From "Big Brothers" to "Little Honeys": Corruption and Masculinity in the PRC

The Center for Chinese Studies at UC Berkeley presents a talk with John Osburg on the gendered practices of corruption in China.

Speaker: John Osburg, Anthropology, University of Rochester
Sponsor: Center for Chinese Studies (CCS)

Drawing from my own ethnographic research with wealthy entrepreneurs as well as several recent insider accounts of corrupt officials' activities in China, this paper examines many of the practices associated with corruption--distributing favors, keeping mistresses, luxury consumption, etc.--as gendered practices. I argue that corruption should be understood primarily not in terms of wayward individuals but as a fundamentally social phenomenon—-as the result of the dominance of the norms, obligations, and values of officials' local social worlds over norms enshrined in law. Many of these norms and values—ideals of hierarchy, loyalty, and masculine solidarity; notions of sexual privilege and consumer pleasure; and modes of status and power derived from patronage are intertwined with evolving configurations of elite masculinity that straddle both government and business worlds in China. This paper highlights some key aspects of this emerging elite masculinity and their significance for understanding the political economy of the PRC.