THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
AND THE HONG KONG MUSEUM OF HISTORY
PRESENT
An Anthropological Talk by Tung-Yi Kho
In Search of the Good Life in Contemporary China: Stories from Shenzhen
Friday 26 June 2020, 7:00pm
Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
What makes a good life in China today? In the past thirty-plus years, China sustained a historically unprecedented economic growth rate that averaged roughly 10% annually, lifting over 800 million of its population out of poverty. In line with these trends, urbanization proceeded apace throughout the country, precipitated by large-scale rural-urban migration. Such radical economic and demographic transformation of an historically agrarian civilisation has led to talk of a civilisation-switch that has been widely hailed as a success-story. But have these coeval meta-level processes of modernization, implied by economic progress, yielded the good life?
Shenzhen was Kho's field-site of choice for 24 months of ethnographic research because it was the PRC's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and, also, its most successful. His interlocutors were all rural-migrants who had come to Shenzhen in search of the supposedly good life. Did they find it? His research sought to find out and in the process, shedding light on the nature of modernity and our prospects of attaining the good life within it.
Tung-Yi Kho is an adjunct professor in CUHK's Department of Anthropology and a scholar of modern China, with PhDs in Social Anthropology (SOAS) and in Cultural Studies (Lingnan University).
The HKAS is a member of the World Council of Anthropological Associations