Revisiting the notion of relational personhood from a Chinese perspective, this article explores the premises of exchange underlying discourses of care, reproduction, and kinship in anthropology. Grandmothers contribute much of the care needed for reproduction of the next generation of children in the Chinese countryside. Their motivation to contribute care to secure offspring stems from the frustration of their past familial desires, and their hopes for transcendence through reproduction in the future. Grandmothers secure claims to offspring through their care between the interstices of the state bureaucracy and patrilineal norms. This care is not simply nurturing but can also become coercive and competitive. As Chinese grandmothers overcome past reproductive hardships by claiming future offspring through care, their selfhood not only becomes distributed through exchange with others, but also is dispersed across time in relation to past experiences and future aspirations of the self.

Culture" has become a resource to be excavated and marketed for profit throughout China in recent decades. This article investigates processes underlying the production of culture through the example of a Star Worshipping Festival staged by a tourism company in a Shanxi mountain village. Regional political economy, historical knowledge, and ritual practices underlie strategies of development that transformed the entire village into a new cultural product revolving around Ancient Fortress culture. Despite a shared vision of culture as a resource, conflicting spheres of interest emerged between villagers and the drivers of development. A tourism company selectively mobilized aspects of villagers' cultural practices to create a historical narrative legitimizing Ancient Fortress culture. By promoting Star Worshipping as a cultural display, the tour company projected Ancient Fortress culture onto the entire village, thereby denying villagers the capacity to stake claims over the present profits and future governance of this new cultural product.

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Banned in China between 1998 and 2005, the reemergence of network marketing allows rural young women to distribute a wide range of consumer products across uneven rural-urban landscapes. The rhizomic distribution channels of network marketing long confounded Chinese legal and regulatory governance based on workplaces embedded in particular locations, a problem compounded by the rise of e-commerce in the last decade. As network marketers and their potential clients maneuvered spatial inequalities, gender hierarchies, and financial exclusion, they confronted the subversion of long-term mutuality and sociality to short-term transactional exchanges, a process partially inverted by the move from physical to virtual retail and its digital rating systems. As the Chinese state sought to establish, monitor, and guarantee trust in economic activities by delimiting predatory schemes, its initial targeting of network marketing companies has given way to regulating the sellers themselves. In contrast to contexts where network marketing forges enterprising subjectivities of neoliberalism, however, Chinese salespersons prioritized meeting aspirations of an imagined pastoral state and idealized social relations over business transactions. By championing that earning trust forms the ultimate measure of success, the discourse of network salespersons and their potential customers rings with the ways that e-commerce platforms and digital bureaucracy attempt to measure, evaluate, and regulate the trustworthiness of Chinese citizens.

In China’s Shanxi Province, responses to an earthquake rumour translated mundane concerns over safe, adequate, and affordable housing into mass action during a perceived emergency. Ongoing housing rumours challenged the wider political-economic sphere that promised order and harmony through regulations, yet frequently led to inequality and even chaos in practice. In order to understand the morality underlying the circulation of these rumours, the article explores the Chinese realm of minjian as a domain of mutual solidarity safeguarding kin, acquaintances, and even strangers. It compares this realm of minjian to E.P. Thompson’s notion of ‘the crowd’, as sites of mass action due to diminishing access to a means of livelihood under conditions of marketization. The article thereby reflects on the transformation of Chinese homes from domestic spaces of safety and security to vehicles for capital accumulation subjected to risky speculation and dangerous corruption.