In this article, life‐cultivation arts (yangsheng) in Beijing are presented as a form of political practice. These technologies of the self include physical exercise, nutrition, and transforming one's attitudes and habits. Drawing on interviews and on popular health literature, these ethnographic findings suggest that China is no exception in the field of modern biopolitics, despite its indigenous political philosophies, its long history of imperial bureaucracy, and its more recent revolutionary history of Maoist socialism. Nonetheless, the particular convergence of power and life is deeply historical (i.e., nonmodern) in instructive ways. Local and historically inflected approaches to spirit, pleasure, and health define the political in relation to the achievement of the good life.

3. Park users often give enjoyment (zhaole) and happiness (kuaile) as reasons for their exercise and self-cultivation routines. This observation opens a large issue explored more fully in a book I am writing with Qicheng Zhang. 4. Kang Liu, Globalization and Cultural Trends in China

Focusing on private medical practices in a north China county town I explore a shift toward the personal in the world of small business and popular healing. In contrast to the mass representation techniques of the currently threatened Maoist state—explored in this article through the figure of Lei Feng, the model soldier—private entrepreneur doctors now seek to embody medicine and health, attracting patients by cultivating personal auras and practicing medicine with touches of magic. China's new culture of “getting rich” invites an ethnography of the individual, the personal, and the embodied, not as a natural foundation of culture but as a particular cultural response to the demise of the pervasive collectivism of the Maoist state. [rural entrepreneurs, magic, state discourses, postsocialism, medical practice]

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