In Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, Geng Song and Derek Hird offer an account of Chinese masculinities in media discourse and everyday life, covering masculinities on television, in lifestyle magazines, in cyberspace, at work, at leisure, and at home. No other work covers the forms and practices of men and masculinities in contemporary China so comprehensively. Through carefully exploring the global, regional and local influences on men and representations of men in postmillennial China, Song and Hird show that Chinese masculinity is anything but monolithic. They reveal a complex, shifting plurality of men and masculinities—from stay-at-home internet geeks to karaoke-singing, relationship-building businessmen—which contest and consolidate “conventional” notions of masculinity in multiple ways.

Geng Song, Ph.D. (2000), University of Hong Kong, is Associate Professor of China Studies and Translation Studies at that university. Among his publications are The Fragile Scholar (HKU Press, 2004) and Rethinking Chinese Television (Routledge, forthcoming).

Derek Hird, Ph.D. (2009), University of Westminster, is Lecturer in Chinese and Research Fellow in Asian Studies at that university. He has published several articles on Chinese men and masculinities, mostly with a focus on white-collar men.