China's massive urbanization has made associating with strangers central to daily life. In her masterful study of China's evolving cultures, Haiyan Lee examines encounters with ghosts and apparitions, animals, women (especially unattached women), maids and tenants, bourgeois intellectuals exiled to rural areas, class enemies, peasant migrants, and foreigners. Through keen analyses of stories, novels, films, a museum and television serials, Lee offers not only a “genealogy of stranger sociality” (p. 10), but richly informed insights into cosmopolitanism, trust, hospitality, employment relations, and a host of other topics integral to China's culture of neoliberalism.

At heart, Lee's subject is ethics: “we act ethically not only when we care for our family and inner circles of friends and associates (zijiren) but when we answer the summons of another being whose claim on us is not grounded in blood or law, but his or her or its vulnerability” (p. 30). Attentive to history, Lee contrasts stranger sociality with the “cozy oases” of traditional Confucian kinship, patronage networks, native place sentiment and other close social ties. She shares original insights into the Mao-era state-management of social life that regulated stranger sociality through the work unit, neighbourhood committees, and an emphasis on class that depoliticized ethnicity. Because the Party as an authority figure looms too large as an overseeing third, Lee sees Mao-era culture – and the figure of the exemplary soldier Lei Feng in particular – as having systematically led to an “atrophy of the moral imagination” (p. 2).

As with the earlier periods, Lee's analysis of the market economy of the reform era integrates an enormous body of contemporary sociological, anthropological and other theories. The figure of the stranger, Lee shows well, configures collective identities in changing ways in different epochs. The modern nation makes strangers of gods, ghosts and their worshippers to suture its thus secular subjects. Yet longings for enchantment also undergird the Party's own “communist theodicy” (p. 49) as it polarizes exploited labourers and their oppressors. Lee offers a particularly haunting example in her analysis of “The Rent Collection Courtyard,” an exhibit that makes visible a landlord's exploitation through harrowing sculptures of peasants paying with their offspring or delivering their last grain amidst the howls of skeletal children.

Animals – Lee recalls from Agamben – epitomize the “bare life” of such human victims excluded from civic, juridical and social protections. Developmental discourse thus “recruits animals to naturalize racist notions of human differences and hierarchies” (p. 100). In some cases, women are just a step up from animals, insofar as their seductive power threatens to destabilize the patriarchal order. In other instances, “the enchantment of womanly virtue” among self-sacrificing mothers both glamorizes drab inequalities and serves “as the secret engine of China's march to the neoliberal world order” (p. 263).

Among her strongest analyses, Lee explains how the “gospel of the free market” creates enchantment in its mysteries of participation. From Cinderella stories to the easy rewards of “casino capitalism,” to other neoliberal fetishes and fairy tales, enchantment recruits subjects to the market policies of “millennial capitalism” (as described by Jean and John Comaroff), while obscuring inequalities, exclusions and injustices. With such treatments, Lee's multidisciplinary methodology demonstrates the value of cultural analyses across the fields of Chinese studies.

Lee's arguments are rich, well-reasoned and persuasive. My one query concerns her claims about the frequently equalitarian basis of stranger sociality. (An important instance concerns clients in courtesans' brothels, which Lee argues anchored an interstitial public sphere wherein modern subjectivity developed.) Yet nearly all her examples present inherently hierarchical relations: employer–worker, landlord–tenant, teacher–student. Invocations of equalitarianism downplay the great extent to which attempts to establish status hierarchies govern much of the improvisation that occurs among strangers.

Lee's detailed close readings bring alive the theoretical ideas concerning the promises and disappointments of living as strangers. A short review can only hint at her rich sources, but I especially recommend her analyses of Zhang Ailing's “The Serial Mistress” (1944), Huang Chun-ming's “Here Comes the Ghost Eater” (1998) and other fiction from Journey to the West to Mo Yan and beyond, pertinent films, and television serials such as 28 Maids at Professor Tian's (1998) and Nannies for Foreigners (2001).

Lee takes seriously perceptions of moral crisis in contemporary China, but she also sees great promise in the power of imaginative culture to train citizens' ethical sensitivities and thus great hope in the face-to-face encounters of China's emerging civil society. Anyone concerned about the fate of the humanities will appreciate her thoughtful defence of visual and written culture as a collective endeavour in which readers and viewers participate in “public reasoning” grounded in empathy for the face of other.