Abstract
ABSTRACTExamining the rise of children’s birthday celebrations in rural China, this article asks what is at stake in these festivities. As kin, friends, and neighbours rally around offspring, birthday parties focus on what children are and will become. Through ritual acts relatives express ties to scarce offspring as kin, often in competition with one another and the values they seek children to attain. Rural citizens thereby negotiate and contest new forms of social exclusion linked to population policies and economic transformation in the Chinese countryside. By imbuing birthday parties with ritual forms, these celebrations challenge theoretical assumptions about the secularisation of kinship under capitalism and the nuclearisation of the family through state bureaucracy.
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