Opening Up: Youth Sex Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai

This book is the lovechild of a deep and longstanding romance with China's snazziest, sexiest, and sleaziest city by reputation. Dr. Farrer has obviously put a great deal of work into researching this book. He has thought long and hard about how sex works in this town. He has explored the loftiest heights and darkest nether regions of the city's vast social landscape. He has armed himself with an impressive breadth of hard core social science research techniques and devices, which he applies with admirable force to a wide variety of people. He has a huge talent for observation and employs a remarkably large set of analytical tools. With these tools, he delves deeply into the hearts and minds of the Shanghaiese. With powerful thrusts of insight, he penetrates through linguistic and cultural layers of obscurity and lays bare their most intimate secrets.Dr. Farrer views sex as a social and commercial activity that is becoming increasingly central and vital to the newly marketized urban environment of Shanghai. With unflagging stamina, he drives home his point again and again as he explores the ins and outs of dating, clubbing, romance, and marriage. The book reaches its climax in the chapter on virginity, where he patiently and adroitly breaks through a welter of preconceived notions about sex in China and digs deep down into the heart of this sensitive matter. This is truly a seminal work on an important and poorly understood phenomenon. It will plant the seeds for research by future generations of talented scholars and will continue to have a deep impact on our understanding of the history of Shanghai during the 1990s, when it opened up widely once again to influences from abroad.

This is a fantastic ethnography that breathes life into the stuffy literature on youth sexuality. The fact that it was done in China makes it even more interesting and impressive. Paying respect to the critiques of post-modernists, Farrer nicely places himself within the ethnography as a participant in the field of interaction. Furthermore his view of his data as "stories" through which participants are not revealing the reality of their lives but rather positioning themselves in social space and understanding contemporary China, is a brilliant move that is both fascinating and gets beyond many of the problems of validity in ethnography. Finally, Farrer took his scholarly analysis one step beyond most sociological work insofar as he drove the concepts into the structure of the book and the analysis. They receded into the background, resulting in jargon-free prose that is accessible to non-specialists and students as well as professional sociologists. This is one of those rare books that I will be able to assign to my undergraduates and enjoy myself. I wish more sociologists would produce this type of scholarship.

As an anthropologist of Asia, I found this book sensitively written with the sort of rich detail that only comes from years of systematic field work, in this case, exclusively in Shanghai. The data is exhaustive and the facts well documented. (Although the footnote style makes references excruciatingly difficult to follow).The book is also a pleasure to read. Rather than the usual heavy-handed dose of cultural theory with thin ethnographic data, we plunge into an amusing and readable narrative that is a tour through contemporary Shanghai's cultural scene, into poor neighborhoods, flashy discotheques and even back in time to the early 1980s (though arguably not back far enough to when Shanghai was really interesting -- the 1930`s and 40`s)As a scholar I also found the introduction to the book particularly helpful. It is employs an innovative take on Kenneth Burke`s theory of rhetoric to analyze how popular representations and practices of sexuality are transformed in a complex changing social and economic context of Shanghai. Farrer is able to bring to life the dynamics and contradictions -- sexual, social and economic -- that these young people face. This is very unusual in academic writing of any kind. I was struck by the way that he saw narratives of sexual play as important devices in the marking out of new moral terrains as the once-secure Chinese political and social landscapes fade away. I also thought the use of rhetoric theory pointed to new and refreshing approaches to the question of agency within the sociology of culture: Farrer clearly shows the struggle that young people in China are facing and how they deploy in innovative ways cultural forms from a wide range of global contexts to bear upon the immediate situation. I personally would have liked to see some more historical tracing of some of these discourses, but that would have been another study. Read the book itself to find out. It is facinating material and makes a theoretical contribution to the scholarly literature.

This book is a useful and informative guide to changes in sexuality and youth culture in China. As a Canadian who spent the last two years in Shanghai, I found the book true to experience, although a few details didn't jibe with my own experience... Farrer seems to be a gifted interviewer, talking to a far wider range of people than the usual foreigner comes into contact with. He is also writing about a time earlier than my own more recent experience, which might explain the more conservative views in this book. His descriptions of the nightlife in the mid-1990s are witty and fascinating... I would recommend that the average reader skip the lengthy scholarly introduction, which seems aimed at the cultural studies crowd rather than the general reader.

Writing a review of an academic book on the city you are living in yourself is a bit tricky. The wealth of familiar gossip, anecdotes that could have happened in my life makes Farrer's book in the first place a feast of recognition. I'm only part of a small part of his book on the opening up of Shanghai, the part of the middle class. But equally enjoyable - and a never before told story - is that about the changes in the working class areas in Shanghai. Most researchers and journalists rather limit themselves to the easy to make stories on the accessible middle class.Is it the most thorough account of Shanghai's opening up I have seen and a nice mirror of China's opening up in so many other places. An account of a revolution taking place, where 25 percent of the world population has to set benchmarks for themselves: how to deal with their own lives?It is a tough read for non-academics, even though the subject is juicy enough. But the enthusiastic way the stories are being told, makes the book also interesting for a non-academic Shanghai girl like me.