SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the English-language literature on Chinese cuisines in the People’s Republic. The transformation of cuisines in post-Mao China can be described in terms of a transition from state to market and from scarcity to choice. Yet the celebration of Chinese cuisines has been paralleled by a grimmer discourse that portrays food and eating as sites of risk, anxiety, danger and disgust. It is emphasised that paying careful attention to the reform socialist and other “Chinese” permutations of increasingly globalised cultural forms and processes related to food will contribute to a better comparative understanding of culinary modernity. The economic reforms were backed by an ideological shift that overturned the egalitarianism and anti-consumerism of radical socialism. The exploratory consumption of the foods of others in the gastronomically ever-more diverse Chinese towns and cities can be described as a form of “culinary tourism".