Kipnis, Andrew B.The funeral of Mr Wang: life, death, and ghosts in urbanizing China. xii, 174 pp., maps, illus., bibliogr. Oakland: Univ. of California Press, 2021. £24.00 (paper)

This book is an insightful study of social change in urbanizing China seen through the lens of funerary rituals. It sets the scene by taking the reader through a partly fictionalized rendition of a specific funeral, that of Mr Wang, a secular cadre, which was carried out by his family as well as by a so-called ‘one-stop dragon entrepreneur’. In urbanizing China, funeral entrepreneurs play a key role in carrying out and sometimes replacing family rituals. These entrepreneurs are themselves often rural migrants who undertake the stigmatized and socially polluting labour of working with dead bodies and, by extension, ghosts. Theoretically, the book examines both ‘transitions’ and ‘transformations’, arguing that both words involve an entity changing from one state to another, but whereas transformations – like the toy ‘transformer’ – entail that elements organized in a particular way are recombined with some new elements to form an entity in a different state, transitions, by contrast, are regular occurrences, such as life stages, which involve clear temporal markers. To give an example, many recent studies of Chinese society have focused on the role of individualization, but Kipnis adds a new element to these studies by examining the decreasing importance of family relationships – in life and death – and the relative rise in importance of relationships to (ghostly) strangers. The book creatively combines fine-grained ethnography with a close reading of Chinese language sources, including an examination of close to ten thousand tombstones(!) as well as ambitious theoretical reflections. Kipnis shows how death is transformed by the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) slogan of thick care, thin funerals, which emphasizes the ideal of filial piety and responsibility to care for one's parents in old age, while secularizing death in ways that seek to replace burial with cremation, shifting family burials to urban cemeteries devoid of polluting rituals such as the superstitious and ‘non-ecological’ practices of burning incense and paper money. Kipnis also analyses the ambiguous distinction between the tradition of gift-giving at funerals and corruption, something the CCP has attempted to limit, and shows that the difficulty of drawing a line between gifts and bribes reflects a moral problem of how to separate economic relations based on ideologies of fairness that require everyone to be treated equally from social relationships in which economic obligations for some people are greater than for others. Kipnis also provides a critical account of the CCP's politics of memory. Because of the human need to link the past to the future, no modernity can eliminate the human need for a soul (p. 128). Indeed, for Kipnis, ‘this refusal to acknowledge the soul of the dead in China is … the essence of totalitarianism’ (p. 109). He demonstrates that the CCP's ‘thin funeral approach’ does not reflect mere ‘materialism’, since the Propaganda Department of the Party devotes considerable effort to memorializing its own martyrs and heroes in sacralized spaces of elite graveyards as well as through so-called ‘red tourism’. Here a kind of ‘transformer logic’ applies since, according to Kipnis, while the current Chinese regime attempts to project its soul as something that is permanent, it must also allow this soul to evolve. Kipnis demonstrates that the soul of the Party must be abstract or vague enough that it can be reinvented through different historical periods and so that different people can relate to it in different ways. In short, communist ritual formally abolishes ‘superstitious religions’ while mimicking their form. The last chapter is the most intriguing for me since it deals with how repressed political ghosts emerge to haunt urban landscapes and the popular imagination. Kipnis does this by analysing the role ghost stories play in a country where haunting is banned, and it is striking that repressed phenomena such as the uncertainty around COVID deaths, political oppression, unemployment, urban areas scheduled for demolition, and so on, emerge as critical themes in popular fiction. He takes stock of the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, which, he says, has forever changed the possibility of carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in China owing to the stepping up of ‘the already terrifying mechanisms of state surveillance’ within the country (p. 133). The crisis of trust that is apparent in these ghost stories is also a real challenge to ethnographers.