Tongyue Zhu

This thesis examines how scarcity endures and transforms in contemporary China, not only as material deprivation but as a lived condition that structures relations, temporalities, and state–society dynamics. Taking the refrigerator as both ethnographic method and analytic lens, I trace how this mundane domestic object modulates everyday negotiations of survival, intimacy, and legitimacy. Based on two years of multi-sited fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, the study follows refrigerators and cold-chain infrastructures across households, markets, elder-care stations, and neighborhoods under lockdown. Through fridge walkthroughs, everyday participant observation, and infrastructural following, I analyze how practices of storing, hoarding, delaying, and discarding mediate the experience of scarcity. In the Covid-19 pandemic, the logics of freezing and freshness extended beyond food, shaping the legitimacy of citizenship itself through expiration codes, quarantine regimes, and bureaucratic violence. I argue that scarcity should be reconceptualized as a relational and temporal horizon within which people schedule uncertainty, negotiate intimacies, and imagine futures. By tracing the refrigerator’s material operations of freezing and cooling, this thesis reframes scarcity as lived consequences rather than static lack, demonstrates how the politics of preservation and distribution are sedimented in everyday rhythms, and bridges household ethnography with the wider logics of logistics and governance.