Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China(Thought in the Act)

In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China’s place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires-as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping-are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront of using affective attachments to nation, leader, and family in the global shifts toward exploitation and authoritarianism.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 Part I. Mapping the Edgeless Landscape of Love 1. Love of the Zeitgeist: Temporalized Desire in the PRC's Sixtieth-Anniversary Ceremony  35 2. Only If You Are the One! The Expansive Neoliberal Universe through Love Competitors' Eyes  60 Part II. Tracing the Machinery That Both Integrates China into and Separates It From the World 3. The Woeful Landscape of Love: Work Hard, Dream Big, and Die Slowly  97 4. Lessons from the Polarizing Love: Mapping Contradictions for Social Change  127 5. Love with an Unspeakable Name: The Exceptional Danmei World as the Escape Route  155 Conclusion. Envisioning a Love-Enabled Future  177 Notes  187 Bibliography  227 Index  255  

About the Author :
Charlie Yi Zhang is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky.

Review :
“This fantastic book is an examination of the undoing of the Chinese worker under neoliberal reform through self-defeating acts of love in the name of family and sacrifice for the sake of children. With great critical insight, Zhang unpacks how the affective renunciations of disenfranchised workers shore up the interests of transnational capital and socialism with Chinese characteristics, resulting in a vertiginous race to the bottom.” - David L. Eng, coauthor of (Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans) “Charlie Yi Zhang offers to do for love in China what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, does for hope. He brilliantly shows how the idea of love has been sold as a means of reinforcing power dynamics that structure the lives of so many people, especially women, laborers, and rural people. Deploying a unique, interdisciplinary combination of ethnographic inquiry and media analysis, Zhang complicates the ways in which we take desire, affective worlds, and class aspirations for granted.” - Ari Larissa Heinrich, author of (Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body) "... this book with the author’s rich, interesting recounting of China’s political–economic traumas and ironies and his piercing critique of the party-state’s neoliberal mentality and capitalist exploitation, is of great significance and can spark further critical inspections of discourses on love and intimacy in post-2020 neoliberal China." - William JanKowiak (China Quarterly) "Dreadful Desires paints a grim picture. After reading, one feels immersed in an atmosphere of scarred landscapes, ruined bodies, aspirations cynically manipulated and carelessly crushed by the machinery of a corrupted power. It is an immensely important book for our times." - Fran Martin (Cultural Studies) "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." - Ping Zhu (Journal of Asian Studies) "Ambitious in temporal and spatial scale and rich in methodological contents, Dreadful Desires emphasizes the centrality of affect and gender/sexuality as part of China’s political and economic transformation. . . . As Xi Jinping’s China takes an inward turn, especially post-COVID-19, this book lays out critical entry points for readers to get a glimpse of everyday people’s lives and desires, which have become more and more difficult to see clearly under increasing state control and surveillance." - Wen Liu (Asian Journal of Women's Studies) "[Dreadful Desires] offers fresh insight into an important aspect of modern China and will be of interest to academics who study China, affect, and popular media culture." - Sara Liao (Signs) "Dreadful Desires offers an innovative queer feminist examination of the painstaking yet almost unescapable psychological/emotional drive hidden behind China’s restless neo-liberalisation unleashed by its party-state. . . . Zhang’s admirable efforts to queer the hegemonic heteronormative power relationships in this book offers real hope to envision an alternative future." - Kailing Xie (NAN NÜ) "Zhang draws on theories of transnational feminist studies and anthropology to present a pioneering gender-focused neoliberal critique of the contemporary Chinese government." - Jamie Zhao (Critical Asian Studies) "Zhang brilliantly weaves together interdisciplinary and theoretical insights and innovation to shed light on China's transition from a socialist planned economy to a market model governed by the state, writing against the grain to excavate the connections between regulatory biopolitical regime, affectivities and groups that are oftentimes invisiblised but indispensable for the neoliberal restructuring." - Stephanie Yingyi Wang (Anthropological Forum)