positions politics editorial group, Author at positions politics

September 28, 2026

Benjamin Kindler reviews Fabio Lanza, Urban Revolution: People’s Communes in Beijing

Fabio Lanza, Urban Revolution: People’s Communes in Beijing (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

In the depths of this engrossing study, Fabio Lanza notes a curious fact in one of his archival sources. In a document whose title reads “Provisions on some issues concerning the urban people’s communes at this stage”, the characters adding “centered on laboring women” have been erased by the editor. Whether this change was accepted in the final version, or how else to assess the flick of the editor’s pen, Lanza tells us, we do not know. (206 fn14). Without – as historians often say – reading too much into the sources, it would seem that this archival trace is fitting as an end to the book: it tells us something about the closure of the dramatic social experiment that was the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The crossing-out of the category of woman marks the end of the urban Great Leap and of the urban communes, which, for Lanza, comprised the most radical attempt to transform the conditions of the everyday during the course of the Chinese Revolution. This telling anecdote at the end of the book marks a perhaps deliberate contrast with the opening of the first chapter, in which a woman, Wang Zhijie, recounts the moment when she experienced the exceeding the category of “housewife” to which she had been limited. At the beginning, then: the opening-up and radical expansion of the category of woman as a site of indeterminacy; at the end, the foreclosure of that category as a language of politics and struggle. In between, a contested, evolving process in which the possibility of a transformed life entered into flickering visibility at decisive moments.

This is a book about the possibility and aspiration of a radical transformation of the everyday, understood with the aid of Henri Lefebvre as the (seemingly) trivial details of the quotidian that often bear on our experience as gendered subjects. For Lanza, the GLF was unparalleled in its ambitions for such transformation. He uncovers these ambitions by recovering the experience of the urban people’s communes in Beijing (1958-1962). The everyday, for Lanza, is not simply that which is the empirical immediacy or “real” that less sophisticated historians have tried to reveal. Rather, the everyday for him constitutes the shifting set of relations that is constantly transformed through the process of revolution itself. In this sense, the practice of socialist revolution for Lanza is by its very nature an everyday affair.

Across five densely-argued chapters, the book treats us to the evolution of a socialist project of everyday transformation. The formal arrangement of the book is a mark of great sophistication in its own right. It is not a strict chronological trajectory, but rather an account that manages to move between the details of emergent policies as actualized in state archives together with the often complex and even esoteric theoretical debates that emerged in the same period. Whereas chapters one, three and five mark a roughly chronological sequence, chapter two brings us into contact with Chinese Marxist theorists who grappled with how to conceptualize socialism in theoretical and policy terms as China was shifting away from a Soviet orthodoxy, whereas chapter four brings us into contact with a particular community of workers — barbers — who emerge as unexpected protagonists and subjects of the GLF. In and across these moments, Lanza develops an account of a locality – Beijing – in the midst of an unprecedented upheaval. The picture of the urban GLF that emerges is of an uneven attempt to provide new social services that would support the entry of women into new occupations beyond the home, accompanied by an ongoing attempt to theorize that process and its relation to the tasks of socialist transition.

Lanza’s study suggests the continuation of the theoretical and political interests that have structured his previous writing. Beyond Lefebvre, his engagement above all with the work of Jacques Ranciere is important; Rancière, like Lanza, is concerned with the moments of radical egalitarian politics in which subjects step beyond the social locations to which they have been assigned. In his first book, Behind the Gate, Lanza developed an account of radical egalitarian politics in relation to students, who, in the act of refusing the position of student as the disciplined subject of the university, moved onto the terrain of political struggle during the 1910s and 1920s. In the current book, the subject positions and locations that came to be troubled (albeit not enough, it seems) during the GLF were the “worker.” Indeed, as Lanza asserts, the GLF re-posed the question of “who was actually included in the category of the ‘worker’” (7). Moments of radical excess – of stepping beyond assigned subject locations – are, for Lanza as for Rancière, the stuff of politics itself.

Yet the more radical orientation of this book is the way it ties the theoretical vocabulary of the everyday and the subject to that of gendered experience and the role of women in the Chinese Revolution. The problem of the everyday is a gendered experience, not least in the way the “trivial” matters that are often dismissed as beyond the realm of “real” politics are themselves gendered. In this respect, Lanza’s work draws on the work of a number of feminist historians working in the field of Chinese Studies, such as Tani Barlow, Gail Hershatter, Kimberley Manning, Wang Zheng, Rebecca Karl, Dong Yige and others.

One major structuring category of the book is framed through the question of reproduction, which is a slippery category both for the Marxist tradition generally as for Lanza himself. It is thus worth pausing here to note the varying and distinct ways in which the category emerges in Lanza’s treatment. The most persistent concern is with the practices of gendered reproduction that comprise what Marxist feminists have termed the “hidden abode” of everyday life and which provide the substratum on which factory-based forms of wage labor rely. These can be profoundly material (preparing and eating food, sleeping, washing, etc.) but they also encompass the emotional and bodily practices that produce and sustain us as subjects (care, sex, etc.). In Lanza’s argument, Chinese Marxists did not generate a specific concept of reproduction insofar as references to reproduction as 再生产 always indicate a narrower and more circumscribed concept derived from the Soviet theoretical edifice (173), ¹ namely the expanded reproduction of the productive forces through socialist accumulation. Nor, crucially, Lanza acknowledges, are the forms of gendered reproduction just listed equally available for collectivization (171). Lanza therefore reaches repeatedly for the theoretical resources of Marxist and autonomist feminists, notably Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who have foregrounded the gendered everyday and its associated practices of reproduction as central to Marxist analysis.

Running alongside this feminist account of reproduction, there is another concept of reproduction, not opposed to the first but that denotes a distinct theoretical logic. When,, in chapter two, Lanza writes that, with the proliferation of bourgeois right, “bourgeois forms of social relations will continue to reproduce themselves, endlessly re-creating new inequalities and differences incompatible” (98) he is invoking a theoretical logic and tradition formally distinct from feminist accounts of gendered reproduction, and more closely orientated towards a part of the French Marxist tradition as associated with such theorists as Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar and Charles Bettelheim, all men who engage(d) in various ways with the Chinese Revolution. They were concerned, as Lanza observes, with an understanding of socialism as an extended and non-contemporaneous period of transition in which capitalist forms reproduced on the basis of socialism itself co-exist with incipient communist modes and relations. Multiple significations of reproduction are thus in operation in this book.

In the Marxist tradition, these different accounts of reproduction have never quite met, insofar as their points of departure have always remained largely different from each other: Dalla Costa being concerned with the everyday forms of violence and oppression that exist within the family and the insurgent possibilities of new feminist movements rooted in the powers of gendered subjectivity, whereas Althusser and his disciples begin from the role of the Ideological State Apparatuses in the reproduction of subjects, in which the school takes on the decisive role. When, then, we ask the question of what or who is being reproduced when we talk of reproduction, the list becomes expansive: social relations, temporalities, modes of production, bodies, subjects, systems of gendered power, and so on. At another level, therefore, beyond the initial question of the everyday, Lanza’s study is an attempt to think these different modes and questions of reproduction together. We are led to confront the question: what is the relation between the transformation of the conditions of the reproduction of life through the reworking (if not abolition) of the family form and the provision of new collective services on the one hand, and, on the other, inhibiting the tendencies towards the reproduction of capitalist social relations?

Just as the divergent strands of reproduction have never quite met in Marxist theoretical analysis generally speaking, so too, it seems, they never did meet in the course of the GLF and the Chinese Revolution more generally. ² The (male) theorists who intervened in discussions around bourgeois right did not, after all, factor social reproduction into their discussions. The effective use to which Lanza mobilizes the category of “reproduction” might, here, have benefited from an explicit interrogation of how much work that category has done within the Marxist tradition, and how that work relates to the absence of an explicit consideration of “social reproduction” as a theoretical category in the Chinese Revolution. Yet Lanza is too good and sensitive a reader to simply mourn the fact that the Chinese Revolution did not generate the theoretical categories that we might like. Instead, he diagnoses the shortcomings behind the urban communes.

If the common sense that occupies discussions around the GLF too often blames it as a movement of foolish excess always bound to failure, Lanza instead locates its shortcomings in the fact that it was not feminist enough. When women exited from the home to work in commune enterprises, he shows, they did so in conditions where their external labor continued to be viewed, remunerated and disciplined in highly gendered terms (135), within a Taylorist logic (146) that was orientated towards the singular aim of increasing production (157). In his most incisive formulation, Lanza notes: “…as the history of urban collectivization proves, the problem of gender equality, even among workers, could not be reduced to one of self-awareness; rather, it was grounded on a systematic devaluation of any work performed by women, in the home as well as in the factory” (158). And this, in turn, points me towards the most generous aspect of the book, in the way it poses the question of who or what counts as a proper site of theoretical production.

There is plenty of analysis in the book that coheres to accepted definitions of theory and philosophy (chapter 2 especially) in the way Lanza pursues close engagements with Marxist analysis and reads that work with the seriousness it deserves. But so too throughout the book there is a sense of the imminence of theory to everyday socialist practice, not only in the way debates around, say, bourgeois right informed the Leap, but also in the way that the subjects of the urban communes evoke desires, fantasies, even visions of utopia that are themselves instances of theory-making. When he writes of how the frenzied orientation towards production eliminated the time available to women amounted to a “devaluation” of their desires (163), and when, in doing so, he draws on the theoretical insights of Dalla Costa, we should, I believe, see this not as an instance of reading “Chinese history” through “Western theory” but rather as a set of feminist echoes across space, embodied in the expression of desire for that most simple but elusive of pleasures: time outside of and beyond the demands of production, in the home or in the factory.

What, then, remains, to borrow a question from another socialist feminist, Christa Wolf? This is of course a book about the Great Leap Forward. Lanza notes that even whilst later moments in the Chinese Revolution witnessed the persistence of certain questions and challenges that emerged in the GLF, the Great Leap was unparalleled in the way it sought – however partially, however unsuccessfully – to address problems of the everyday through reproduction.

In this regard, it would be remiss not to at least touch on the other moment of radical Maoist politics, namely the Cultural Revolution. In a recent panel discussion on the “late” Cultural Revolution at the Association of Asian Studies meeting in Vancouver (March 2026), Lanza responded to a paper by Harlan Chambers on “struggle drama” by noting that short dramatic texts featuring women protagonists who take up political struggle are curious for their lack of narrative content relating to reproduction or indeed production as such.³ As a descriptive statement, Lanza was quite right, and my instinct is that this was intended as a critical remark about the texts in question. Yet, if we insist on the term of reproduction itself not just as referring to who does the dishes but also as the production of subject positions and subjectivities, then, seen in those terms, the Cultural Revolution clearly was also about reproduction – in the way the critique of Confucianism under the auspices of the Criticize Lin Biao Criticize Confucius campaign was directly concerned with the ideological reproduction of a hierarchical gendered order, and in the way that new subject positions such as the “youth”/qingnian or “revolutionary successor”/jiebanren (movingly recalled by Zhong Xueping and Wang Zheng amongst other contributors to the volume Some of Us) offered new modes of subject formation that stood at least partially outside a gendered order. Or, to pose this question from a different angle, we may also ask the question of what other theoretical categories were absent from the Great Leap Forward alongside a fully developed concept of social reproduction, in which case we find the surprising absence of a language of class and class struggle under socialism (distinct from the logic of bourgeois right, which does not, in the Great Leap period, admit the formation of a new bourgeoisie in the party) insofar, as, during the Great Leap, the tasks of overcoming the class divisions of pre-1949 society were understood to have been largely completed. It is, by contrast, the return of class struggle in the Cultural Revolution and indeed its totalizing function that also allows it to incorporate a set of feminist concerns around the persistence of patriarchal logics in the everyday and their associated modes of subject formation, with a corresponding interrogation of the family form that encompasses a more ruptural set of possibilities.

Perhaps the point, then, is that reproduction in the Cultural Revolution is precisely not informed by production and reproduction in the sense identified by Lanza in the Great Leap; nor is it indeed informed by the desire for free time. Rather, it comes to be about politics (a class politics that – in uneven and complex fashion – also subsumes and incorporated an anti-patriarchal politics) in a way that the Great Leap Forward did not address. Which is to say, reproduction in the Cultural Revolution is about politics as militant, antagonistic practice, politics about desire in a new form, where we see the emergence of a new configuration of the subject beyond what even the women of the Great Leap might have imagined. Does that subject have a name? Perhaps her name is Jiang Qing.

Benjamin Kindler is the author of Writing to the Rhythm of Labor(Columbia University Press, 2025) and is currently teaching as Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He has written a number of articles on Mao-era China, and is also a prolific translator from the Chinese into English of texts by prominent socialist intellectuals.

September 21, 2026

Mingwei Huang reviews Nadine Attewell, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949

Nadine Attewell, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949 (Stanford University Press, 2026).

In the early twentieth century, Chinese migrants, among others from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe, flocked to London, Liverpool, and Hong Kong. Nadine Attewell’s luminous Archives of Intimacy transports readers to these vibrant early 20^th century dockside worlds and offers a feminist and queer history of relation, one that expands how we understand the global formation of “Chineseness” and write history. Through Attewell’s vast archival research, we encounter Chinese migrant men who married white immigrant women and local women of color, mixed-race Chinese children, elite Eurasian families, and Chinese Caribbean diasporic subjects. The book unfolds across the street corners, laundries, boarding houses, brothels, dance halls, and shops of London’s Limehouse and Liverpool’s Pitt Street neighborhoods. The heterogenous presence of seamen of color, sex workers, and social reformers exceeded the moniker “Chinatown.” Attewell examines the working-class cosmopolitanisms, intimate relations, and everyday acts of solidarity between port city residents to survive the anti-immigrant, racist inhospitalities of interwar Britain under the 1905 Aliens Act. In contrast to British port cities, Attewell also considers the Chinese majority British colony of Hong Kong to highlight a different set of mobilities, intimacies, and forms of Chineseness.

Since the relational turn in the study of race, colonialism, and empire—of which Lisa Lowe’s Intimacies of the Four Continents (2015) is paradigmatic— “relation,” “intimacy,” and “entanglement” have become ubiquitous to the point of losing their analytical specificity. However, in Archives of Intimacy, intimacy and relation are treated with precision. In this book, intimacy is both the stuff of the archives and a heuristic, “a genre of relation,” for bringing together histories of (semi)colonial east Asia, Chinese migration, and imperial Britain. Archives of Intimacy attends “to the fleshy, emplaced particulars of Chinese people’s social lives” (Attewell 3). What makes this book distinctive is its emphasis on the ephemeral, queer forms of relation that are not easily categorizable: same-sex intimacies and transactional sex, homosocial domestic arrangements, “deviant” family formations, and acts and aspirations “not always in accordance with imperial dictates or desires” (Attewell 3). Attewell mobilizes relational terms to write a connected history of colonial capitalist modernity that brings Chinese people across imperial geographies together, shaping and constraining their lives and “wayward itineraries” but never determining them. While it is easy to romanticize intimacies, the intimacies in this book are in the service of Chinese working-class survival and the reproduction of class privilege and imperial power. Interracial intimacy and multiracial conviviality are “material social practices with the potential to proliferate life chances for more people than might otherwise have been supported to survive, let alone thrive” (Attewell 4). Intimacies do not spontaneously spring up whenever racialized people encounter one another but must be laboriously forged through relational work.

Like the pejorative terms “half-caste” and “Chinaman,” “mixed-race” and “Chinese” are terms of identity freighted with racial and geopolitical meanings, and they have not been available for all diasporic subjects to claim. Accordingly, Attewell is careful to not rely on identitarian logics that posit a stable mixed-race Chinese subject and that reify Han-centric, racial nationalist “Chineseness.” Rather, she approaches Chineseness as a cultural text and frames it through relation; subjects become Chinese through their encounters with and ties to others. Refusing to narrow who can claim Chineseness, she emphasizes “the capacity of Chineseness to…mean and do new things.” “Chinese” is a “capaciously descriptive rather than a normative modifier to mark an inheritance or ascription that people may have taken up in any number of ways, or refused altogether” (Attewell 15). Refusing to demarcate and police who is Chinese, Attewell radically expands Chinese into an “inclusive category through which a range of subjects might access care and pleasure” (94). Crucially, Chineseness is not a fixed identity based in lineage and biology, nor a property of the self, but “materializes as a key site of attachment and meaning” (Attewell 75, 93).

In three parts — “Encounters,” “Itineraries,” and “Lifelines” — Attewell tells the singular and collective stories of Chinese men, women, and children, while interrogating the heteronormative, racial ways of knowing that structure their inclusion or absence in the archive. Chapter 1 “Looking Relations” centers a photograph of three mixed-race Chinese girls in London, their names and the provenance of the photograph unknown. Writing against the “archive of pathology,” Attewell attends to the girls’ refusal to be captured on film, attending to their practices of looking, knowing, and relating instead. Chapter 2 “The Queerest Parish in England” examines the promiscuous social relations of Chinese Liverpool and the pressures of white heteronormative respectability on shaping the community’s historical narratives. We meet the memorable Bella Gomes, a neighborhood resident of “Portuguese and Negro blood” who sold sexual services to Chinese migrant men. Gomes is absent from community oral histories despite her sustained presence and the solidarity she offered to the community. Chapter 3 “Everyday Chineseness” theorizes how “Chinese” is relationally produced and lived through the affective, nostalgic medium of food. Chinese mixed-race children felt a sense of identity and belonging through foodstuffs and goods. Practices of nourishment—the devalued yet “necessary work” of social reproduction—formed the bedrock of children’s acculturation and the community’s regeneration. Continuing Attewell’s attention to child subjects, Chapter 4 “Black and Chinese Liverpool in Relation” analyzes photographs of Asian and Black children playing at school. The children’s relations emblematize the maritime networks that brought African and Chinese men to Liverpool and the possibilities of Afro-Asian conviviality against racial division.

Largely set in Hong Kong, “Itineraries” explores patterns of mobility, settlement, and place-making. Contrasting the working-class cosmopolitanism of previous chapters, Chapter 5 “Relationship on Top of Relationship” turns to the imperial cosmopolitanism of Hong Kong’s elite Eurasian families, including the Cheng family, and the multigenerational reproduction of social influence through marital alliances and pedagogical training. This is also relational work, but in the service of accruing familial privileges within the British colonial capitalist order. In Chapter 6 “Model Students and Problem Children,” we follow doctoral student Irene Cheng as she embarks on dissertation research about working-class Chinese in Limehouse, only to suffer a mental breakdown and change her dissertation topic. Cheng exerts a ghostly presence throughout the book. For Attewell, in perhaps a poignant moment of identification with her subject, Cheng’s breakdown “point[s] to the affordances, costs, and limits of the deeply personal repertoires of knowledge that researchers bring to some projects more than others” (18). Chapter 7 “Exit Strategy” follows the case of Sarah Hing, a mixed Chinese woman born in the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act, who married a Muslim medical student “of half Chinese and half East Indian blood” in Hong Kong, and was barred from re-entering the US when pregnant. Within the constraints of imperial citizenship, Hing rejected married life and shuttled back and forth the Pacific with her child. These chapters standout in Attewell’s creative reading of colonial archives, pressing at the limits of Cheng’s thesis and Hing’s immigration file to speculate about their interior lives, relations, and experiences as desiring, mixed-race subjects.

“Lifelines” clarifies the stakes of relational work during the Second World War in occupied Hong Kong and southern China. Chapter 8 “Mixed with the Caribbean” examines how Afro-Chinese Caribbean diasporic returnees mobilized knowledge of Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guianan, and Surinamese social worlds and local Chinese relations to support Britain. It tells the story of Percy Chang, an Afro-Chinese Jamaican who worked as a British intelligence agent in Guangdong where he could stealthily pass as Chinese, and Chang’s fraught ties across the Caribbean and Pearl Delta River worlds. Chapter 9 “A Matter of Life and Death” commemorates the mixed-race Chinese women who engaged in relational, social reproductive work for collective survival. To keep their families together, Chinese women often joined their white British partners in POW camps. They procured foodstuffs, sent parcels, raised children, and engaged in sex work. These everyday acts may not be as legible as rebellions, strikes, and insurgencies, but they resolutely were forms of political action. Throughout the chapters, Attewell insists on Chinese women and girls’ everyday practices of resistance—girls who refused the photographer, women who chose another way—and the social necessity of their relation-making labors. In this way, we can consider Archives of Intimacy as a companion text to Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). Focusing on daughters, wives, aunties, and sex workers, Attewell recasts “ordinary people’s intimate experiments as (counter)archives of global Asian thought and action” (14).

There are many ways to read this book: a social history of early twentieth-century Chinese diasporic life, an Afro-Asian atlas, a people’s history of the port, a feminist manifesto about reproductive labor, a model for writing histories of relation, a collection of community and life histories, among other things. For me, Archives of Intimacy realizes the radical potential for engaging Asian and Asian diasporic studies with feminist and queer theories and methods to imagine usable pasts of connection. It can also be read as a timely blueprint for mutual aid and care in the face of cruel state violence, organized abandonment, imperial war, repressive border regimes, and family separation. An indispensable resource for interdisciplinary methods, Archives of Intimacy offers an exercise in attention: listening at “lower frequencies” (Campt 2017) and reading images for what appears on the edge of the frame or is absented all together. Ethnography is a form of knowledge-production specific to the subjectivity of the ethnographer and their relations with a particular group of people and place. The same is true for the historian. Attewell, herself a mixed-race Chinese diasporic subject, narrates her encounters with the archive and how its silences affected her. Research is relational work, she reminds us.

References

Attewell, Nadine. 2026. Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949. Stanford University Press.

Campt, Tina M. 2017. Listening to Images. Duke University Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2018. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W. W. Norton & Co.

Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.

Mingwei Huang is Associate Professor, Program in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Dartmouth College. Huang is the author of Reconfiguring Racial Capitalism: South Africa in the Chinese Century (Duke University Press, 2024).

September 17, 2026

Christian Sorace, The Golden Chinggis and the Iconoclast

Several years ago, I met S. Molor-Erdene at a café in Ulaanbaatar. He is hyped as Mongolia’s ‘only’ continental philosopher—a provocateur with a large following among young Mongolians alienated from the hypocrisy of tradition and cult-like reverence for Chinggis Khan.

Over the years, his position has been consistent: Mongolians are backward; anything good in Mongolia has been the gift of Soviet modernity; Mongolians should praise Marx, not Chinggis Khan. His hatred of all things Mongolian always struck me as an inverted narcissism; the preservation of Mongolian exceptionalism through its negation. My gripe with Molor-Erdene, however, has less to do with his persona, and is more squarely with his politics: How could someone who is supposedly a socialist disparage ordinary people as a ‘black mass’ (khar massa) of uneducated and unclean commoners? This is not a socialism I can affirm.

Molor-Erdene told me that an essay he wrote on Chinggis and Marx resulted in death threats. I believed him, but also attributed the claim to his narcissism. He is said to have claimed that the Mongols never existed as a people, an argument that may not be as outlandish as it sounds: after all, the Mongol empire was based on aristocratic genealogies, not anachronistic national mythologies. A nation always retroactively projects its own founding myths and origins, and Molor-Erdene was turning over the stones. For this, he is being investigated under Article 19.9 of the Criminal Code for ‘undermining national unity,’ a charge that could carry five to twelve years in prison and that one commentator compared to Hong Kong’s National Security Law. In China, he would be accused of what the Chinese Communist Party calls ‘historical nihilism’ — a species of revisionism that challenges the nation’s founding myths and can also result in criminal charges.

One thing most commentary on him has not actually done is look at what Molor-Erdene has written. He offers a principled critique of identity-based belonging. In his Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow trilogy, he warns, ‘The “biological” era of blood ties and wanting to know who you are has begun.’ (Tsus oirtokh bolon khen gedgee medmeer baina gesen ‘biologiin’ tsag üye ekhelsen.) To further Molor-Erdene’s point: Why should anyone need to know, or prove through state documents, who they are, to be a political subject? One does not need a microscope to see the tincture of blood in liberal democracies. Molor-Erdene’s critique of Chinggis Khan is also worth considering: what kind of political symbol is Chinggis Khan? What political possibilities is he retrofitted to support, imagine, and foreclose? Are these yours?

I devote one of my seminars to Chinggis Khan and the historical battles over his legacy. In it I discuss how, at different points in history, Chinggis Khan has meant different things to different people. In Mongolia, he is now viewed as the founder of the Mongolian people and state; during the socialist period, by contrast, he was cast as a feudal tyrant. Across the border, in Inner Mongolia in the 1930s, the Communists claimed Chinggis Khan as an anti-colonial hero, only later to repudiate him during the Cultural Revolution. Further afield, in the late nineteenth century, a Japanese student at the University of Cambridge wrote a dissertation claiming Chinggis Khan was Japanese, prompting imperial expeditions into Siberia to find proof. I usually end the class with the trailer for John Wayne’s racist, tragicomic portrayal of Chinggis Khan in The Conqueror. Chinggis Khan has never been a stable referent.

But the Mongolian state needs Chinggis more than Chinggis needs it. Every new populist needs his own Chinggis. Former president Kh. Battulga was behind the world’s largest equestrian statue of Chinggis Khan, in Töv Aimag — though he built it as a businessman, years before he entered the political scene. More recently, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, and Sports unveiled the Chinggis Khaan National Museum: the building is nine storeys of marble and concrete; a golden falcon perches on top of the dome designed to look like a Mongolian ger. Visitors enter the museum through its imperial façade and gilded doors, which resemble the signature of imperial authority. On the top floor, for an extra fee, one can sees a 7.5-metre golden Chinggis Khan. It was enshrined in a state ceremony in March 2025 — consecrated with soil from Mongolia’s thirteen sacred mountains and attended by the president, the prime minister, and the speaker of parliament. Trump has the same taste for gold; populism, on either side of the Pacific, speaks of a metallurgic desire. It is an architectural obscenity.

This is at a time when China is folding Chinggis Khan’s memory into its own Sino-civilizational-multi-cultural fantasy and erasing the last vestiges of minority national (minzu) autonomy and language in its own quest for national rejuvenation. One nation’s independence myths are another nation’s extinction myths. As I write about in my forthcoming book, Steppe Immunity: Reimagining Political Futures from Mongolia, extinction anxieties drive national attachments, foreclosing alternative political futures. The problem may not be Chinggis Khan, or even the states that keep reinventing him. It is the nation-form itself that requires the policing of identity, history, and movement.

This is the sacred line of national immunity that Molor-Erdene is criticised for crossing. On social media, many comments have approved of the government’s actions. One representative comment ran: ‘I support freedom of speech. However, this case is not about freedom of speech. This man is attacking Mongolia’s independence…’ Say whatever you want, but do not question the nation. Another person suggested: by denying the historical fact of Chinggis Khan and the Mongol people, Molor-Erdene has left the protected realm of free speech and academic debate and is engaged in ‘slander.’

The common liberal rejoinder went: ‘I don’t agree with what Molor-Erdene says but I will defend his right to say it.’ There is palpable worry that Mongolia’s legal protections are being peeled like clementines, one after another. But is there a way out of this dialectic of liberal free speech versus nationalist slander? There is, but it is not one that fits within nationalist historiography—it is only visible by the faint light from a star that has since disappeared.

Complicating matters further is the usual intrigue and opacity of Mongolian politics. An unlikely Socrates, Molor-Erdene has ambitions to run for president. Speculation has been rampant whether he is a pawn of a larger electoral game, always being played behind the scenes. The person leading the charge against Molor-Erdene, S. Amarsaikhan, last month announced a new policy of social media registration, copying China’s playbook; each social account would be linked to a personal identity number. Perhaps Molor-Erdene is an early victim of what such a policy portends: a fly stuck in a turbid ointment. The latest news on this issue is that he is being detained for a month, pre-trial.

A friend said to me this morning: ‘This whole thing is a farce,’ which does not mean it is without consequence. It is a scandal commensurate with the times in which we live.

Christian Sorace is Associate Professor of Global China at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell 2017) and of the forthcoming Steppe Immunity: Reimagining Political Futures from Mongolia (Stanford, 2027). He co-edited Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso, 2019) and Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour(Verso, 2022). He also serves on the editorial board of the Made in China Journal.

September 14, 2026

Susan Thomas, The Foreign Student “Threat”: Repression, Austerity, and the Politics of Scapegoating

It is undeniable that university life in the United States is implicated in the current moment of state violence, institutional repression, and worsening neoliberal austerity. What has been noteworthy is how, in this context, the foreign student has emerged as a significant figure. The broader targeting of the higher education sector by the right-wing Trump administration, the violent quelling of Palestinian solidarity protests on campuses, and the surge in nativistic resentment in light of President Trump’s own inconsistent positions on education- and labor-related migration all have involved a heightened, hostile attention to the presence of international students at American universities. In the latest instantiation of this trend, the Trump administration issued a change to the “duration of status” rule that had permitted international students to remain in the country as long as they had maintained their enrolled status; with this revision, a fixed period of four years is now imposed, ultimately meaning that foreign students will be subject to additional federal immigration scrutiny during their time in the United States (See Department of Homeland Security, 2026).

How did the student-migrant subject appear in the political crosshairs of the battles raging on and against our campuses? Why is this the case? Our answers cannot merely come from a presentist framing that only interprets the attacks on international students through critiques of the overtly fascist turn in U.S. national electoral politics. Rather, we must attend critically to the political and policy legacies that have long been part of the story of student migration in the U.S. and have helped foster this current moment of strife in which our international students are being aggressively targeted by a familiar politics of scapegoating.

For the past two decades or so, we have been witnessing an extraordinary rise in overseas students at U.S. institutions of higher education. A consequence of the global commodification of higher education, drawing students from overseas in large numbers has been accepted as a viable and easy option for revenue generation. Indeed, throwing open American campus doors to students from other parts of the world is now the primary strategy of what has come to be referred to as “internationalization,” the systematic efforts and policy agendas made by universities seeking to ensure their own survival and relevance in the era of neoliberal globalization. There are currently over a million students from overseas studying on American campuses. Notably, these students overwhelmingly arrive from the Asian region, with India and China serving as leading sources of foreign students for over 20 years. They contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy, serve as key sources of revenue and labor for the campus, and predominantly enroll in technical fields seen as pivotal to the “global knowledge economy” but ones that are otherwise chronically under-enrolled by domestic students.

In the academic world, the economic significance of foreign students’ enrollments is widely recognized today, often casually referred to behind closed doors as our campuses’ “cash cows.” This sentiment often smuggles in a range of assumptions, such as the notion that these students are elite, wealthy, and that their arrival on our campuses is not because they earned a place, but solely because of their economic value. These kinds of assumptions are problematic not only because of the ways they disregard the actual lived and quite varied experiences of this migrant population, but also how that disregard, then, contributes to rendering them vulnerable to the politically charged tussles transforming our institutions. The neglect I allude to here is partly explained by the tendency in U.S. scholarship to hold the international student as an analytically distinct, ahistorical, and apolitical category of transnational mobility, thus divorcing their experiences and stories from the socio-political and historical conditions forging their paths as migrants. I want to suggest that re-framing and attending ethnographically to the foreign student as a key migrant personhood would bring to the surface deeper, crucial insights on the interface of migration, race politics, and higher education in the era of late-stage capitalism.

In my critical ethnography, Indebted Mobilities (2024), I offer this kind of ethnographic reading of the migratory lives of non-elite, middle-class, Indian men pursuing an overseas education at a public university in the U.S. within the post-9/11, neoliberal landscape. The book argues that the transnational educational sphere is imagined as a site of masculine becoming among these men who are raised in a post-liberalized India, and whose arrival on an American campus is imbricated in the geographies of racial capitalism. These young people’s desiring for successful modern manhood, which they believe can be made possible through their migration for an American education, articulates with the racial and class formations that mark their movement across borders and locate them ambivalently on campus. The sensemaking that emerges from these articulations is configured not only through the narrative of US exceptionalism, which has been tethered to the history of Indian educational migration to the United States, but also through interrelated ideas of indebtedness.

Importantly, the vast majority of these migrant youth would not have been able to study overseas without having received significant amounts in student loans to finance the pursuit. Their transnational migration being directly linked to the accrual of student debt informed key aspects of their lives as student-migrants—being forced to live in subpar, segregated housing conditions on campus, working part-time jobs that were regularly low-wage, exploitative and at times, involved taking risks around their visa status,⁴ and feeling immense pressure to stay and secure professional work in the U.S. after graduation in order to repay their loans.

At the same time, drawing on late anthropologist David Graeber’s (2011) analysis of debt, the book contends that student debt, and the material conditions wrought by such debt, were intertwined with other affective and moral logics of indebtedness to mediate how these young people negotiated their desire to become modern “men of the world.” My middle-class interlocutors revealed how the webs of obligation attached to their migratory paths produced a cultural logic of indebtedness—a sort of inventory-taking of what they owed and what they were owed in return—that configured how these Indian youth registered their lives as migrants. This moral calculus, working in tandem with the impersonal and legal nature of the market-based obligation to immediately repay student loans after graduation, served a crucial disciplinary function that ultimately groomed these young people for the volatility of the global neoliberal economy.

As disillusionment and crisis pervade the ethos of U.S. higher education in the throes of neoliberal restructuring, the notion of the U.S. university as the place one can seize the promises of the so-called “American Dream” is arguably beginning to fade in the American popular imagination; peddling such promises to the aspirational middle-classes of the Global South, then, makes sense. Doing so is not only crucial for the economic vitality of campuses because of the revenue and labor student-migrants end up providing, but also because it ultimately draws in student populations whose growing presence helps ideologically sustain the exceptionalist logic inherent to the mission of U.S. higher education. The Indian middle-class migrant youth centered in my ethnographic work lamented to me about what they deemed the failures of India’s higher education system to provide the upward mobility, status, and success they were convinced were rightfully theirs;⁵ they felt an American education, in contrast, was the authentically liberal, secular site where true meritocracy thrives, hard work is rewarded, opportunities are abundant, and the successful modern futures they believed they deserved are rendered possible. That they are chasing these possibilities by falling into severe financial debt because of their student loans (the repayment of which becomes mainly dependent on whether they can stay in the United States and secure stable work in pertinent fields) is indicative of how the violence of debt is increasingly a shared condition of student life that includes foreign student populations, and continues to be essential to sustaining the neoliberal university. And still, the pertinence of student-migrants arriving from the Asian region is hardly recognized or acknowledged in the student debt discourse in the United States.

Overall, Indebted Mobilities’ ethnographic centering of the Indian student-migrant as a key figure of South Asian transnationality illuminates how the production of indebted, racialized migrant-subjects is a vital feature of the educational circuits of neoliberal empire. This kind of ethnographic attention to the trajectories of student-migrants can offer something toward undoing a troubling erasure of the lived experiences of a migrant population that has become especially critical to the landscape of higher education today.

Pushing back against this erasure is something that matters not only because these young people have become integral to our classrooms and university community, but also because of the ways their presence on our campuses is implicated in the political tensions around immigration in the United States. When immigration debates traffic in reductive binaries of the good, appropriate, virtuous migrant striving for the promises of US exceptionalism, on the one hand, and the treacherous, criminal and illegal migrant exploiting an all-too-benevolent immigration system on the other, the student-migrant, understood to be migrating for educational opportunities they receive as part of a commodified exchange, is typically idealized as the former. The migrant youth arriving on student visas in large numbers from places like India are especially positioned to be seen as the desirable migrant because of how their paths resonate with long-existing tropes of Asians as more ambitious, hard-working, and more naturally or culturally inclined for educational and economic success. But in my work, I argue that in moments of political and economic crisis, such clear divisions between the innocuous and the risky migrant become blurred, and the student-migrant is revealed as a much more ambivalent figure. This ambivalent positioning thrusts the figure of the foreign student into the politically charged spotlight in various conjunctures of crisis and nationalist angst, marking this migrant subject as a racialized threat to the national order.

One such significant conjuncture was the inception of the “War on Terror” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which had enduring consequences for the foreign student presence on American campuses. The War on Terror not only heralded an era of endless, devastating military invasions and occupations abroad; it also involved a massive restructuring of national state agencies that enabled the consolidation of mass surveillance and deepened the link between transnational migration and the U.S. carceral state. As a feature of this restructuring, restrictive, stringent measures to track and surveil foreign students on campuses and in the U.S. were an important development. The justification for this scrutiny of the figure of the educational migrant was tied to the discovery that some of the 9/11 hijackers had been issued student visas or had used educational reasons to gain entry in the U.S., thus suggesting how the student visa system was inefficient, ineffective, and putting the nation in danger. In the context of post-9/11 racial profiling and racially motivated acts of violence, student-migrants who could be constructed racially as potential terrorist-threats (including Arabs, Muslims, South Asians, and other so-called “Muslim-looking” individuals) were marked as ambivalent, suspicious figures on our campuses, drawing institutions of higher education into the nationalist narratives of border security. For the student-migrants discussed in Indebted Mobilities, the post-9/11 surveillance state was crucial to their moral calculus and racialized becoming in the era of neoliberal globalization, illuminating how the circuits of educational migration specifically linking South Asia and the United States are caught up in the exigencies and contradictions of nation- and empire-building projects and pointing to the need to read these young people’s ambivalent positioning through the nexus of geopolitical interests, conjunctural crisis, and racial politics.

The politicized targeting of foreign students and their place in the tussles around the future of U.S. higher education we are witnessing in the current moment should be situated in relation to some of the considerations I have noted above. For one, the framing of international students as mere economic subjects essential to revenue-generation schemes, which contributes to a problematic disregard of the actual differences that exist within the transnational class formations of this migrant population, easily dovetails with the nativistic scapegoating of overseas students in the face of broader economic and political turmoil in the U.S.

Most recently, President Donald Trump’s own vacillating on whether or not to severely restrict the issuance of F-1 (student) and H-1B (work) visas (Gooding, 2025; Licon and Tang, 2025), two categories that are often perceived as synonymous with a larger arrival of Asian foreign nationals, led to a backlash within his own base that revealed the xenophobic resentment of international students. During a televised interview with Fox News, Trump made a stunning reversal in his earlier stance on the issue, arguing that not only would restricting international student enrollments spell disaster financially for universities across the country, but that the U.S. simply did not have the home-grown talent necessary to strengthen the U.S. economy (Trump, 2025). Online discourse condemned the change in Trump’s position as a grave betrayal of his promises to put “America First,” insisting that it both impacts the availability of jobs for Americans, as well as encourages a saturated foreign presence on American campuses where “talent” is meant to get nurtured. The online exchange around the Trump interview also reflected the widespread misinformation that exists about the relationship between the foreign student and the campus economy. Namely, there appeared to be not only an overall rage that these “foreigners” were taking up seats in university classrooms, but that they also must be taking scholarships and other funding opportunities away from American students who are increasingly unable to afford a college education (Stonetoss, 2025), reflecting the widely held assumption that these students are highly privileged foreigners displacing the U.S.’s own more deserving citizens.

Indicative of how racialized migrants are often scapegoated in times of political and economic crisis of U.S. global hegemonic power, the Asian foreign student has come to play the bogeyman in white nationalist anxieties linking immigration, the US economy, and higher learning. Such nativistic resentment is consistent with the broader right-wing attacks on higher education that have escalated recently. Higher education as the main target for the culture wars that have ensued has had a strong ally and enforcer in the second Trump administration, which has been using executive actions to bend institutional decision-making to the will of the administration’s agenda. This has included the threat (and in some cases, the actual implementation) of massive federal funding cuts. Importantly, the right-wing government’s show of force has helped serve as a cover for universities to carry out acts of austerity and repression that could be argued were in their institutional interest all along. For one, campuses have gradually been turning their attention to redefining policies in ways that weaken the conditions for academic freedom and campus dissent, something that has been amplified in the wake of the egregious, violent crackdown on the 2024 Palestinian solidarity encampments and protests (Blinder, 2025; Charbonneau, 2026; Greenfield, 2026). For another, institutions of higher education have been using the broader political tensions caused by the Trump administration to move forward with slashing academic programming and curricula that apparently don’t meet the muster of economic value; unsurprisingly, many of the programs that are impacted tend to have a humanistic and critical edge to them (Otterman, 2026; Robbin and Gomez, 2025).

These developments serve as the backdrop for the recent targeting of foreign students. Existing at the intersection of the Right’s attacks on liberal campuses and on immigration, student-migrants are a valuable target but one that is marked in contradictory ways because of their economic import. In fact, the shifts in Trump’s rhetoric—from the promise to return to an isolationist and unapologetically White America to the realization of and allusion to how U.S. economic, political, and military might are dependent on [racialized] foreign talent and labor—are not simply the inexplicable whims of a megalomaniac madman; it is a central tension in the history of U.S. migration policy. The xenophobia directed at the Asian foreign student is a familiar reaction to the long-standing contradictions and angst that underlie the liberal capitalist logic of the U.S. nation-building project. Whatis noteworthy is that as the rhetorical and policy maneuvers that surface to manage these contradictions are worked out on student-migrants, it reveals how the university is a pertinent node in the U.S. migration policy regime; indeed, the university being entangled in and understood as a site of broader nativistic battles today is not all that unexpected or unprecedented.

To this point, another key consideration is how the consolidation of the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus directly set the stage for the current moment of political targeting and repression of international students and their political activities. As suggested, the ambivalent positioning of racialized student-migrants, at times, constructs them as a threat to state interests; this is especially true when their political alignments unfold in ways that are unexpected and deemed inappropriate. Throughout the history of educational migration to the United States, students from other parts of the world, particularly from the Global South, have gotten involved in the cultures of dissent that have been partly nurtured on American campuses, participating in anti-colonial struggles and internationalist social movements that challenged the repressive and imperialist campaigns of the U.S. and other nations (Shannon, 2017; Thomas, 2019). Overseas students’ involvement in such acts of resistance meant risking their educational standing, migration status, and their bodies. Most recently, foreign students took these kinds of risks protesting alongside American students as part of the global Palestinian solidarity movement. In 2024, thousands of students got involved in the pro-Palestine encampments that spread across campuses to demand a halt to U.S. complicity in the genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing campaigns driven by Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism. In response, under both the Biden and the Trump administrations, and facilitated by university leadership, this student resistance was criminalized using the full force of state violence. The migration status of foreign students who were involved in the protests made them an especially easy, vulnerable target. The 2025 detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a former international student, is a telling instance of how the U.S. migration policy regime is mobilized, even in contradictory ways, to ensnare the disruptive, dissenting foreign student. While Khalil was initially admitted on a student visa to study at Columbia University, he had already been granted permanent residency or “green card” status by the time ICE agents arrived at his doorstep claiming to have revoked his student visa (Svrluga, 2025). When informed of this status change, the agents detained him anyway. Now, Khalil is fighting in the courts to keep his green card and prevent his deportation from the United States (Bustillo and Johnson, 2026). Such cases exemplify how ICE is systematically using immigration law and the extensive powers sanctioned by post-9/11 surveillance measures to intervene by identifying, threatening, detaining, or deporting student-migrants who dared to engage in acts of protest on U.S. university campuses (Jeyaretnam, 2025).

The transnational lives of student-migrants entangled in the migratory circuits of racial capitalism are, and always have been, implicated in the geopolitical struggles and crises of critical political and historical conjunctures. Ethnographic analyses that uncover the particular material and affective conditions of these migrant subjects’ everyday lives produced within such conjunctures can contribute to deepening our understanding of those implications and help unsettle the distorted assumptions made about their presence on our campus that are directly rendering them vulnerable to state-sanctioned scapegoating and violences.

To end, I would like to return to the idea of debt. What if, as I ask in Indebted Mobilities, we were to collectively re-think a notion of indebtedness—of what is owed in this life—that is not driven by a market logic? Graeber, in his own work, pointed to the various kinds of already-existing, mundane practices of obligation to and care for one another embedded in everyday life that are not processed through a paradigm of exchange. Meanwhile, in The Undercommons, Harney and Moten (2013) reflect on the promise of “bad debt”—a refuge of mutual, social dwelling in which we may perpetually owe, but payment is never possible. It is here, Harney and Moten insist, where true study and solidarity can meaningfully thrive. As they write, “Justice is only possible where debt never obliges, never demands, never equals credit, payment, payback. Justice is possible only where it is never expected, in the refuge of bad debt, in the fugitive public of strangers and not of communities, of undercommons and not neighborhoods, among those who have been there all along from somewhere” (p. 26).

The 2024 Palestinian solidarity protests ignited on our campuses, which also included the courageous involvement of student-migrants, offer an invaluable example of thinking indebtedness differently as Graeber, Moten, and Harney move us to do. Students from across campuses and legal status stepping out of the bounds of the institutional classroom and into makeshift encampments, raising their voices, sharing food and knowledge, taking turns resting and protecting one another, and putting their bodies on the line in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle gesture to a praxis of being in each other’s (bad) debt that was not dictated by a market logic, but through other, already-existing and re-imagined ways of owing each other and our collective futures.

For those of us engaged in the endeavor of higher education but in ways that are mired in the complicities of the institutional violence of American campuses, what are we moved to reconsider through such notions of indebtedness? For instance, what do we, as scholars and educators, owe the people of the Global South that have been and continue to be at the receiving ends of U.S.-led political, economic, and military destruction, which is fundamentally facilitated by our institutions? What do we owe the people of Palestine? Of Yemen? Of Venezuela? Of Iran? What is owed to the poor and disenfranchised in our universities’ own surrounding communities? In a time of aggressive austerity and growing repression on our campuses, such questions are tied to a probing of whether we can regard spaces of higher learning as having value beyond being, first and foremost, an economic good. Can we reimagine higher learning through a consideration of what we owe one another that will allow us to study and create and exist together differently than the violences of late-stage capitalism allow?

As the global neoliberal project of higher education today brings students from other parts of the world to our campuses, some arriving in substantial numbers from places like India and China, we need to include student-migrants in this re-envisioning. They are critical to the conditions of being in our institutions. Yet, neglecting to consider this significance in more robust ways not only contributes to our own pedagogical inadequacies in the classroom; it also renders these students vulnerable to the political volatility rocking the very foundation of U.S. higher education today. Attending to their experiences with restrictive migration policies, racial exclusion, surveillance, exploitative labor conditions, and the shackles of student debt and precarious futures offer nodes of connection that could help draw these young people, who overwhelmingly fill seats in technical fields that are the engine of US hegemonic power, into collective acts of political study, protest, mutual care, and solidarity in times of ever-expanding austerity, repression, and imperialism. In a sense, student-migrants’ arrival to and presence at our institutions are often perceived as embodying the human face of the “global” on our campuses. I believe, then, that the acts of risk-taking and internationalist solidarity that some of the student-migrants enacted in the most recent protests for Palestine, a legacy of resistance they continue from their predecessors, are a glimpse into what a more just notion of globality is made possible through them—one that looks and acts across the violent borders of this world and reimagines what we owe one another.

References

Blinder, A. (2025, April 9). How Universities are Responding to Trump. New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/article/trump-university-college.html

Bustillo, X., & C. Johnson. (2026). He was Detained for 104 Days. A Year Later, He’s Still Fighting for the Right to Free Speech. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/10/nx-s1-5716101/mahmoud-khalil-legal-fight

Charbonneau, L. (2026, March 18). Academic Freedom in US Under Threat: Book Bans, Distorted Curricula and Crackdowns on College Campus Protests. Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/03/18/academic-freedom-in-the-us-under-threat

Department of Homeland Security. (2026, July 16). Trump Administration Issues Final Rule to End Foreign student Visa Abuse [Press Release]. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2026/07/16/trump-administration-issues-final-rule-end-foreign-student-visa-abuse

Gooding, D. (2025, October 20). New H-1B Fee Change: Trump Admin Reveals How to Pay and Who’s Exempt. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/h-1b-visa-change-update-fee-trump-immigration-10909882

Graeber, D. (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House.

Greenfield, N. (2026, January 16). Catastrophic Year for US Academic Freedom and Autonomy. University World News. https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20260116140044901

Harney, S., & F. Moten, F. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.

Jeyaretnam, M. (2025, April 1). These are the Students Targeted by Trump’s Immigration Enforcement Over Campus Activism. Time. https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-trump-ice-detention-deport-campus-palestinian-activism/

Licon, A.G., & D. Tang. (2025, August 26). Trump Saying 600,000 Chinese Students Could Come to the US Draws MAGA Backlash. The Associated Press. https://apnews.com/article/chinese-student-visas-trump-maga-dce4e064ea61a4df090865668ca48cde

Otterman, S. (2026, April 3). Syracuse Drops 84 Majors Including Classics, Ceramics and Italian. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/01/nyregion/syracuse-university-degrees-eliminated.html

Robbin, A., & S. Gomez (2025, November 26). University to Cut or Pause 23 Programs Next Fall Amid Restructuring. New School Free Press. https://www.newschoolfreepress.com/2025/11/26/university-to-cut-or-pause-25-programs-next-fall-amid-restructuring/

Susan Thomas is the author of Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University. University of Chicago Press, 2024. She is Associate Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education and a Senior Research Associate with the South Asia Center at Syracuse University.

September 8, 2026

Joshua D. Pilzer, Listening to Korean Victims of the Atomic Bombs: Prospects for the International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings (November 13-15, 2026)

Since 2010 I have been listening to first and second-generation Korean victims of the atomic bomb and documenting their expressive lives. In November 2026 many of the victims whom I work with will host an International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings, for the purposes of “examin(ing) the legal responsibility of the United States government for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. People’s tribunals, which originate in the 1960s, ⁶. are important interventions in the global practice of law: they attempt to make human beings, not state or corporate actors, the central focus and the executive authority of law. With the prospect of the International People’s Tribunal on the atomic bombings in view, in this essay I offer some suggestions about how to listen, how to hear as fully as possible the people who are and must remain the central focus and concern of the People’s Tribunal.

In March of 2026, I took part in an Association for Asian Studies conference panel on “People Power: Grassroots Legal Campaigns against Intra- and Inter-state Violence in the Aftermath of WWII and the Cold War,” organized by Lin Li of Kenyon College. The panel concerned two current grassroots legal efforts. The first of these is the current lawsuit in which South Korean women accuse the US military of illegal abuse, confinement, and medical treatment in the sex work network surrounding American military bases in South Korea. The second legal movement we were to discuss was the International People’s Tribunal on the US Atomic Bombings. I prepared my remarks by speaking with one of my key interlocutors, Han Jeongsun, by telephone. Han Jeongsun is one of the main plaintiffs in the People’s Tribunal, a second-generation victim of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and head of the Korean Society for Second Generation Atomic Bomb Survivors. I asked her about her reasons for participating in the People’s Tribunal.

“The most important reason is to let people know that we, as victims, exist,” she told me. When the atomic bombs fell on Japan in 1945 there were about 70,000 Koreans in Hiroshima and 30,000 in Nagasaki. Koreans had been recruited from underdeveloped parts of Japanese colonial Korea to do many of the most dangerous jobs involved in the construction of the Japanese empire and its military industrial complex; and the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Koreans had largely been brought to Japan for munitions labor. About half of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Koreans died in the bombings; the rest and their descendants have lived out their lives with injury, illness, and developmental disabilities arising from the experience of the bombing and the legacy of radiation exposure.

It is convenient for the US to ignore the existence of the Korean victims of the atomic bombs, because they are unquestionably innocent victims who cannot be cast as aggressors. It is convenient for Japan to hush up Korean victims, as it helps consolidate the Japanese monopoly on nuclear victimization, part of the post-war sleight-of-hand by which Japan transformed itself from an aggressor nation to a victimized people (see Yoneyama 1999). Even in South Korea, where the atomic bomb has been enshrined in history as an agent of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonialism, historical consciousness has been reluctant to acknowledge its Korean victims. All of these forces of forgetting are why Han Jeongsun insisted first and foremost that the US and the international community recognize victims’ existence.

She told me of her hopes that the People’s Tribunal will make that possible. “When we said we were going to the US…there’s an expression you probably know. People told us that it will be like ‘hitting a boulder with an egg.’” They told her it would be useless. “But,” she went on, “I don’t think of it that way. Thinking of the victims, especially the second-generation radiation sufferers, and how they have to leave the world in this terrible pain, it’s awful. That feeling of being ill-used… What we’ve got is not a chicken egg, it’s a quail’s egg. It’s so much smaller. We throw it to express these awful feelings, although it likely won’t break the stone. But we want to leave behind even a trace. And in this way victims might be able to relieve their hearts of their burdens just a little. And we want to ask people to understand the depth of these horrible feelings. We want to shout to demand such understanding. We want people to see our will to strike the stone with our pain. And in this way we want to communicate to Americans that even now there are people suffering as the result of the use of nuclear weapons.”

The atomic bomb, in the global imagination, conjures up images of mushroom clouds and horrible injury and destruction. If you have looked into the matter, you may have read something about it, perhaps starting with John Hersey’s astounding Hiroshima. The global imagination about the atomic bombs is largely silent, which means it is devoid of living people. It has been framed as a historical event, not the living legacy that it is, which continues to harm countless people. One way of acknowledging these people is to listen—to actually listen—to victims. The International People’s Tribunal, a remarkable product of the community of Korean bomb victims’ grassroots activism, is the best opportunity for the international community to do so yet.

In my monograph Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of ‘Korea’s Hiroshima’ (2022), readers encounter and listen to several victims at length, hearing their voices on the book’s website. Theirs are practically inconceivable stories of suffering and endurance, as double victims of the Japanese colonial exploitation of Koreans and the indiscriminate atomic bombing of Asian civilians by the United States. For all their injury and fragility, their voices have a strength that is powerful beyond the words that human voices are often reduced to, in scholarship, in thought, and in legal proceedings.

Han Jeongsun is a second-generation victim of the bomb because her parents were in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing. Her mother was pregnant with her older brother, who died soon after they relocated to Korea at the end of the war. All of her siblings have suffered from the intergenerational transfer of illness and disability that is the legacy of the atomic bombing and its radiation. Her youngest sibling lost all of his teeth as a child. Han Jeongsun herself suffers from avascular necrosis, a degenerative bone disease that has required her to have twelve surgeries for knee replacement. Her son suffers from cerebral palsy and, as she puts it, “lives lying down.”

There is much to be learned from listening to Han Jeongsun’s voice, and her often spoken, sometimes sung narration of her experiences. In my book, I investigate the remarkable ways that she draws on popular cultural resources in her effort of survival and in her activist speech—in official statements, testimonies, and casual talk. Through sung and spoken quotation she weaves songs into tapestry-like narratives of the experiences of second-generation victims of the atomic bomb. In so doing, she connects the experiences of profoundly marginalized and forgotten Korean atomic bomb victims with core metaphors of mainstream popular culture, making profoundly compelling claims to social membership and a plea for recognition.

Han Jeongsun does this work of connection utilizing myriad songs of struggle from the 20^th century genre of Korean ballads known as teuroteu, an abbreviated Koreanization of ‘foxtrot.’ ‘Trot’ originates in the Japanese colonial period and is perhaps the genre that most painfully and ambivalently expresses the sorrows of Korean modernity. She borrows the many references to walking as a metaphor for struggle found in Korean popular song in order to relate this core metaphor to her literal experiences of difficulty walking. Yu Jina’s 2009 “Gochu” (Hot Pepper), with its references to the seemingly endless chains of mountain passes that dot the Korean landscape, Shin Yu’s 2008 “Jam janeun gongju” (Sleeping Princess), which invokes the ‘world road’ (sesang-gil) one walks in life, and “Queen of Elegy” Yi Mi-ja’s 1968 “Yeojaui ilsaeng” (Woman’s Life), which refers to the “weary life-road” (godalpeun insaeng-gil), are just some of the references to walking that make appearances in her narratives. Han Jeongsun may sing a verse, or quote a text for support, or slip in a phrase from a song text so subtly that only people deeply familiar with the ‘trot’ genre would even know it was there.

Han Jeongsun’s knack for making these connections and for encapsulating experience in speech are just two aspects of her eloquence, which has assured her central place in the movement. Her narration of the second-generation experience has had subtle and enduring effects on the activism and media coverage surrounding Korean first and second-generation bomb victims. Her poetry of walking as struggle, for instance, surfaces across the activist discourse of the second-generation movement (Pilzer 2022: 170). And all of this eloquent activism has culminated in her central role in the upcoming International People’s Tribunal.

As we concluded our telephone call Han Jeongsun told me that she and Shim Jintae, a first-generation victim of the bombing of Hiroshima and director of the Hapcheon Branch of the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims Association, were planning to visit the US a few months later for a speaking tour, in order to spread the word about the tribunal. So in May 2026 I travelled to the UN to hear her and Shim Jintae speak at a side event held during the 11th Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The panel was put on by SPARK, Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, an activist organization founded in 1994 to fight for a more equable relationship between the US and Korea, and to pursue peace, disarmament, and Korean reunification.

Shim Jintae spoke first. He told us briefly about his childhood in Hiroshima, before giving a long and reasoned indictment of the US for its failure to acknowledge that the atomic bombings were war crimes. “How can there be victims without aggressors?” he asked. “How, if the US refuses to accept responsibility for the 1945 atomic bombings how do we hold accountable any nation that seeks to use nuclear weapons today?”

Han Jeongsun presented next, speaking forcefully and clearly, clearly feeling the gravity of the situation. This was not quite the place for her rich cultural embroidery, but for succinct, unequivocal and articulate expression of the situation of Korean second-generation victims, and of her suffering and anger. She read from a text she had written. She described her family’s suffering due to the bomb, and the onset of her avascular necrosis. She described being unable to walk, and how the floor of her apartment was covered in blood as she used her torn hands to move about. She spoke of her activism on behalf of second-generation victims. She voiced her frustration about the refusal of the United States to offer apology or compensation to the victims of the atomic bombings of Japan. She concluded by expressing her hopes for the International People’s Tribunal.

Han Jeongsun’s speech was filled with the sort of epigrammatic brilliance that has made her so important to the movement. She described how the damage of nuclear radiation passes down mercilessly through the generations. “In mybody, the war rages endlessly,” she said. The translation of this speech on the webpage of the International People’s Tribunal, which records her making the statement at an event in March 2025, omits that last, epigrammatic line,⁷ perhaps because she added it later. Whatever the reason, there is a richness missing from the written transcript that leads me to suspect that the entextualization of thought and speech here does more than just flatten both into text; its flattening effect extends to the content of expression as well. Han Jeongsun’s speech was originally text, although it was written to be read aloud and listened to. A written transcript of a read speech thus endures two phases of entextualization, such that few traces of the sound and the sounding body remain. And yet the body, as Han Jeongsun has told us, is the locus of victimization.

Listening to victims’ voices allows for hearing that does not erase, in the entextualization of experience, the human bodies that bear the legacy of the bombs. To listen in this way, it is essential to pay attention to what they say and how they say it as if these two aspects of expression were of equal importance. This means that one can listen to half the story without knowing the languages in which victims are speaking. It is also essential to listen beyond official contexts, to encounter the broad range of expressive practices that constitute the expressive ecology of victims as activists and witnesses to experience.

Victims like Han Jeongsun and Shim Jintae imbue their speech with an unimaginable strength. They offer their voices, phrases, statements, and narrative tapestries to listeners, such that they might educate and energize the movement on behalf of justice for the victims and a nuclear-free world. These voices and their messages are things listeners can learn from; but they are also tools we can all use in pursuit of human flourishing.

References Cited:

Hersey, John. 1946. Hiroshima. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

International People’s Tribunal on 1945 US Atomic Bombings. 2026. “Leaflet: The International People’s Tribunal to hold the US accountable for dropping A-bombs.” Online document, https://abombtribunal.campaignus.me.

Pilzer, Joshua D. 2022. Quietude: A Musical Anthropology of “Korea’s Hiroshima.” New York: Oxford University Press.

Simm, Gabrielle, and Andrew Byrnes. 2013. “International People’s Tribunals in Asia: Political Theatre, Juridical Farce, or Meaningful Intervention?” Asian Journal of International Law 4: 103-24.

Yoneyama, Lisa. 1999. Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music, and an affiliate faculty of the Centre for the Study of Korea at the University of Toronto.

praxis episteme eikon paideia

subscribe about us journal

Check out our paideia section - Winner of the CELJ 2024 Best Digital Feature Award

Author: positions politics editorial group

Benjamin Kindler reviews Fabio Lanza, Urban Revolution: People’s Communes in Beijing

Mingwei Huang reviews Nadine Attewell, Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Chinese Lives in the Colonial Port City, 1905-1949

Christian Sorace, The Golden Chinggis and the Iconoclast

Susan Thomas, The Foreign Student “Threat”: Repression, Austerity, and the Politics of Scapegoating

Joshua D. Pilzer, Listening to Korean Victims of the Atomic Bombs: Prospects for the International People’s Tribunal on the 1945 US Atomic Bombings (November 13-15, 2026)

positions politics