This book investigates how the emerging middle class in China navigates the intersection of state governance, market-driven risk, and the construction of identity through themed urban spaces. Hai Ren, an anthropologist specializing in Chinese society, utilizes ethnographic fieldwork and cultural analysis to examine how individuals engage in 'life-building'—a process of managing personal security and social status within a rapidly shifting neoliberal landscape. The author argues that the state and the middle class co-produce new forms of social regulation and spatial organization that define contemporary Chinese urban life.

Scholars in the field of Chinese urban studies identify this work as a critical examination of the socio-political mechanisms shaping modern Chinese society. Readers frequently note the academic density of the prose, which provides a rigorous look at the intersection of state power and individual aspiration.