Consumption Plus Love

Inequality, Domestic Utopia, and China’s New Politics of the Future

Bibliographic Data

ID6008680
AuthorsWanning Sun (0000-0002-8687-3739, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume46
Issue1
Pages49-78
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern China (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0097-7004 • E-ISSN: 1552-6836
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0097700419837929
OpenAlexW2927373164
LanguageEN
Citations received9
References cited20

With hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers now dominating the labor market in China’s fastest growing regions, this group embodies that nation’s most intractable problems of inequality. Young, single, socially disenfranchised rural migrants, particularly men, reportedly experience widespread difficulty in finding a marriage partner, largely because they cannot afford to buy a home. The resulting potential social instability is of pressing concern to the Chinese Communist Party. How do discourses of governmentality reconcile/manage class inequality? How do they construct the future and encourage hope? What moral, cultural, and rhetorical resources does this ideology of the future draw on, and to what extent does it represent a rupture with China’s revolutionary—and traditional—past? Do China’s most disenfranchised socioeconomic groups buy into the “China Dream” rhetoric? This article addresses these questions through a series of “love stories” screened by China Central Television. It pinpoints a particular moment in China’s state capitalism when romantic love became a means of managing, if not solving, social inequality. It uncovers a new discursive blueprint for future state narratives of inequality and brings to light some new ways of restructuring the fantasy of the “good life

Capitalism · Communism · Ideology · Inequality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social inequality · Sociology · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Chinese history and philosophy · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences · Gender Studies · Law