Abstract
This dissertation surveys consumer lifestyles in underdeveloped small towns in western China. It explores how local social status connects to national and global political-economic contexts while demonstrating how the state significantly influences the market-oriented process of consumption. The study employs a comprehensive mixed-methods approach, integrating secondary research, in-depth interviews (both in person and online), onsite observations, surveys, and digital ethnographies. Drawing from scholarship on consumer culture, status consumption, and cultural globalization, it poses the following questions: What are the implications of recent urbanization in small towns in China for consumer culture? How does this urbanization process shape participants’ consumer aspirations? What kinds of lifestyles do they aspire to? What role does the state play in this seemingly market-oriented process? How do consumer cultures among small-town residents interact with the local landscape of status hierarchy? The analysis delves into the cultural politics at play, examining how institutional processes—specifically urbanization, globalization, and the alternating decentralization and recentralization of state power—shape status hierarchies and consumer habits within a small-town context, legitimizing unique consumer cultural expressions while molding aspirations. By situating consumer culture within these broader processes, the dissertation challenges market-centered explanations and underscores the enduring influence of the state in China’s consumption landscape. It shows that material experience, rather than abstract ideology, plays a defining role in shaping residents’ engagement with consumer cultures, including those related to status, belonging, urban modernity, consumer nationalism, and global cultural flows.