Zhang, Charlie Yi.Dreadful desires: the uses of love in neoliberal China. 280 pp., bibliogr. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2022. $27.95 (paper)

Dreadful desires examines neoliberal China through the lens of love. Charlie Yi Zhang argues that the contemporary Chinese state employs various biopolitical techniques to render people's lives ‘dreadful’, particularly by exploiting their affective search for love to further neoliberal development. The analysis of media representations, such as official ceremonies and reality shows, reveals increasingly instrumentalized and stratified gender and class relations, while Zhang's interviews with rural migrants and local workers in Southeast China illustrate how the market is driven by migrants seeking a better life. This often comes at the cost of family separation or conformity to normative values, leading to the disintegration of an idealized family structure. Finally, Zhang's discussions with fans of danmei, a Chinese male same-sex literary genre, highlight the ways in which these predominantly middle-class urban women challenge the state from a feminist perspective while simultaneously reinforcing existing cultural hegemonies. Overall, Zhang suggests that even though the state's paradoxical use of neoliberal management creates certain openings for ordinary people to resist and challenge it, these opportunities are ultimately limited. The Foucauldian influence on the analysis is evident, as is the reliance on affect theory. The book's breadth is impressive. It provides a panoramic view of neoliberal China while ambitiously constructing a grand theoretical framework that connects various aspects of contemporary Chinese life and draws comparisons with US and global politics. The analyses of the reality show If you are the one (chap. 2) and Beijing comrades: a novel (chap. 5) are particularly detailed, where Zhang effectively traces the growing entanglement of love and material exchange by analysing character archetypes from these media representations. The incorporation of migrant workers' poetry alongside the author's own storytelling movingly illustrates the precarious lives of the working class under China's capitalist turn. Their lives are in fact occupied by a pervasive sense of cruel optimism, a concept borrowed from Lauren Berlant's work. The future looks dim, yet at times it is the only thing one can hold on to. The book succeeds in providing an affective understanding of affect-laden topics: desire, love, and everyday life. To support his core arguments, Zhang introduces several key concepts, summarized as the workings of a ‘difference-making neoliberal machinery’ that utilizes ‘homepatriarchal love’ in a ‘borderless Loveland’. While these terms appear frequently, their precise meanings could be more clearly defined. The ‘machinery’ functions as a vague signifier, broadly referring to a combination of Chinese governmentality, biopolitical management, and top-down ideological control that differentiates people based on gender, class, sexuality, and ethno-race. This framing at times leads to overly generalized discussions, as the state is often depicted as a monolithic and malevolent Leviathan without fully specifying the policies, institutions, and individuals through which it operates across different social strata. For instance, the discussion of If you are the one prioritizes media analysis over an examination of the production dynamics behind the show. Participants appear as passive subjects of state discourse, with little agency or interiority beyond materialistic constructions of love. Similarly, while the book is centred on love, its engagement with the concept remains uneven. Chapter 5 presents a rich discussion of love, but interlocutors in chapters 3 and 4 make very few emic references to love. The connection between the desire to uphold family values, achieve social mobility, and Confucian ethics also remains underexplored. China's increasingly commercialized marriage market (pp. 100-1), for example, is positioned as part of China's ‘ultracommercialized lovescape’ (p. 101), but a discussion of its continuities with traditional Chinese kinship systems, which have long been centred on material exchanges and moral values, could have added more nuance to the analysis. Instead, Zhang draws a stark division between Maoist and neoliberal China, as if the latter alone makes people's lives ‘dreadful’. Some factual inaccuracies might also weaken the book's argument. Zhang claims that danmei fans support their ‘gay idols’ (p. 172) and overlooks the distinction between TV show fandoms and danmei readers. Not all funü (women who enjoy same-sex content) engage with danmei. Furthermore, danmei itself has evolved into various branches under censorship over the years, rendering some of Zhang's descriptions of its features somewhat stereotypical. Ultimately, Dreadful desires should be read as a work situated at the intersection of media and gender studies. The book offers valuable insights for readers unfamiliar with contemporary Chinese politics and neoliberal culture. Its strength lies in the broad scope and detailed analysis of discourse in television, literature, and everyday life. However, a more rigorous engagement with ethnographic depth and historical context is required to fully support some of its claims.