Love Troubles: Inequality in China and its Intimate Consequences

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Four decades of economic reform have made China one of the most unequal countries in the world but the impact of this inequality is not just socioeconomic. Love Troubles is the first book to examine the emotional cost of this inequality to the intimate and emotional lives of Chinas people. Drawing on first-hand ethnographic research among rural migrant factory workers in the Pearl River Delta in southern China, Wanning Sun critically analyzes narratives about love, romance, and intimacy in contemporary Chinese public discourses. Examining the impact of economic and cultural inequality on private life, this book both embodies and facilitates an intimate turn in the study of Chinas social change, and presents a significant intellectual intervention into worldwide debates on inequality.

Reviews

Focusing on the impacts of inequality on the affective lives of rural migrant workers and the differences between the realism and resilience of the subaltern intimacy on one hand and the elitist yet often distorted portrait of the intimate turn in social inequality on the other, Love Troubles makes a superb contribution to the studies of the moral world of migrant workers and the emotional cost of Chinas rapid economic development. This brilliant, empathic, and highly sophisticated book is filled with insights from cover to cover and will likely establish itself as a new classic in the sociology of emotional inequality and cultural politics. -- Yunxiang Yan * Professor UCLA, Author of Private Life under Socialism and The Individualization of Chinese Society *
As Wanning Sun explains in ... this important pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of Chinas social and economic heap struggle for a sip. -- Linda Jaivin * Inside Story *

Author Bio

Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). She is a member of the College of Experts, Australian Research Council (2020-2022). She is best known for her work in the fields of Chinese media and cultural studies, migration, and social change in contemporary China, and diasporic Chinese media. She is the author of four research monographs including Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination (2002) and Maid in China: Media, Morality, and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009).