Entrepreneurial Masculinity, Health, and the State in Post-Socialist China

Abstract

Drawing on the author’s three years’ ethnographic research of karaoke bar hostesses and male clients in the Chinese urban sex industry, this paper argues that men’s health practices are impacted by the practices of entrepreneurial masculinity and the development of social relationships with the state. In addressing the ways in which men’s health practices are impacted by social factors rather than individual factors, this research has significant implications for HIV intervention programs, which should be devised to alter men’s health practice through breaking the association of condoms with authoritarian, top-down, and coercive family planning programs and changing peer culture, peer behaviors, and peer worldviews in men’s workplaces including companies and government offices in China.