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Where do Chinese villagers lay the blame when they develop cancer? The focus falls on the state when the supposed cause is water pollution; on the family context when it is hard work; and on the market when farm chemicals contaminate food. These different cancer aetiologies define the contours of a biological citizenship which does not only operate in relation to the state or premised on ‘scientific’ or biomedical evidence, but also on the basis of competing parameters of wellbeing and welfare drawing on personal and social experiences of work and eating. With data from fieldwork in rural Sichuan, this article illustrates that disputes about cancer causality and attitudes towards farm chemicals are also ways to voice villagers' ambivalent attitudes towards modernisation, consumerism, and development as contending forms of morality.
Anna Lora‐Wainwright (Wed,) studied this question.