'Spending My Own Money, Harming My Own Body': Addiction Care in a Chinese Therapeutic Community.

In this article, I explore a Chinese residential therapeutic community I call Sunlight in order to understand its quotidian therapies, its fraught nature binding China’s past with its future, and the to care for the self under postsocialism. Reviewing Sunlight ethnographically allows for broader theoretical exploration into how China’s economic transition created tensions between capitalism, socialism, and communism; between individual and community, care and coercion, and discipline and freedom. Sunlight blended democratic, communal, and communist values that in several ways transition drug addicts into a market-socialist society. In focusing on the socialist transition to capitalism much work concentrates on the neoliberal transition as the only path out of communism rather than exploring its exceptions. In exploring China as an exception, I ask: What do the residents, peer-educators and administrators reveal in their stories and reactions to community-based therapeutics of care and what happens when their notions of care clash? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]