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This book offers a nuanced discussion of the globalization of the English language and the widespread effects it has had on Shenyang, the capital and largest city of China's northeast Liaoning Province. Adopting an ethnographic and linguistic perspective, the book considers the personal connotations that English has for Chinese people, beyond its role in the education system. Through research on how English is spoken, taught, and studied in China, the book considers what the language itself means to Chinese speakers. How and why, the book asks, has English become so deeply fascinating in contemporary China, simultaneously existing as a source of desire and anxiety? The answer suggested is that English-speaking Chinese consider themselves distinctly separate from those who do not speak the language, the result of a cultural assumption that speaking English makes a person modern. Seeing language as a study that goes beyond the classroom, the book assesses the emerging viewpoint that, for many citizens, speaking English in China has become a cultural need—and, more immediately, a realization of one's future.

This book investigates the wider social, political, religious, and economic dimensions of the Gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, as well as the complications that arise from its existence. Each year, some nine million high-school seniors in China take the Gaokao, which determines college admission and provides a direct but difficult route to an urban lifestyle for China's hundreds of millions of rural residents. But with college graduates struggling to find good jobs, some are questioning the exam's legitimacy — and, by extension, the fairness of Chinese society. Chronicling the experiences of underprivileged youth, the book illuminates how people remain captivated by the exam because they regard it as fateful — an event both consequential and undetermined. The book finds that the exam enables people both to rebel against the social hierarchy and to achieve recognition within it. It contends that the Gaokao serves as a pivotal rite of passage in which people strive to personify cultural virtues such as diligence, composure, filial devotion, and divine favor.

This book approaches the developing field of synthetic biology by focusing on the experimental and institutional lives of practitioners in two labs at Princeton University. It highlights the distance between hyped technoscience and the more plodding and entrenched aspects of academic research. The book follows practitioners as they wrestle with experiments, attempt to publish research findings, and navigate the ins and outs of academic careers. It foregrounds the practices and rationalities of these pursuits that give both researchers' lives and synthetic life their distinctive contemporary forms. Rather than draw attention to avowed methodology, the book investigates some of the more subtle and tectonic practices that bring knowledge, doubt, and technological intervention into new configurations. In so doing, it sheds light on the more general conditions of contemporary academic technoscience.