China's postsocialist transformation in the past couple of decades challenges us to comprehend its explosive capitalist growth, its multiple social contradictions, its tumultuous strategies of re-linking with global capitalism, its apparent lack of coherence between theory and practice, and its transformation of the social body into emerging interest groups. China's increased globalization has also kept the mainstream media in the United States ever on edge in producing interpretations of what China's transformation means, ranging from coming collapse to inimical rise, with uncertainty and ambivalence in between. While this colossal transformation has been central to contemporary China anthropology, Lisa Rofel's volume is distinguished by its explicit engagement with U.S. politics through an extensive examination of China-in-transformation.
Rofel's analysis centers on public cultural spheres and foregrounds the thesis that globalization is no longer external to China but internal to its economic and cultural productions of commodities, public spheres, subjectivities, and desire. “Desire,”...
