The Affective Scope: Entering China's Urban Moral and Economic World Through Its Emotional Disturbances

Abstract

From an outsider's perspective, today's Popular China might appear as a self‐confident and triumphant country. However, a large‐scale examination of the country's recent moral controversies reveals a very different picture, one that has much to do with the widespread local public perception of an ongoing “moral crisis” (Kleinman et al., 2011), whose examination requires careful attention placed on the ethical and affective aspects of the everyday lives of today's Chinese people. In this article, I propose to examine the anguish that Chinese bachelor youths and their concerned parents undergo and express, as they are confronted with the difficult process of finding a suitable mate for marriage. I examine the fears their celibacy generates, the mutual distrust that participants taking part in bachelors’ parents gatherings demonstrate, and the disputes these encounters engage. I analyze the moral world of today's urban China from the perspective of the very feelings and affects that pervade it. Highlighting the ways in which my interlocutors shared their emotions with me along the course of my fieldwork, carried out in the cities of Beijing and Chengdu, I will insist on the importance of these affects within an anthropological approach. The moral sensitivities contained in the maintenance of the economic and social situations of one's family reveal themselves as an exceptional resource for knowledge. By examining the political economy of sentiments within which parents and their children find themselves entrapped, I argue that we can gain a deeper understanding of the concrete consequences of today's societal transformations.

“A question of bank notes, cars, and houses!” Matchmaking and the Moral Economy of Love in Urban China

“…Xiangqin practices are common and often visible in the public space. Throughout the past two decades the term has denoted several phenomena: meetings of parents of single children (Pettier 2016; 2020; Sun 2012; Zhang and Sun 2014), often labeled as “marriage corners,” which happen in public parks; marriage agencies and the services of professional matchmakers (Pettier 2019); massive events where thousands of young singles meet; and TV dating shows (see Chen 2016; Kong 2013; Li 2015; Wei and Zhen 2014) and TV series and films on the theme of matchmaking 3 . All these activities and related media productions have developed in parallel with online dating through websites and messaging platforms; they have not been diminished by the development of self-directed mate searches by the younger generations.…”

Passion Love, Masculine Rivalry and Arabic Poetry in Mauritania

“…The third trend considers love in its current shape as primarily a European and North-American cultural product and studies the circulation of this model around the world. A large body of research addresses the impact of love on kinship arrangements (Cole & Lynn, 2009;Hirsch & Wardlow, 2006;Lipset, 2004;Padilla, 2007;Pettier, 2016;Stacey, 2011;Zavoretti, 2013). In her pioneering research on love letters in a rural area of Nepal Laura Ahearn contends, for instance, that romantic feelings, earlier related to shame, had become a symbol of modernity for the villagers she studied (Ahearn, 2003(Ahearn, , 2004.…”

Introduction: The politics of negative affects in post-Reform China

“…Feminist thinkers like Sara Ahmed (2004) and Sianne Ngai (2005: 27) have regarded the distinction between emotion and affect as only one of degree (see also Lutz 2017: 183), suggesting that the two terms might be used interchangeably. Recent work in the anthropology of China and East Asia has followed in their footsteps (Pettier 2016;Yang 2014Yang , 2015Ying 2011), while adding insights from local conceptions of affect/emotion which blur the distinctions between cognition and feeling.…”

“…The story condenses significant affective dynamics that anthropologists have shown to be at work in the People's Republic over the last decades. Attending to predicaments shared among various groups of people, scholars have described the impact of fast-paced transformations since the end of the Mao era in affective terms: the pressures felt by young people as they face the education system and the attendant worries of parents over childrearing (Kuan 2015); the anxiety of middle-class urbanites over issues such as housing (Ho 2017) or marriage (Pettier 2016); new forms of psychological distress (Yang 2017;Zhang 2020); the "heartache" of officials (Yang 2018); the anger and depression among laid-off workers (Yang 2015(Yang , 2016 or rural migrants employed in facto-ries (Pun and Lu 2010); the distrust that plagues stranger interactions (Lee 2014;Pettier 2016), to name but a few. In the Chinese context, where the Communist Party has a long tradition of presenting itself as the provider of the people's happiness (Larson 2019), such negative affects are no light matter.…”