Creative work is best understood as a process of getting lost. Scholarly work is a creative endeavour. And an endeavour requires total attention. On a superficial level, total attention is a demonstration of scholarly seriousness and discipline. On a deeper level, total attention is a necessary effort for successful scholarship. Yet, do we as scholars see getting lost as a necessary precondition for total attention? The authors whose works are showcased in this special issue of China Information add to our appreciation of marginalization as creative endeavour. They do so by means of scholarship highlighting the creation of marginal existence through the application of labels and locators that stick and shift. They do so, moreover, because of their willingness to share their particular experience of getting lost. That experience includes challenges to professional and personal identity when their own status – whether religious, racial, ethnic, or sexual – is called into question.
AntonyRobert J. (2009) Banditry, marginality, and survival among the laboring poor in late imperial South China. In: CheungSiu-KeungLeeJoseph Tse-HeiNedilskyLida V. (eds) Marginalization in China: Recasting Minority Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 35–48.
2.
AntonyRobert J. (2016) Unruly People: Crime, Community, and State in Late Imperial South China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
3.
BoretzAvron (2010) Gods, Ghosts, and Gangsters: Ritual Violence, Martial Arts, and Masculinity on the Margins of Chinese Society. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
4.
BowenElenore Smith (1954) Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel. London: Victor Gollancz.
5.
CahillJames (2011) From academy to Chan: Liang Kai. Lecture 11D, A pure and remote view: Visualizing early Chinese landscape painting. A lecture series with James Cahill. Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2owLWZ7IJU, accessed 23 July 2018.
6.
ChangPaul Y. (2015) Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970–1979. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
7.
ChoMun Young (2009) Forced flexibility: A migrant woman’s struggle for settlement. The China Journal, no. 61: 51–76.
8.
ChoMun Young (2013) The Specter of ‘the People’: Urban Poverty in Northeast China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
9.
FanLuluNgKenneth Tsz Fung (2019) Non-legalistic activism from the social margin: Informal workers with pneumoconiosis in Shenzhen. China Information33(2): 185–209.
10.
FeuchtwangStephanRowlandsMichaelWangMingming (2010) Some Chinese directions in anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly83(4): 897–925.
11.
FrenchBrigittine M. (2005) Partial truths and gendered histories: Ruth Bunzel in American anthropology. Journal of Anthropological Research61(4): 513–32.
12.
FuldaAndreas (2016) The logic and limits of the Party’s social management approach to maintaining stability: Lessons from Bismarck. In: TsangSteveMenHonghua (eds) China in the Xi Jinping Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 71–96.
LeeJoseph Tse-HeiNedilskyLida V. (2012) Appeal and discontent: The yin and yang of China’s rise to power. In: LeeJoseph Tse-HeiNedilskyLida V.CheungSiu-Keung (eds) China’s Rise to Power: Conceptions of State Governance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–30.
17.
LiuShao-hua (2011) Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
18.
LiuSidaHallidayTerence C. (2016) Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
19.
LiuSidney Y. (2012) Harmonious online society: The China model in the information age. In: LeeJoseph Tse-HeiNedilskyLida V.CheungSiu-Keung (eds) China’s Rise to Power: Conceptions of State Governance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 91–110.
20.
LiuTingting (2019) The empowerment of rural migrant lalas: Contending queerness and hetero-normativity in China. China Information33(2): 165–84.
21.
LuddenDavid (2003) Presidential address: Maps in the mind and the mobility of Asia. The Journal of Asian Studies62(4): 1057–78.
22.
MaXinrong (2019) Ethnic minority empowerment and marginalization: Yi labour migrants outside China’s autonomous regions. China Information33(2): 146–64.
23.
MaZhao (2015) Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center.
24.
SolingerDorothy J. (1999) Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley: University of California Press.
25.
TaylorDyanna (2014) Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning (DVD). Arlington, VA: Public Broadcasting Service.
26.
TouraineAlain (2014) After the Crisis. Trans. MorrisonHelen. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
27.
VolppSophie (2001) Classifying lust: The seventeenth-century vogue for male love. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies61(1): 77–117.
28.
WenZhuoyiNgokKinglun (2019) Governing the poor in Guangzhou: Marginalization and the neo-liberal paternalist construction of deservedness. China Information33(2): 210–33.
29.
WilliamsDee Mack (1996) The barbed walls of China: A contemporary grassland drama. The Journal of Asian Studies55(3): 665–91.
30.
YangGuobin (2009) The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online. New York: Columbia University Press.
