CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

In 1997, I arrived in Guangzhou, the booming capital city of Guangdong province,to begin teaching English at a provincial education college. Like many casualobservers of China, I was captivated by the irony of a wealthy, entrepreneurialclass in an ostensibly socialist country and the social tensions andcontradictions brought by China's market reforms. My students were primarilyhigh school English teachers in their twenties from small towns in ruralGuangdong. They were attending two years of professional training in Guangzhoubefore being sent back to their schools. Over late-night snacks andbeers in outdoor sidewalk restaurants, they talked about their hopes for thefuture and anxieties about the present. I quickly learned that the broadersocial and economic transformations of the previous two decades, while improvingtheir standard of living, had overturned many of their certainties about Chinesesociety and their place within it. They felt both threatened by and drawn to theexpanding world of business, angry about its injustices but seduced by itspromises of excitement, status, and riches.

While the new rich were a common topic of discussion, many of the conversationswe had about this group quickly evolved into discussions of marriage, romance,and sexual morality. In many ways, among my students it seemed that anxietyabout growing social inequality in China manifested in moraldiscussions about men and women.

My male students frequently complained that in their hometowns uneducatedentrepreneurs and nouveau-riche peasants were taking "their women."They claimed that just a few years earlier the level of education and thelifestyle afforded by their occupations had given them moderate status in theirrural home communities, enough status at least to attract another hometownteacher as a wife. Now they felt that the relatively paltry material benefits oftheir jobs—low incomes and dependence on their schools for cramped, dilapidatedhousing—ranked them lower in the marriage market than uneducated but wealthyentrepreneurs who often had private cars and personal residences bought in thecommercial housing market. Their female classmates, they complained, had iteasy. Because they were educated (but not overeducated), poorly paid (relativeto a potential husband), and employed in jobs considered morally appropriate fortheir gender, these women had no trouble finding a suitable (and wealthy)spouse.

For these male students, an increasingly normative masculinity based on takingentrepreneurial risks and achieving success in the market economy had very realconsequences for their life decisions. As a result of their difficulty gettingmarried, many were looking for ways to leave their schools. However,because their work units (danwei) had funded their two-year stints at theeducation college, the only way out of their teaching commitments back home wasfor them to reimburse their schools for all the money spent on their behalf.Ironically, this led quite a few of them to skip classes in search of businessand money-making opportunities in Guangzhou. In fact, some had viewed attendingthe college in Guangzhou from the start as little more than a means of gettingto the city to find better employment, a better quality oflife, and, they hoped, a wife along the way.

They experienced their dependence on the state sector as a form of emasculation.Their outdated sense of entitlement, derived from their status as nonlaboring"intellectuals" (zhishifenzi), informed their indignation over "theirwomen" marrying nouveau-riche fish farmers and auto parts dealers who wouldhave been both morally and politically suspect just a decade earlier. Thisexample points to the gendered logic and consequences of stratification incontemporary China. The emergence of a new, class-inflected masculinity,revealed in this case in the domain of marriage, reoriented the ambitions ofthese teachers and altered their sense of themselves as producers, consumers,and men. And for the female teachers it helped reinforce a reemerging"traditional" femininity—that women should cultivate their feminine virtues andphysical attractiveness along with the goal of marrying well. As many popularallegories now proclaim, overachievement in education and business would onlymake finding a husband more difficult.

There was a saying often repeated to me in these conversations: "As soon as aman gets rich, he goes bad; as soon as a woman goes bad, she becomes rich"(nanren yi youqian jiu huaile; nüren yihuaile jiu youqian). Thisstatement suggests that to many of my students both the lure of wealth and theexperience of prosperity affect men and women differently. They understoodwealth not only to reveal basic differences between men and women, but to have atransformative effect on their motives, characters, and relationshipsas well. In short, the social stratification brought by China's economic reformshas produced new ideologies and relations of gender, and these are in turnaffecting the course of social and economic change in China (Gal and Kligman2000).

This book examines the rise of elite networks composed of nouveau-richeentrepreneurs, state enterprise managers, and government officials. Thesepowerful new groups have exerted increasing dominance overmany aspects of Chinese commerce and politics during the reform era, which beganin the late 1970s. The book considers these networks, which are composed mostlyof men, as gendered social formations governed by an ethics of brotherhood,loyalty, and patronage. Using ethnographic data gathered frominterviews, experiences as the host of a Chinese television show, and countlessevenings accompanying businessmen entertaining their clients, partners, andstate officials, I analyze the ways in which relationships...