Assuming power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party was soon faced with a crucial problem: how to construct the socialist 'New Man'? Using Foucault's theory of 'technologies of the self', Lynteris examines the conflict between self-cultivation and the abolition of the self in the biopolitically neuralgic field of 'socialist medicine'.

Christos Lynteris is a Mellon/Newton Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) of the University of Cambridge, researching the social ecology of plague in Inner Asia. He read and lectured social anthropology at the University of St Andrews and completed this book under a Fellowship at the Centro Incontri Umani, in Ascona, Switzerland.