China has experienced a tremendous turn-around over the past three decades from the ethos of sacrificing life to the emergent appeal for valuing life. This book takes an interdisciplinary look at China during these decades of transformation through the defining theme of governance of life. With an emphasis on how to achieve an adequate life, the contributors integrate a whole range of life-related domains including: the death of Sun Zhigang, the peril caused by rising tobacco consumption, the emerging suicide intervention, the turning points in the fight against AIDS, the intensely evolving birth policy, the emerging biological citizenship, and so on. In doing so, they explore how biological life has been governed differently to enhance the wellbeing of the population instead of promoting ideological goals. This change, dubbed "the deepening in governmentality," is one of the most important driving forces for China’s rise, and will have huge bearings on how the Chinese will achieve an adequate life in the 21st century. This book presents works by a number of internationally known scholars and will be of interest to students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, political science, history, Chinese philosophy, law, and public health.

The last 30 years in China have witnessed tremendous changes, primarily as a result of the shift in focus by the state from class struggle to economic development. China soon eliminated the threat of famine and the rationing of food in the first decade of the reform era and increased its GDP per capita by 41% between 1978 and 2006. The average annual GDP growth rate during the same period is about three times the world average. Between 1981 and 2004 China had the largest poverty reduction in human history. Along with the fast economic development, there has been great change to the ethos of Chinese society from sacrificing life for the revolutionary cause to valuing life itself. This change, which is perhaps among the most significant in the transformation of contemporary China, has enormous bearings on the question of what is an adequate life in China now.

Deep China investigates the emotional and moral lives of the Chinese people as they adjust to the challenges of modernity. Sharing a medical anthropology and cultural psychiatry perspective, Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, and Guo Jinhua delve into intimate and sometimes hidden areas of personal life and social practice to observe and narrate the drama of Chinese individualization. The essays explore the remaking of the moral person during China’s profound social and economic transformation, unraveling the shifting practices and struggles of contemporary life.

A Companion to Moral Anthropology is the first collective consideration of the anthropological dimensions of morals, morality, and ethics. Original essays by international experts explore the various currents, approaches, and issues in this important new discipline, examining topics such as the ethnography of moralities, the study of moral subjectivities, and the exploration of moral economies. Investigates the central legacies of moral anthropology, the formation of moral facts and values, the context of local moralities, and the frontiers between moralities, politics, humanitarianism Features contributions from pioneers in the field of moral anthropology, as well as international experts in related fields such as moral philosophy, moral psychology, evolutionary biology and neuroethics

Unprecedented social change in China has intensified the contradictions faced by ordinary people. In everyday life, people find themselves caught between official and popular discourses, encounter radically different representations of China's past and its future, and draw on widely diverse moral frameworks. This volume explores irony and cynicism as part of the social life of local communities in China, and specifically in relation to the contemporary Chinese state. It collects ethnographies of irony and cynicism in social action, written by a group of anthropologists who specialise in China. They use the lenses of irony and cynicism - broadly defined to include resignation, resistance, humour, ambiguity and dialogue - to look anew at the social, political and moral contradictions faced by Chinese people. The various contributions are concerned with both the interpretation of intentions in everyday social action and discourse, and the broader theoretical consequences of such interpretations for an understanding of the Chinese state. As a study of irony and cynicism in modern China and their implications on the social and political aspects of everyday life, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of social and cultural anthropology, Chinese culture and society, and Chinese politics.

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.

This multifaceted book examines the free market reform of the Chinese healthcare system in the 1980s and the more collectivist or socialist counter-reforms that have been implemented since 2009 to remedy some of the problems introduced by marketization. The book is based on an ethnographical study in a Chinese county from 2011 to 2012, which investigated local people’s experience of healthcare reforms and the various ways in which they have adapted their own behavior to the constraints and opportunities introduced by these reforms. It provides a vivid depiction of the morality and emotionality of people’s experiences of the Chinese healthcare system and the myriad frustrations and sometimes desperation it induces not only among patients with significant health problems and their families, but also healthcare practitioners caught between their desire to do right by their patients and the penalties they personally incur if they do not adhere to institutionalized cost-saving measures. The people’s experiences within China’s health sector presented reflect many similar experiences in the wider Chinese society. The book is thus a valuable resource for researchers and graduate students interested in China’s healthcare reforms and scholars concerned with issues of contemporary Chinese society.