Introduction

The body has long been a serious matter for Chinese people. Traditionally, a typical way of greeting is asking each other: ‘How's your eating going?’ (chi le ma). Despite being gradually abandoned among the masses, in a sense this greeting highlights the central importance of eating practices and associated bodily functions for ordinary people in China. Some researchers have gone further to argue that Chinese culture is characterized by its ‘somatization’ of many aspects of social life (Brownell, 1995; Sun, 2004 [1983]). Moreover, the social construction of ideal manhood has long been manifested in and through bodily presence and performance throughout different historical periods. In light of these cultural discourses around the body, in this chapter I explore how young men construct and live with their bodies in everyday life, what masculinities are formulated in myriad embodied experiences, and how young men's perceptions and practices are informed by, and also contribute to, shared aesthetics of the male body and packages of cultural particularities (or commonalities) compared with other societies.

This chapter is located in a Chinese cultural, philosophical and sociological framework of shenti (body-self) while engaging with Western theorizations of embodiment, self and gender. My analysis was structured in this way due to the consideration that the Chinese language itself has a rich set of expressions related to shen and shenti. For example, a general search in the original transcriptions of interviews showed the young men's frequent adoption of shenrelated terms to describe diverse aspects of their personal lives. More importantly, traditional Chinese understandings of the body intrinsically differ from most Western philosophical traditions, especially in terms of body-mind unity and the social, reflexive and relational features of bodies in Confucianism (Ham, 2001). My conceptualization of shenti has also been inspired by traditional Chinese medical theory that is ‘primarily interested in the process of interaction and transformation that nourished and maintained the healthy body’ (Bray, 1997: 302). This implies a perception of the constitution of the human body fundamentally different from Western medicine's focus on bodily structure. Meanwhile, Confucian values came to dominate elite medicine during its formative state in the late Spring and Autumn period and the Han period (Scheid, 2013: 302).