Ghost Protocol: Development and Displacement in Global China

by Carlos Rojas (Editor), Ralph A. Litzinger (Editor)

Even as China is central to the contemporary global economy, its socialist past continues to shape its capitalist present. This volume's contributors see contemporary China as haunted by the promises of capitalism, the institutional legacy of the Maoist regime, and the spirit of Marxist resistance. China's development does not result from historical imperatives or deliberate economic strategies, but from the effects of discrete practices the contributors call protocols, which stem from an overlapping mix of socialist and capitalist institutional strategies, political procedures, legal regulations, religious rituals, and everyday practices. Analyzing the process of urbanization and the ways marginalized communities and migrant workers are positioned in relation to the transforming social landscape, the contributors show how these protocols constitute the Chinese national imaginary while opening spaces for new emancipatory possibilities. Offering a nuanced theory of contemporary China's hybrid political economy, Ghost Protocol situates China's development at the juncture between the world as experienced and the world as imagined.

Contributors. Yomi Braester, Alexander Des Forges, Kabzung, Rachel Leng, Ralph A. Litzinger, Lisa Rofel, Carlos Rojas, Bryan Tilt, Robin Visser, Biao Xiang, Emily T. Yeh

272 pages, Hardcover

Published August 26, 2016

About the author

Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image, and is also the current president of the Association of Chinese and Comparative Literature. His research focuses on issues of gender and visuality, corporeality and infection, and nationalism and diaspora studies, particularly as they relate to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora.

He is the translator of Yan Lianke's Lenin's Kisses and The Four Books, which won the Franz Kafka Prize, and, with Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, has translated Yu Hua's two-volume novel, Brothers, which was short-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize.