Refashioning the Self through New Therapeutics in Urban China

The Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College presents a discussion with Professor Li Zhang on a new mass psychological counseling movement is unfolding in contemporary China.

A new mass psychological counseling movement is unfolding in contemporary China. In this talk Zhang explores how, through this movement, middle-class Chinese seek to refashion “the self” (ziwo) by turning it into an object of intense inquiry and pursuing personal development and fulfillment through therapeutic projects centered on the notion of self-management. This new therapeutic work is contributing to intricate forms of urban subject-making that challenge a set of simple binaries: the private versus social self, the inner versus outer life, psychological versus social problems. Further, while this new regime of the self seems to bear certain neoliberal traits, it ironically dovetails with the state’s project of building a harmonious society in post-reform China.

About the Speaker
Li Zhang is Professor and Chair of anthropology and former Director of the East Asian Studies Program at the University of California-Davis. Her research concerns the cultural, spatial, and psychological repercussions of market reforms and postsocialist transformations in China. Her current project explores the "inner revolution" brought by an emerging urban psychological counseling movement and how it reshapes Chinese people's understandings of selfhood, emotions, happiness, and well-being in the midst of rapid social change. She is the author of Strangers in the City (Stanford 2001) and In Search of Paradise (Cornell 2010), and the co-editor of Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar (Cornell 2008).