Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University. All things 民族
Melbourne AUS +61 3 9479 2089
Joined April 2009
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A confident nation does not need to manufacture national consciousness.
China’s new ethnic unity law reveals the Party-state’s deeper anxiety: unity is no longer assumed, but engineered, monitored, and enforced.
My latest for @ChinaBriefJT:
jamestown.org/new-law-engine…
James Leibold retweeted
I’ve been offline for most of this year after having my first baby (the best assignment of my life, hands down) but am happy to be back at work now - and delighted to share that I’ll soon be moving to Tokyo as @TheEconomist's East Asia Bureau Chief.
James Leibold retweeted
Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, China “is walking into a dead-end, closed version of itself that will worsen its demographic decline,” writes @CarlMinzner.
bit.ly/4ysRLjf
James Leibold retweeted
Beijing’s rigidity threatens China’s future, writes @CarlMinzner. “Instead of creatively addressing emerging challenges, the CCP is relying on repression and reflexively following central mandates—no matter the risks.”
foreignaffairs.com/china/chi…
New CCTV Documentary Helps Forge the Chinese race-nation jamesleibold.substack.com/p/…
You can watch an English-subtitled version of the documentary series
here: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL…
In Helsinki I spoke on “infrastructure nationalism” in Tibet: how roads, rails and airports reshape state power. Thanks to Prof Julie Yu-Wen Chen & Taiwan’s Center for Chinese Studies, National Central Library.
Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=gvZ0gO4z…
Write-up: ncl.edu.tw/galleries/0Q25856…
James Leibold retweeted
Under #XiJinping, "[y]ou see a kind of back to the future, a return to #Mao, a belief in the importance of ideology, the importance of an interventionist state, that you needed to literally forge a collective identity" | James Leibold @jleibold bit.ly/3UJ8WPs
James Leibold retweeted
Our Non-Resident Senior Fellow @jleibold (Professor, @latrobe) presents his research on #China’s infrastructural expansion in 3 places in southeast Tibet - adjoining to #Arunachal Pradesh.
He brings this under the frame of ‘infrastructure nationalism’: how the Party-state, using transportation & connectivity networks, binds frontier territories to the nation while presenting that binding as development, unity and sovereign care.
The presentation was hosted by @helsinkiuni. youtube.com/watch?v=gvZ0gO4z…
James Leibold retweeted
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
James Leibold retweeted
If you hv not watched the latest episode of Australian Story @ChengLeifreedom，you must！
As a Chinese Australian dissident artist，I am so proud of befriending with Chenglei.
Her courage for self-reflection， resilience in brutal prisoning and advocating for human rights now is a great gift of inspiration to all Aussies！
abc.net.au/news/2026-09-07/t…
James Leibold retweeted
I am delighted to share that the 2026 Afghanistan Conference, Five Years of Taliban Rule: Implications of International Engagement with a Repressive Regime, concluded successfully yesterday at the University of Melbourne.
James Leibold retweeted
My great honor to converse with @RollandNadege for Documenting China’s Borderlands.
Delighted to be joined by @otkur009, @amish973, Ryoko Nakano, and Dylan Plung for this final episode of the #Borderlands podcast miniseries. We're unpacking China's Weltanschauung and ways it attempts to pull its neighbors into its cultural orbit.
strategicspace.nbr.org/docum…
James Leibold retweeted
The Chinese government is interrogating Uyghur Australians visiting Xinjiang, pressing them to collect information. Beijing exploits the vulnerability of separated Uyghur families as an opportunity for surveillance & disruption of communities abroad. @hrw hrw.org/news/2026/08/16/aust…
James Leibold retweeted
China’s new ethnic unity law codifies, “under the guise of civic inclusion,” a requirement that Mongols, Tibetans, and Uyghurs “become part of a single, party-defined Chinese identity,” write @jleibold and @tendor.
foreignaffairs.com/china/nex…
James Leibold retweeted
Today I start a new job as a White House correspondent with NPR. I am so excited; this is one of the biggest beats in the world right now, and a challenging one at that.
npr.org/people/705255512/emi…
James Leibold retweeted
I just finished the two chapters on cross strait relations in Hsiao-ting Lin's brand new book on Lee Teng-hui. Absolutely fascinating material, especially new stuff from Clinton archives on what Washington thought was going on with regards to elite politics in Beijing at the time.
James Leibold retweeted
"It's harder for the Chinese government to inject propaganda into those communities and to surveil and control what those communities are saying and thinking," @BethanyAllenEbr tells @abcnews on what's driving China's new ethnic unity policies.
📰 Read ⬇️
abc.net.au/news/2026-08-02/c…
James Leibold retweeted
“Beijing is overlooking the defining paradox of its own success: China’s rise remains tied to the openness of the economies it hopes to surpass,” write Enrico Fardella and @DrRadchenko. “Its road to a post-Western order still runs through the West.” foreignaffairs.com/china/chi…
James Leibold retweeted
“It is, in the official language of the party, the forging and casting of souls — that is, the remaking of habits, attachments, and historical memories that national minorities in China rely on to understand who they are and where they belong.”
New in @ForeignAffairs: @tendor and I argue that China’s new ethnic-unity law does not abolish minority autonomy on paper. It does something more insidious: it gives statutory force to assimilation while hollowing autonomy out in practice. foreignaffairs.com/china/nex…?
James Leibold retweeted
.@jleibold and @tendor discuss China’s assimilationist policies—and warn that Xi may soon “find that his only option for preserving national unity is a state of permanent coercion.”
foreignaffairs.com/china/nex…