Anxious Wealth interrogates the dark side of China's warp-speed economic growth, but with more nuance than one usually finds among those who address the subject through criticism of neoliberalism or of one-party authoritarian politics. In part, Osburg carves out an original perspective, because he has spent thousands of hours socializing with Chengdu entrepreneurs. He does not ignore earlier scholarship, but he always returns to the lived experience of these business people, and especially to the men he knew who worked in the real estate and construction industries. The tensions, contradictions and limitations of their lives are the primary subject of his inquiry and thus the title: Anxious Wealth. To argue that economic elites in China, particularly those who have made windfall profits by leveraging special favours from government agents, are anxious is hardly an original observation. But because Osburg was so deeply immersed in the lives of these entrepreneurs, and because he returned again and again over nearly a decade, his close scrutiny of their extensive socializing provides the best account of how "shared transgressions" (p. 63) not only infuse instrumental networks with sentiment but also make superiors beholden to their inferiors.
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