Consuming China

Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson, Jakob Klein

• 1. Introduction: Consumption and Cultural Change in Contemporary China 2. Conjuring Goods, Identities and Cultures 3. Deception, Corruption and the Chinese Ritual Economy 4. The Emergence of Consumer Rights: Legal Protection of the Consumer in the PRC 5. Powers of Imagination: The Role of the Consumer in China's Silent Media Revolution 6. Changing Tastes in Guangzhou: Restaurant Writings in the Late 1990s 7. On (not) Eating the Dead: Reader's Digest of a Chinese Funerary Taboo 8. Images of the Chinese: Photography and Consumerism in 1990s Hangzhou 9. Fashions and Feminine Consumption 10. Wong Kar-wai's Sensuous Histories 11. The Consuming or the Consumed? Virtual Hmong in China 12. Afterword: Reflections on China, Consumption and Cultural Change

'Consuming China's major contribution is to scholarly discourse on the socio-cultural dynamics and transformative qualitites of post-Mao China's burgeoning consumerism, while at the same time it reminds us ... that the "practice of Chinese consumption" goes beyond these parameters.' - Beverly Hooper, The China Journal, No 58, July 2007