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University of Pittsburgh

Department of Anthropology
Cultural Studies Program
Asian Studies Center 

present

Hai Ren, Ph.D.

The University of Arizona

East Asian Studies

“The Middle-Class as a Social Norm: Consumer Citizenship in China’s Reform”

China’s ongoing process of reform, which began in the late 1970s, has extracted individuals from the social institutions developed in socialism by re-embedding them within a new sociopolitical system. Meanwhile, the embrace of a market economy, with all its attendant risks, has forced the development of new governmental and social policies to stabilize China’s social structure through the conceptual category of the “middle class.” Within this historical context, life-making and life-building takes the form of self-formation but only in such a way that it becomes measured by the new social norm of the middle class. I draw from my ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing to examine how individuals transform themselves into entrepreneurial subjects through consumer practices and how private corporations play an important role in cultivating middle class values and shaping consumer behavior. As a social engineering project, I argue, the making of responsible middle-class subjects through consumption is part of the government’s larger project of engineering a new society for the future.

Friday, March 7, 2008

3:00 p.m.

3106 WWPH

Anthropology Lounge

A wine and cheese reception will follow the talk