Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019. xi, 220 pp. (Figures, tables, B&W photos.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-5017-3840-1.
Focusing on car consumption and the middle class in urban China, this book examines various relationships explicitly connected to “car-oriented mobility” or “the automotive regime,” defined as “a social and technical assemblage” of “humans, machines, roads and other spaces, representations, regulatory institutions and a host of related businesses and infrastructural features” (2). Jun Zhang aims to show how car-oriented mobility “is shaped by and in turn reconfigures different forms of social interaction, hierarchy, authority, and political engagement” in “the making of the middle class, the primary group of car owners” (10). The book’s research relies on the methodology of ethnographic fieldwork in Guangzhou and surrounding urban areas from 2006 to 2016, including interviewing car owners, attending car license auctions, participating in driving tours, and a four-month internship at a local car dealer from 2006 to 2007. After a historical outline of the development of the car industry in China since the early twentieth century, the author produces a detailed account of topics explicitly related to the fieldwork: sociality (chapter 1), family (chapter 2), work at a car dealership (chapters 3 and 4), license plate auctions (chapter 5), and residential parking (chapter 6). This rich ethnography will be a benchmark for any forthcoming scholarly work on car consumption in China.
It is in the context of car consumption that the book contributes to the scholarship on the middle class in urban China. Zhang’s main interlocutors are potential and actual car buyers, owners, entrepreneurs, sales and maintenance people, and car-owning residents in a gated community. Mostly born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, they tend to have a higher-education background, and most are salaried professionals, such as lawyers, college professors, and engineers, as well as government employees. Their estimated annual income ranges from US$17,970 to $150,000 (6). Zhang’s interlocutors may appear to be representative of C. Wright Mills’ “white collar” professional middle class. In Zhang’s ethnographic account, this middle class has multiple meanings. Owning such things as apartments and cars, as a group they are among the “midpropertied” (zhongchan) but without the status of “class” (jieji) or “stratum” (jieceng). They use “in-betweenness” or “middleness” to characterize their social mobility. Additionally, they use suzhi (quality), a hybrid form of human capital and conduct, to delineate class boundaries between themselves and others. Thus, this Chinese middle class—characterized by property ownership, correlated mobility in social life worlds (rather than social projects or nonlife worlds), and a civilized conduct—is neither comfortably defined by Mills’ “white collar” nor completely conceived by one of the four major theoretical perspectives of the middle class: the Marxian perspective on antagonist class relations, the Weberian on educational and professional qualities, the Habermasian on the public sphere, and the Foucauldian on governmentality. The author’s analysis mostly builds on recent anthropological studies of the Chinese middle class (e.g., Li Zhang on home ownership, Luigi Tomba on homeowner politics, Hai Ren on the dispositive of the state) and of the middle class in countries such as the United States and South Asia (e.g., Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty). I agree with the author that a comprehensive study of the Chinese middle class needs to focus on its complexity, and that ethnography is an important tool for creating a situated knowledge of that complexity.
Throughout the book, the author repeatedly emphasizes the complexity of the entangled relationship between automobility and the middle class. This does not mean that the book’s analysis has fully addressed complexity in a comprehensive way. Zhang consciously excludes such critical issues as environment, gender, and political economy (see the introduction). This is less a limitation of the researcher but more of ethnography as a method grounded in a situated reality of the social world. In the discussion of car license and plate auctions, for example, chapter 5 indicates several types of licenses, including one on cars using cleaner energy (figure 7, 138). However, Zhang’s discussion of licensing never mentions anything about it. In the book’s epilogue, the author again emphasizes the project’s comprehensiveness (including dealing with environmental issues). Without any discussion of the environmental impact of the rapid rise in car ownership, the gender and sexual dynamics of normativity, or the relational class politics of the propertied class, how can readers fully appreciate the project’s claim of complexity regarding such issues as car ownership, car-related family kinship and welfare, suzhi, middle-class anxiety and vulnerability, and even the concept of the automotive regime?
Critical to the entanglement of automobility and the middle class is the issue of risk society: the do-it-yourself way of life as a governmental norm. Zhang does not explicitly engage the concept but mainly addresses it in terms of individualization (via Yunxiang Yan’s take of Urick Beck) and neoliberalism (via Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang’s discussion of privatization). While confirming entrepreneurism as an important practice of risk society, the author rejects the view of neoliberal practices that are based on the weakening of the state. Generally, the neoliberalism discussed in the book appears to be mainly about a form of globalization in China. Whether neoliberalism in a risk society is about ways of governing differences, markets, and nonlife (see Elizabeth Povinelli’s work) or about a new populist project is beyond the scope of the book. As the work suggests, understanding the middle-class risk society entails recognizing the limitations of the scholarship on Chinese neoliberalism.
In sum, Zhang’s ethnographic account of the car-owning mobility of middle-class consumers in southern China represents a major contribution to an important topic in the understanding of contemporary Chinese society.
Hai Ren
Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing
University of Arizona, Tucson