A Body-Grounded View of China's Neoliberal Transition

This chapter draws upon critical theory's recent turn to the body, namely, the affective turn, to revisit China's economic reform and opening-up, launched by the state in the late 1970s. The breathtaking transformation from an underdeveloped economy plagued by severe famine and shortage of subsistence materials into a driving engine of the global capitalist system within a span of four decades-all under the reign of the Chinese Communist Party-presents a paradoxical case that can hardly be explicated using traditional analytical tools such as Marxist political economy. Taking cues from feminist and queer scholars such as Jasbir Puar, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I develop a body-grounded approach and demonstrate how I employ it in my own work to trace and unpack the ways in which love is projected as a cluster of desirable potentialities that have been translated into divergent, emotionally charged subjectivities to facilitate China's neoliberal transition.