Animals with parents: the fictive kinship of contemporary China’s body politic

Over the recent decade, animal metaphors have emerged collectively in China’s public discourses to characterize and categorize particular social groups—corrupt officials, urban professionals, sophisticated consumers, or the unmarried youth coming of age under the national One-Child-Per-Couple Policy. Specifically, wildlife of tigers and snakes now refer to corrupt officials that the current state leadership deems as national enemies that need caging. Domesticated animals, such as dogs, pigs, and fish, respectively, index undesirable bachelors, consumerist youths, and victims of financial or sexual offenses. Meanwhile, the fictive use of kin terms has also increased to register national role models or the current state leaders. By exploring these metaphors’ pragmatic usages in urban lives, media discourses, and state actions, this article maps out a fictive kinship of contemporary China’s body politic. It further reveals how socioeconomic marketization and globalization exert influences on middle-class desires, urban sociality, and national belonging in China in the global stage of post-socialism. In doing so, the article demonstrates how anthropological studies of metaphors, animals, and kinship might inform broader human relations of similarities and differences, inclusion and exclusion, and the self and the other. This further opens up anthropological imagination for socio-political becoming and national future-making.