The membranes: A decade of game studies and China in retrospect

In the past decade, both English-language game studies about China and Chinese-language game studies in mainland China itself have grown both in size and intellectual cohesion. This essay is not so much a retrospect on the intellectual development of Chinese-language game studies in China nor English-language game studies on China, but the ‘intellectual membrane’ between them. As a result of continuous conversations with games scholars inside and outside of China in the past decade, this reflection is not necessarily directed at game studies but takes games scholarship as a prism into the various processes of knowledge production on China and in China – therefore the phenomenon discussed here is valuable to the intersecting fields of China studies and internet studies.