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Emptiness and Fullness

Emptiness and Fullness

Susanne Bregnbæk | Mikkel Bunkenborg

(2017)

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Book Details

Abstract

As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China.


Susanne Bregnbæk is assistant professor at University College Capital in Copenhagen, where she is working on socially vulnerable children and their families in Denmark.


Mikkel Bunkenborg is an associate professor in China Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen.


Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Emptiness and Fullness iii
Contents v
List of Illustrations vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. China’s Examination Fever and the Fabrication of Fairness 15
Chapter 2. Guanhua! Beijing Students, Authoritative Discourse 35
Chapter 3. Interior Spaces of Hope 52
Chapter 4. The Tower and The Tower 67
Chapter 5. The Manchu in the Mirror 85
Chapter 6. Empty Diseases and Horror Vacui in Rural Hebei 104
Chapter 7. The Potentials of Feicui 120
Index 139