “Shangri-La,” soothing their anxiety about modern life burdened by all-around pollution and food safety issues. Numerous rural vloggers flourished in this Li Ziqi style, representing the vast land of rural China in a utopian aesthetic, vividly portraying an idealized rural life. On the other end of the spectrum are rural mothers speaking bitterness through short videos. In this guise,  husbands often work at menial jobs in the city and leave them in the village taking care of children and elders while working in the fields and tending to domestic chores. Yet their husbands’ meager remittances often can hardly sustain the whole family’s life, and rural mothers who choose to become vloggers then take on one more burden of economic livelihood. These rural mothers have been vividly tagged as a “bitter squad team” (kugua dadui 苦瓜大队) by netizens, referencing the impoverishment of their lives as a collective problem rather than an individual issue. For instance, the leading vlogger in this idiom, Xiaoying (小英), became a spectacle due to the stark contrast between her presentation of a messy cowshed, piles of dirty laundry, endless fieldwork, and her carefree character. Nevertheless, such vlogging practices are hardly sustainable. Most bitterness vloggers remain unrecognized with few followers, and while some of them have gained attention, such attention remains precarious since audiences are skeptical of such “speaking bitterness” after they gain popularity. The increasingly disciplined digital economy also tends to regulate such vlogging practices. In a neoliberal frame of market economy, the empowerment of this group can hardly be realized, and any understanding of the intricacy of this gendered struggle is immersed in the overly depoliticized, consumerized, and spectacularized digital realm. (Details can be found in our upcoming article on this group).

Last but not least, female delivery couriers, many of them with kids on their backs, have become an increasingly normal yet heartbreaking phenomenon showcasing the interlocked problem of gender and labor. In urban areas, food delivery platforms offer jobs to a considerable number of migrant workers, men and women. The low threshold, the wages paid on time, and the flexible work environment make food delivery a widely chosen occupation for migrant workers who are marginalized in the fierce competition for employment. Women make up 7 – 10 percent of food delivery workers (Chen et al., 2025; Huang and Zhuang, 2023). Although women do not constitute a major percentage of couriers, the number of female couriers has increased over recent years during the slowdown of China’s economy. Statistics from Meituan, one of the two major food delivery platforms in China, show that the number of female food delivery workers grew from 517,000 in 2022 to 701,000 in 2024. This represents a 35.6 percent increase, even while the total number of food delivery workers grew only 19.4 percent during the same period of time.

Working for food delivery platforms generates female migrant workers’ distinct experiences in comparison with their female counterparts in villages and their male counterparts on food delivery platforms. Unlike rural women participating in short-video making or rural e-commerce workers, female migrant workers on food delivery platforms work outside their families; thus, they face less pressure from domestic patriarchal rules. Instead, they need to follow the efficiency rules implemented by food delivery platforms, just like their male colleagues (Sun et al., 2021). Food delivery platforms construct a “de-gendered” work environment because they do not emphasize gender segregation during the labor process. This doubtlessly facilitates women’s participation in the public sector. However, it also helps conceal the particular dilemmas of women.

Women’s precarious status on food delivery platforms is manifested in two aspects: traditional gender roles and algorithmic discrimination. First, many women join food delivery platforms because of the traditional gender role of being a caregiver (Chen et al., 2025; Huang and Zhuang, 2023). Quite a large number of female migrant workers choose to deliver food because this flexible job allows them to get paid for fragmented labor time. As wives and mothers, they are occupied with sending children to school, cooking, washing, and other household chores, and have only three to four hours a day available for delivering food orders. Some rural women leave their children in villages and work alone in cities, aiming at maximizing their work time and wages. Second, female couriers experience algorithmic, gendered discrimination in daily work. Food delivery platforms rely heavily on algorithms to distribute orders, plan routes, and monitor delivery time. This seemingly scientific and efficient technology conceals the fact that platform algorithms are trained by big data that is mostly generated by male couriers (Chen et al., 2025, pp.38-41). Empirical research shows that male couriers can handle heavier food orders, ignore traffic rules more, and spend less time climbing stairs and riding than their female peers. However, the gender difference is not included in the algorithmic design. Female workers have to race with the universal algorithmic standard made from male experiences, and they do not always succeed. Many female couriers take fewer orders and consequently earn less on average. Despite the harsh working environment, a small percentage of female couriers stand out in the delivery competition and become danwang (单王, indicating the courier who sends the most orders in a certain radius). These exceptional cases do not confirm the invalidity of algorithmic bias. Rather, female danwang usually extend working hours, and select orders with simpler routes and lighter food to counter their inferior status under platform algorithms. It is worth noting that female danwang are usually unmarried women (Huang and Zhuang, 2023) or single mothers who do not live with their children (Chen et al., 2025). Women living with children are unlikely to stand out in the race for time and speed. Again, this manifests the entrenchedness of traditional gender roles even when rural women migrate to cities.

As Chinese rural women participate in the digital economy, possibilities lure them into this burgeoning field to aspire for empowerment and opportunities, yet persisting forms of patriarchal power dynamics condition their engagement. The promotion of productive powers does not automatically lead to a better world without the advancement of productive relations. Gendered forms of production relations are a primary way to understand these social and economic structures. We hope that future in-depth inquiries into the intersectional issue of women, the rural, and the digital will reveal more dynamics of this situation and theoretical approach.

 

 

Bibliography

Chen, Long, Lei Zhao and He Sheng. 2025. “Yinni de ta: nv waimai qishou shifou zaoshou suanfa qishi? (The invisible her: do female food delivery couriers suffer from algorithmic gender discrimination?)” Funv yanjiu luncong (Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies), 191(5), 38-49.

“Full text of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s keynote address at opening ceremony of the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women.” October 13, 2025, Xinhua. http://english.www.gov.cn/news/202510/13/content_WS68ecbacdc6d00ca5f9a06bb4.html.

Huang, Yan and Lixian Zhuang. 2023. “Chengjiu danwang: nvxing qishou de laodong guocheng ji laodong celue yanjiu (Making danwang: research on female food delivery couriers’ labor process and strategies).” Funv yanjiu luncong (Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies), 176(2), 52-64.

Liu, Qian. 2025. “Shuzi laodong zhong de nongcun qingnian nvxing: xingbie zhutixing jiangou de Shijian luoji (Digital labor among rural young women: Practical logic of gender subjectivity construction).” Dangdai qingnian yanjiu (Contemporary Youth Research), (5), 21-35.

Marx, Karl. 1904. A Contribution to A Critique of the Political Economy. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Sun, Ping, Yuzhao Zhao and Qianyu Zhang. 2021. Pingtai, xingbie yu laodong: nv qishou de xingbie zhanyan (Platforms, Gender, and Labor: Female food delivery couriers’ gender pertformativity). Funv yanjiu luncong (Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies), 168(6), 5-16.

Yu, Haiqing, and Lili Cui. 2019. “China’s E-Commerce: Empowering Rural Women?” The China Quarterly, 238, 418–437.

Zhang, Lin. 2023. The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

 

 

Zexu Guan (Ph.D., Leiden University) is a lecturer in the School of International Politics and Communication, Beijing Language and Culture University. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, information technology, and cultural studies.

Tingting Hu (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina) teaches comparative literature, gender studies, and creative writing at Renmin University of China, Beijing. Her research interests include women’s narratives, as well as contemporary literature, film, and art in China and beyond.

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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.

Protesters being confronted by police on their way to the parliamentary building during the August 2025 demonstrations in Jakarta. Source: Indrawan Prasetya, used with permission
Protesters set fire to a police post during the 2020 anti-Omnibus Law mobilizations in Jakarta Source: Indrawan Prasetya, used with permission
Leaflets displayed during the 2020 protests. The one on the right reads “lebih jauh dari itu, ada kemiskinan di dalamnya,” translated as “Even deeper than that, there is poverty within.” Source: Indrawan Prasetya, used with permission.
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Patricia Thornton, Project 2025: China and the United States

On October 2nd, 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

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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