Based on two and a half years of fieldwork in China, this book examines the cultural genesis and social mechanisms of stigma related to mental illness and HIV/AIDS in China. It also explores the bio-politics on stigma through detailed description of social exclusion experienced by people suffering from mental illness or HIV/AIDS and by systematic comparison on stigma between the two illnesses in the Chinese context. Through the comparison, this book describes the micro socio-dynamic process of stigmatization in the local Chinese context, highlights the identity transformation accompanying the illness trajectory the patients and their families have lived through, and ultimately connects Chinese society and its community-centered social value system and institutional arrangement to the stigma associated with mental illness and HIV/AIDS.

Dr Jinhua Guo is currently an assistant professor at the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology in Peking University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2008. Before that, he studied sociology and received both his BA (1998) and MA (2001) from Peking University.

Since 2004, Dr Guo has been conducting ethnographical research in China, focusing on mental health, HIV/AIDS, and poverty issues. Beginning in 2009, he has been teaching courses on medical anthropology, ethnographical research methods, and history of anthropology at Peking University. Dr Guo has authored a number of articles in Chinese journals on stigma studies with respect to illness and HIV/AIDS in the Chinese context. He is also a contributor to Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person published by University of California Press in 2011.