Buying Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery in China is an ethnographic account of the political, economic, and social complexities underpinning the boom in cosmetic surgery in post-socialist, globalizing China. The author, Wen Hua, contends that the power of the post-socialist Chinese state is predicated upon consumerism and the pervasive discourse about choice in consumption. Through an ethnographic account of women's rationale for their choice of cosmetic surgery, Hua argues that Chinese women, while exercising their agency to undergo cosmetic surgery, not only are paradoxically cementing state legitimacy and perpetuating state power, but also are appropriated by the state to showcase a modern, globalized nation with Chinese cultural values.
In researching this book, Wen Hua engaged in a year of fieldwork in Beijing, China. Her methodologies included participant observation at cosmetic surgery clinics and beauty salons, and in-depth interviews. She conducted interviews with a government official, six surgeons, and fifty-eight women who had undergone cosmetic surgeries. Her interviewees varied in occupation, age, education, and social class. In addition to the ethnographic data, she also surveyed a rich array of media sources, including newspapers, magazines, biographies, and advertisements, to provide a more overarching picture of women's involvement in cosmetic surgery in China.
This book consists of an introduction, four sections, and a conclusion. Each section represents a specific theme. In the first section, Hua chronicles the introduction of cosmetic surgery from the West to China and its adoption into China's social, economic, and political milieu from the early twentieth century through the Republican, Maoist, and post-socialist eras. Hua also highlights the controversial debates concerning Hao Lulu—China's alleged first “artificial beauty”—through which she pinpoints a shift of body politics from the Maoist revolutionary body to the post-socialist consumerist body. The latter, to Hua, epitomizes a sophisticated means of control over women's bodies.
In the second section, Hua unravels the incentives undergirding women's choice of cosmetic surgery. As she notes, the current economic reforms and social transformations in China have had a profound impact on women's choice of cosmetic surgery. Women, confronted with difficulties in the job market, workplace, and marriage market, feel compelled to improve their appearance to empower themselves in these social spaces. Indeed, as Hua states, fierce competition in the job and marriage markets spur women to make the decision to alter their bodies to improve their employment opportunities, obtain better jobs, procure a higher salary, and enhance their social status. As a result, Hua contends that women's modified body embodies gender norms, social stratification, and social anxiety in post-socialist China. Hua states that the decision to undergo cosmetic surgery is ubiquitous for women, touching all ages, classes, and social groups. She provides three case studies of a laid-off woman, an upper-middle-class woman, and a rural migrant woman in the city to highlight the social uncertainty, scarcity of resources, and future insecurity driving women's decision to undergo cosmetic surgery.
In the third section, Hua illuminates the role of mass media in depicting and disseminating beauty ideals that fuel women's sense of inadequacy about their own bodies and their choice of cosmetic surgery to remedy their “imperfections,” attempting to demonstrate that women are so engulfed in the media constructions of ideal beauty that they strive to approximate that ideal with consumption of cosmetic surgery. In the fourth section, Hua underscores the impact of globalization, especially the onslaught of beauty ideals from the West and Korea, on the choice to undergo cosmetic surgery. More specifically, Hua analyzes the ways in which cultural imports, such as Barbie products from the West and pop culture from Korea, are implicated in the reconceptualization of standard beauty in China. To Hua, the contradiction between homogenization and heterogenization in the globalizing era is captured in women's pursuit of double eyelids and fair skin. Her ultimate conclusion is that these altered women's bodies mirror China's social transitions.
Overall, Hua views women's involvement in cosmetic surgery as a false-consciousness empowerment, which is subsumed within the interests of the market, state, and men. To a critical reader, the book's introduction is less than ideal: instead of highlighting the contribution of the book, it offers an annotated bibliography that is fragmented, erratic, and lacking a coherent theme that can weave her framing ideas and scholarly context into an integral whole. The book could also have addressed the issue of whether women are aware of their subjugation to state power, men, and the market. Nevertheless, this book will be welcomed by a wide array of scholars who have an interest in Chinese studies, gender studies, and cultural studies.
