Beauties at Work situates women's labour in two contradictory social trends in China. The first is the coming of age of a generation of women raised as only children. In the absence of male siblings with whom they would be forced to compete for resources, their parents invest substantially in their education and hold high aspirations for their career success. As a result, the women of the “only child generation” enjoy unprecedented educational and occupational mobility. At odds with their socio-economic rise, though, is a sexually objectifying commercial environment. As members of this relatively entitled generation of female workers find employment in professional settings they confront myriad obstacles to their career mobility, because male managers, colleagues and clients view them through sexualized lenses.

The book is based upon ethnographic research in a state-owned outlet of a foreign trade company in Jiangsu province, where Liu worked as an intern for six months in 2008. These data are supplemented by interviews with men and women in other professional organizations, both state-owned and privately owned, during research conducted between 2007 and 2011. While prior research has investigated the employment experiences of working class women who navigate sexually charged labour conditions, Liu's book is the first to focus on the gender dynamics confronted by China's female white collar workers. Of particular interest are the unprecedented resources and confidence this cohort bring to the workplace as they navigate structural obstacles and masculine predispositions that inhibit their ambitions.

Liu generates feminist theory grounded in the experiences and structures outside a “Euro-American parameter.” She writes, “Western feminist theories are local theories written from a Euro-American social reality and any local theory should be viewed as equally important in understanding what an interconnected global structure could be” (p. 5). In particular, Liu emphasizes a Confucian–Daoist notion of complementarity in gender relations, mobilized in a popular rhetoric of “harmony.” This distinguishes work relations in China from individualist and competitive workplace discourses in the US and Europe. Liu also links workplace norms to historical conceptions equating female respectability with spatial confinement.

Liu's research offers abundant detail illustrating the gender dynamics shaping virtually every facet of professional women's workplace situations. Firms recruited women for their beauty, youth and accomplishments. Once recruited, it was nearly impossible for women to rise from sales assistant to the lucrative position of sales manager. In the office, regular sexual banter offered men the opportunity to live out titillating fantasies while preserving their formal commitment to family, at the expense of women workers who were subordinated and objectified as instruments of male desire. Managers urged single women workers to spend less time at work and more effort seeking a husband.

Liu has a keen eye for hypocrisy in the workplace. She explains that a rationale for barring women from sales management was that it involved international travel, which was allegedly too dangerous for women. Male managers felt that foreign men were apt to take advantage of Chinese women and they were duty bound to protect women's respectability. However, in other companies courting domestic clients, managers readily deployed female workers for socializing at banquets and karaoke bars. The biggest challenge for these women was to disguise their mortification during bouts of drinking and sexual humour among male clients. Professional women workers walk a thin line maintaining respectability and fulfilling such work responsibilities. Indeed, sexual norms betray a familiar double standard, men “happily consume women's sexuality, women who are actively engaged in sexual activities outside the chastity of marriage are considered decadent” (p. 16).

Not surprisingly women armed with educational capital and self-confidence challenged the gender structures that subordinate them. Arguments that men were more deserving of responsibility because they were technically inclined rang hollow to women with engineering degrees, and they pushed for better wages. At the same time women drew upon a repertoire of appropriate femininity to make affective displays (viewed as inappropriate for male workers) to contest the bureaucratic power held by men. Such displays threatened to erode male managers’ reputation for maintaining harmony and thereby weakened their status. These women also leveraged their influence to exercise greater financial control in their families, including putting their names on property deeds.

As comprehensive as the book is, I would have appreciated additional detail about the substance of the daily work routines in the firm hosting Liu's study. But this is a mere quibble. Overall, Beauties at Work offers a skillfully constructed and theoretically rich account of the experiences of a generation of women who have had unprecedented opportunities, as they confront thinly veiled gender limits to their mobility in the workplace. It should garner the attention of feminist scholars and be included on course lists for sociology of gender, work and economy course lists, as well as relevant courses in anthropology and China studies. It should also be of interest to a popular audience interested in Chinese organizations.