Eat, drink, man, woman: Modernity and urban lifestyles in China

Based on my fieldwork and research in Beijing and other Chinese urban cities in the 1990s, this dissertation focuses on urban Chinese lifestyles caught up in historical and momentous dynamics of continuity and transition. It is to study how lifestyles are embodied by urban men and women in the 1990s and played out in the bars, coffee shops, teahouses and Karoke halls in Beijing, as well as Shanghai and Zhengzhou. In general, this dissertation tries to explore how lifestyles become both reflexive and performative bodies in a complex of historical, political, social, cultural phenomena in a flow of fluxes and trends, a flow of information, a flow of history, a flow of modernity and a flow of globalization