“Appetite for food and sex is nature.” Or so says the sage Mencius, as translated by D.C. Lau. But Judith Farquhar begs to differ. For her, food and sex, and our appetites for them, are historical matters through and through. As proof, she points the fact that, in contemporary China, attitudes towards carnal and dietary consumption have changed dramatically in the course of less than two decades. China has transited from a socialist to a market economy and, in the process, a new body has emerged, with new attitudes towards food and sex, with new appetites and desires. The new Chinese body differs substantially from its previous socialist version. The socialist body was frugal, martial, and asexual. The new body is gluttonous, relaxed, and sensual. If what constitutes our most intimate dimension can change in such a short span of time, then it is proof that food and sex do not stand on the side of nature, but belong squarely to the camp of history and human society. Appetite for food and sex is not nature: it comes from our second nature as social and historical beings.
Things in China under Mao used to be so simple. Land owners and capitalist exploiters were the gluttonous class. They fed themselves at the expense of the masses, and ate their feast on the back of poor people. The Chinese character for ‘right’ has the element ‘mouth’ in it, and ‘left’ comes up with the element ‘work’. For Maoists, the explanation was simple: the capitalists, on the right of the political spectrum, were big mouths that endlessly needed to be filled, while the workers from the Left were defined by their work. Revolution was to reverse this unequal repartition by feeding the masses and forcing the idle landowners to work. Mao himself frequently used food metaphors in his political speeches and writings. He famously remarked that “revolution is not a dinner party,” and also argued that “if you want to know the taste of a pear, you must bite into it.” He described “political synthesis” as akin to eating crabs: “eating one’s enemy” involves absorbing the flesh and expelling the waste. Class struggle existed “at the tips of people’s chopsticks”: every pang of hunger, every bite of food, every sip of drink had a class character and an almost martial significance. Providing the “iron rice bowl” was one of the main slogans for communism: the Chinese Communist Party was supposed to provide job opportunities for everyone. Propaganda rejoiced in the newly gained abundance: “in the old society we didn’t see meat from year to year, but now we can have dumplings whenever we want.”
The public discourse on food shifted dramatically in the reform period, but it did not disappear. Economic reforms and the introduction of private forms of property started with agriculture: the objective was, again, to feed the masses and provide a steady diet to everyone. Much of the rationale for “market socialism” had to do with food: private control of the land and entrepreneurship in distribution would “liberate the enthusiasm of the people for labor” and thus be more efficient in meeting the nation’s dietary needs. But people had higher hopes than merely to fill their stomach: their dreams and desires made them pursue not only satiation but pleasure, not only three meals a day but long days of strength, health, and enjoyment. For many, the market economy offered glowing visions of feast and abundance. The return of the banquet, with its elaborate order of dishes and drinks, came to symbolize this newly acquired material prosperity and became a central technique for building and maintaining social relationships under the new entrepreneurial order. For some, the excesses banquets indulged reflected the new social evils in post-Maoist China: the excessive indulgences of the nouveaux riches, the arrogance and corruption of public officials, the disregard for the environment that makes guests cherish treats taken from endangered species, etc. Gluttony led to obesity, to the point that China now has the largest overweight population in the world. Meanwhile, the one-child policy was promoted with the bizarre slogan: “Have fewer children, raise more pigs.”
Political change had direct consequence at the dinner table. People could now pick and choose among a variety of domestic and foreign dishes, and they understood their newly-gained pleasures in contrast to their memories of a simpler, poorer, or hungrier past. Historians rediscovered the Great Famine that took place at the end of the 1950s, and tales of hunger and oppression resurfaced in people’s conversation and literary works. Writers evoked the image of bands of children roaming the countryside, eating the bark from trees and the roots of the grass. As novelist Gu Hua writes, “After eating fernroot sweetcakes, your stools would be as hard as iron, jam up in the rectum and make it bleed; you’d have to poke with a little stick or dig it out with a finger—life really sucked!” But writer Mo Yan also remembers his childhood days during the great famine with nostalgia: “When you’re hungry, every pleasure has to do with food. In those days, children were demons for foraging, we were like the legendary Shen Nong [founder of herbal medicine], we tasted a hundred grasses ad a hundred bugs, making our own contribution to broadening the diet of the human race.” There is a subtle irony in finding the same grasses and insects, then eaten out of necessity, now finding their way back into new Chinese cuisine as elaborate dishes and rare treats. The Chinese banquet, with all its abundance and extravaganza, has at its backstory the memory of privation, hardship, and empty larders.
Chinese culture charges food with collective values far beyond the nutritional. The techniques of Chinese medicine provide a language of embodiment that brings together body and mind, matter and energy, solids and fluids. Chinese medicine takes account of states of repletion (shi) and depletion (xu) and operates an “economic” rectification in the form of therapies for the imbalances afflicting individual sufferers. Chinese medicine is particularly good at identifying areas of deficiency, which it figures as functional debility or depletion. Diagnosis traces depletions to their systematic roots, and therapy intervenes to nourish these roots and gradually eliminate the state of depletion. States of repletion, in contrast, tend to be static and localized, leading to the stagnation and corruption of crucial substances that should, by their nature, circulate. Excess is more often found outside bodies than in them. Excessive heat, wind, or humidity, especially at unseasonable times, can easily act as a pathogen for people who are already suffering some kind of debility. Too much rich food and drink, overwork, and sexual overindulgence should be avoided in order to lead a healthy life. The Chinese medical language of depletion and repletion applies just as well to economic and social states of excess and deficiency. The coexistence of uneven productivity and widespread shortages with pockets of wealth and privilege is understood by policymakers as a problem of deficiency and excess affecting the national body. The resolution of these tensions is not necessarily equalitarian, nor is it inherently progressive. But economic policies are in harmony with the categories of Chinese medicine, which provides powerful tropes and allegories.
China after Mao has undergone a sexual revolution. The story is familiar by now: gender-neutral Maoist clothing and boyish haircuts for girls gave way to cosmopolitan fashion and cosmetics; sex became a topic for online discussions and medical counseling; prostitution and sleaze reappeared in the red-light districts of big cities; and homosexuality was dropped from the list of crimes and mental illnesses. As with the development of banquets and gourmet restaurants, the indulgence of sexual appetites is a highly visible, even flamboyant, aspect of a growing consumer culture. For Judith Farquhar, the shift toward the personal and the private is not conducive to a form of depoliticization: food and sex remain political in China, and the political field is being reconfigured to include the domestic and the sexual as new domains of political action. Except, perhaps, for the youngest consumers, relatively new forms of self-indulgence have a political and transgressive edge: enjoyment of capitalist luxuries is a personal revenge taken on the Maoist past and its regimen of asceticism and chastity. But as with revenge, it has a bitter taste: when sex is found everywhere, it tends to lose its alluring sweetness and emotive appeal. The focus on sexual intercourse leading to orgasm as the only legitimate sexual act leaves out many other forms of intense erotic experiences, such as touching hands, sharing gifts, writing love letters, and engaging in verbal badinage and flirtation. Hence the success of romantic love stories and family dramas that are so prevalent in popular novel and television series.
Changes in intimacies and consumption patterns often resulted from changes in material conditions. Maoist China imposed severe constraints on the intimacy of couples. A single living-eating-sleeping room often accommodated a whole family, including children and an elderly parent; cooking and washing facilities were shared by groups of apartments; and walls and doors were paper thin. Many married couples lived apart for years while struggling for permission for one or the other to shift to their spouse’s work unit. Romance during university years was discouraged, as student couples could be sent thousands of miles apart after graduation. These political constraints on privacy and intimacy did not disappear in post-Maoist China. The hukou system of registration is still in place, and so is the one-child policy that gives the state and party official direct control over the intimate lives of couples. Many married couples still live apart in remote work units, and those who are living together are often crammed into tiny apartments. Busy work schedules and long commutes leave little time for private exchanges and intimacy. Sex education is still lacking, and sex surveys reveal large “fuzzy spots” of ignorance and inhibition. Reviewing the ideological postulates of these surveys, Judith Farquhar reads the Chinese sex education literature as “a form of cultural imperialism.” Rather than rehashed versions of Masters and Johnson, she prefers to immerse herself in recent publications on ancient Chinese sex lore, with their “odd familiarity and quirky charm (that) are apparent even for a reader like me." Finding “strong evidence that Chinese medicine and sex lore have a common origin,” she documents the reemergence of “life-nurturing techniques” (yang sheng) that also include the traditions of the martial arts, meditation disciplines associated with religious movements, and self-help books.
This book review is part of a series taking stock of recent books on China written by cultural anthropologists. Modern anthropology is especially well attuned to describing China’s modernity. China has emerged as the discipline’s new frontier or its favorite terrain, a place once occupied by Japan in the postwar period. Studying Japan allowed classical anthropologists to describe how one could be modern without being Western. Beyond the usual tropes of East vs. West, tradition vs. modernity, the group vs. the individual, social order vs. economic change, anthropologists writing about Japan were able to explore moral categories such as guilt and shame, face and honor, true feelings and public displays (honne and tatemae), or the need for dependence and care known as amae. They were also able to make the transition from the exotic to the familiar. As social scientists turned into business consultants, Japanese ethnographies provided the background for studies about industrial organization, corporate strategies, and management techniques. China as observed by modern anthropologists raises different issues, and provides different answers. Modern anthropologists come to the field equipped with a different toolkit that their forefathers used to carry with. Exit the focus on rites, kinship, hierarchies, and social structure. Social scientists are now more interested in the individual, the intimate, and the private, while being cognizant of the political nature of these categories in the Chinese context. They put their own experience on the line: Judith Farquhar alludes to the many banquets she attended, refers to her intimate conversations with close friends, and cannot refrain her feeling of nostalgia for the simple pleasures and moral virtues that were to be found in everyday life under socialism. Her solution is not to advocate a return to the past, but to experiment with new collective visions and values compatible with global neoliberal capitalism. If anthropology can help identify and shape these visions, its social role and public contribution as an academic discipline will be very well justified.
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
