Hans Steinmüller is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics, UK. He is the author of Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China (2013).

Susanne Brandtstädter is a China anthropologist and Chair of the Anthropology of Globalization at the University of Cologne, Germany. She is the author of Falsificaciones, Derechos y Protestas (2015) and co-editor of Rights, Cultures, Subjects and Citizens (Routledge 2013).

Introduction: Irony, Cynicism, and the Chinese State 1. Moral Persons and Implicit Irony in Today's China 2. The Farmer, the Foreman and the Tinker: Irony and the Displacement of Meaning in Xiakou Village 3. Morality and Cynicism in a "Grey" World 4. Chinese Migrant Workers' Cynicism and the Politics of "Decent" Wage 5. The Ironies of "Political Agriculture": Bureaucratic Rationality and Moral Networks in Rural China 6. An Interactionist Perspective on Irony in the Street-level Bureaucracies of Beijing 7. The Rebel as Trickster and the Ironies of Resisting in Rural China 8. Freedom in Irony and Dreams: Inhabiting the Realms of Ancestors and Opportunities in Southwest China 9. Differentiating Cynicisms: Irony, Cynicism and New Media in Contemporary China 10. Afterword: Ironic Reflections in a Cynical Age