Privatizing China
Description
Everyday life in China is increasingly shaped by a novel mix of neoliberal and socialist elements, of individual choices and state objectives. This combination of self-determination and socialism from afar has incited profound changes in the ways individuals think and act in different spheres of society.
Covering a vast range of daily life-from homeowner organizations and the users of Internet cafes to self-directed professionals and informed consumers-the essays in Privatizing China create a compelling picture of the burgeoning awareness of self-governing within the postsocialist context. The introduction by Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang presents assemblage as a concept for studying China as a unique postsocialist society created through interactions with global forms.
The authors conduct their ethnographic fieldwork in a spectrum of domains-family, community, real estate, business, taxation, politics, labor, health, professions, religion, and consumption-that are infiltrated by new techniques of the self and yet also regulated by broader socialist norms. Privatizing China gives readers a grounded, fine-grained intimacy with the variety and complexity of everyday conduct in China's turbulent transformation.
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Persons
Li Zhang is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Strangers in the City. Aihwa Ong is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several books, including Neoliberalism as Exception, Buddha Is Hiding, and Flexible Citizenship.
Content
Introduction: Privatizing China: Powers of the Self, Socialism from Afar
by Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang
PART I. POWERS OF PROPERTY
Emerging Class Practices
1. Private Homes, Distinct Lifestyles: Performing a New Middle Class
by Li Zhang
2. Property Rights and Homeowner Activism in New Neighborhoods
by Benjamin L. Read
Accumulating Land and Money
3. Socialist Land Masters: The Territorial Politics of Accumulation
by You-tien Hsing
4. Tax Tensions: Struggles over Income and Revenue
by Bei Li and Steven M. Sheffrin
Negotiating Neoliberal Values
5. "Reorganized Moralism": The Politics of Transnational Labor Codes
by Pun Ngai
6. Neoliberalism and Hmong/Miao Transnational Media Ventures
by Louisa Schein
PART II.POWERS OF THE SELF
Taking Care of One's Health
7. Consuming Medicine and Biotechnology in China
by Nancy N. Chen
8. Should I Quit?: Tobacco, Fraught Identity, and the Risks of Governmentality
by Matthew Kohrman
9.Wild Consumption: Relocating Responsibilities in the Time of SARS
by Mei Zhan
Managing the Professional Self
10. Post-Mao Professionalism: Self-enterprise and Patriotism
by Lisa M. Hoffman
11. Self-fashioning Shanghainese: Dancing across Spheres of Value
by Aihwa Ong
Search for the Self in New Publics
12. Living Buddhas, Netizens, and the Price of Religious Freedom
by Dan Smyer Yu
13. Privatizing Control: Internet Cafes in China
by Zhou Yongming
Afterword: Thinking Outside the Leninist Corporate Box
by Ralph A. Litzinger
Notes
Contributors
Index
