Privatizing China

Li Zhang is a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Davis and a 2008 Guggenheim fellow. Her research concerns the cultural, spatial, and psychological repercussions of market reforms and postsocialist transformations in China. Her first book, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population (Stanford 2001), traces the reconfigurations of space, power, and social networks within China's "floating population" under late socialism and globalization. Her recently published book, In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Cornell 2010), examines how the rise of private home ownership reshapes class-specific subjects, urban space, and postsocialist governing. She has also co-edited a volume with Aihwa Ong, Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (Cornell), which explores how technologies of privatization and neoliberalism articulate with diverse areas of life and politics in China. Her current new research project explores what she calls the "inner revolution" brought by an emerging psychological counseling movement in the cities and how it reshapes Chinese people's understandings of selfhood, emotions, happiness, and well-being in the midst of rapid social change.