Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China's New Rich

In his 2013 ethnography of China's business entertaining world, John Osburg offers unique insight into some lively scholarly discussions around non-Western capitalism and Chinese sociality, and he grounds his contribution to these conversations in detailed and fluidly written (and more than a bit titillating) ethnographic description. The subject of the book is the networks forged by elite entrepreneurs, government officials, and state-owned enterprise managers in China, networks through which business opportunities, wealth, privilege, sex, and affect are distributed. Citing this entanglement of market with non-market machinations in the contemporary business world and government circles, Osburg challenges claims hotly debated in China Studies that China is transitioning to a neoliberal order (cf. Harvey 2005). He tackles questions of corruption as well, providing a helpful way to understand the intertwining of legal and illegal practices in elite networks. Finally, he also questions the broadest strokes drawn by some analyses of neoliberalism by exploring how gender, sexuality, morality, consumption, and taste shape how people involved in these elite networks think of the market and whether it is impartial. As a whole, the book details how a particular class-inflected masculinity is formed through the interactions of elite men and the women with whom they interact, and how through these interactions, they engage in state and non-state, legal and illegal practices of business, government, and leisure at once.

In the introduction, along with background information and an excellent condensed history of business in post-1949 China, Osburg contributes to a longtime debate in China Studies about the nature of guanxi, or informal, reciprocal relationships, and the role guanxi plays in Reform Era business practices. He rejects both of two opposed approaches, one framing guanxi as a set of ancient Chinese practices which must be altered in order to be used to rational ends (cf. Yan 1996), and one explaining guanxi as a universal response to a lack of institutional structure (cf. Gold, Doug, and David 2002). Osburg's descriptions of business entertaining throughout the rest of the book demonstrate how informal guanxi relationships among entrepreneurs, officials, and illegal operatives occupy ‘the very heart of “capitalist” development in urban China’ (32). Though Osburg does not provide a synthesis of the two sides of the debate, he gives a lucid accounting of the limits of each. He redirects attention in China Studies from whether guanxi is rational to how it operates in actually-existing capitalism.

The second chapter focuses on the entanglement of profit-driven and affective concerns in elite networks by describing how entrepreneurs forge relationships with the state-owned enterprise managers and government officials who often control access to business opportunities and land for development. Entrepreneurs court officials’ favor with banquets, and, following ‘an inflation in forms of commodified pleasure’ (39) in recent decades, with time spent in luxurious karaoke clubs and with commodified sex as well. Patronage relationships among these men, and between elite men and young women involved in the leisure business, are idealized as relationships in which affect transcends crude economic transactions. Osburg writes that participants ‘attempt to embed market relationships into [these] gendered social relationships’ (44). Here embeddedness differs from the society-scaled embeddedness of economic behavior in social institutions described by Polanyi (1944). Osburg draws more directly on the embeddedness of economic action in structures of social relations, such as in Granovetter's (1985) analysis of networks linking individuals within different organizations. Yet Osburg's focus is different. He describes how his interlocutors enacted embeddedness as a reaction to commodification, actively and intentionally situating and articulating relationships of economic instrumentality in and through affect. There is no chicken-and-egg exploration here as to whether this active and intentioned embedding of economic concerns into social relations is prior to the latter, intriguing though that would be in a discussion of guanxi. Rather, Osburg's cental observation is that ‘elite networks, cronyism, and protection rackets are not aberrations of market economies but are organic products of capitalism’ (188), and it is both an ethnographically specific and an analytically incisive one.

The third chapter tackles the topic of corruption through observations about China's heishehui, which I will simply call the mafia here. Osburg writes of how government officials at local levels are often handed down general directives without specific instructions, and how when they choose extra-legal means of achieving them – such as illegal evictions in the service of real estate development projects (108) – they require the cooperation of local mafia. Ironically, connections between elite officials and mafia bosses maintain government officials’ influence on mafia networks, rendering them more governable, if indirectly. While some evaluations of corruption inside and outside China figure it as an encroachment of private interests upon the public interest, Osburg specifies that in China the ‘transfer of state assets into private hands […] has in large part followed the dictates of moral economies based on kinship […], bureaucratic hierarchies, and ideals of interpersonal morality’ (78). This privatization, he points out, is not the privatization described in narratives of neoliberalism, characterized by a simple unleashing of suppressed market forces. Rather, in what I find to be the strongest and most innovative point of the book, Osburg points out that private wealth and informal power and state power and resources flow through the same elite networks (80). Thus, he suggests that ordinary people in China understand corruption not through claims of private trumping public interest or civil society gaining ground against the state, but through an imaginary in which informal networks and relationships dominate formal legal codes and structures of power.

The final two ethnographic chapters turn to consumption, gender, and the ideal of an impartial, ‘free’ market. The fourth chapter describes how leisure consumption frames elite men as successful or unsuccessful. Osburg suggests that Bourdieu's analysis of class and consumption illuminates how Chinese elites require their consumption not to do the work of revealing itself to a discerning few, as Bourdieu describes in late twentieth-century France, but rather to be widely recognizable, so that counterparts will recognize their success and be willing to partner with them. Women entrepreneurs are often unable to consume sex and other gendered leisure commodities alongside elite men, and so they are unable to project wealth through this type of consumption. They articulated the belief that eventually a meritocratic market would, in Osburg's description, ‘usher in a neoliberal rapture’ (139) in which those whose success had been ill-gotten through luck and connections would be weeded out in favor of the truly talented. This is an interesting argument, but readers may be left hungry for a fuller explanation of why a meritocratic market is necessarily a neoliberal one. I return to this point below.

The final ethnographic chapter explores sexuality and morality through the perspective of diverse women subjects involved in elite masculine networks: entrepreneurs, wives, mistresses, karaoke hostesses, and sex workers. Osburg finds that, like elite men, women entrepreneurs and elite men's wives articulate an ideal of sexuality independent of material exchange; for example, some look down on young women they see as trading on their youth and beauty to be wealthy men's mistresses. Osburg points out, however, how mistresses and sex workers suggested that married and unmarried women alike enter into sexual relationships in which material wealth is exchanged, describing ‘a single market in which women trade their sexuality for financial security’ (145; emphasis added). In this light, Engels’ pure ‘sex-love’ ideal, and the boundary work in which women entrepreneurs engage to discount claims about their own sexual impropriety, appear as high-income luxuries. In this chapter and the previous one, Osburg describes how the odds are stacked against women entrepreneurs, mistresses, and sex workers because they are not privy to the gendered elite networks through which privilege and opportunity are distributed. The surprising outcome is that in China, successful businessmen are not necessarily the staunchest advocates of market freedom, because they build their careers in part through affective ties with officials; rather, at times it is those who are most disadvantaged who speak most strongly for market freedom.

Here I return to the question I raised above of neoliberalism and the market. At times, Osburg's association of a meritocratic, or impartial, or rapturous market with neoliberalism seems, though under-explored. Readers interested in building a precise understanding of the relationship of markets and neoliberal processes, and how markets work in China if not through neoliberal processes and initiatives, will have to look elsewhere. What Osburg offers instead is an important piece of this puzzle, a detailed and clear account of how government officials and entrepreneurs build and utilize the networks through which both capital and state power move.

Any ethnographer would envy Osburg's resounding success at entering into and participating in the very networks that are the subjects of his book. Through participant observation in entertainment venues, interviews with elite men, women entrepreneurs, and a small number of other women involved in the leisure business willing to discuss their work, Osburg has crafted a rich depiction of a world usually inaccessible to outsiders. It is unfortunate that a number of the most detailed descriptions speak to points of secondary analytical importance, and some of the juiciest ethnographic detail is written in a more general voice. Considering the topic of Osburg's research and his need to protect his interlocutors from legal and illegal retribution, this is understandable.

Anxious Wealth provides a richly detailed account of the frenetic social activity required of China's new rich to build and maintain the relationships on which that newfound wealth depends. The book offers an innovative perspective on discussions of capitalism's many instantiations throughout the world. My hope is that Osburg's account will redirect attention from evaluation of paradigms we use to measure capitalism – civil society, the public sphere, neoliberalism, development – and toward broadening understandings of what practices belong in the fold of capitalism so that it can be better understood. This book will be a useful read for scholars of elites, corruption, non-Western capitalism, China, and gender. As the writing is accessible and much of the scholarly ‘inside baseball’ is confined to the footnotes, some chapters would be an engaging addition to advanced undergraduate classes; for MBA students studying business in China, the chapters debunking guanxi essentialism should be mandatory. Osburg's account is a convincing argument for the inextricability of legal and illegal, government and non-government, and affective and economic practices.