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Should I Quit? Tobacco, Fraught Identity, And The Risks of Governmentality In Urban China

How do people come to understand, produce, and respond to emergent regulatory initiatives of public health, new complications in the management of desire, citizenship, health, and identity? This is explored in terms of current media involvement with the regulatory regime of tobacco control in an urban Chinese setting. Several theorists have suggested that tobacco control is emblematic of recent sociopolitical transformations pertaining to risk. Rather than arguing for either the broad scale applicability of a "risk society" framework or its outright mismatch, I agitate for a different tack, wherein risk is seen as one of several factors at play in shaping the form and reception of tobacco-control media in urban China today. I argue that equal if not more important than risk has been a distinctive form of post-socialist governmentality, oriented around producing and managing identity. This argument is developed through discussions of various forms of tobacco-con- trol media found in Kunming, China. Such media currently work to problematize lives, to create what Dean has called a "critical ontology of our selves" (1996). They involve less the production of risk, and instead a specific type of fraught modern embodi- ment: a self-regulating, cosmopolitanism-seeking, conflict-ridden masculinity.