Engendering Wealth: China's New Rich and the Rise of an Elite Masculinity

Ethnographic examples are drawn from work as the host of a provincial Chinese television show, experiences with an underground criminal brotherhood in Chengdu, published confessional interviews with corrupt officials, personal narratives of women who participate in the beauty economy, interviews with male and female entrepreneurs, and countless evenings accompanying businessmen as they entertained clients and government officials. Engendering Wealth argues that elite networks in China transcend any neat boundaries between state and society, and they mobilize official and unofficial resources as well as legitimate and illegitimate forms of authority. This dissertation suggests that visions of a retreating totalitarian state, a growing civil society, and an ever-expanding, "neoliberal" market economy are inadequate for accounting for the complexity of power relations and new forms of inequality in contemporary China.