Description
What does wellbeing mean for Chinese urbanites marked by the experience of long lockdowns and the sudden end of China’s ‘Zero Covid’ policy? During the 2022 lockdowns, millions of residents of Chinese cities were unable to leave their homes and cut off from most delivery services. Limited to insufficient food rations provided by local governments, neighbors in many residential communities engaged in cooperative or group-buying practices. One pattern that rapidly emerged was for a volunteer tuanzhang, or residential coordinator, to arrange bulk purchases through private channels, organize interested buyers, and facilitate payment, delivery, and distribution. Neighbors shared and bartered amongst themselves and through their networks, often looking out for the most vulnerable members of the community, who might have starved without help. Residential cooperation was an important part of life under socialism, but the experience of collective organizing to benefit the community was new to the majority of those participating in these schemes. Rojas (2016) has argued that China is “haunted” by its socialist legacy, and we might follow this line of thought and search for the ‘ghosts’ of lockdown in the well-stocked pantries of the present. Robbins’ (2013) ‘anthropology of the good’ steers our inquiries away from a focus on the suffering subject, and towards an exploration of how these new and old provisioning practices are in part an effort to live well and care for each other. This is not to ignore the feelings of betrayal among citizens who have come to expect a continual increase in wellbeing in the form of economic growth and technological development in return for their support of the Chinese Communist Party (Perry 2008), but to understand how these feelings are integrated into larger visions of imagined futures. This paper investigates the legacy of lockdown through interviews and consumption diaries with urbanites in Shanghai and Beijing. It explores the provisioning practices Chinese citizen-consumers engaged in during lockdowns and examines their effects. How have citizens’ engagements with collective buying changed their relationships with their neighbors and communities? Have their concerns about the stability of supply chains and doubts about the ability of state officials to guarantee their well-being led to new concerns with maintaining household reserves of food or other necessities? And what can we learn if we try to understand Chinese urbanites not as haunted by the experience of scarcity but as imagining possibilities for an individual and common good grounded in new forms of sociability and sharing?| Period | 18. May 2023 → 20. May 2023 |
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| Event title | Society for Economic Anthropology 43rd annual meeting: Well being and the common good |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Evanston, United States, IllinoisShow on map |