Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.

Charismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation. Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid. Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals. In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers—or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious—sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation. Examining the volatile aesthetic forms that embody stifled social tensions and surging anxiety over zombie citizenship, Hillenbrand traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. On the Edge is highly interdisciplinary, fusing digital media, art history, literary criticism, and performance studies with citizenship, protest, and labor studies. It makes both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture central to global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.

When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms-remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos-as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.

"Documenting China" brings together a series of linked texts, each one chosen for its impact when first published and which together chart the core developments in twentieth-century Chinese history. With extracts spanning the fields of philosophy, political science, gender studies, popular culture, literary history, neo-nationalist discourse, and international relations, the book challenges advanced language learners to elevate their reading ability to the level necessary for handling real primary sources in an unmediated way while deepening their understanding of Chinese politics, society, and culture. Each chapter is structured around crucial passages from a core historical text, each chapter begins with an introductory essay in English that provides context for fully understanding the text, suggested further readings, and a glossary of key terms.

Margaret Hillenbrand is university lecturer in modern Chinese and a fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford, and author of "Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990." Chloe Starr is assistant professor of Asian theology at the Yale Divinity School, author of "Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing," and coeditor of "China and the Quest for Gentility: Negotiations beyond Gender and Class."

"A very useful textbook for extensive reading in advanced Chinese language courses. The first Chinese textbook designed to help students do research on their own with 'authentic texts' in their own fields." -Shuhui Yang, author of "Appropriation and Representation: Feng Menglong and the Chinese Vernacular Story "

When nations decide to disown their troubled pasts, how does this strategic disavowal harden into social fact? In Negative Exposures, Margaret Hillenbrand investigates the erasure of key aspects of such momentous events as the Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tiananmen Square protests from the Chinese historical consciousness, not due to amnesia or censorship but through the operations of public secrecy. Knowing what not to know, she argues, has many stakeholders, willing and otherwise, who keep quiet to protect themselves or their families out of shame, pragmatism, or the palliative effects of silence. Hillenbrand shows how secrecy works as a powerful structuring force in Chinese society, one hiding in plain sight, and identifies aesthetic artifacts that serve as modes of reckoning against this phenomenon. She analyses the proliferation of photo-forms-remediations of well-known photographs of troubling historical events rendered in such media as paint, celluloid, fabric, digital imagery, and tattoos-as imaginative spaces in which the shadows of secrecy are provocatively outlined.

Documenting China brings together a series of linked texts, each one chosen for its impact when first published, and which together chart the core developments in twentieth-century Chinese history. With extracts spanning the fields of philosophy, political science, gender studies, popular culture, literary history, neo-nationalist discourse, and international relations, the book challenges advanced language learners to elevate their reading ability to the level necessary for handling real primary sources in an unmediated way while deepening their understanding of Chinese politics, society, and culture. Each chapter is structured around crucial passages from a core historical text, each chapter begins with an introductory essay in English that provides context for fully understanding the text, suggested further readings, and a glossary of key terms.