Recovering Histories
Recovering Histories Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are…
Specifikacia Recovering Histories
Recovering Histories
Heroin first reached Gejiu, a Chinese city in southern Yunnan known as Tin Capital, in the 1980s. More than two decades later, both the heroin epidemic and the mining boom are often discussed as recent history. Widespread use of the drug, which for a short period became "easier to buy than vegetables," coincided with radical changes in the local economy caused by the marketization of the mining industry.
Overcoming addiction in Gejiu has become inseparable from broader attempts to re-imagine laboring lives in a rapidly shifting social world. Middle-aged long-term heroin users, however, complain that they feel stuck in an earlier moment of the country's rapid reforms, navigating a world that no longer resembles either the tightly-knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of their early careers. Drawing on more than eighteen months of