Governing Death, Making Persons : : The New Chinese Way of Death / / Huwy-min Lucia Liu.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2023
• VerfasserIn: Liu, Huwy-min Lucia,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (270 p.) :; 2 diagrams, 1 chart

Governing Death, Making Persons tells the story of how economic reforms and changes in the management of death, in China, affected the governance of persons. The Chinese Communist Party has sought to channel the funeral industry and death rituals into vehicles for reshaping people into "modern" citizens and subjects. Since the Reform and Opening period and the marketization of state funeral parlors, the Party has promoted personalized funerals in the hope of promoting a market-oriented and individualistic ethos. However, things did not go as planned.Huwy-min Lucia Liu writes about funerals she witnessed and the life stories of two kinds of funeral workers: state workers who are quasi-government officials and semi-legal private funeral brokers. She shows that end-of-life commemoration in urban China today is characterized by the resilience of social conventions and not a shift toward market economy individualization. Rather than seeing a rise of individualism and the decline of a socialist self, Liu sees the durability of socialist, religious, communal, and relational ideas of self, woven together through creative ritual framings in spite of their contradictions.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Note on Anonymity and Transliteration -- INTRODUCTION -- Part 1 THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY AND THE MAKING OF MARKET SUBJECTS -- 1. Civil Governance -- 2. Market Governance -- 3. The Fragile Middle -- Part 2 DEATH RITUAL AND PLURALIST SUBJECTIVITY -- 4. Individualism, Interrupted -- 5. Dying Socialist in “Capitalist” Shanghai -- 6. Dying Religious in a Socialist Ritual -- 7. Pluralism, Interrupted -- CONCLUSION -- Notes -- References -- Index