Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China

"Dreadful Desires investigates how love is orchestrated as an apparatus of sentiments integrating individual subject making with exploitative policies to serve collective interests of the Chinese state and transnational capital. Drawing upon discursive analysis, empirical data, and ethnographic fieldwork as well as popular culture texts, Charlie Yi Zhang investigates how love is orchestrated as an apparatus of sentiments through the systems of gender, class, and sexuality that integrates individual subject-making with regulation of population to serve collective interests of the Chinese state and transnational capital. Zhang deciphers the ways in which love is projected as a cluster of desirable potentialities, such as private property ownership, upward mobility, and endurable heteronormative intimacy, that generate enduring attachment shaping people's subjectivities. These love-impelled individual subjectivities are aligned with gendered, classed, and sexualized regulation of population by the state to reproduce cheap labor that has fueled China's marketization and reintegration with the global economy"--
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.
Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population in order to secure China’s place in the global economy.