Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

In what began as an attempt at reconciling with her mother, He Xiaopei’s first feature-length documentary takes us from the 1920-2020s through the lives, desires, and willpower of her mother, herself, and her daughter. As they experience political and social revolution, bend the rules and are desperate for a life to call one’s own, each woman passes to the next the most tender lover, but also, unintentionally, trauma.

A film by He Xiaopei. China, 2021, 82 minutes. Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles

Dr. He Xiaopei is an independent film director and the founder of Pink Space, a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to promoting sexual rights and gender equality.As a teenager, Xiaopei worked as a shepherd in the hills. After graduating from university, she joined the Chinese Mountaineering Team and climbed the Himalayas, including the Namcha Barwa summit. Following her mountaineering career, she served as an economist at the State Council, conducting research on economic reform for 14 years.Since the 1990s, Xiaopei has been active in the feminist and lesbian movements in China and participated in the 1995 United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. She later moved to the UK to pursue studies in sexuality and cultural studies, earning a Ph.D. before returning to China, where she founded Pink Space and began working with film as a medium to represent marginalised desires and lives.

https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/61485852898?pwd=fpQpvmsjen4unCMWPaU2zfc0SIf8d5.1

Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere, a recently published anthology edited by Elisabeth Lund Eengebretsen and Jinyan Zeng, explores the vibrancy and complexity of feminist activism across the Sinosphere in the Xi era. The book brings together scholars and scholar-activists to examine urgent issues such as the #MeToo movement, digital feminist mobilizations, online misogyny, and the lived experiences of queer, trans, and ethnic minority communities.. The BCCN conversation with Engebretsen and Zeng delves into how feminist engagements in China and beyond reconfigure activism through art, media, and digital platforms. By reflecting on the global and academic context of undertaking this kind of research, Engebretsen and Zeng offer fresh insights into the possibilities and challenges of building solidarities and producing critical knowledge in the post-2010s Sinosphere and beyond.

Bio:

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (she/they) is Professor of Gender Research in the Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Norway. A trained anthropologist, sinologist and feminist and queer studies scholar, Engebretsen specializes in ethnographic analyses of gender and sexual diversities, intersectional inequalities, political activism and theory-building in the empirical contexts of China, East Asia, transnational cultures, and Nordic Europe. Recent and current work focus on Nordic and transnational anti-LGBTQ+ mobilizations, Pride politics and activist engagements, climate justice and lesbian and queer history. Most recently, Engebretsen co-edited the anthology Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (Bloomsbury 2024; with Jinyan Zeng) and published a chapter on queer climate justice for the anthology Queer and Trans Life: Anthropological Futures (Berghahn 2025).

Dr. Jinyan Zeng 曾金燕 was born and raised as an ethnic Hakka in China. Since 2021, she has been affiliated with the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden. She is a scholar, creative writer, and documentary filmmaker. She earned her PhD in Gender and Sexuality from The University of Hong Kong and subsequently held fellowships at Colby College in the United States (2017) and at the University of Haifa in Israel (2020). Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and activism, and ethnicity, with an emphasis on the Chinese speaking world. Zeng authored Feminism and Genesis of Citizen Intelligentsia in China (2016), co-edited Feminist Activism in the Post-2010s Sinosphere (with Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, 2024) and co-directed the documentary film Outcry and Whisper (2020, with Wen Hai and Trish McAdam). She has two forthcoming books—Structures of Affect: A Feminist Approach to China’s Political Culture (Bloomsbury) and Chinese Women Intellectuals (tentative title, Routledge).

Under what conditions will leaders of a developing economy resist dominant ideologies of modernization and development? If modernization implies maximizing GDP growth through urbanization, high-tech industry, and large-scale production, then Guizhou province in China once charted an opposing path. For more than two decades beginning in the mid-1980s, Guizhou prioritized rural-based development, that is, investing in infrastructure and livelihood opportunities that directly benefited the rural poor. Consequently, despite posting China's slowest GDP growth, the province achieved faster poverty reduction and rural income gains than many of its faster-growing neighbors. Yet by 2010, a new provincial regime embraced a mainstream modernization agenda centered on large-scale infrastructure and high-tech industries, especially big data. As a result, although GDP growth accelerated, poverty alleviation and rural income gains lagged, while Guizhou became China's most indebted province. Drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2002 and 2025, John A. Donaldson analyzes the dialectical political forces and outcomes of these two divergent strategies, thereby highlighting the trade-offs between growth-centered modernization and more inclusive, rural-based development. He then exemplifies how this "Guizhou model" has been applied in other contexts, examining cases from countries ranging from Switzerland and Scotland to Costa Rica, Colombia, Chicago, and Hong Kong.

Bio:

John A. Donaldson is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University (SMU). He researches on politics, rural development and poverty in China and elsewhere, having conducted extensive fieldwork in rural India and Thailand, as well as in Singapore.

John Donaldson is the author of Small Works: Poverty and Economic Development in Southwestern China (Cornell University Press, 2011). His research has also been published in journals such as World Development, Journal of Development Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Politics and Society, China Journal, China Quarterly and Journal of Contemporary Asia.