John Osburg

Associate Professor of Anthropology University of Rochester

Rochester NY

Osburg is an expert on contemporary Chinese society and the changing economy in China

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Spotlight

Jan 23, 2020

2 min

The Chinese New Year goes on despite the coronavirus. University of Rochester Anthropologist John Osburg says the occasion is about family, feasting, TV, and family stress.

This is typically the busiest travel period in China—if not the world—as millions of people make their way home to celebrate the Chinese New Year, clogging highways, airports, and train stations in the process. As described by Forbes, the country goes into radio silence as more than 1.3 billion Chinese go on vacation at the same time. “It’s been called the largest mammalian migration on the planet, and it always takes place at the Chinese New Year,” says John Osburg, a University of Rochester associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. This year’s celebration may be less than typical, as the country is faced with an outbreak of coronavirus, which has forced the closure of Wuhan, a major port in China, and several other cities. Osburg says, “While I’ve heard from friends in China who are cancelling travel plans, I also have friends who are mostly unconcerned with the threat of the virus.” Osburg spent three years conducting ethnographic research in China, which culminated with his 2013 book, Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich (Stanford University Press). He has also written numerous articles related to China, on such topics as masculinity, consumerism, and state capitalism. His work has provided him the opportunity to observe and understand the week-long Chinese New Year—also known as the Lunar New Year or Spring Festival—which begins this year on January 25. As Osburg explains, it’s a time for families to come together, which accounts for all the travel headaches. And typically, it’s children traveling to see their parents. “One of the more important cultural values in China is filial piety—caring for your parents,” says Osburg. “In order for a lot of young people to make enough money to support themselves, their own families, and their parents, they have to leave their homes in the smaller towns to find better-paying work in big cities.”

Areas of Expertise

Entrepreurship in China

Chinese Society

Contemporary China

Masculinity

China

Consumerism

Political Corruption

Wealth in China

Media

Social

Biography

Professor Osburg’s research is broadly concerned with the relationship between market economies and systems of cultural value, affect, and morality. From 2003 to 2006, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork with a group of wealthy entrepreneurs in southwest China, examining practices of network building and deal making between businesspeople and government officials. Networks of elite entrepreneurs and state officials have exerted increasing dominance over many aspects of Chinese commerce and politics since the start of economic reforms in the late 70’s. Osburg examines how these networks were forged and maintained through ritualized entertaining and the informal moral codes through which they operated.

In 2018, Osburg was awarded a two-year Andrew Carnegie Fellowship which will support a project titled, “Spiritual Crisis and Moral Transformation in Post-Mao China.” This research examines the emergence of new forms of spirituality and religiosity in urban China, with a particular focus on the growing numbers of Han Chinese practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism. The project will consider the ways in which these new forms of religious belief engender broader transformations in Chinese society: How will this spiritual turn among affluent Chinese, which has emerged right as China is poised to become an economic and political superpower, affect their political attitudes, philanthropic practices, environmental consciousness, and social activism, and how will this transformation impact the world beyond China?

Osburg’s research has been supported by the ACLS, The Henry Luce Foundation, the Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Social Science Research Council, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Prior to coming to Rochester, Professor Osburg was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Chinese Studies at Stanford University.

Education

University of Chicago

PhD

Anthropology

2008

Selected Media Appearances

State of affairs

ECNS online

2018-10-16

Lily (pseudonym) did not think twice about when a family friend’s colleague offered to drive her home after dinner. He was sober, her place was on the way, and, besides, her friend was a powerful guy. No one would want to upset him.

Their conversation was innocent enough, as they discussed how his 10-year-old son should study to attend a top university like her. But when they arrived, he leaned over to forcibly kiss her. For weeks afterwards, he continuously texted her, asking her out to dinners, clubs, and KTVs before finally taking the hint to stop.

Anthropologist John Osburg is not surprised by these studies. During research for his 2013 book, Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich, the associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rochester befriended and interviewed numerous wealthy businessmen in southwest Sichuan province. “The infidelity rate of my research subjects was nearly 100 percent,” he told TWOC. “Of course, my sample size was relatively small and the subjects had a lot of similarities.”

Commentary: ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ didn’t tell all of our stories, but Asian Americans found a way to relate

Los Angles Times online

2018-09-07

The news that “Crazy Rich Asians” had become the most successful romantic comedy in nearly a decade inspired, I confess, not just happiness but relief....

Ostentatious displays of wealth in China can be read as a reaction to extreme poverty, said John Osburg, a professor at the University of Rochester who wrote “Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich.” Many of China’s new billionaires spend liberally in part to repudiate the old stereotype that China — and Asia in general — is backward and poverty-stricken

To The Chinese, Ivanka Trump Is A Genetic, Generational & Caucasian Miracle

Refinery29 online

2017-05-30

In America, Ivanka is no miracle. Depending on who you talk to, and what their politics are, she is either a martyr or a mercenary. But in China, she’s a genetic miracle, a generational miracle, and a Caucasian miracle — a role model to China’s women and children who feel an incredible amount of professional, familial, and societal pressures to earn lots of money and nurture a high-performing family. To them, Ivanka is a singular example of how to use good looks and connections as social currency, and how to invest them. Knowing that, Yi Wan Ka plastic surgery clinics and diet pills begin to make sense.

Her’s is a persona that’s so unflappable, that even her father’s antics don’t have much impact; a phenomenon that many of the experts in Chinese-American relations I spoke to find flabbergasting. But even the President himself gets a pass in China, for the same reason as Ivanka: “The idea that someone who came from a family with no political connections whatsoever could become President of the United States — someone who was a true outsider — was appealing to many Chinese,” says John Osburg, assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester. “It would be unthinkable in the Chinese system. Trump winning was a fantasy that people had about China projected onto the United States.”

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