The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This book offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Li Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains.
Li Zhang is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of two award-winning books, Strangers in the City and In Search of Paradise.
"An original and important exploration of the various ways that psychotherapies are being enculturated and popularized in China today. The result, Li Zhang so successfully shows, is a new instrument for self-transformations, institutional rationality, and political authority."—Arthur Kleinman, author of The Soul of Care
"Anxious China is a fascinating exploration of the new power of psychological thinking and therapy in China. Rich with comparative insights, the book greatly broadens our cross-cultural understanding of the effects of psychological thinking for concepts of the self and sociality and for the maintenance of political power in postsocialist China."—Emily Martin, Professor Emerita of Anthropology, New York University
"Li Zhang always has her finger on the pulse of key transformations in contemporary Chinese culture and society. This insightful and moving ethnography is not a narrative about the emergence of an individualistic self in China. Rather, Zhang offers a nuanced analysis of popular psy fever in what she calls the anxious times of rapid transformations in China, linking an inner revolution of self-care to a reshaped sociality and governance."—Lisa Rofel, coauthor of Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion
224 pp.6 x 9Illus: 8 b/w illustrations
9780520344181$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Aug 2020