Charlie Yi Zhang's monograph Dreadful Desires: The Use of Love in Neoliberal China is an ambitious interdisciplinary study that brings together cultural studies, media studies, ethnographic studies, gender studies, political economy, geopolitics, and empirical data. With impressive breadth and depth, the book probes the so-called Loveland in contemporary China, which is an expansive spatiotemporal matrix enabling contemporary China's transitions from socialism to neoliberalism.
The scope of the book actually far exceeds what is proclaimed in its subtitle: it is not merely about “the use of love” but offers a panoramic and nuanced picture of “the entanglement of affect, rationality, capital, labor, market, and state in contemporary China” (6). Following Lisa Rofel's argument that desires are central to China's neoliberal transition,1 Zhang's book not only tells us how desires are socially manufactured as a form of biopower from below in service of capital and the state, but also how, as...
