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Who exactly are China's new rich? This pioneering investigation introduces readers to the private lives-and the nightlives-of the powerful entrepreneurs and managers redefining success and status in the city of Chengdu. Over the course of more than three years, anthropologist John Osburg accompanied, and in some instances assisted, wealthy Chinese businessmen as they courted clients, partners, and government officials. Drawing on his immersive experiences, Osburg invites readers to join him as he journeys through the new, highly gendered entertainment sites for Chinese businessmen, including karaoke clubs, saunas, and massage parlors-places specifically designed to cater to the desires and enjoyment of elite men. Within these spaces, a masculinization of business is taking place. Osburg details the complex code of behavior that governs businessmen as they go about banqueting, drinking, gambling, bribing, exchanging gifts, and obtaining sexual services. These intricate social networks play a key role in generating business, performing social status, and reconfiguring gender roles. But many entrepreneurs feel trapped by their obligations and moral compromises in this evolving environment. Ultimately, Osburg examines their deep ambivalence about China's future and their own complicity in the major issues of post-Mao Chinese society-corruption, inequality, materialism, and loss of trust.
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Reviews
"Anxious Wealth provides a close up view of the elite networks that criss-cross China's state/society divide, generate new forms of masculinity, and compel members to enact particular moral codes. Osburg's depiction is simultaneously critical and sympathetic, theoretically deft and ethnographically rich-a compelling anthropological portrait."
The Australian National University
"Anxious Wealth is a compelling narrative of China's new rich, revealing the blurred boundaries of legality/illegality in the guanxi networks of private entrepreneurs, government officials, and state corporate managers. Osburg provides a valuable explanation of how masculinity, elite status, and wealth are stitched together in the leisure-cum-business activities of KTVs, saunas, and sex, thereby r
Santa Cruz
"In Anxious Wealth John Osburg provides important insights into the rise of the new rich in post-Mao China through an ethnographic case study on young and middle-aged, male private entrepreneurs . . . Osburg has done an excellent job deciphering hidden cultural rules and moral codes in this gendered and sexualised space of elite masculinity . . . [T]his carefully written ethnography provides an im
Renmin University of China, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology