Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences

Four decades of economic reform have made China one of the most unequal countries in the world - but the impact of this inequality is not just socioeconomic. Love Troubles is the first book to examine the emotional cost of this inequality to the intimate and emotional lives of China’s people.

Drawing on first-hand ethnographic research among rural migrant factory workers in the Pearl River Delta in southern China, Wanning Sun critically analyzes narratives about love, romance, and intimacy in contemporary Chinese public discourses. Examining the impact of economic and cultural inequality on private life, this book both embodies and facilitates an intimate turn in the study of China’s social change, and presents a significant intellectual intervention into worldwide debates on inequality.

Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA). She is a member of the College of Experts, Australian Research Council (2020-2022). She is best known for her work in the fields of Chinese media and cultural studies, migration, and social change in contemporary China, and diasporic Chinese media. She is the author of four research monographs including Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination (2002) and Maid in China: Media, Morality, and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009).