Dreadful Desires

Charlie Yi Zhang's monograph Dreadful Desires: The Use of Love in Neoliberal China is an ambitious interdisciplinary study that brings together cultural studies, media studies, ethnographic studies, gender studies, political economy, geopolitics, and empirical data. With impressive breadth and depth, the book probes the so-called Loveland in contemporary China, which is an expansive spatiotemporal matrix enabling contemporary China's transitions from socialism to neoliberalism.The scope of the book actually far exceeds what is proclaimed in its subtitle: it is not merely about “the use of love” but offers a panoramic and nuanced picture of “the entanglement of affect, rationality, capital, labor, market, and state in contemporary China” (6). Following Lisa Rofel's argument that desires are central to China's neoliberal transition,1 Zhang's book not only tells us how desires are socially manufactured as a form of biopower from below in service of capital and the state, but also how, as David Harvey suggests, the neoliberal elements interdigitate with the authoritarian regime.2Zhang starts the introduction with the real-life story of a Chinese woman named Liu, who had to give up her career for the sake of her family. Zhang views it as an apt example of the dreadful desires in neoliberal China: Liu's love for the family took away her own happiness. This unsettling pattern of “love” drives the author to examine the difference-making neoliberal mechanism “that regenerates oppositional relationships and binaristic categorizations of gender, race, sexuality, and class” (14) in contemporary China.Chapter 1, “Love of the Zeitgeist,” traces how the affective apparatus is employed by the party-state to reunify its fractured historiography. Through a close examination of China's spectacular sixtieth-anniversary celebration in 2009, Zhang argues that the celebration unequivocally exhibits China's transition from a society espousing class disparity and gender egalitarianism into a society of “classless gendered and sexualized subjects” (37). The newly emerged differences in gender and sexuality are harnessed to the needs of the party-state and capital.The title of chapter 2, “Only If You Are the One,” is derived from the popular Chinese dating TV show If You Are the One (Feicheng wurao). Zhang uses the reality show as a critical optic to examine the instrumentalization of love in contemporary China with new paragons of self-serving and calculative subjectivities. Zhang has created the notion of “homepatriarchal love” to refer to the “futuristic and other-place-oriented” desire that arises from the combination of heteroromantic relationship and private property, which integrates the Chinese into the global Loveland.Titled “The Woeful Landscape of Love,” chapter 3 turns to the Chinese migrant workers who have been transformed into willing subjects by the transnational neoliberal mirage. Drawing from Zhang's interviews with the rural migrants, this chapter shows how China's integration with the global economy leads to rural women's biopolitical devaluation and how male migrants are forced into enslaved labor by their unswerving homepatriarchal love.Chapter 4, “Lessons from the Polarizing Love,” problematizes the polarizing mechanism of the difference-making machinery by unraveling “the neoliberal regime as a self-regenerating system that is open to challenges and disruptions” (154). Building on his ethnographic engagement with the migrant communities in Hai'an and Wuxi, Zhang shows the contradictions, ruptures, and new possibilities in the neoliberal Loveland, which might benefit the precarious workers.The last chapter, “Love with an Unspeakable Name,” shifts the focus to the danmei culture in contemporary China. Zhang argues that by relying on the fictional platform of male same-sex desire to articulate desires, these well-educated professional urban Chinese women can temporarily escape from the borderless and marketized Loveland. At the same time, Zhang also cautions that danmei culture can be “neutralized and transformed into new tools of gentrification and exploitation” (181).In the conclusion of the book, Zhang uses the most recent examples that happened during the COVID-19 pandemic to show the capitalistic crises at the heart of the neoliberalist system. The author calls for “a love-enabled peaceful future” (179) when people can break out from the polarizing control of the neoliberal machinery.Throughout the book, the author has used the notions of affect, desire, and love interchangeably. If the author can sort out and discuss the different notions and forms of love, the book can be a more outstanding study showing the divergences and entanglement of neoliberalism with feudalism, socialism, and authoritarianism, all of which coexist in contemporary China. In addition, most of these notions seem to have been predominantly defined in Western terms. This largely one-sided conceptual positioning may have prevented the author from envisioning the alternative uses of love based on kinship, community, class, and so on. In the story of Liu repeatedly mentioned in the book, for example, Liu has rightfully proposed a “big love” different from the neoliberal “small love” (2). It appears the author's statement that Liu is unhappy due to her sacrifice for the love of family is based on the neoliberal valorization that the book intends to repudiate. In chapter 3, the statement that the Chinese migrant workers are impelled by “love” to leave their homes to take on hard work appears farfetched, unless here “love” means livelihood. Finally, despite its revolutionary potential to counter neoliberal love, the proletarian love espoused by the socialist state is not discussed in this book.Overall, Dreadful Desires successfully shows the illusions, pitfalls, contradictions, and possibilities in the process of neoliberalization in an authoritarian state such as China. It contains numerous insights into contemporary China, and I admire the author's critical sensitivity to capture and theorize the present moments within a larger historical and transnational framework. It is a must-read for anyone who is interested in contemporary Chinese culture, labor, economy, biopolitics, and gender, as well as feminist and LGBTQ+ activism

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