Numbers and the Assembling of a Community Mental Health Infrastructure in Postsocialist China

This chapter shows how globally validated epidemiological estimates have constituted a population of seriously mentally ill patients in China. It talks about the target population of the 686 Program and compares the program's different visions. It also discusses how national and local interests translate estimates into program targets and evaluation standards. The chapter explains how the numbers' circulation in existing bureaucratic pathways can generate controversies of “quota apportioning.” It covers what the numerically guided community mental health infrastructure might include or exclude and when it might work or break down. The data for the chapter draw on ongoing ethnographic research on community mental health in China.

Afterword

This chapter reviews the collective exploration into the entanglements of science and technology, the state, the market, and everyday life in contemporary China. The chapter presents a compelling argument for why it is critical, at this particular moment, for anthropologists to step in and make their accounts and analyses of science in/of/and China relevant to academic and public discussions and debates. It emphasizes that China is not a place outside of the West where “usual science” proliferates and changes its forms in a non-Western national or cultural context. Rather, the translocal sociohistorical formation and the complex conceptual and institutional interplay of state, market, and technoscience shaping and shaped by post-Mao, post-socialist, and now Xi's authoritarian China demand thoughtful and experimental ethnographic engagement on the ground. The chapter also invokes governmentality as an analytical point of entry into the enmeshments of science, state, and market and as a way to forge a conversation with topics central to science and technology studies (STS) literatures.

Unmasking a Gendered Materialism

This chapter analyses some of the cultural methods behind the seemingly comedic madness of “cigarette masks.” Rather than casting them aside as senseless, the chapter looks into the “cigarette mask memes” as a scholarly portal, seeing them as imagistic gateways for understanding air filtration in contemporary China. For one thing, the memes gesture to an uncanny backstory hitherto untold regarding China's current market for home air purifiers. This is a backstory heavily tied to the development of an air filtration product—the cigarette—manufactured across China in far greater numbers today than home purification units. The chapter also discusses a variety of materially tangible filters, ones that are manufactured currently for daily use across China and are ostensibly providing people immediate access to cleaner air. The smallest of the filters mentioned are no bigger than a pinky finger and typically come twenty to a pack. The largest ones—free-standing air purifiers—come encased in plastic and metal, as small as a toaster or as large as a multi-drawer file cabinet.

The Black Soldier Fly

This chapter follows Dr. Wu in his work to devise a solution for organic waste treatment using insects. By examining the tension between China's urban development and the sustainable treatment of organic waste, the chapter argues that China's project to institute a green modernity increasingly shows a preference for scientific solutions that address local conditions. This preference is in stark contrast to previous policies and approaches under which Chinese cities, for example, pushed for the adoption of imported waste management technologies and, in the case of organic waste, expelled the animals that served as a de facto waste management system. The chapter also highlights the longer historical traditions and practices that buttress the development of technology. China has a specific history of using insects as a tool and resource and has also focused on biological pest control in domestic entomological research. As a waste management technology, the Black Soldier Fly project creates a new use for insects while simultaneously generating increased interspecies dependencies between insects and humans.