Series Editors’ Preface

Summary

This is the first book on masculinity in the series and the first on China, which is in keeping with our ambition for the series to be truly international in scope. Those of us who live in the ‘Western world’ are increasingly aware of the rise of China as a global power, but what we glean from the media about life in China is the intensive surveillance of an authoritarian party-state and its human rights abuses – especially, at the time of writing, the oppression of the Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang. We know less about the everyday lives of Chinese citizens as they negotiate the many challenges they face as a result of China's rapid socioeconomic transformations. Siyang Cao offers us an illuminating picture of some of those everyday lives through the experiences of the young urban men she interviewed, men who define themselves as simply ‘ordinary’.

While there is a substantial and growing body of research on China, this book makes an original and important contribution to expanding our knowledge, both empirically and conceptually. Importantly, it adds something new to the study of Chinese men and masculinities. Much existing research in this field comes from historical or cultural studies perspectives, while more sociological work has tended to focus on particular groups of men, such as wealthy entrepreneurs and, at the other end of the social sale, migrant manual workers. Tongzhi (gay/queer men) have also received considerable attention. The men Siyang Cao interviewed, like the vast majority of Chinese men, fit into none of these categories; this is one sense in which they can be defined as ‘ordinary’ in that they are neither rich nor poor and are not exceptional in any way. They are heterosexual, mostly university educated and would broadly fit within China's growing middle class. They distance themselves from the extravagant excesses of wealthy businessmen as well as from new ‘softer’ forms of masculinity visible in popular culture.

Internationalizing sociology entails more than merely studying diverse parts of the world or the application of ‘Western’ sociological perspectives to other places; it requires the development of new conceptual vocabularies that move sociological research forward.