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The term “artificial beauty” (renzaomeinü) became popular in China after a young Chinese woman, Hao Lulu, was dubbed as China’s first “artificial beauty” in 2003.Her story caused an upsurge of interest in cosmetic surgery and triggered a nationwide debate in China.This chapter provides a quick yet telling glimpse into the burgeoning cosmetic surgery industry and women’s involvement in it. While some people condemn the pursuit of beauty through cosmetic surgery as women’s submission to the male gaze, Hao Lulu and women like her claim their rights to cosmetic surgery as a way of self-improvement and self-fulfilment. Through discussing controversial debates concerning Hao Lulu, the author explores the newly emerging body politics and market discourse of post-Mao China. The author argues that cosmetic surgery involves both exploitation and liberation of the body, and both enslavement and empowerment of women.

The anxiety about body image is captured by the ubiquitous consumer culture and the ever-expanding beauty market in China today. Mass media contributes to the commodification of female appearance by producing the feeling of imperfection and creating the desire to buy an “ideal beauty”. While some women actively construct their senses of self by consuming various beauty products, including cosmetic surgery, others are passively exploited by the profit-driven market and suffer from dangerous operations such as leg-stretching surgery. Nevertheless, both cases display women’s bodies being targeted by China’s thriving beauty industry.

Machinic suture refers to the operations through which the true self can be transformed into a desired human body through augmented realities. This chapter attempts to thematically connect an individual’s outer appearance with his or her inner soul. Cosmetic surgery was developed to surgically provide the desired beautiful body to an individual. All over the world, makeovers and reality shows are driving some men and many women to go under the surgeon’s knife in order to appear young, refreshed, and beautiful. This change makes them sociologically more acceptable in their community.

Through reviewing the development of plastic surgery from Republican China to contemporary China, this chapter discusses how plastic surgery was transmitted from the West and adopted into China’s social and political settings. How plastic surgery was appropriated into China’s social contexts demonstrates that the boundaries crossed over are not only regional, but also national, political and ideological.

China was integrated into a global market economically as well as culturally. It is exposed to the influence of the omnipresent beauty ideals and consumer culture in the west. The rapid increase of Barbie sales in China indicates that the global capitalist market has brought China an ultimate fantasy of Western female beauty. Moreover, in recent years, the popularity of Korean TV dramas and pop music shows that the global cultural encounter also takes place within the non-Western world. Furthermore, by examining a Chinese cosmetic surgery reality TV show, the chapter explores how the development of the Chinese cosmetic surgery market has been intertwined with transnational flows of people, media, capital and techniques.

Since China launched its historic process of economic reform and opening up in the late 1970s, women have become vulnerable to the impact of economic restructuring on employment. This chapter focuses on the impact of economic transition and social transformation on women’s choices of cosmetic surgery. It explores why cosmetic surgery is widely considered as an “investment” to gain “beauty capital” among Chinese girls and women. In particular, it explores the phenomenon of Chinese high school and college students rushing to have cosmetic surgery over summer/winter holidays to get an edge in a tight job market.The obsession with female beauty in workplaces and in the marriage market is rooted in traditional Chinese gender norms, where women’s appearances are more emphasized than their ability and talents.

In an era of globalization, female beauty seems to be increasingly standardized according to the Western ideal. However, the author argues that Chinese women’s preference to “Caucasian features” need to be understood in local settings.The author discusses how the “Caucasian features” take on various meanings in China’s historical and social contexts. Furthermore, the author explores how globalization has heightened the sense of local culture and increased the Chinese’s sentiment towards the oriental aspects of Chinese beauty. It reveals the tension between cultural homogenization and heterogenization in terms of the globalization of standards of beauty and women’s pursuit of these standards through cosmetic surgery.

People usually assume that cosmetic surgery is a privilege of the elite and the rich. However, women who opt for cosmetic surgery come from diverse groups in China. Using ethnographic cases, this chapter highlights the diverse motivations that lead to cosmetic surgery. It reveals that for some Chinese women, cosmetic surgery is less about vanity than practicality. The drastic and dramatic economic, socio-cultural and political changes in China have produced immense anxiety that is experienced by women both mentally and physically.

Beauty is about economy; nevertheless, it is also about ideology. This chapter discusses the political implications of China’s booming beauty economy. A main driving force of cosmetic surgery in China is pragmatism. This pragmatism is not only produced by the instability of the transitional Chinese social structure, but is also channelled by the Chinese Communist Party’s pragmatic ideology as exemplified by its ”cat theory” and “xiaokang” concepts. It affects an individual’s choice to undergo cosmetic surgery and the state’s policy of developing its beauty industry. Moreover, using the Miss World competition and the ceremony hostesses of Beijing Olympics as examples, the author discusses how beautiful female bodies have been appropriated into a nationalist agenda in China. Female body image and alteration practices have become both a reflection of personal identity, and a site of ideological contestation, of which state power and market forces reconfigure their power structures to form a new bodily regime.