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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 cafés 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.
Nancy N. Chen, University of California at Santa Cruz
Lisa M. Hoffman, University of Washington, Tacoma
You-tien Hsing, University of California, Berkeley
Matthew Kohrman, Stanford University
Bei Li, University of California, Davis
Ralph A. Litzinger, Duke University
Pun Ngai, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Aihwa Ong, University of California, Berkeley
Benjamin L. Read, University of California, Santa Cruz
Louisa Schein, Rutgers University
Steven M. Sheffrin, University of California, Davis
Dan Smyer Yü, CIEE Study Center at Central
University of Nationalities in Beijing, China
Mei Zhan, University of California, Irvine
Li Zhang, University of California, Davis
Zhou Yongming, University of Wisconsin–Madison
Reviews
“Privatizing China is an outstanding contribution to the literature on the extraordinary changes taking place in China today. Its authors analyze fresh evidence through new and compelling frameworks that capture the often contradictory but always fascinating 'assemblages' that constitute Chinese social, economic, cultural, and political life. All of the essays adopt a mode of presentation and argumentation that moves back and forth between theoretical commentary and ethnographic description; all are clearly written, highly accessible, moving, and evocative in their storytelling.”—Susan Greenhalgh, University of California, Irvine "Privatizing China is an important book that deserves a close reading by all scholars interested in postsocialist societies and/or twenty-first-century socialisms. Contributors explore China's headlong plunge into the privatization of housing, urban land, labor, consumption practices, health care, and new media. This is anthropology at its very best."—James L. Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Harvard University
About the Author
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.
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