Mao Jingyu has produced a richly evidenced sociological study of ethnic performers in order to make the case for the importance of intimacy as enabling a kind of relational self-making in which personhood – specifically ethnic self-making – emerges out of dense work interactions. The data comes from what she calls “Green City,” her hometown in Yunnan province. Mao chooses this small city to foreground the less-researched experiences of migrants who labour within their own provinces and regions. Her own complex positioning – registered as Hani but disconnected from any cultural knowledge about them – highlights discrepancies between official designation and lived experiences, which in turn created opportunities to learn from interlocutors’ misguided expectations about her.

Mao’s ethnographic research spanned six months during which she conducted participant observation in three ethnic performance sites, pursuing immersion by working alongside the performers or following them beyond those sites where she also conducted 60 in-depth interviews. Interviewees were one third Han with the other two thirds comprising registered minorities including Wa, Hani, Lahu, Yi, Dai and Miao. It is crucial to recognize that this is not primarily a story of minorities per se, but rather a nuancing of existing accounts of service workers and of rural–urban migration. Chief among her points about migrant labour is that service workers may be highly distinct from those most-studied factory workers who are alienated from the fruits of their labour on assembly lines; this is because of the intimate and emotional social interaction with customers that allows instant feedback on their work.

Mao’s writing is lucid and to the point. While deftly integrating a wide range of theoretical resources for analysis, she manages to be clear and persuasive, allowing readers to follow along even if they lack previous knowledge of those literatures. Skilled at explaining the theories she employs, she incorporates them organically into a multi-faceted treatment of the performers’ situations and concomitant subjectivities. Several key concepts are woven throughout the text and together constitute the backbone of the argument. These include intimacy, social inequality, emotions, ethnic scripts, feminization/eroticization, rural–urban, hukou, suzhi, modernity and bordering. While space will not allow detailed discussion of each, her central contribution is how these elements inflect each other.

A through line of the book concerns the selfhood and ethnic awareness of rural minority performers. Acknowledging that a significant proportion of the “ethnic” performers were Han-identified, Mao makes a case for a complex dynamic of selfhood for those who are minority-identified, especially those from rural backgrounds. Documenting research participants’ yearnings to become more modern and urban, she relies heavily on Nikolas Rose’s notions of neoliberal subjects’ “working on the self” to improve their economic circumstances and social standing. While I have some reservations about apparently seamless applications of neoliberal analysis to China’s later reform decades, Mao makes clear that what could be regarded as an increasingly globalized neoliberal ideology has come to saturate Chinese cultural space, shaping aspirations and self-perceptions of neophyte labourers and urban newcomers. In China, this becomes entangled with the indigenous discourses of suzhi and the China Dream. Mao calls this assemblage an “emotional regime.” Her insights into “emotional management” and self-making are provocative, and it is clear that she has drawn very close to her research participants.

An example of this perspective emerges as Mao elegantly describes the yearnings of performers to escape experiences of social inequality at work. Here she highlights the hukou aspirations of rural migrant workers, showing how they have internalized that it is their fault that they have not achieved the success that would entitle them to shift to urban status. This would be contingent on their earning ability, but also on their acquisition of urbanity and mastery of modern lifestyles. Performers strive, Mao asserts, to evade denigration as service workers by themselves becoming consumers and participants in entertainment activities.

In many ways, what distinguishes this book is its treatment of ethnicity as delinked from ethnic minority persons. Developing the concept of ethnic scripts, she points out how societally ubiquitous is the binary of Han–minority and how regularly the latter aligns with the rural, the feminine, the backward, the sexual as well as with the uniform cultural imaginaries around singing, dancing and ritual drinking.

Proposing ethnicity as “doing rather than being,” Mao makes visible how both minority and Han performers reinforce ethnic scripts through their conformity to them at work, as do customers through their consistent demands and expectations. However, even as such ethnic scripts enjoy a powerful hegemonic status in the Chinese ideological environment, it must be remembered that this framing applies only to a narrow slice of Chinese life – that of performing or consuming ethnicity in discrete moments of ethno-tourism encounters. Mao resists imputing greater authenticity to other, “off-stage” aspects of performers’ lives by showing how their work is implicated in self-making.

This raises a related issue, that of historical specificity. Ethnic performance predates the 1949 revolution, has moved from being largely state-sponsored to becoming commercialized and then evolved over decades of reform, eventuating in the state promotion of ethnic marketing precisely for targeted poverty alleviation. The rise of domestic ethnic tourism, which has taken place over the decades from the 1980s to the present, likewise has had stages of development, from the xungen era of seeking roots of Chinese tradition to the increasing valorization of cultural heritage and yuanshengtai primitivity as urbanization has relentlessly advanced. Mao’s study offers a snapshot from the 2016–2017 period, gesturing to antecedent changes, but also generalizing about ideologies of, say, ronghe (assimilation), that have undergone many permutations prior to and possibly since her case study. Another example demanding specificity is highly sexualized intimate labour, a set of practices that have burgeoned over the decades and differentially between different minorities and regions. When ethnic sex tourism was burgeoning in Yunnan in decades since the 1990s, with practices of sitting on laps, massaging shoulders, and erotic flirting accompanying the choreographed drinking rituals, there was no sign of it in my increasingly touristed Guizhou field site. A sense of what was distinctive and emerging in her particular type of site and in the 2010s would have been a welcome enhancement to an otherwise evocative and granular analysis.