This essay analyzes recent discourse on two emerging representations of women in China, "tender" women (nennu) and "ripe" women (shunu), in order to examine the relationships among gender, body politics, and consumerism. The discourse of nennu and shunu suggests that older, ripe women become younger and more tender by consuming fashions, cosmetic surgery technologies, and beauty and health care products and services because tender women represent the ideal active consumership that celebrates beauty, sexuality, and individuality. This discourse serves to enhance consumers' desire for beauty and health and to ensure the continued growth of China's beauty economy and consumer capitalism. Highlighting the role of the female body, feminine beauty, and feminine youth in developing consumerism, this discourse downplays the contributions of millions of beauty and health care providers (predominantly laid-off female workers and rural migrant women) and new forms of gender exploitation. Such an overemphasis on gender masks intensified class division. This essay suggests that women and their bodies become new terrains from which post-Mao China can draw its power and enact consumerism. Gender constitutes both an economic multiplier to boost China's consumer capitalism and a biopolitical strategy to regulate and remold women and their bodies into subjects that are identified with the state's political and economic objectives. Since consumerism has been incorporated into China's nation-building project, gender thus becomes a vital resource for both consumer capitalist development and nation building. This essay shows that both gender and the body are useful analytic categories for the study of postsocialism.

In China, an emerging psycho‐politics seeks to extract value from and to govern the potential of individual citizens. The party state attempts to preempt social unrest by encouraging the poor and the unemployed to engage in psychological self‐help to unlock their positive potential. Television counseling programs promoting the cultivation of happiness are part of these attempts. These programs showcase marginalized people who appear happy despite their limited life circumstances. Expert counselors glorify individuals who have actualized their potential through happiness to become entrepreneurs and role models. However, critics argue that these programs promote “fake happiness” and divert people's attention from structural forces that negatively affect their lives. This article advances these critiques by illustrating how happiness promotion in China taps into the resources of the victims of socioeconomic dislocation to effect economic advancement and political equilibrium. This article contributes to the growing anthropological literature on happiness by engaging happiness as a governing technology based on psychologization and as a force for both the government and underprivileged people to rally resources for their respective causes.

In this article, I examine how Chinese state enterprises sustain social stability in the wake of mass unemployment caused by privatization. At the same time that China, in its attempt to sustain stability, unmakes, or remakes, state workers into entrepreneurial subjects, it attempts to remake itself as a benevolent patriarchal government exercising kindly power. State enterprises translate labor unrest into a crisis of masculinity and the sustaining of stability into governing men and masculinity. For men, mass unemployment has meant the loss of virility associated with life‐tenured employment, and this loss of livelihood and virility results in social instability, which is embodied in the unemployed male. Male workers then use the language of gender and family and translate it back into an expression of class antagonism.

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