As critical voices question the quality, authenticity, and value of people, goods, and words in post-Mao China, accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning, substance, and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography, this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials, in underground churches, housing bubbles, and nationalist fantasies, in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade, there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality, value, and subjectivity in China.

Susanne Bregnbæk is assistant professor at University College Capital in Copenhagen, where she is working on socially vulnerable children and their families in Denmark.

Mikkel Bunkenborg is an associate professor in China Studies at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen.

“…an impressive, if short, volume. Harking back to structuralist ethnography’s attention to semiotic detail, its case studies show the importance of comparative ethnography built on linguistic, conceptual, and methodological rigour. Each chapter provides a rich array of Chinese keywords that warrant further attention, particularly in terms of their social the oretical implications…[This volume] showcases the conceptual breadth and linguistic rigour of the anthropology of China coming out of Europe today, synthesizing much of the existing literature and connecting it to well-presented case studies.” • Anthropos