Emptiness and Fullness

<p> As critical voices question the quality authenticity and value of people goods and words in post-Mao China accusations of emptiness render things open to new investments of meaning substance and value. Exploring the production of lack and desire through fine-grained ethnography this volume examines how diagnoses of emptiness operate in a range of very different domains in contemporary China: In the ostensibly meritocratic exam system and the rhetoric of officials in underground churches housing bubbles and nationalist fantasies in bodies possessed by spirits and evaluations of jade there is a pervasive concern with states of lack and emptiness and the contributions suggest that this play of emptiness and fullness is crucial to ongoing constructions of quality value and subjectivity in China.</p>