Introduction

In his 1952 essay, Father Christmas Executed, Lévi-Strauss tells about an event that happened the previous year in Dijon, France: Santa Claus was found guilty of being false and was burned in public before apprehensive children's eyes. The Catholic Church had warned against the distortion of religious values that was provoked by the commercialization of the character. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on cheap, copied, and ordinary, manufactured Chinese commodities, such as an electronic Santa. It is not about a commoditized Santa per se, but the entire system that enabled its existence and worked to maintain its low cost-the invisible human experience that created a transnational commodity circuit in the Global South, and the dialectical relationship through which people and value constituted each other. While China was closed off to the world in the Mao era, the world capitalist system continued to change and expand.