The Moral Worlds of Wealth and Poverty: Review EssayAnxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich, by John Osburg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. xii + 234 pp. US$75.00 (hardcover), US$22.95 (paperback and eBook).The Specter of the People: Urban Poverty in Northeast China, by Cho Mun Young. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013. xxiv + 208 pp. US$69.95 (hardcover), US$24.95 (paperback and eBook).

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among Chinas New Rich, by John Osburg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. xii + 234 pp. US$75.00 (hardcover), US$22.95 (paperback and eBook).The Specter of the People: Urban Poverty in Northeast China, by Cho Mun Young. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013. xxiv + 208 pp. US$69.95 (hardcover), US$24.95 (paperback and eBook).The ideas of wealth and poverty evoke radically different economic and existential conditions. But what do wealth and poverty have in common? They describe individuals as both economic and political beings, and are often used to explain individuals' grievances or, at least in China, to inscribe their existence in the developmental trajectory of the country or in the building of the nation. The terms depict seemingly objective states of being, but comprehension of these expressions is largely dependent upon relative subjective perceptions. The conditions of being poor and of being rich are also both deviations from an assumed normality or ideal-the perfect situation of collective relative wealth and freedom from want which is the shared goal of every modern nation and every legitimate government. Everyone has felt rich or poor at different stages; social groups experience mobility within or outside either category; and even international relations are driven by real or perceived differences in wealth between countries. Wealth and poverty, as much as class, have both objective and subjective dimensions. Their nature is defined not only by material resources but also by ideational and discursive strategies, and these are functions of the history that created them.The deviant, abnormal character which all societies attach to wealth and poverty is better accommodated in modern political and cultural systems that internalize the idea that market and competition are the impartial judges of the distribution of prosperity. Nonetheless, even in such systems, the existence of abject poverty juxtaposed with extreme wealth is the most significant challenge to the (presumed) self-evident corollary that markets provide a "natural regulation".The rich and the poor sit even more uncomfortably in systems where this liberal view is inflected by the ethical concerns and normative discourses of "socialism". Of such systems, China is today a most prominent example. Here, the ideas of poverty and wealth, as well as the bodies of the rich and poor, provide ways to contest the guiding principles of redistribution. The argument that poverty or wealth are generated by the transition to a market economy, but also by corruption in the leadership and the uneven allocation of opportunities, presents a fundamental challenge to the credibility of the socialist ethics invoked by both old and new leaders. The existence of the rich, as much as that of the poor, challenges the intrinsic logic of socialism more fundamentally than it does with liberal ideologies.These two books demonstrate how the ethics of wealth and poverty are constituent of both individual and collective "anxiety" over Chinas contemporary condition and of the need, possibly more than in other parts of the world, to "historicize" conditions that otherwise risk being seen either as "natural" or as the mechanistic result of the introduction of market reforms.The authors of these two books may think that their work has little in common, but reading them in tandem generated fertile thinking. The books' protagonists differ greatly. One book narrates the stories of wealthy entrepreneurs and underworld brotherhoods in Chengdu; the other, the struggles of unemployed workers and rural migrants in Harbin. Yet they are remarkably comparable. Both books provide vivid and enjoyable reading and serious anthropological reflections on China's contemporary society. They also feature the struggle of the rich and the poor to elaborate (and mobilize) an explanation of their condition, to "exist" in the discursive world of yet another "new China". …