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This paper considers what a Foucauldian-informed analysis of decentralization and urban transformation offers to current debates. It analyzes decentralization as a new regime of governing, in contrast to many studies that treat it as a policy process, objective or outcome aimed at alleviating some problem of centralized authority. Rather than understanding decentralization as 'less' state governance, this paper asks how practices such as 'local autonomy' are in fact technologies of governing the urban. Decentralization is analyzed then not simply as an 'absence' of some central state power, either in the political or fiscal realm, but rather, as new mechanisms of governing the urban, which are linked with the regulation and constitution of subjects. This paper focuses on an aspect of decentralization that typically is under-examined-that is, the decentralization of welfare provisioning in urban China. Under high socialism of the Maoist era, social services for urban residents were distributed by the state, through the work unit (danwei) as part of the planned economy. In recent years, however, major reforms have been put into place to diversify the ways that social services are delivered, under a general rubric of decentralizing the distribution away from the state. Based on anthropological research in Dalian, a major port city in northeast China, this paper examines a new social practice and subject form that has emerged with new ways of caring for those "in need" in the city-volunteerism. By focusing on this resulting social form, the paper argues we may better understand how decentralization is not a singular process with multiple outcomes, but rather, a complex assemblage of elements that includes technical questions about how to govern as well as normative practices of subject formation. An analytical disaggregation of these elements also allows us to avoid the assumption that decentralization necessarily contains certain characteristics, or that it will lead to particular kinds of political and social forms. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Editors' Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One Xia Hai: Ethnographies of Work and Leisure -- Placing Practices: Transnational Network Marketing in Mainland China -- Guiding College Graduates to Work: Social Constructions of Labor Markets in Dalian -- Rock in a Hard Place: Music and the Market in Nineties Beijing -- Part Two Gender, Bodies, and Consumer Culture -- The Consuming Mother: Infant Feeding and the Feminine Body in Urban China -- Foreign Marriage, ''Tradition,'' and the Politics of Border Crossings -- Making Dream Bodies in Beijing: Athletes, Fashion Models, and Urban Mystique in China -- Sex Tourism Practices on the Periphery: Eroticizing Ethnicity and Pathologizing Sex on the Lancang -- Part Three Negotiating Urban Spaces -- Health, Wealth, and the Good Life -- Railway Workers between Plan and Market -- Contesting Crime, Order, and Migrant Spaces in Beijing -- Part Four Expressions of the Urban -- Urbanity, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption -- Xiaxiang for the '90s: The Shanghai tv Rural Channel and Post-Mao Urbanity amid Global Swirl -- Face in the Crowd: The Cultural Construction of Anonymity in Urban China -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index

The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context brings together scholars working in the fields of the humanities and social sciences who critically examine the notion of the "good life," understood in all of its dimensions-material, psychological, moral, emotional, and spiritual-and in relation to the greater good. In so doing, the authors provide interdisciplinary insights into what the good life means today and how a viable vision of it can be achieved to benefit not just individuals but our interdependent world as well.