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The Civil Governance of Death: The Making of Chinese Political Subjects at the End of Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2020

Huwy-Min Lucia Liu Open the ORCID record for Huwy-Min Lucia Liu [Opens in a new window]
Huwy-Min Lucia Liu*
Affiliation:
Huwy-min Lucia Liu ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University.
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Abstract

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

Keywords

ChinaShanghaideathfuneral ritualgovernanceselffuneral reform
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 49 - 71
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Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2020

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