Two-Dimensional People - Lives, Desires, and Social Attitudes in a Changing Chinese Village

Based on almost eight years of fieldwork in a town and a village in South China, this book analyzes contradictions among various dimensions of the peasant economy, social relationships, popular religion, and local politics in rural China.

Compared to many anthropological, sociological, and political studies of rural China, which regard Chinese peasants as one-dimensionally materialistic, politically conservative, egocentric (lacking public-mindedness, as in anthropologist Yan Yunxiang''s notion of the "uncivil individual"), with collapsed beliefs, and thinking only of the present (or the "today-ness of today" according to anthropologist Liu Xin), this book shows that people in contemporary rural China are actually "two-dimensional": trying to combine the calculation of self-interest with affective networks of reciprocity, but often falling into awkwardness or cynicism, in a paradoxical symbiosis between nihilism and transcendence. While Marcuse used the words of Benjamin to a