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This article investigates how Western-educated scholars negotiate the distinction-making process and strategise the conversion of acquired cultural capital to social capital upon return to China. Building on Bourdieusian theory, it finds anti-Western distinction constructed by local scholars monopolises their privileged positions in Chinese academic reproduction. Cultural capital obtained by returnee scholars is often devalorised by nationalist rhetoric, posing obstacles to its convertibility to other forms of capital. Some returnees tactically hide their acquired cultural capital to demonstrate easiness with Chinese culture and to marginalise their returnee peers as too 'Westernised' to fit in. Others stress their cosmopolitan cultural capital as sources of distinction, claiming they do not want to play the Chinese game, but are more likely to be excluded from the core academic network, thus disadvantaging their career progression. This study highlights how transnational mobility across fields affects the revalorisation of rule-specific cultural capital in the process of distinction-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how Chinese rural migrant workers are subject to the contradictory integrated regimes of capitalist advocates of migration and urbanisation, which are, in reality, distinctive integrating constraints. Online platform work has become a key site for rural migrant workers in China to experience and experiment with obfuscating sets of promotions and disciplines about labour, migration and urbanness. We propose the concept of platformed distinction work to explain how platforms have played a complex and multifunctional role that enhances migrant workers' participation in the digital economy while concurrently defining and conditioning their labour as disadvantaged distinct work. This dual process of migrant workers' social integration and distinction in platform work reveal the multilayered, complicated relations between migration and platformisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Specialty coffee is increasingly produced and consumed as part of routine life in many cities in modern China, but the social and cultural shifts it has engendered yet to be systematically examined. By examining the intersections between social media and the operations of independent Chinese coffeehouses in the field of taste, this paper puts forward the idea of new taste among Chinese millennials, which comprises individual subjectivity, heterogeneous social relationships, and forms of class distinction. Using taste-oriented keyword searches on WeChat official accounts, 20 articles were returned and analyzed in terms of their textural and visual orientations to examine the processes underlying how taste is influenced in the consumption of specialty coffee in China. Findings suggest the importance of taste makers in this process, from routine creation of aesthetic ambience in the coffeehouses to the construction of affective taste spaces online, and the establishment of taste cycles from online to offline, which all underpin class privilege. Moreover, the emergence of an 'urban café community' appears to be characterized by specific forms of belonging resulting from a productive effect of the interplay between independent coffeehouses and consumers in everyday urban life in which a set of aesthetic boundaries reside. Second, these digital consumers distinguish themselves socially by positioning themselves as having a cosmopolitan taste grounded in coffee appreciation instead of merely consuming coffee for physiological benefits. These findings extend taste propositions through engagement of Chinese digital millennial consumers to uncover the underlying cultural classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines two domains in which wealthy Chinese seek to cultivate social distinction. The first section examines luxury consumption and highlights the ambivalences surrounding global luxury goods in China. Given that luxury goods often fail to deliver on their promises of distinction, many wealthy Chinese have turned to new forms of money-mediated spirituality—in particular, patronage of Tibetan Buddhism. I argue that in a context in which forms of value, authenticity, taste, morality, etc., are all too easily reduced to quantitative, monetary terms, appropriation of the spiritual power of Tibetan lamas and the authenticity associated with Tibetan Buddhism has become increasingly attractive to wealthy Han Chinese. This appropriation, however, has generated tensions between practitioners for whom Buddhist patronage is an extension of worldly projects of social distinction and wealth accumulation and those for whom Buddhism is imagined as an isolated spiritual retreat from those same concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers analysis of the Chinese reception and adoption of Paul Willis’s landmark book, Learning to Labour. Specifically, we recount the early introduction and translation of the book to Chinese readers and catalogue the ways in which Learning to Labour has been fruitfully applied in China, while highlighting some shortcomings in terms of the generalized Chinese interpretation of the text in translation. Despite these potential shortcomings and gaps in translation, we note the influence of Learning to Labour and its author Paul Willis on the growing interest in and commitment to ethnographic work in China and discuss its potential for increased application and relevance moving forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study adopts Bourdieu's conceptualization of taste and distinction to examine the discursive construction of Chinese middle‐class identities. Drawing on an ethnographic fieldwork of young urban professionals who display a shared passion for Saab cars, this article presents three examples to instantiate the ways that the participants employ linguistic and discursive resources to construct an urban middle‐class identity revolving around consumption and commodification: the first example is an interview about their taste for their Saab cars; the second is a participant observation of the Saab fans' linguistic exchanges in which they demonstrate their 'taste for each other' – recognition of each other's in‐group membership and social identity; the third example is an online observation of their multimodal display of other lifestyle commodities. All three examples highlight the importance of language in creating a sense of distinction and in negotiating middle‐class identities among Chinese young urban professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints -- the mainstream Mormon Church -- has been seeking to establish itself in the People's Republic of China since the 1980s. Unlike other religious movements of Christian and foreign origin, which have chosen to go underground, the LDS Church has adopted a strategy of complying with the law and negotiating with the state to obtain official authorisation to conduct its religious activities. The aim of this article is to describe and examine the basis, the form, and certain observable effects of such a strategy, both on an institutional level and in terms of the religious identities that are produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a case study of the development of a local cultural form – Shanghai Yueju – caught up in the rapid urban redevelopment of post-socialist China. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘distinction’, it analyses the processes of the reformation of taste and class in a Chinese city. It explores the following question: can high levels of financial investment revive Yueju and allow it to gain market success and cultural distinction? The question is examined in the context of Shanghai’s swift urbanisation process, throughout which the government has reinforced its control over not only economic but also social and cultural capital. It suggests that ignoring Yueju’s rootedness in a local habitus of long history and focusing only on its economic organisation has had a damaging effect on the vibrancy and viability of this cultural form. This case study of Yueju in Shanghai suggests that economically driven cultural development could lead to the erosion of local culture and restricting its social and cultural innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of the everyday practices of individuality among the migrant workers with whom I worked at "Lamb Buddha", a hotpot restaurant in Anshan City, Liaoning Province, during the summer of 2007. The majority of the data comes from four young men, meaning that the analysis complements extant studies of Chinese female migrant workers by allowing male-gendered inflections of discourse prominence. The paper examines the internal structure of "symbolic boundaries" drawn and managed in judgements, positioning statements, and so forth, attempting to regress the modalities by which these migrants assert themselves, thus showing how individuality arises from a discursive environment structured by relation to similar peers and distinctly different others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers experiences of social change and downward social mobility in contemporary China by applying theoretical tools from Bourdieu to understand service interactions at a large, state-owned department store serving the urban working class. It demonstrates how sales clerks sought to maintain an imagined space of working-class security by emphasizing a set of fading social distinctions. Sales clerks did so by calling forth the waning symbolic capital of state socialism and translating it into a form of postsocialist, working-class nostalgia. In an effort to appeal to a downwardly-mobile, working-class clientele in a reconfigured marketplace, sales clerks simultaneously traced the downward social trajectory of China's diminished urban proletariat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]