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This essay examines how the human body has been variously imagined and acted upon in twentieth-century China. It does so by focusing on one particularly prominent feature of Chinese discourse concerned with the calculation, measurement, and shaping of the human body and human conduct: the notion of suzhi (quality). By examining the position of suzhi in a broader discourse concerning the population and its attributes (which also intersects with key notions of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship) I shed light on the fortunes of what I refer to as “technoscientific reasoning” in contemporary China. The essay is divided into three sections. In the first section I ground the problem of suzhi and technoscientific reasoning in the emergence of population discourse in early modern China. The second section examines suzhi and its relation to subjectivity under the auspices of a socialist planning mentality, especially as it emerges after a hiatus of several decades toward the end of the 1970s. The final section then traces the subtle but important shifts in suzhi, technoscientific reasoning, and population discourse in China's move toward a “socialist market economy” in the 1990s. I conclude by arguing that the significance of research on suzhi lies in the way it supplements our understanding of Chinese political and social life.

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Tea has played a prominent role in Chinese history and in China's relations with foreign cultures near and far. It was a luxury product, along with porcelain and silk, that defined Chinese civilisation and was eagerly sought after by all peoples who acquired a taste for its stimulating brew. Tea was also pivotal in the 'opening' of China to the modern world through the first Opium War (Sigmond, in Tea its effects, medicinal and moral, 1839-1842). We tend to only focus on the 'opium' side of the equation forgetting that it was the desire to acquire large quantities of tea that brought the British and other Western nations to the shores of China in the first place. In the 21st Century, as China is on track to become the world's largest economy and reshape the global order in ways that are still difficult for Westerners to comprehend, tea and tea culture is being 'rediscovered' and 'redeployed' within China as a means of reinforcing a sense of unique Chinese identity and national character. In this paper I further explore the place of tea in Chinese and world history. I conclude by examining the rise of Chinese tea nationalism and consider how tea is shaping Chinese identity in the 21st Century.