Globalization, the Chinese State, and Chinese Subjectivities. A Review Essay

China has long been portrayed as a collectivist society where the state, the family, and political economy define, control, and overwhelm individual subjectivities. While this portrayal has been useful in highlighting the hegemonic power of various institutions of Chinese society, it has often caused the scholarship on China to overlook the significance of private life, individual agency, and marginalized experiences. A collectivist, top-down approach was often the only approach possible, given limited scholarly access to data under a Maoist government (1949–1976) that tried to place all aspects of private life under state control. By the 1990s, however, the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was embracing globalization and allowing and even encouraging privatization. The increasing prominence of individualistic values and lifestyle diversity in this most recent era of Chinese history demand scholarly approaches that go beyond a focus on collective experience. The three books reviewed in this essay represent a refreshing new movement in the study of Chinese society that sheds light on the blind spots of overly collectivist and top-down interpretations by focusing on the subjectivities of individuals negotiating between powerful forces of globalization and the state. Yunxiang Yan articulates the need for an “individual-centered” ethnography of Chinese life when he introduces Private Life under Socialism as his answer to a question frequently posed by his students in the United States: “Why is the