Preface

The nouveau riche Chinese families of Bangkok whom Blanc discusses adopt a conspicuous and self-consciously modern and up-to-date affect, style, and habitus focused on the syncretic consumption of both Western and Chinese cultural commodities, providing them with an explicitly new “Asian” identity that challenges older models derived from the Thai nobility; these trendsetters readily display their transnational connections and see themselves as associated with the new “Asian” affluence. In another setting, the Shanghai urban middleand working-class audiences studied by Yang construct new subjectivities for themselves out of their fantasies of consumer desire and empowered mobility in adventures overseas, fed by the mass-media images of Hong Kong and Taiwanese stardom, which are promoted by the city’s film and television industries. In so doing, these audiences elude the regime of governmentality and moral order set in place by the Chinese Communist state. The vicarious fantasies of consumption and travel on the part of Shanghai residents are embodied in a less utopian vein in the ventures of the overseas scholars in Great Britain studied by Liu (in part 1). At the same time, these Shanghai imaginaries of power and adventure represent the obverse of the subjectivities of the villagers of Zhaojiahe, Shaanxi, also reported by Liu, which are grounded in their perceptions of themselves as weak, powerless, and trapped by their lack of guanxi ties over space.