Chinese Discourses on Happiness 9789888455720, 9789888455515

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Happiness in Chinese Socialist Discourse
2. Tibet and Happiness in Chinese Media Discourses
3. Happiness “with a Chinese Taste”
4. “As Long as My Daughter Is Happy”
5. Smile Yourself Happy
6. “Happy Housewives”
7. Cultivating Capacity for Happiness as a Confucian Project in Contemporary China
8. Talking of Happiness
9. Chinese Happiness
10. The Happiness of Unrealizable Dreams
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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“This distinctive volume creates sustained dialogues around a substantive debate. Rejecting the conventional contrasts between China and the West, and yet deeply immersed in sinophone media, the authors understand Chinese discourse on happiness as multiple but interconnected conversations within a globally shared production of knowledge. Equally concerned with text and image, they exhibit an ethnographic eye as sharp as any orthodox ethnography.” —Deborah Davis, Yale University

Gerda Wielander is a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on the link between the spiritual and the political in contemporary China. Derek Hird is a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at Lancaster University, UK. His research interests include gender and masculinities and mental health needs of Chinese migrants in London.

Contributors analyze the government’s “happiness maximization strategies,” including public service advertising campaigns, Confucian and Daoist-inflected discourses adapted for the self-help market, and the promotion of positive psychology as well as “happy housewives.” They also discuss forces countering the hegemonic discourse: different forms of happiness in the LGBTQ community, teachings of Tibetan Buddhism that subvert the material culture propagated by the government, and the cynical messages in online novels that expose the fictitious nature of propaganda. Collectively, the authors bring out contemporary Chinese voices engaging with different philosophies, practices, and idealistic imaginings on what it means to be happy.

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“Wielander and Hird have put together a superbly researched and thoughtfully written set of essays on the multiple ways in which that most elusive of all states—happiness—is understood and pursued in contemporary China. A volume that should become required reading for all interested in Chinese society today.” —Julia C. Strauss, SOAS, University of London

Happiness is on China’s agenda. From Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” to online chat forums, the conspicuous references to happiness are hard to miss. This groundbreaking volume analyzes how different social groups make use of the concept and shows how closely official discourses on happiness are intertwined with popular sentiments. The Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to define happiness and wellbeing around family-focused Han Chinese cultural traditions clearly strike a chord with the wider population. The collection highlights the links connecting the ideologies promoted by the government and the way they inform, and are in turn informed by, various deliberations and feelings circulating in the society.

Happiness Studies / Cultural Studies / China

Front cover image: Detail from a propaganda poster displayed on hoardings in Beijing’s CBD in April 2017. © Gerda Wielander

Printed and bound in Hong Kong, China

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Chinese Discourses on Happiness

Chinese Discourses on Happiness

Edited by Gerda Wielander and Derek Hird

Hong Kong University Press The University of Hong Kong Pokfulam Road Hong Kong www.hkupress.hku.hk © 2018 Hong Kong University Press ISBN 978-988-8455-72-0 (Hardback) All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed and bound by Hang Tai Printing Co. Ltd., Hong Kong, China

Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii Acknowledgments viii Introduction: Chinese Happiness, a Shared Discursive Terrain Gerda Wielander 1. Happiness in Chinese Socialist Discourse: Ah Q and the “Visible Hand” Gerda Wielander

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2. Tibet and Happiness in Chinese Media Discourses: Issues and Contestation 44 Jigme Yeshe Lama 3. Happiness “with a Chinese Taste”: An Interpretive Analysis of CCTV’s 2014 Spring Festival Gala’s Public Service Announcement (PSA) “Chopsticks” (Kuaizi pian) 64 Giovanna Puppin 4. “As Long as My Daughter Is Happy”: “Familial Happiness” and Parental Support-Narratives for LGBTQ Children Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen

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5. Smile Yourself Happy: Zheng Nengliang and the Discursive Construction of Happy Subjects Derek Hird

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6. “Happy Housewives”: Gender, Class, and Psychological Self-Help in China Jie Yang

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7. Cultivating Capacity for Happiness as a Confucian Project in Contemporary China: Texts, Embodiment, and Moral Affects Yanhua Zhang

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8. Talking of Happiness: How Hope Configures Queer Experience in China William F. Schroeder

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9. Chinese Happiness: A Proverbial Approach to Popular Philosophies of Life Mieke Matthyssen

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10. The Happiness of Unrealizable Dreams: On the Pursuit of Pleasure in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction Heather Inwood

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List of Contributors 227 Index 230

Figures and Tables

Figures Figure 1.1 Zhao Yanian, “Ah Q laughing hysterically”

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Figure 2.1 Lhasa’s Happiness Sculpture

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Figure 4.1 Mama Wu: “My son is gay,” screenshot from the Chinese edition of Elle 87 Figure 4.2 Screenshot from Pink Dads: Father and son

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Figure 4.3 Screenshot from Mama Rainbow: Mother and lesbian daughter

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Figure 5.1 “Zheng nengliang every day” (meitian zheng nengliang) 115 Figure 5.2 “Live a bit more gracefully” (huode youyaxie) 117 Figure 5.3 “Optimism is an attitude” (leguan shi yizhong taidu) 118 Figure 5.4 “Hello happy times” (meihao de shiguang nihao) 119 Figure 5.5 “Offer compassion; transmit zheng nengliang” (fengxian aixin; chuandi zheng nengliang) 121 Figure 9.1 Chi kui shi fu 吃虧是福 and nande hutu 難得糊塗 191

Tables Table 3.1 Titles and synopses of CCTV gala PSAs, 2013–2016

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Table 3.2 Main sequences of the gala PSA “Chopsticks,” 2014

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Acknowledgments

This book started with a simple conversation between colleagues. Gerda Wielander told Derek Hird about her interest in happiness; Derek Hird told Gerda Wielander about his interest in developing a multidisciplinary project. The two things were put together, the idea germinated, articulated, and turned into a call for contributors to an initial, closed workshop on happiness, which took place in November 2014 at the University of Westminster. In addition to the editors, Heather Inwood, Giovanna Puppin, and Jigme Yeshe Lama, who joined us all the way from New Delhi, were among the participants in this initial event. The idea of an edited volume started to grow from there. The editors made a targeted approach to academics who they felt might be a good fit for the volume in terms of their interests and disciplines. The authors who contributed to this volume were as enthused as we were about the idea and chose to engage with us, in most cases despite considerable pressures on their time. We want to thank all of them for believing in the project, sticking with it, and for entrusting us with their excellent research; we feel honored that they chose to work with us. In the process new friendships were forged, despite less than rigorous application of the em dash in some cases, ultimately resulting in vastly increased happiness levels all around. Strategic Impact Funding from the University of Westminster enabled us to organize a two-day event at Westminster in July 2016, which brought together seven of the final contributors in London, and added an additional one who had signed up to the event as a participant. The event did not take the form of a traditional conference, but simultaneously engaged with academic and nonacademic audiences from the Chinese community in London. It was facilitated by True Heart Theatre, which specializes in playback theater. Films and photographs of the event can be found at https://www.westminster.ac.uk/contemporary-china-centre/ projects/chinese-happiness. The event was an eye-opener to all of us. We are grateful to all of our participants, in particular to those outside the academic community, and to True Heart, who managed to take us all out of our rehearsed patterns to try to find a new language to communicate our research. We want to thank our editor at Hong Kong University Press, who recognized the importance and timeliness of “happiness” in the context of contemporary China

Acknowledgments ix

and was willing to put faith in us. We thank Eric Mok for his expert advice and unfailing encouragement in bringing this edited volume to fruition. We are also grateful to the two anonymous readers of the complete manuscript for their hugely positive and encouraging feedback and for unequivocally recommending the publication of this volume. Their comments also led to a comprehensive rewrite of the introduction, which has vastly improved this important part of the volume. Of course, all errors or omissions remain the responsibility of the author. Many factors contribute to the success of a creative and intellectual project. In addition to excellent authors and a supportive editor at the chosen press, there are also a host of intangibles and inexpressibles; this is an acknowledgment of all these factors that came together in a cosmically fortuitous constellation. Finally, Derek Hird wishes to thank Gerda Wielander for leading this project with consummate efficiency and good humor all the way from the conception to the completion of this volume, and for stoically bearing the brunt of the editing work. Gerda Wielander wishes to thank Derek Hird for his unfailing creative and intellectual input, and for his robust Scottish constitution, a vital ingredient in making the collaboration with his “efficient” coeditor such a happy one.

Introduction Chinese Happiness, a Shared Discursive Terrain Gerda Wielander

Happiness is on China’s agenda. Happiness, often represented by the Chinese character fu 福, is part of the visual propaganda campaign of the Chinese Dream, and raising levels of happiness has become an official government target. Much is written and said about happiness by the Chinese government, by authors of self-help books, by journalists, TV chat show hosts, pop psychologists, and China’s netizens. This book is the first attempt at analyzing these various writings and related images to see what concepts and agendas inform this proliferation of discourses on happiness. The essays in this volume show some of the many different contexts and discursive practices in which happiness is discussed by different social groups and actors, in order to illuminate different notions of happiness in China today. The starting point of our analysis is the Chinese term xingfu 幸福, now the standard Chinese term to translate the English word happiness. The term is not a neologism; it was already used to indicate happiness back in the eleventh century.1 Becky Hsu (2016) distinguishes between three different components in relation to the meaning of happiness: good mood, a good life, and a meaningful life. While, in her view, the English term happiness refers mostly to the notion of good mood and a good life, she argues that the Chinese term xingfu implies a longer-term state of mind based on moral values, referring to a combination of a good life and a meaningful life. However, these aspects are certainly all present in recent Western studies on happiness (e.g., Layard 2005) and are taken into account in the many different questions used to measure people’s life satisfaction, happiness, or subjective well-being. There are also other groupings of words denoting happiness in Chinese, notably variations including le 樂 (joy), which are not excluded from our study. Indeed, one of the important contributions this volume makes is to map the linguistic field of happiness and well-being in China today.

1. According to Baidu Baike, xingfu was already recorded in the Xin tangshu 新唐書, which was compiled in 1060. https://baike.baidu.com/item/幸福/18803. Accessed August 17, 2017.

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A search on the China Core Newspapers Full-text Database revealed 386 articles in Renmin Ribao 人民日報 (People’s Daily) with xingfu in the title between the years 2000 and 2016. The amount per year was in single figures until 2005 and ranged from 13 to 38 per year in the years 2006 to 2010, jumping to 105 in 2011, followed by 71 in 2012, and has ebbed off since. This broadly mirrors the picture in all core newspapers, where 2011 also marks the high point of their concern with happiness, with a total of 9155 articles with xingfu in the title in that year. This culminated in a CCTV series called Happiness Survey (Xingfu Diaocha 幸福 調查) broadcast in October 2012 in which journalists carried out interviews with members of the public, and which elicited a range of interesting responses (Leyre 2012). The series also led to a lively discussion in the public sphere as well as numerous publications on the topic of happiness, with titles such as Guo fule! Xingfu ne? 國富了！幸福呢？ (The country has become rich! What about happiness?) (Gao 2013). The theme of happiness has also been picked up in expensive public service advertising and features prominently in TV shows, in which members of the public undergo speed therapy to cure their unhappiness. This diversity and pervasiveness is reflected in the comprehensive analysis of texts and images in multimedia formats presented in this volume.

Global Happiness Discourse and Neoliberalism Happiness as the telos of human existence has been debated since Aristotle and has been a key theme in the works of political philosophers in the West. Happiness studies, on the other hand, is a relatively recent academic discipline. The Journal of Happiness Studies was founded in 2000, and publishes research carried out in psychology, economics, anthropology, sociology, and related fields. Most studies on happiness either refer back to or respond to the so-called Easterlin Paradox. Richard Easterlin showed in 1974 that despite economic growth and widespread increase in prosperity, people in the Western world had not become happier. While this finding has since been refined and the statement qualified depending on a variety of variables, the essential truth remains: that more material wealth does not necessarily lead to increased happiness of individuals and societies (Easterlin 2010, Kahnemann 2006)—and China appears to be the world’s biggest example of this paradox (Bartolini and Sarracino 2015). A detailed overview and critique of all these works—political philosophy as well as happiness studies—is included in the two seminal treatises on happiness which are closely linked to the development of happiness studies, and which most authors in this book also refer to. In his book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005) Richard Layard—professor of economics at the London School of Economics and the son of two Jungian therapists—argues that, following decades of economic and psychological research, we now know what factors impact most on happiness. It follows that we must devise policies designed to ensure the maximum happiness of

Introduction 3

the maximum number of people. Layard builds directly on Jeremy Bentham’s maxim of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” as the guiding moral principle against which both individual decisions and policy formulation must be judged. Layard’s argument and ensuing policy recommendations are based on the now, as he argues, scientifically proven premise that happiness is not entirely subjective, but that it is an objectively verifiable and measurable state of mind. This premise is built primarily on results from neuroscience which have shown that people’s brains do show measurable changes that correspond to their self-reported states of happiness. Layard’s work was instrumental in the development and publication of World Happiness Surveys and Reports as outlined below. Sara Ahmed’s critical study The Promise of Happiness (2010) is suspicious of the utilitarian maxim of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as well as agreed-upon notions of what is good and hence conducive to happiness. Ahmed argues that, rather than the individual choosing a certain object (by which she means not only material objects, but also values, ideas, and beliefs), the judgment about certain objects being “happy” is already made, before they are even encountered. Certain objects are attributed as the cause of happiness, which means they are already circulated as social goods before we “happen” upon them; indeed, the reason we happen upon them is because they are already being circulated (Ahmed 2010, 28). In her approach to the concept of happiness, Ahmed is guided by Locke rather than Bentham, in particular his idea that freedom is the freedom to be made happy by different things (27). The recent emphasis on happiness as a goal and object of study also owes much to the positive psychology movement and its seminal figure, Martin Seligman, founder and director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman’s main argument is that happiness comes principally from individuals’ cultivation of positive emotions (Seligman 2002, xiii). According to Barbara Ehrenreich (2009, 92; 102), this approach has its roots in the positive thinking movement catalyzed by Norman Vincent Peale, an American Protestant minister and author, in his 1952 international bestseller The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale argued that through techniques such as mentally “imaging” a goal in a sustained way, and at the same time repeatedly believing in its achievability, one could banish self-doubt, strengthen one’s personality, and solve intractable problems. Yet, Martin Seligman has pointed out that although there is a philosophical relationship between Peale’s ideas and his positive psychology initiative, namely, the notion of a freely choosing individual, there is no empirical connection. According to Binkley (2011), the current enthusiasm for the promotion of happiness and positive thinking/psychology by governments of varying political stripes across the globe is strongly inflected by a neoliberal mode of self-governance that aims to produce independent, resourceful, and enterprising subjects. The form, content, and effects of neoliberalism, or “advanced liberalism” (Rose 1999) across the world have been hotly debated in recent years, and no less so with regard to

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China. The work of some scholars suggests that the concept of a neoliberal China is a productive way of understanding and explaining China’s reengagement with global capitalist markets in the reform era (e.g., Harvey 2005; Ren 2010; 2013). Others are more cautious, choosing to examine how some policies and practices often associated with neoliberalism have been adapted and altered in particular ways in China (Anagnost 2004; Ong 2006; Rofel 2007; Yan 2003; Zheng 2015), such as how they combine with a “traditional political culture . . . that often contradicts the expected trajectory of evolution that links marketization with the decline of the role of the state” (Tomba 2014, 75). Ong characterizes neoliberalism as a malleable technology of governance that has been taken up globally in diverse ways in very different sociopolitical environments. From a more skeptical perspective, Andrew Kipnis (2007; 2008) criticizes the misuse of neoliberalism as an overarching trope for analyzing contemporary China, taking particular aim at characterizations of suzhi 素質 and Chinese audit cultures as forms resulting from the dominance of a purported global neoliberalism. While not rejecting the value of the concept of neoliberalism outright, Kipnis reminds us that scholars must also pay attention to “unliberal and antiliberal” elements in contemporary Chinese governance (2007, 395–96). Finally, there are those scholars who deny that neoliberal policies and practices are present in any shape or form in China (e.g., Nonini 2008; Ringen 2016, and personal communication to one of the editors), and who criticize works that neglect the roles of non-neoliberal discursive traditions in China. These traditions have shaped an oligarchic corporate state that has little interest in neoliberal ideas and practices concerning the market, the individual, or an “audit culture” for professionals, argues Nonini. Chinese discourses on happiness are undeniably linked into, informed by, and in some ways mirror similar discourses in other parts of the world. However, we deliberately chose not to include comparisons to other parts of the world, although some authors make reference to connections or similarities (e.g., Yang), and indeed much of the available self-help literature in Chinese in fact comprises translations from Western languages (mostly English). These translations complement works written in Chinese and together make for a diverse field of discourse, which is informed by very different ideas and sociopolitical history than the “same” discourses in the West. One of the aims of this volume is to bring out the Chinese voices on happiness: what do different social groups and different philosophical, psychological, cultural, and political ideas bring to the subject of happiness in contemporary China?

Measuring China’s Happiness The sudden surge in China’s attention to happiness as outlined in the opening paragraph is directly linked to the publication of the first World Happiness Report in 2012. It was published in support of the United Nations High Level Meeting on

Introduction 5

Happiness and Well-Being, held on April 2, 2012. That meeting itself followed the July 2011 Resolution of the UN General Assembly, proposed by the prime minister of Bhutan, inviting member countries to measure the happiness of their people and to use this to help guide their public policies (Helliwell et al. 2015, 3). There have since been five further reports, the latest published in 2018.2 Rankings in the survey are based on the mean scores to the main life evaluation questions on a scale from 0 to 10. In 2017, China ranked 79 out of 155 countries, while Taiwan ranked 33 and Hong Kong ranked 71 (Helliwell et al. 2017, 20–22) These rankings are very similar to those of the previous year, when China ranked 83 out of 157, Taiwan ranked 35, and Hong Kong 75 (Hrala 2016). We can see that China occupies a distinctly middling position.3 In The Distribution of World Happiness, which forms part of the 2016 World Happiness Report, the authors compare data from 2005–2007 and 2013–2015. Their data analysis shows that life evaluation is influenced by factors beyond economic growth and rise in per capita income. Among the noneconomic factors considered to impact on the life evaluations of individuals is the importance of social context for happiness-supporting resilience under crisis and the consequences of a relative rise or fall in inequality (Helliwell et al. 2016). The authors’ analysis shows that China ranks among the top twenty countries (just, at number nineteen) where happiness scores have improved significantly between 2005 and 2015, more than would be expected on the basis of economic factors alone. Easterlin et al. (2017) provide an in-depth analysis of China’s data. GDP growth is generally held to be the most reliable predictor of a country’s levels of happiness. However, in China, GDP has multiplied over five times in the past twenty-five years, but well-being4 in China today is less than in 1990. China’s reported levels of happiness have seen a U-shaped development since 1990; levels kept dropping until reaching a trough in the period of 2000–2005, and have recovered since, but have not yet reached the same levels as in 1990, when China’s levels of happiness were high for what was then a poor country. Pretransition Russia reported equally high levels of subjective well-being. It would seem that the “iron rice bowl system” made people happy. Growth of GDP is not a reliable indicator of happiness in China; in fact, GDP growth in China was highest when happiness levels were falling. The economy was viewed by the public as much worse in 2002 than in 2014, when the GDP rate in 2002 was in fact much higher. In fact, none of the six predictors used in the World Happiness Reports (Helliwell et al. 2017, 4) prove to be reliable predictors in China. Neither GDP per capita, healthy years of life expectancy, social support (defined as having somebody to rely on in times of trouble), trust (defined as perceived absence 2. All World Happiness Reports can be accessed online at http://worldhappiness.report/. 3. In 2017, the leader in the world happiness rankings was Norway, followed by Denmark and Iceland; Burundi and the Central African Republic were at the bottom of the table. 4. Easterlin et al. use the terms happiness, life satisfaction, and subjective well-being interchangeably.

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of corruption in government and business), perceived freedom to make life decisions, nor generosity (defined as giving to charity) show much or any correlation to reported levels of happiness in China. Nor is there any correlation between house prices or pollution and happiness, or between the rate of inequality. While the gap between rich and poor has grown in the new millennium, gaps in the levels of happiness between different income groups have in fact lessened (57), another counterintuitive development in China. Instead, the two main factors explaining China’s trajectory in happiness levels are unemployment and the social safety net. Unemployment rose sharply after 1990, reaching its peak in 2000–2005—the trough of China’s happiness—and has since declined moderately, as happiness levels have risen moderately. The level of unemployment is mirrored by the relative coverage of the social safety net over the same time period. It seems that the restructuring of state-owned enterprises (SOE) has had the most profound effect on the happiness of Chinese people. This mirrors developments in Eastern European countries. However, while European transition countries abandoned the entire public sector to privatization and experienced major GDP collapse (with accompanying drops in levels of happiness), China invested heavily in the most productive SOEs and was rewarded with significant output growth (55); China’s “economic miracle” is in large measure built on state-owned enterprises, which puts another question mark over the claims of China’s pursuit of neoliberal practices in the reform era. In addition to unemployment rates and the social safety net, education and age are also important factors in determining Chinese people’s happiness over the period. Not surprisingly, the older generation who experienced the iron rice bowl system was most affected by unemployment and the withdrawal of the safety net, and hence recorded the biggest drop in subjective well-being. Furthermore, the lower the level of education, the more affected people were (63). Yang’s chapter in this volume provides us with an illustrative example of women who found themselves as “housewives” following their layoff from SOEs and the ways in which they were encouraged to find new fulfillment and meaning. The youngest generation at the time restructuring began (1961–1970) was best able to adapt to the transformation, most notably by acquiring a college education (64). It seems that levels of education and levels of happiness are indeed linked; not only does a college education provide access to better job opportunities, but it also makes one more adaptable to changing circumstances and better equipped to engage with a variety of methods offered by cultural resources (as described in Wielander’s, Zhang’s, and Matthyssen’s chapters, for example) to look after individual levels of happiness. Bartolini and Sarrancino (2015) provide another in-depth analysis of China’s happiness data between 1990 and 2007 and argue that not only is GDP not a reliable indicator, but China is also a good example that the importance of social capital is not a phenomenon restricted to developed countries. Social capital is defined

Introduction 7

as “networks together with shared norms, values and understandings that facilitate cooperation within or among groups” (OECD 2014). It is a decline in these networks that is considered to lie behind the decrease in happiness in developed countries like the US.5 But Bartolini and Sarracino show that a decline in social capital also seems to be central to China’s falling levels of happiness. During the same period, they also observe a rise in materialism, which they see as a personal value system attributing a high priority in life goals to extrinsic motivations and low priority to intrinsic motivations—a phenomenon sometimes referred to as China’s moral or spiritual “vacuum.” Social capital refers to personal relationships and the support (emotional, financial, material, practical) derived from these, as well as civic engagement (contribution to community life) and social trust and norms (OECD 2014). Keeley (2007) distinguishes between bonds, bridges, and linkages, where bonds are links based on a sense of common identity (“people like us”) and form the closest connections, while bridges and linkages relate to people further removed (socially and emotionally) from the individual—a definition of social capital which is remarkably similar to Fei Xiaotong’s simile of concentric circles appearing on the surface of the lake when a rock is thrown in to describe how the individual relates to society in traditional China ([1947] 1992). Bartolini and Sarracino’s study ended with data from 2007, just shortly after Chinese happiness levels had bottomed out. Since then, happiness levels have risen at a faster rate than China’s growth in GDP would suggest. We have seen that this can be linked to the fall of unemployment and the improvement of the social safety net. However, following Bartolini and Sarrancino’s argument, we would need to conclude that social capital must have risen in the years from 2007 to 2017, in order to explain the rise in happiness levels since then. Certainly, during this decade, China has seen a proliferation of social organizations, ranging from the purely leisurely and intellectual (e.g., yoga groups or book clubs) to the spiritual (as evidenced in the continuous growth of religion), to the highly political network of the New Citizen Movement, for example. The chapters in this book provide some examples of networks and social support (“someone to turn to”) from within the LGBTQ community, which illustrate the ways in which people seek the support of communities to discuss matters of concern in their lives. They also provide examples of the way cultural resources and values are updated to fit the contemporary context. What is clear through these case studies is that normative values as promoted through official discourses—on “Chinese values” (Zhongguo jiazhiguan 中國價值觀) or the “Chinese Dream” (Zhongguomeng 中國夢) do resonate at the grassroots. Far from being diametrically opposed or juxtaposed, we can observe a common discursive terrain. A shared core theme is the importance of family—one type of network with shared values and understandings which the 5. Robert Putnam (2000) famously illustrated this through the example of bowling in the US, where, as a result of a decline in community networks, people are now literally “bowling alone” (Putnam 2000).

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Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is keen to promote and which it supports with more enthusiasm than it does religious groups or civil society organizations. This concept of the family is extended to the nation and is built around common ethnicity and a shared culture, symbolized so effectively (and emotively) in the chopsticks of the eponymous film analyzed in Giovanna Puppin’s chapter.

The Chinese Dream, Suzhi, and Ah Q This film is one example of the ways in which the Chinese government has stepped up its efforts on the ideological front to create shared norms, values, and understandings of what it means to be Chinese and to belong to the Chinese nation. This ideological articulation started with the coining of a “harmonious society” in 2006 and has since moved to the Chinese Dream, one of the dominant discourses of Xi Jinping’s leadership since 2013. Recently, the term “Chinese values” has also become a prominent element of Chinese cultural nationalism. Dismissing these discourses as mere propaganda that washes over people would amount to disregarding the importance of ideology for the CCP and the significant role ideology plays in its hegemonic rule (Brady 2008). The CCP does not only wish to rule by coercion. Winning over the hearts and minds of people through carefully chosen discourses that resonate in the population was an important factor of its ascendancy to power, and this has remained a key feature of the mechanics of CCP rule. China’s ideological discourse makes rich use of emotional and spiritual language. We can see this in the sources from the 1950s, and we can observe this very clearly in the language and the images used around the Chinese Dream. Recently, “hurting China’s (or the Chinese people’s) feelings” is a new and recurrent reproach, when China’s actions are being criticized. Happiness, specifically, has been core to Chinese socialist discourse from its inception. The Revolutionary Alliance Programme of 1905, from which the CCP ultimately developed, used the term fuzhi 福祉 (welfare) to express its aspirations for a new society, a term Xi Jinping reintroduced in his communiqué following the third plenum of the Eighteenth People’s Congress in 2013. Chinese sources of the 1950s spoke of building a “prosperous and happy socialist” country (fanrong xingfu shehui zhuyi guojia 繁榮幸福社會主義國家) and clearly show that socialism has never just been an aspiration to equal prosperity through the redistribution of resources, but has always also held the promise of a new society, which would bring spiritual as well as materialistic transformation. This can also be observed in contemporary political counterdiscourse. Happiness features prominently in the writings of Xu Zhiyong, for example, lawyer and initiator of the New Citizen Movement (Xin gongmin yundong 新公民運動). When questioned in 2005 about his motives in engaging in social action, he responded by saying, “Today, what brings me the greatest happiness is working hard to use individual cases or my research to push

Introduction 9

for social progress that will bring dignity and happiness to even more Chinese people” (Xu 2017, 145).6 With the Chinese Dream, Xi Jinping signaled the start of a new phase where the goal of restoring China’s greatness has come within clear reach. It also seems to serve as a reminder to the Chinese people that it was the party which delivered the economic improvements that lifted millions out of poverty and brought into existence a now reasonably affluent middle class. The Chinese Dream is, among other things, a way to remind Chinese individuals that their prosperity and wellbeing, including their mental well-being, are tied to the party-state. Nowhere in this volume is this clearer than in Yeshe Lama’s chapter on Tibet. China’s hegemonic discourse now builds on nationalistic sentiments around an understanding of Chinese culture as Han culture, practiced by “moderately well-off members of society.” The public service advertising campaign around the theme of “homecoming” broadcast during the New Year Gala, analyzed in Puppin’s chapter, provides one vibrant example of such discourse; Zhang’s and Matthyssen’s chapters show in more detail what qualities and virtues these discourses rooted in Confucian and Daoist philosophies promote, and how traditional sayings and terms have been updated and translated for the contemporary self-cultivation and self-help market. In the government’s happiness campaigns, which invoke the individual’s ability to learn the correct attitude (to be happy) and to be inspired by the correct values, we can also detect attempts to link the ability to be happy with higher levels of suzhi. Suzhi is an important example of China’s hegemonic discourse and yet almost impossible to define, let alone translate. It derives from both nature and nurture; it is closely linked to education. According to Kipnis (2007, 390), it now offers a way of speaking about class without using the term. Suzhi anchors quality in the individual rather than a defined collective like “the proletariat,” but like class discourse, suzhi discourse is decidedly unliberal. It asserts morally justified hierarchies linked to the party’s leadership, which alone can ensure the nation’s success. It is the party itself that has the right to declare who has the highest suzhi (Kipnis 2007, 390). Nonetheless, it is a concept with a lot of currency in the population at large. A person of higher quality is perceived to have the inner resources and capabilities to avail him- or herself of appropriate happiness maximization strategies. This link is particularly evident in Confucian-inflected notions of happiness (see Zhang’s chapter). Happiness seems to have become a new marker of high suzhi, if understood as an inner quality, which is cultivated and perfected, regardless of the individual’s material circumstances. As with traditional Confucianism, there is a democratic, egalitarian element to this: in theory, everybody can elevate themselves to higher levels of education (and happiness), provided they work hard enough on their self-improvement. (In reality, this is of course highly debatable.) As we have seen, studies from the social sciences show that higher levels of education do indeed 6. For the original blog post in Chinese, which returns many times to the feelings of happiness, see Xu 2012.

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seem to be tied to higher levels of happiness (Bartolini and Sarracino 2015)—the younger, better educated generation of Chinese adapted more easily in the period of transformation and reported higher levels of happiness. Ah Q, created in 1921 by Lu Xun, China’s leading modern writer, is China’s archetypal low suzhi character, and features in several of the chapters in this volume. Ah Q, perhaps modern literature’s most famous Chinese character, is the master of “spiritual victory,” a particular technique with which to deceive himself in the power struggles that make up social relations, and which ultimately leads to his own execution. Ah Q’s method allows him to wrestle personal victory from the most humiliating defeats life serves him, an uneducated, uncultured, and unsophisticated subaltern at the very bottom of Chinese society. Ah Q became a symbol of doomed China in the collective Chinese socialist unconscious. It has fed Chinese national sentiment, fueled for a century by the idea of national humiliation and demise, and has instilled the need to change fundamentally the Chinese collective psyche as a prerequisite for the modernization and development of China through the conscious adoption of the correct “spirit” or jingshen 精神. These conscious attempts have been informed by Chinese culture’s belief in the capacity for self-improvement, brought sharper into focus by the writings of Liang Qichao (1873–1929)—a great idol of Mao’s—who emphasized the importance of fiction in the process of changing people’s thinking. Jingshen remains a key term in China’s political and psychological vocabulary. The concept lies at the heart of a specifically Chinese approach to the psyche, which emphasizes the conscious mind, the importance of human agency, and the individual’s ability to learn and internalize the correct attitude. According to Wendy Larson, in modern China, spirit is the significant concept of orientation through which one negotiates one’s social position or one’s relationship to power in society. Like the unconscious, the spirit node is deeply situated within the mind and has significant intellectual and emotional implications (Larson 2009). Some of the psychological methods recommended to the Chinese people in China’s vibrant self-help market today (much of it government-sponsored)—be they culturally inflected or informed by positive psychology—are reminiscent of Ah Q’s spiritual victory: when it comes to the individual’s emotional state in China today it is not so much about “seeking truth from facts,” as Deng Xiaoping famously advocated, but about adopting the correct positive mental attitude quite regardless of one’s actual situation. As such, Ah Q remains an important archetype, who has gained new significance in postsocialist China.

Conceptual Approaches to Happiness While existing (limited) studies on happiness in China (often in the form of journal articles) tend to focus on the link between psychology and economics, this volume engages with a much wider variety of discourses and images. The scholars

Introduction 11

contributing to this volume all employ different methodologies and disciplines in their investigation of one aspect of happiness discourse in China today, including historical, psychological, literary, artistic, anthropological, ethnographic, and political approaches. We argue that only by attempting to capture a variety of these discourses and their mutual interconnectedness in one volume can we begin to understand the multifaceted ways of searching for happiness in contemporary China. This multifaceted way is also represented in the wealth of different sources analyzed in the ten chapters that make up this volume. They include magazine articles (both historical and contemporary), popular fiction, proverbs, educational material, documentary films, TV chat shows, public service advertising—ranging from expensive government-commissioned films to small stickers on handgrips on public transport—messages on billboards, self-help books, public lectures, postings in online chat forums, news media, government reports, blogs, and so on. Befitting its multidisciplinary and multimethodological nature, the different authors bring a number of theoretical perspectives and conceptual approaches to the study of happiness. We are very aware of the dangers and pitfalls of imposing Western theory on Chinese sources; however, as editors we believe in a globally shared knowledge economy. We are not convinced that the China-West dichotomy (while readily employed in China, and certainly in its official discourse) serves scholars and academics well in our shared endeavor to make sense of the complex social phenomena of contemporary China (and the world). Chinese works on happiness, which take a more theoretical or conceptual approach, refer almost exclusively to Western philosophers, a bit of Confucianism, and Marx.7 Where more contemporary theories on happiness are referred to, they include Layard and the core tenets of positive psychology. One of the aims of this volume is to bring out the Chinese voices on happiness from different social groups and actors. In their endeavor to understand these voices, different authors employ different theoretical frameworks. They can be grouped in the following way. Firstly, there are those conceptual approaches that seek to analyze how people are responding to the currently prominent discursive positioning of individuals as primarily responsible for their own fortunes in life, especially through working on improving their personal skills and emotional states (Ehrenreich 2009; Hochschild 1979; Kleinman et al. 2011; Rofel 2007; Stafford 2015; Welzel and Ingelhart 2010), which are referred to by Hird, Wielander, Zhang, and Engebretsen. Secondly, theories and concepts of affect and imagining are used in this volume to inform discussions on how shifting emotions, moods, and states of mind are produced, received, and used to inspire orientations to the future (Mannheim 1955; Massumi 2002; McCracken 1998; Stewart 2007), including specifically in Confucian

7. For example, Luo (2013).

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(Bell 2010; Feng 1997; Tseng et al. 2005;) and queer (Muñoz 2009) contexts. We can see these woven through the essays by Schroeder, Zhang, and Inwood. A third category of theoretical approaches adopted in this book are those that elucidate the relationality of emotional states. Through their emphasis on how individual subjectivities are always constructed in relationships with other people, these theories provide a useful contextualization to approaches that focus on individualization processes (Mathews and Izquierdo 2008; Stafford 2015; Stoller 2014; Walker and Kavedžija 2015; Yan 2011), used, for example, by Engebretsen, Schroeder, and Yang. Theories and conceptualizations of class and gender differentials form the fourth category of approaches (Dai 2004; Illouz 2007; Kingfisher 2002; Lee 2006; Osburg 2013; Scott 1990; Wang 2003), as employed by Yeshe Lama and Yang, while Hird and Puppin, for example, engage with several theories that shed light on the propagandizing and semiotic aspects of political and media messages (Barthes 2004; Hong and Chan 2009; Liu and He 2014). Despite the different disciplines from which the scholars writing in this volume conduct their analysis, as editors we subscribe to the notion and significance of “New Sinology,” which promotes a multifaceted understanding of China and the Sinophone world. It promotes an integrated approach to the study of contemporary China.8 New Sinology reaffirms the importance of language and text in the engagement with and understanding of China; this approach will be evident in every single contribution to this volume.

The Chapters The contributions to this volume show the wide range of media through which psychological language around happiness shapes political discourse and people’s everyday lives in China. Different chapters illuminate how the recent discourse of happiness encompasses both motifs of individual self-interest and collective socialist ethics. Happiness seems to have emerged as a culturally and historically specific and relevant topic for China’s population that resonates across class divisions. Wielander’s opening chapter analyzes the appearance of happiness in public and political discourse in China in the wider context of socialist modernization underpinned by Chinese socialist views of the psyche. Wielander examines the link between the spiritual and the political and argues that this emphasis on happiness needs to be understood as a continued effort on the part of the CCP to instill the “correct spirit” (zhengque de jingshen 正確的精神) in China’s population. She illustrates this point with her findings from close reading of a debate on the meaning of happiness as conducted in Zhongguo Qingnian 中國青年 (China Youth Journal) in 1954. 8. For a detailed outline of this approach, see www.thechinastory.org/new-sinology/, accessed August 7, 2017.

Introduction 13

One clear characteristic of China’s continued socialist character is the continued presence of the “visible hand”—a commonly used adaptation of Adam Smith’s metaphor to indicate the state’s direction—which now comes in many colorful guises, guiding with the help of glossy publications and advertising (see Hird’s and Puppin’s chapters). It promotes certain “happiness maximization strategies” over others, with particular emphasis on positive psychology. In a context where the level of happiness in the Chinese population has not only become a target of development but also serves as one measure of the ruling party’s legitimacy, happiness has become the required emotional state of the Chinese people, even if reaching the target may require a considerable amount of self-deception akin to Ah Q’s famous “spiritual victory” method, argues Wielander. There is no spiritual victory for the party in Tibet, where the CCP’s hegemonic discourse on happiness seems to be far from successful, as Jigme Yeshe Lama’s chapter (Chapter 2) argues so poignantly. Yeshe Lama analyzes the “official” and “hidden” transcripts (Scott 1990) about Tibetan happiness through close reading of a wide range of media sources. The official designation of Tibet as a “happy” place stands in stark contrast to the realities of harsh suppression and desperate acts of self-immolation. According to the official transcript, Tibetans are enjoying a “happy and healthy” life due to the party’s pursuit of the correct development path in Tibet. The happiness of Tibetans is linked to liberation, modernization, and economic development. The building of infrastructure, social welfare schemes, poverty alleviation programs, housing projects, old age pension schemes, as well as strong ethnic unity are all considered to be sources of Tibet’s happiness—as well as a gift from China. Such focus on material gains alone has now shifted in the party’s discourse on happiness as far as the general (more developed) Chinese population is concerned, where spiritual aspect of happiness are now emphasized (see, for example, Zhang’s and Matthyssen’s chapters). In Tibet, which is still lagging behind in development, improvements in the population’s socioeconomic situation trump all other concerns. Previous discourse rooted in historic materialism has now changed, but the principle approach remains: Tibet is backward and requires Han Chinese help in order to improve its material situation, and, as a consequence, its happiness. However, as Yeshe Lama shows, Tibetan spiritual culture, including the values and rituals of Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of the Dalai Lama, are of great importance to the local population, and much of the newly created material wealth is spent on the regeneration of Tibetan religion. Yeshe Lama shows the presence of strong alternative ideas and sources of happiness among Tibetans, which stands in contrast to the public transcript on happiness. The establishment of hegemonic discourses relies on effective dissemination, both in terms of the reach of dissemination and in terms of appeal factor. Much of China’s creative talent and energy has gone into the production of visuals to illustrate and communicate the party-state’s agenda. Chinese socialist propaganda art

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now spans nearly seventy years and offers a uniquely appealing catalog of aesthetics, with an unsettling ability to draw one in, despite our knowledge of the social realities and historical events that produced them and the tragic realities that lie behind the beautiful images. In 2014, Xi Jinping reiterated the need for art to “uphold socialist core values” and to “uphold the Chinese spirit” (Roberts 2014), and in the autumn of 2016 the Chinese state passed a law on Chinese film to ensure it “serves the people and socialism” (Evans 2016). In China’s socialist market economy in the digital age, the party state has found many more spaces and formats in which to display its messages to the population in an artful manner. Giovanna Puppin’s chapter (Chapter 3) takes a very close look at public service advertising, a subgenre of advertising that was launched “to fully realize the ideological role of advertising .  .  . and give priority to social effects, rather than economic effects” (Gao 2003) as the main tool for the promotion of official happiness in China. Her chapter analyzes the happiness-related cultural representations and signifying practices activated by public service announcements (PSAs), that, by definition, do not sell a product or commodity as such, but promote public goods like “freedom from fear” or “happiness.” She does so on the basis of one particular PSA called “Chopsticks” (Kuaizi pian 筷子篇), a lavishly and artfully produced series of short films, which was broadcast during the China Central Television’s (CCTV) 2014 Spring Festival Gala, the most coveted and most expensive advertising slot of all. All the PSAs broadcast in this primetime slot since 2013 address the topic of reuniting for the Chinese New Year and as such are all related to happiness, the media event itself being referred to as a “happy gathering” (Zhao 1998). Through close analysis of this PSA, Puppin shows that the happiness promoted by the party through the medium of a professionally produced PSA with maximum reach is culturally anchored through the use of chopsticks and the invocation of virtues, which vaguely chime with Confucian notions of happiness, as expounded in Yanhua Zhang’s chapter. Chopsticks, representative of Chinese culture, play an essential part at every stage of a person’s life; the family, representative of the Chinese nation, provides a place of belonging for all those who conform to the promoted values. This happy nation consists of a range of “reasonably well-off ” Han Chinese conforming to heteronormative, extended family arrangements, where the younger generation defers to the older and the older nourishes and guides the young. No minority groups of any kind are represented in this PSA, suggesting that these are not included in the vision of a happy China. It seems that in order to be happy, one has to become like the Han Chinese; only adaptation to Han Chinese cultural values and customs promises happiness. However, happiness discourse does transcend the heteronormative ideal, as portrayed in the “Chopsticks” PSA. In Chapter 4, Elisabeth Engebretsen maps and analyzes the striking emergence and establishment of stories of parental support, love, and understanding—or “love advocacy” (Broad 2011)—in recently published

Introduction 15

film media in parental support-narratives for LGBTQ children. The founding of PFLAG China—Parents, Friends, Family and Allies of Lesbians and Gay—exemplifies an ongoing transformation of parenting practices and ideals in China, where affective articulations are key. Engebretsen maps and analyzes this unfolding discursive terrain from the lens of happiness and contributes important perspectives to the broader debate on happiness in China that this volume engages, as well as to happiness studies more generally. Engebretsen illustrates her discussion by focusing on three recent films featuring PFLAG China volunteers and affiliates: Popo Fan’s Mama Rainbow (2012) and Pink Dads (2015), and a fictionalized short film titled Coming Home (Huijia 回 家), posted online just before Chinese New Year in 2015. All three films articulate happiness as a foundational quality of the good Chinese life in modern times and acceptance as the premise of support for a gay/lesbian child. Engebretsen asks how parents talk about the process of making sense of and accepting a child’s homosexuality and how figurations of happiness, family relationships, and parenthood are constructed in such narratives. Her ethnographic inquiry into happiness in the context of supportive parental narratives of LGBTQ children offers a nuanced approach, and demonstrates that “happiness is best understood as relational and intersubjective aspiration, informed by broader cultural expectations beyond the issue of accepting homosexuality per se. But happiness is also clearly predicated upon preexisting norms for sociofamilial harmony and collective equilibrium, in a stable, harmonious society.” Derek Hird returns to the subject of public service advertising in Chapter 5, but examines more mundane examples by conducting a Barthian analysis of the messages displayed on handgrips in Beijing underground and bus shelters. The starting point of his analysis is an examination of the holistic and embodied dimensions of zheng nengliang 正能量 (positive energy) in popular discourse. The term provides a good example of how positive psychology and happiness trends in China have charted their own course by linking happiness and well-being to zheng nengliang, which draws from Western and Chinese cultural resources. Hird’s chapter explores how an analysis of zheng nengliang in PSAs can help inform our understanding of the kinds of happy subjects that inhabit Chinese discourse today; but he also contributes to broader discussions on modes of subjectmaking in China’s postsocialist modernity. According to Hird, the subway adverts speak to a sophisticated, emotionally aware, self-governing subject that uses zheng nengliang to cultivate inner happiness, whereas the bus stop shelter advert addresses a relatively unsophisticated and potentially unruly subject who needs firm guidance on how to spread zheng nengliang and create happiness among others. He argues that these differences suggest multiple imagined subjects in contemporary happiness education. Positive energy and self-governance also feature in Jie Yang’s contribution (Chapter 6) on “happy housewives.” Yang analyzes representations of “happy

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housewives” in popular psychological self-help media in order to examine the relationship between gender, psychology, and privatization in China today. She demonstrates that while both gender and psychology are represented as sites of regulation and value extraction, the heart of the housewife is the true space of commodification, where emotions, value, and virtue are all generated. This felt space of possibility and potentiality, constructed by media in concert with state interests, intensifies women’s attachment to commodities and to the world and enhances consumption and entrepreneurship. Yang argues that happiness promotion, of which the figure of the “happy housewife” is a key part, not only objectifies women and renders invisible their complex subjectivities, but also downplays the intensified gendered exploitation and class stratification between middle-class housewives and workingclass domestic workers since the mid-1990s when privatization began. The example of “housewives” shows that “happiness is both a psychologizing technology and a mode of self-regulation, evoked to govern subjects in terms of their inner strength and self-fulfillment.” According to Yang, it derives from human agency, and the power to seek happiness is a mode of self-governance that can be coopted for broader political and economic ends. In Chapter 7, Yanhua Zhang examines Confucian notions of happiness— invoked in the government’s lavish PSAs—in more detail. She investigates what accounts for the Confucian turn in happiness “production” in today’s China and how we can make sense of the present “Confucianism for happiness” movement that traverses diverse plains of social life and motivates participants from all walks of life. She does so by focusing on a distinctive Chinese happiness engagement that moves away from the external object-oriented happiness seeking associated with consumerism (in contrast to Yang’s argument) to attend to Confucian selfcultivation as “relational, dialogical, and embodied social practices for developing the ‘moral character and inner capacity for happiness’ (xingfu pin’ge/nengli 幸福 品格／能力).” Zhang draws on the diverse public discourses on “the Confucian notion of happiness” (rujia xingfu guan 儒家幸福觀) and the relevant textual sources to examine how Confucian le 樂 is interpreted to articulate different needs for happiness in contemporary Chinese life. Zhang shows how Confucian happiness has acquired a meaning of cultivated inner capacity for the good life through the dialogical processes of engaging Confucian texts and negotiating among multiple social and political interests and concerns. Based mainly on the visual and textual data collected online from a private Confucian Academy in Beijing, she examines the ritual dimensions of engaging Confucianism and explores the role of li 禮 (Confucian propriety/rituals) in cultivating happiness capacity. Zhang argues that the Confucian project for happiness should be understood as part of Chinese efforts to negotiate an alternative narrative of modernity which is able to accommodate Chinese cultural sensibilities and mediate the tensions between the existing social formations and the market-based ideologies and

Introduction 17

practices in contemporary China. It is a way of finding spiritual comfort and practices from within China’s cultural heritage which resonate across wide sectors of society, she says. It is one example where China’s official discourses on happiness seems to perfectly chime with a wide part of the population, albeit a predominantly Han population, as we see portrayed in the “Chopsticks” PSA. William Schroeder’s contribution (Chapter 8) provides an example of counterdiscourse to established cultural notions of happiness. Based on a detailed analysis of one particular online forum hosted on a queer lifestyle portal, he explores what it means to discuss, look for, and feel happiness in the postmillennial queer PRC. What he noticed when examining the discursive strategies taken in many of the posts about happiness in that archive is that, far from merely demonstrating cultural patterns, the posts more often refuse definitive accounts of what happiness is and use the concept as a foundation for creating contexts in which joy becomes imaginable. Twenty-first-century online forums fulfill a similar function to the readers’ letters sections in magazines of previous decades. They give a personal voice to challenges and dilemmas individuals face, and initiate discussions in which other participants put forward various sides of the argument. As with the discussions from the 1950s outlined in Wielander’s chapter, one can never be quite sure about the true identity of its participants. However, since the forum that Schroeder investigates is the online discussion space of a real-world gay yoga club whose offline activities he also participated in, Schroeder is able to present convincingly the identities of the yoga club members whose posts he analyzes. Schroeder discovered that some kinds of happiness talk were more successful in bringing about togetherness and generating hope than others. A widely circulating happiness meme posted on the forum which presented strident propositions that seemed to diminish possibilities of happiness, did not elicit much shared or enduring approval. By contrast, two posts from well-known yoga club members that carefully discussed the affective benefits and drawbacks of respectively either coming out or meeting heteronormative parental expectations in a filial manner (an issue also explored in Engebretsen’s chapter) were much commented on. Paradoxically, Schroeder argues that it is “in the postings of the participant who chooses not to come out, in order not to hurt his father, that happiness reveals itself most strongly, as a sense of openness and hopefulness about potential future rewards.” One aspect of Chinese discourse concerned with happiness is the flourishing self-help market containing popular books, blogs and counseling sites. These sources offer a valuable platform for investigating typical perceptions of happiness and wellbeing in contemporary China, and how these are promoted and experienced by common people. In such sources, popular philosophies of life are often expressed in proverbs and sayings containing happiness (fu), contentment (zu 足), and joy (le), with their characteristic dialectical phrasing. These proverbs and sayings represent

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wisdoms of life strongly rooted in Daoist and Confucian cosmology and ethics, such as constant change, cyclic thinking, and moral self-cultivation. Mieke Matthyssen (Chapter 9) shows that the wisdoms of life articulated in these sayings are not only products of a cultural philosophical tradition; they also offer concrete tools to navigate positively through life. On the one hand, they embody individual strategies for coping with conflicts, failure, grief, feelings of powerlessness, and the whims of fate in order to stay mentally and physically healthy; on the other hand, these sayings emphasize the importance of harmonizing interpersonal relations (zuo ren 做人), Matthyssen argues. Matthyssen demonstrates how these popular philosophies permeate today’s popular psychology and popular health discourse, providing practical guides for pursuing inner peace and social harmony. They advocate endurance, tolerance, contentment, rejoicing in fate, and pretended muddle-headedness; they are built on Confucian virtues and the Daoist ideals of spontaneity and carefree living resulting from the knowledge of Dao. Although they do not encourage immediate action, they are active and intentional strategies for coping with stress and unfortunate events. They are vital elements of the process of self-cultivation. The emphasis is on “training” and “educating” the self, on consciously and contextually adjusting one’s emotions and thoughts towards a more balanced, harmonious situation, according to Matthyssen. These virtues are the polar opposite of the principles that guide the life of Lin Wanrong, the protagonist of the 691-chapter long online novel Top Quality House Servant, which is the subject of Heather Inwood’s analysis in Chapter 10. Inwood juxtaposes Xi Jinping’s Chinese Dream with the kinds of dream-like narratives contained within contemporary Chinese popular “YY fiction” in order to consider how the latter might produce a sense of pleasure in its readers that defies the logic of pursuing happiness via realistic and practical goals. Li Wanrong’s story is one of perfect wish fulfilment; no obstacles are put in his pursuit of pleasure which include both sensual and materialistic riches with little concern for morality. Readers of these novels may be holding onto one of the handgrips analyzed in Hird’s chapter, which exhort them to be a simple person, to not indulge in fantasies and not worry about imaginary troubles, while deriving escapist pleasure reading about Lin Wanrong’s fantastical and imaginary exploits on their smartphones. Inwood is interested in what the fantasy settings and imaginative acts of pleasure can tell us about the origins and ethical implications of feeling good, a sensation that can be linked to the current global obsession with happiness and well-being. What does it mean that in order to be happy we would need to be capable of traveling back in time, of pushing aside those who stand in the way of our success, and of largely relinquishing our sense of moral goodness in the process, she asks? According to Inwood, Chinese netizens have referred to the Chinese Dream as a “spring dream” or “wet dream” and described their own dream narratives as the “sleep talking” of losers. While this kind of talk seems far removed from the

Introduction 19

idealistic political dream of the rejuvenated Chinese nation, both tap into a shared cultural tradition. When Xi first invoked the phrase of the Chinese Dream, ten days after taking office, people were quick to liken it to the American Dream, even considered it a copy of it. However, for most Chinese the phrase draws on imagery in Chinese statecraft, philosophy, and literature. Chinese rulers framed questions on how to rule as interpretations of dreams, and dreams have figured prominently in Daoist philosophy and Chinese novels (Johnson 2017, 281). The consensus, then, lies in the act of dreaming itself.

Conclusion Between 2005 and 2017 reported levels of happiness in China have risen more significantly than would be expected based on economic factors alone. Fall in unemployment and the improvement in social safety as well as a rise in social capital are three strong explanatory factors offered up by social science research. The chapters in this volume provide unprecedented insight into the many and varied discourses on happiness in China during this same time period and make a significant contribution from the perspective of the humanities to the understanding of individual and collective happiness. From the essays in this volume, we can see that the multiple mix of influences on the current happiness boom include no less than the following lengthy list: market-oriented policies and practices, socialist views of the psyche, the strong and visible hand of the CCP, notions of Buddhist spirituality, Han-centered nationalism, mainstream views about “traditional values” and heteronormative family relationships, recently emerging conceptions of homosexual identities, positive psychology reimagined in the light of cosmological forces of dao 道 and qi 氣, self-regulating discursive practices, Confucian self-cultivation and notions of the good life, internet technologies circulating memes and hosting discussion forums, strong feelings of hope for a better future, harmonizing concepts from millennia-old literature, and the latest feel-good narratives detailing the time-traveling exploits of online fictional protagonists. Transnationally circulating yet historically embedded, progressive and yet also conservative, happiness discourses and practices in contemporary China reveal the field of happiness as a lively, pluralistic, and contested arena. Collectively, the chapters point towards an important link between ideology, government discourses, and the way they inform and are in turn informed by discussions, deliberations, and feelings circulated in society. The many opportunities for civic engagement, the continuing rise and proliferation of spiritual and religious practices, and the emotional language of political counter-discourses have all impacted on official discourses on happiness. In turn, the increased efforts on the part of the government, which emphasize the importance of intrinsic values over extrinsic values, and its

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attempts to build a value system around the Chinese Dream and Chinese cultural traditions based around the family, clearly strike a chord with the wider population. Underscoring Chinese dreams of happiness is the aspirational model of the “relatively prosperous” Han Chinese with high levels of suzhi—a key ingredient of China’s hegemonic discourse; ethnic or cultural diversity is absent in the discourses on happiness. This seems to mirror government visions of ethnicity and nationhood in which Han identity plays a key role (The Economist 2016). The one example where we can find a distinct rejection of the hegemonic discourse is in Tibet, where the “happiness” brought through economic development cannot supplant the importance of and desire for Tibetan culture. Another key element, which we detect in all the different sources analyzed in this volume, is the presence of the family as the source of happiness. Here, the dominance and appeal of the traditional happy family built on vaguely Confucian values is striking, even in what one would expect to be more progressive or marginal discourses. There seems to exist a strong consensus across the entire spectrum of the different discourses (apart from Tibet) that harmonious familial relations built on shared values rooted in a plethora of Chinese cultural resources are the main objective and source of happiness. This volume demonstrates that expressions and practices of happiness in contemporary China derive from much more than simply neoliberal modes of governance. It shows that while there is clear direction from the party-state’s visible hand about preferable strategies of happiness maximization, there is also a considerable degree of engagement with and elaboration on the different philosophies, practices, and idealistic imaginings, resulting in a diverse but broadly shared discursive terrain—provided that the participants have reached a degree of social security through employment and education and feel they are part of the extended family that is the Han.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. London: Granta. Barthes, Roland. 2004. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Carolyn Handa, 152–63. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. Bartolini, Stefano, and Francesco Sarracino. 2015. “The Dark Side of Chinese Growth: Declining Social Capital and Well-Being in Times of Economic Boom.” World Development 74 (October): 333–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2015.05.010. Bell, Daniel. 2010. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Binkley, Sam. 2011. “Happiness, Positive Psychology and the Program of Neoliberal Governmentality.” Subjectivity 4 (4): 371–94. Brady, Anne-Marie. 2008. Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Broad, Kendal L. 2011. “Coming out for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays: From Support Group Grieving to Love Advocacy.” Sexualities 14: 399–415.

Introduction 21 Cheng, Hong, and Kara Chan. 2009. “Public Service Advertising in China: A Semiotic Analysis.” In Advertising and Chinese Society: Impact and Issues, edited by Hong Cheng and Kara Chan, 203–21. Gylling: Copenhagen Business School Press. Dai, Jinhua. 2004. “Class and Gender in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Literature.” In Holding Up the Half Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present and Future, edited by Tao Jie, Zheng Bijun, and Shelley L. Mow, 289–302. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Easterlin, Richard. 2010. “The Happiness-Income Paradox Revisited.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107: 22463–68. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. London: Granta. Evans, Alan. 2016. “China Passes Law to Ensure Films ‘Serve the People and Socialism’.” The Guardian. Accessed November 7, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/ nov/08/china-passes-film-industry-law-box-office-fraud. Feng, Youlan. 1997. A Short History of Chinese Philosophy: A Systematic Account of Chinese Thought from Its Origins to the Present Day. New York: The Free Press. Gao, Qiang 高強. 2013. Guo fule, xingfu ne? Gei jiaolü de Zhongguoren yige da’an 國富了， 幸福呢？給焦慮的中國人一個答案 [Now that the country has become rich, what about happiness? An answer for the anxious Chinese people]. Beijing: Zhongguo youyi chubanshe. Gao, Zhihong. 2003. “What’s in a Name? On China’s Search for Socialist Advertising.” Advertising & Society Review 4 (3). Accessed July 18, 2017. http://muse.jhu.edu. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Helliwell, John F., Haifan Huang, and Shun Wang. 2016. “The Distribution of World Happiness.” In World Happiness Report 2016, 8–48. Accessed December 20, 2016. http:// worldhappiness.report/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/03/HR-V1Ch2_web.pdf. Helliwell, John F., Haifan Huang, and Shun Wang. 2017. “The Social Foundations of World Happiness.” In World Happiness Report 2017, edited by John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, 8–47. Accessed August 11, 2017. http://worldhappiness.report/wpcontent/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/HR17-Ch2.pdf. Helliwell, John F., Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs. 2015. “Setting the Stage.” In World Happiness Report 2015, edited by John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, 2–11. Accessed April 15, 2016. http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/uploads/ sites/2/2015/04/WHR15_Sep15.pdf. Helliwell, John F., Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs. 2017. “Overview.” In World Happiness Report 2017, edited by John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey Sachs, 2–7. Accessed August 11, 2017. http://worldhappiness.report/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2017/03/ HR17-Ch1.pdf Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85 (3): 551–75. Hrala, Josh. 2016. “The World Happiness Index 2016 Just Ranked the Happiest Countries on Earth—ScienceAlert.” Accessed June 6, 2017. http://www.sciencealert.com/theworld-happiness-index-2016-just-ranked-the-happiest-countries-on-earth. Hsu, Becky. 2016. Definitions of Happiness. Symposium, Georgetown University. Accessed August 6, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhIGbKUTLA.

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Illouz, Eva. 2008. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jacka, Tamara. 2009. “Cultivating Citizens: Suzhi (Quality) Discourse in the PRC.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17 (3): 523–35. Johnson, Ian. 2017. The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao. London: Allen Lane. Kahnemann, Daniel. 2006. “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.” Science 312: 1908–10. Keeley, Brian. 2007. Human Capital: How What You Know Shapes Your Life. OECD Insights. OECD. https://www.oecd.org/insights/humancapitalhowwhatyouknowshapesyourlife. htm. Kingfisher, Catherine. 2002. Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kipnis, Andrew. 2007. “Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People’s Republic of China.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2): 383–400. Kipnis, Andrew. 2008. “Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?” American Ethnologist 35 (2): 275–89. Kleinman, Arthur, Yunxiang Yan, et al. 2011. Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person; What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Larson, Wendy. 2009. From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Layard, Richard. 2005. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. London: Penguin. Lee, Haiyan. 2006. “Nannies for Foreigners: The Enchantment of Chinese Womanhood in the Age of Millennial Capitalism.” Public Culture 18 (3): 507–29. Leyre, Julien. 2012. “Are You Happy? Chinese Reflections on a State of Mind.” The China Story. Accessed December 15, 2017. https://www.thechinastory.org/key-article/ are-you-happy-chinese-reflections-on-a-state-of-mind/. Liu, Linqing 劉林清, and He Qunpo 和群坡. 2014. Gongyi guanggao xue gailun 公益廣告 學概論 [An introduction to public service advertising]. Beijing: Zhongguo chuanmei daxue chubanshe. Luo, Fenfen 羅芬芬. 2013. Gen zhexuejia tan xingfu 跟哲學家談幸福 [Talking happiness with philosophers]. Beijing: Zhongguo caifu chubanshe. Mannheim, Karl. 1955. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Reprint edition. San Diego: Mariner Books. Massumi, Brian. 2002 Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mathews, Gordon, and Carolina Izquierdo, eds. 2008. Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective. New York: Berghahn. McCracken, Scott. 1998. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Nonini, Donald M. 2008. “Is China Becoming Neoliberal?” Critique of Anthropology 28 (2): 145–76.

Introduction 23 OECD. 2014 [2002]. “OECD Glossary of Statistical Terms—Social Capital Definition.” Accessed August 15, 2017. https://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=3560. Ong, Aihwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Osburg, John. 2013. Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Peale, Norman V. 1952. The Power of Positive Thinking. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster. Ren, Hai. 2010. Neoliberalism and Culture in China and Hong Kong: The Countdown of Time. London and New York: Routledge. Ren, Hai. 2013.The Middle Class in Neoliberal China: Governing Risk, Life-Building, and Themed Spaces. London and New York: Routledge. Ringen, Stein. 2016. The Perfect Dictatorship: China in the 21st Century. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Roberts, Dexter. 2016. “Echoing Mao, China’s Xi Says Art Must Serve the People and the Socialist Cause.” Bloomberg.com. Accessed November 18, 2016. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-16/chinas-xi-to-artists-follow-the-party-line. Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rose, Nikolas. 1999. The Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. Seligman, Martin. 2002. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Simon and Schuster. Shu, Tiange 舒天戈, ed. 2013. Jianshe Xingfu Zhongguo 建設幸福中國 [Building a happy China]. Beijing: Hongqi chubanshe. Stafford, Charles. 2015. “Being Careful What You Wish for: The Case of Happiness in China.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(3). Accessed August 16, 2017.http://dx.doi. org/10.14318/hau5.3.003. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University. Stoller, Paul. 2014. Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sutich, Anthony J., and Miles A. Vich. 1969. “Introduction.” In Readings in Humanistic Psychology, edited by Anthony Sutich and Miles Vich, 1–18. New York: The Free Press. The Economist. 2016. “The Upper Han.” Accessed August 15, 2017. https://www.economist. com/news/briefing/21710264-worlds-rising-superpower-has-particular-vision-ethnicity-and-nationhood-has. Tomba, Luigi. 2014. The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tseng, Wen Shing, Suk Choo Chang, and Masahisa Nishizono, eds. 2005. Asian Culture and Psychotherapy: Implications for East and West. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Walker, Harry, and Iza Kavedžija. 2015. “Special Issue Introduction: Values of Happiness.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5: 1–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau5.3.002.

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Wang, Zheng. 2003. “Gender, Employment and Women’s Resistance.” In Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, edited by Elisabeth Perry and Mark Selden, 159–82. New York: Routledge Curzon. Welzel, Christian, and Ronald Inglehart. 2010. “Agency, Values, and Well-Being: A Human Development Model.” Social Indicators Research 97 (1): 43–63. http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s11205-009-9557-z. Xi, Jinping. 2013. “Communique of the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Party Congress.” Accessed August 7, 2017. http://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/ communique-of-the-3rd-plenum-of-the-18th-party-congress/. Xu, Zhiyong 許志永. 2012. “Ni Shenme Dongji?” 你什麼動機？ [What is your motive?]. Accessed August 10, 2017. http://xuzhiyong2012.blogspot.com/2012/11/blog-post_ 3571.html. Xu, Zhiyong. 2017. To Build a Free China: A Citizen’s Journey. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Yan, Hairong. 2003. “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/ Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks.” Cultural Anthropology 18: 493–523. Yan, Yunxiang. 2011. “The Changing Moral Landscape.” In Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person; What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today, edited by Arthur Kleinman et al., 36–77. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zhao, Bin. 1998. “Popular Family Television and Party Ideology: The Spring Festival Eve Happy Gathering.” Media, Culture and Society 20 (1): 43–58. Zheng, Tiantian. 2015. Tongzhi Living: Men Attracted to Men in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

1 Happiness in Chinese Socialist Discourse Ah Q and the “Visible Hand” Gerda Wielander

Introduction Happiness is not what sinologists usually associate with China. We tend to focus on the many dramatic events in Chinese history, on the big political questions, and often on the underrepresented, the struggling, the subaltern. Modern Chinese literature is not known for its lighthearted humor. Where the reader is invited to laugh, it is a painful, hysterical laugh—a laugh that borders on a cry, as so vividly expressed in Zhao Yanian’s depictions of Ah Q, the literary antihero created by Lu Xun.1 This chapter argues that the recent interest in happiness is not simply a sign of Westernization or even the pervasive influence of “neoliberalism” in the world today.2 Instead, the chapter analyzes the appearance of happiness in public and political discourse in China in the wider context of socialist modernization underpinned by Chinese socialist views of the psyche, which have been shaped in the first half of the twentieth century and further honed in Maoist China. It examines the link between the spiritual and the political and argues that this emphasis on happiness needs to be understood as a continued effort on the part of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to instill the “correct spirit” (zhengque de jingshen 正確 的精神) in China’s population. It also highlights the ideological dilemma the party is facing as a ruling party which continues to espouse visions of “groundbreaking change” and future utopian societies while at the same time trying to elicit contentment and support from all. The chapter draws on a range of conceptual frameworks from cultural studies, psychology, sociology, and anthropology in its analysis of the tension between individual and collective happiness and the strategies adopted by the CCP—as ruling party—to address it. Examples from a debate on happiness held in the journal 1. Ah Q Laughing Hysterically can be viewed at http://jameelcentre.ashmolean.org/collection/6980/9413/0/13103 (accessed August 2, 2017). All sixty illustrations of Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q by Zhao Yanian can be accessed through the Ashmolean’s online collection. 2. Andrew Kipnis (2007) convincingly critiques this blanket application of “neoliberalism.”

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Zhongguo Qingnian 中國青年 in the 1950s will be used to illustrate the continuity and differences in the Chinese socialist debates on happiness over the decades.

Happiness as a Result of Individual and Social Transformation Moving from a state of unhappiness to happiness requires a process of transformation at the individual level, which—provided enough individuals go through the same process—becomes a process of collective transformation. Welzel and Ingelhart (2010) describe this process as an evolutionary process guided by people’s ability to adapt their strategies to maximize happiness depending on needs and opportunities. When needs shift for many people at the same time (due to massive changes in their sociopolitical environment, for example), then similar adaptation strategies will be adopted. These in turn accumulate into collective trends, which lead to social change (Welzel and Inglehart 2010, 44). Twentieth-century Western culture has been deeply influenced by Freudian concepts of the unconscious and tends to focus on the importance of individual transformation in isolation from the social. Only very few psychoanalytical schools offer perspectives on transformation that go beyond the individual. Otto Gross (1877–1920), an Austrian psychoanalyst, could not conceive of transforming the self without a transformation of the sociopolitical context; to him, factors outside the individual’s history needed to be taken into account in an individual’s unhappiness (Heuer 2003). More recently, the British Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels argues that the inner world of emotion and fantasy about survival and status builds up in a ceaseless feedback loop with the outer world; and outer world problems in society gain emotional and fantasy elements within the individual. (The fantastical dream elements of online fiction analyzed in Inwood’s chapter provide a good example of this.) Hence—according to Samuels—the economic (and political) and the psychological mutually irradiate (Samuels 2014, 78). In China, individual transformation has always been conceived of as a conscious and social act. The soul, or the unconscious, has never played a significant role in the Chinese concept of transformation. But the transformation of China into a “happy and prosperous socialist society” (fanrong xingfu de shehui zhuyi shehui 繁榮幸福的社會主義社會)—the slogan of the 1950s—has always been premised on both the transformation of the individual and the transformation of outer circumstances, e.g., the overthrow of the existing social order or the redistribution of the means of production. Key to the transformation of the modern Chinese individual is the concept of jingshen 精神 (spirit), or “revolutionary spirit” (geming jingshen 革 命精神), as defined by Wendy Larson in her book From Ah Q to Lei Feng (2009). According to Larson, in modern China, spirit is the significant concept of orientation through which one negotiates one’s social position or one’s relationship to power in society. Like the unconscious, the spirit node is deeply situated within the mind and has significant intellectual and emotional implications. Just as the

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unconscious requires endless effort to uncover its secret (in the psychoanalytical conception), spirit requires constant self-critique and push for greater awareness. Revolutionary spirit—as a Chinese socialist paradigm—anchors a comprehensive system that implies normative attitudes, reactions, and behaviors, which is enacted through cultural institutions and strategies developed to ensure the “correct” spirit (Larson 2009, 78–79). Ah Q, the protagonist of Lu Xun’s seminal text, captures the centering of spirit as a crucial point of negotiation between the person and the state. The spiritual value around which Lu Xun develops the plot of Ah Q is “positionality essentialized as a profound and ubiquitous quality,” as Larson argues (Larson 2009, 78). Lu Xun’s Ah Q is the master of “spiritual victory,” a particular technique with which to deceive himself in the power struggles that make up social relations, and which ultimately lead to his own execution. Ah Q, the imaginary creation of Lu Xun, struggles against conditions that crush his ideal vision of social life, a vision in which he is recognized for his contributions and lives comfortably, in an ordinary way, with a wife and family. (Ah Q worries about his failure to produce descendants.) His “spiritual victory” method is a strategy that allows him to continue to exist under conditions of oppression and victimization, and also a tactic that prevents him from fully recognizing the lowliness of his true social position (Larson 2009, 111). Ah Q became a symbol of doomed China, an archetype in the collective Chinese socialist unconscious. It has fed Chinese national sentiment, fueled for a century by the idea of national humiliation and demise, and has instilled the need to change fundamentally the Chinese collective psyche as a prerequisite for the modernization and development of China through the conscious adoption of the correct “revolutionary spirit.” These conscious attempts have been informed by Chinese culture’s belief in the capacity for self-improvement, brought sharper into focus by the writings of Liang Qichao (1873–1929) who emphasized the importance of fiction in the process of changing people’s thinking. The CCP was extremely adept and successful in using a variety of propaganda methods paired with rigorous programs of “thought reform” in order to help individuals develop the “right” frame of mind, the “correct” understanding of situations, and the appropriate spirit in any particular context in the collective aim of building a “happy, prosperous socialism”—to use the term of the early 1950s. The concept of correctible tastes, which features strongly in Sara Ahmed’s study (Ahmed 2010), has been a key ingredient in the Chinese socialist project from the start. Learning to be affected by objects in the correct way and the possibility that we can affect our affections by action or through will or reason as the basis of the ethical imperative, which Ahmed sees as central to any government’s aspirations to collective happiness today, has always been key to Chinese socialist modernization.

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Happiness and Elite Interventions The recent coupling of psychology and neuroscience has brought emotional experience, which was previously considered to be personal, individual, and subjective, into the realm of the objectively measureable; and an individual’s emotional experience—at least as far as his or her state of happiness is concerned—has become much less unique or mysterious as a result. At the same time, this notion of the empirical mind also opens the door to particular types of elite interventions (Davies and Samuels 2015). This neuroscientific measuring of the mind is an extension of the possibilities originally offered by market research, which—by allowing the voice of the ordinary person to be heard—made it possible for negative attitudes to be captured. But crucially, it also made it possible to look for ways to “correct” people’s attitude rather than change policy. As William Davies says, “Roosevelt may have conducted endless polls on how the public perceived his policies, but he never once altered a policy in response” (Davies 2015, 101). “Correcting” people’s attitudes through well-chosen communication and interventions—in the Chinese socialist context honestly referred to as propaganda—becomes one way in which political elites assert their legitimacy, rather than trying to (re)gain legitimacy by addressing the concerns of the people. The American sociologist Arlie Hochschild speaks of “feeling rules” as the “bottom side” of ideology, where ideology is understood as an interpretive framework that can be described in terms of framing rules and feeling rules. Framing rules are the rules according to which we ascribe meanings or definition to situations, whereas feeling rules are guidelines to assess the appropriateness of certain feelings in certain situations (Hochschild 1979, 566–67). According to Hochschild, societies function on the basis of agreed feeling rules, which establish the basis of worth to be ascribed to a range of gestures in social exchange. Rather than being acted out on the level of individuals, Hochschild argues that elites struggle to assert the legitimacy of their framing rules and feeling rules. In other words, the bottom side of a ruling elite’s ideology is to set rules as to how people should feel about certain situations and how they should appropriately express these feelings to others. Individuals will comply with these rules in order to be an accepted member of society. Hochschild speaks of three key junctures: the juncture between consciousness of feeling and consciousness of feeling rules; between feeling rules and emotion work; and between feeling rules and social structure. What she describes as “emotion work” comes close to the Chinese concept of spirit. To Hochschild, “emotion work” is trying to change in degree of quality an emotion or feeling and can take two forms. It can try to generate a feeling that is initially absent (evocation), or it can try to focus on undesired feelings that are present (suppression). Emotion work can be done by the self upon the self, by the self upon others, and by others upon the self

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and involves several techniques. It becomes necessary when there is a discrepancy between what the individual feels and what they ought to feel (Hochschild 1979, 561). The possibility that we can change our affections by action or through will or reason (through, for example, emotion work), which Sara Ahmed (2010) sees as central to any government’s aspirations to collective happiness today, has been central to the Chinese understanding of spirit or jingshen. Leninist notions of reflection and recognition, both of which demanded a keen and conscious awareness of one’s position, influenced the normative expectations of the Communist Party in relation to social behavior. They also meant that the individual could easily suffer from an improper spirit by refusing to internalize and exemplify, through demonstrated attitude and behavior, his or her correct social position (Larson 2009, 5–6). Placing affect in the conscious realm appeals to individual agency—a key factor in shaping people’s life satisfaction, as Welzel and Inglehart argue (2010, 44). They say that people can and do change strategies to maximize their happiness and that these strategies will adapt according to a changing environment. In a social setting, positive selection (of successful strategies) operates via the markers of success that flag out the thriving agents as role models for others to emulate. As perceptive agents, humans recognize the social markers of success; this means people will work out which models are most useful for taking advantage of new opportunities in a changing social environment. Many people will then adopt the values inspiring these models, resulting in a social diffusion of new values. Welzel and Ingelhart concede that social stratification limits the horizon within which human agents look for role models, but principally argue that changes in agents’ adaptive strategies operate on the basis of the “invisible hand” of the adaptive logic, with reference to Adam Smith; in other words, these changes are self-driven and do not need a central coordinator with a master plan (Welzel and Inglehart 2010, 46–47). China has always preferred the visible hand when it comes to proposing suitable role models for its people to guide them in their selection of adaptive strategies. The model soldier Lei Feng exemplified “revolutionary spirit.” He died aged twentytwo and was elevated to communist sainthood by Mao, when, in 1963, he urged the Chinese to “Learn from Lei Feng.” If Ah Q’s “spiritual victory” was what haunted the Chinese collective psyche, Lei Feng was the antidote. While the obstacles that Lei Feng faced in the stories constructed about this life were primarily physical, his techniques to overcome them were entirely psychological. Lei Feng was revolutionary spirit personified, a “can do” attitude of the highest order. His image continues to be evoked in recurring campaigns (China Central Television 2015), and despite healthy levels of cynicism and satire, he remains a popular symbol of the voluntary spirit required to realize the Chinese dream. He has been joined by Guo Mingyi, the “Lei Feng of the new era”; like Lei, Guo is a soldier and party member, but also an employee at the Angang Group Mining Corporation in Liaoning, where he has worked in various capacities since the early

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1980s.3 One of the best-known images of Guo sees him literally giving his blood for the people. (Among the many awards he has won, some relate to his capacity as blood donor.) It is surely no coincidence that the peak of happiness reporting in 2011 and 2012 mentioned in the introduction coincided with the publication of Guo Mingyi’s autobiography Xingfu jiu shi zheme jiandan 幸福就是這麼簡單 in December 2011, which followed the release of a feature-length film called “Guo Mingyi” illustrating his many achievements earlier in the same year.

Happiness Lies in Serving the People: Impressions from the 1950s For the model soldiers Lei Feng and Guo Mingyi, happiness derives from selflessness and good deeds, and is therefore largely driven by the individual’s motivation and outlook on the world. There is in fact broad consensus among philosophers that the sources of happiness are both external and internal. Despite the importance of good laws and well-designed (and implemented) policies as well as a degree of prosperity, happiness must also come from within. It is a state of mind that can to some degree be learned or trained. There also tends to be agreement that happiness is closely linked to morality and agreed notions of a common good. Working towards a common goal and contributing to other people’s well-being is understood to be a key factor in individual happiness (Layard 2005, 72). But for the young people writing about their (un)happiness in Chinese sources of the 1950s, it is family, friends and lovers, a good salary, consumer choices, and the freedom to choose their own path in life which are considered the key ingredients to happiness. A lack of agency, or more specifically the denial of individual agency, is a key source of unhappiness. Take for example Wang Yishan, whose story features in issue seventeen of Zhongguo Qingnian. A 21-year-old petrochemical engineer from Beijing, he works at an oilfield in western China, where the daily isolation of his work is matched by the monotonous vista of dusty expanses framed by snowcapped mountains that greet him every day. He is jealous of his friends in Beijing, who live in a stylish urban environment and enjoy the benefits of modern material culture. He envies them their light and pleasant work, their leisure time with their girlfriends and the many consumer choices they enjoy. Their praise for his heroic work in the oilfield does nothing to console him. He finds his life monotonous and boring and craves material gratification and spiritual comfort. His social life is nonexistent and the resulting depression has started to impact on his efforts at work. He resents that he is wasting away his youth while his friends are having fun. He doesn’t care that his work is for the good of the country. So what if his work contributes to other people’s happiness—does this justify his individual unhappiness? 3. See Communist Party of China News (no date) for a comprehensive website dedicated to Guo Mingyi. Ai Jun (2010) provides an example of a laudatory blog entry, while Ni (2012) lays out the core party line on Guo.

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Zhang Wenzhi used to grapple with a similar problem, but has taken action. He used to work in a big company selling insurance policies, something he was good at and which earned him respect from his peers. However, through contact with businessmen, his behavior started to change. He started to engage in more hedonistic pastimes like reading pornographic novels, talking about women, going out late dancing, all of which impacted on his work ethic. He smokes and drinks in abundance, spends most of his money on food and fashionable clothes, and mocks everybody who counsels against such excessive behavior. He is living his dream of happiness, which involves having enough money to eat and dress well without having to work every single day. He dreams of traveling, taking his girlfriend shopping in Shanghai, and treating her to a range of sartorial pleasures. He has moved into the private sector, which means a higher salary including a regular bonus. He is also glad to be rid of the endless meetings, which were a key feature of his previous work. His former workmates are shocked by his transformation. Surely his idea of happiness was wholly wrong (Zhongguo Qingnian 1954a, 26)? The two cases started off a debate which ensued over six issues of the China Youth Journal in 1954, and which received over 5,000 readers’ letters in response to these two individuals’ plights. The debate revolved around the tension between individual and collective happiness in this phase of building a “happy and prosperous socialist society.” Playing an active part in creating one’s happiness is a dominant theme. The writer Peng Hui weighs in with a review of Pyotr Andreyevich Pavlenko’s novel Happiness, which won the Stalin Prize of Literature in 1947. The novel is set in the Crimea in the years 1944–1945 and tells the story of a wounded war veteran, who arrives in war-torn Crimea in the hope of settling down to a quiet life. Instead, he finds happiness by throwing himself into selfless work for the party and the reconstruction of the area. To Peng Hui, the protagonist of the novel (entitled Xingfu in Chinese) “had fallen out of happiness as though he had fallen out of an aeroplane,” but through engagement with the local community and his leading role in the area’s reconstruction, he regains happiness by becoming fully immersed in the collective. The reconstruction of the ransacked area thus becomes a metaphor for the “reconstruction” of the protagonist’s happiness (Peng Hui 1954, 29). This socialist realist trope was expected to particularly resonate with the young readers of Zhongguo Qingnian, who were called upon to curtail their selfish, youthful desires by aiding in the reconstruction of the country in the name of the socialist project. Decisions concerning the young people’s future were taken away from them by, for example, allocating students to certain subject specialisms depending on the country’s need. This is how Wang Yishan ended up studying petrochemistry, landing him in the dusty expanses of Qinghai. Despite his misery, he clearly had persevered in his studies. Failure rates were high. A rousing article penned by She Minghua tried to convince the young readers that studying according to the needs of the country is the great happiness of this generation—an article written

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in response to distinct lack of enthusiasm and disastrous exam results on campus (She 1954). The debate includes pieces by writers and educationalists, as well as Hu Yaobang, then in charge of youth work within the CCP. The political tenor is unequivocal: happiness should be tied to the greater good of the country. One point, oddly in sync with recent research on happiness, is that happiness has a “class nature,” i.e., different classes hold different understandings of happiness. In line with the concept of jingshen, it is made very clear that there are correct understandings (zhengque de renshi 正確的認識) and wrong views (cuowu de kanfa 錯誤的看法) of happiness. But even within this broad understanding of happiness as lying in the benefit of the collective, some readers disagree. Wang Fengtong feels that one should be able to choose in which field one wants to work for the collective according to one’s own interests. Forcing him into a particular line of work diminishes his enthusiasm and prevents him from serving the masses as best as he can. Wu Duansheng recognizes that there is happiness in laboring for the people, but resents the fact that he has not been given the opportunity to study. For Wu, studying entails much more happiness for young people than hard labor, and by dedicating a short period of their lives to study, they can optimize their knowledge and expertise and be much better equipped to serve the country (Zhongguo Qingnian 1954b, 29). Much of the advice provided in the columns—mostly done by reproducing readers’ letters in response to Wang Yishan’s and Zhang Wenzhi’s dilemmas—could have been written by those advocating happiness as a goal of public policy today, like the economist Richard Layard. In issue twenty-three of 1954, the well-known journalist, novelist, and propagandist Wei Wei enters the debate with what reads like the ultimate pronouncement on the meaning of happiness. He declares that happiness depended on every individual’s view of life and his or her aims in it. He sees the fundamental problem as the equation, in most people’s minds, of happiness and enjoyment, as expressed in Zhang Wenzhi’s hedonistic aspirations and exploits. Wei Wei counsels that one does not only enjoy the fruits of work, but also work itself. Work and creation in and of themselves can be sources of happiness. He continues to make the point that happiness is both a material and a spiritual concept, related in equal measure to enjoyment and creativity. He concedes that everybody has hopes for material benefits and improvements, and yet making the revolution just about eating and dressing better would be a reductive view of humankind. The spiritual aspect includes cultural life, ideals, and creativity, but also friendship and love. Crucially, it was down to every individual to open up this spiritual world for him- or herself. Likening it to a beautiful landscape, Wei Wei urges every individual to avoid at all costs their spiritual world becoming arid and neglected, or worse, consisting of only two pits called “status” (ming 名) and “profit” (li 利) (Wei 1954, 3).

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Happiness as Development Target From 1955 onwards, discussions on happiness disappear from the pages of Zhongguo Qingnian, as articles reflect the political campaigns of following years, which culminated in the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961). A utopia of a happy socialist paradise of abundance became the official narrative of the Chinese state project during the Mao years. Communism (a term more frequently used in those years), the ultimately desired endpoint in this teleological vision of history, was declared within reach and described by officials in terms that were utterly utopian in the 1950s, but mostly realized in China of 2015. China has certainly surpassed the UK and the US in its steel production, a point of great chagrin to the UK, perhaps the one note of disharmony during Xi Jinping’s visit to the UK in 2015 (Mason and Wintour 2015). Red Guard sources of the 1960s (McFarquhar 1983) speak of an abundance of food, including delicacies of all sorts, a great variety of clothing rather than the mass of uniform black, the presence of airports in all counties, people everywhere living in high-rises and the availability of up-to-date communication technology as the meaning of communism, painting a rather accurate picture of China in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Cultural Revolution are now officially evaluated as ultraleftist aberrations during Mao’s advanced years. However, the emphasis on the results of Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up” and the rapid change they brought to China risks overlooking the ideological links between the periods and the continuous importance of target setting as a key incentive in socialist modernization. Hu Angang, one of China’s leading economists and proponents of Chinese exceptionalism, uses hyperbolic language reminiscent of this more revolutionary era in his treatise 2030 China: Marching towards Common Prosperity (2011), a follow-up to his earlier China in 2020: A New Type of Superpower. In its Chinese introduction (which is rather different from the English version inserted in the Chinese book), Hu predicts that China in 2030 will be a strong nation where more than one billion people will share prosperity, creativity, and welfare. Apart from surpassing the US in a number of key statistics, Hu also predicts a world where previous indices of development are turned on their head. In the first chapter, entitled “A Roadmap for the Chinese Dream,” which starts with a 1962 quotation from Mao—during a time when he was in retreat, preparing for the Cultural Revolution—Hu refers to the necessary preparation for a new kind of struggle to meet the challenges of the unprecedented upheavals in social transformation that are lying ahead. By quoting Mao’s words of struggle, he firmly positions China’s future development in the country’s socialist tradition. In Hu’s words, the main changes lying on the road to 2030 are the construction of a xiaokang 小康 society, common prosperity as well as socialist modernization in order to achieve

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the ultimate goal of a “world of great unity” (datong shijie 大同世界), a Chinese cultural metaphor for communism rooted in Confucianism. In his book’s fifth chapter, Hu Angang addresses the topic of happiness. According to Hu, for China to become a nation with high levels of happiness, it needs to raise income levels and levels of higher education, improve overall health, and become a highly developed country. (In fact, as we know from recent happiness research outlined in this volume’s introduction, the most important factor would be raising levels of employment.) These aims are in line with Chinese socialist thinking from its inception. The Revolutionary Alliance Program of 1905, from which the CCP ultimately developed, used the term fuzhi 福祉 (welfare) to express its aspirations for a new society, a term most recently reintroduced by Xi Jinping in his communiqué following the third plenum of the Eighteenth People’s Congress in 2013. Socialism has never just been an aspiration for equal prosperity through redistribution of resources; it has always also held the promise of a new society both in terms of spiritual and materialistic transformation. Referencing Hu Jintao’s “scientific development” and “starting at the human level,” Hu Angang argues that China needs to explore how, given the limitations of external constraining factors, people can become happier. He suggests that the concept of Gross National Happiness can help China achieve a renewed understanding of what development and what happiness are, and to make people in the current phase of middle income levels happier. Indeed, even when the stage of highincome levels has been reached, the aim of development still needs to be people’s happiness. Here Hu Angang draws on the ideas by Jigme Thinley, the former prime minister of Bhutan, whose book Xingfu shi shenme 幸福是什麼 (What Is Happiness? with the English subtitle Happiness: A Shared Global Vision) could be found in the same section as Hu Angang’s book in the Wangfujing bookstore in Beijing (Jigemei 2014) in 2015. Jigme Thinley originally put forward the concept of Gross National Happiness, which implies a holistic approach to notions of progress and gives nonmaterialistic factors of well-being as much importance as economic factors. Hu Angang promotes the idea of a Gross Human Development Index, which would include common prosperity, widely available public services, sustainable development power, as well as subjective feelings of happiness. To say it with Sara Ahmed, happiness has become the ultimate performance indicator (Ahmed 2010, 4). The factors most often quoted as the main causes of unhappiness in China today are house prices, the pressures of education, care for old age, the cost and processes of health care, and environmental degradation. (However, as analysis from the social sciences suggests, the most important factor is in fact the level of employment.) Most importantly though, happiness is not equally attainable for all. As Gao Qiang (2013) puts it in the preface to his book, “In the past leaving the system meant riches and happiness; now you can only become rich if you are part of the system . . . in the past happiness opened a big door for everybody; nowadays happiness only

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opens its arms to a small group of people” (Gao 2013, 3). This seems to be borne out by the results of a study conducted by Hu Anning (2013), which showed lower levels of deprivation and higher levels of subjective well-being among public sector employees (considered “part of the system”) in urban China. In the Chinese sources from the 1950s, when there existed broad consensus about the utility of socialist values for China’s development, the need to sacrifice individual happiness for the sake of the greater good lay at the heart of the debate and was broadly accepted. During the period of reconstruction, which characterized the first half of the 1950s, the benefit to the collective was more clearly obvious and the “correct spirit” clearly defined. Many of the readers’ responses shared the journey of their own transformation once they had adopted the “correct spirit”—serving as far more subtle and individualistic role models years before Lei Feng came to personify “revolutionary spirit.” Within the restrictive ideological framework and limited available opportunities of early socialist China, people were encouraged to use their capacity to make purposeful choices (agency) by adopting the right frame of mind. Today, collective values summarized as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” continue to be presented as the inspiration of happiness maximization strategies (to use Welzel and Ingelhart’s term) with accompanying role models like Lei Feng and his updated version, Guo Mingyi. But in a radically changed economic and social environment, people’s readiness (and choice) to try out new strategies to maximize happiness has increased considerably, and today the government’s attempts at reaffirming normative expectations of behavior and the “correct spirit” around the values of socialism compete with alternative value systems derived from religion and different schools of thoughts circulating among the population, which—judging by the surge of religion in China—seem to produce far more convincing models of happiness than Guo Mingyi in all his selfless glory. Nonetheless, the current packaging of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as the “Chinese Dream” allows individuals to feel a sense of belonging to the affective community of China, where feelings of exceptionalism and patriotism are foregrounded and compatible with a variety of value systems, as long as all align in their hope and aim of “reinvigorating the great Chinese nation” (and do not question the rule of the Communist Party). In addition to role models, more concrete techniques are also on offer in order to achieve the new target levels of happiness.

Suzhi 素質 and the Study of Happiness Happy China’s Citizen Handbook for Happiness (Wang 2013) is but one example of the many tools Chinese people today are encouraged to rely on to help them in their quest for happiness. Published in 2013, the handbook consists of three parts. Part one focuses on psychology and happiness as a feeling; part two focuses on character and happiness as an ability; part three centers on harmony and happiness as a right.

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As such, the book follows the three main areas of concern in positive psychology, which are positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. The central premise is that too much in psychology has been focusing on negativity, complexes, depression, and other shortcomings; in short, psychology used to be a victim science, while the needs of normal people (this term is used without quotation marks in the book) as well as the myriads of beautiful and positive things in the world have been neglected (Wang 2013, 14–15). The author of the book is quite clear that a refocus of emphasis on the beautiful and the positive is overdue, based on the logic that a focus on the positive will make people experience their lives as better and happier. As such, the book is entirely in line with the core tenets of positive psychology.4 From the above, the author of the Happiness Handbook draws the conclusion that happiness can be studied. If an individual is not happy, then it is not because his or her life lacks happiness, but because they lack a proper method to study happiness and have therefore lost the ability to be happy (Wang 2013, 18). Wang continues to cite research that speaks of the baseline of happiness, i.e., research that concedes that different individuals are naturally more or less disposed towards a happy condition. Consequently, the handbook concludes that every individual must strive to raise their own happiness baseline by a few points. Provided this can be achieved at an individual level, it will also raise the happiness baseline of communities and society as a whole (22). This particular book does not speak of jingshen, but the core tenets of positive psychology are congruent with the concept of jingshen, insofar as both emphasize conscious efforts on the part of the individual to bring about transformation. What differs very clearly is the lack of the social or the collective both as source of happiness and as benchmark of what constitutes “correct” and “wrong” attitude. In contrast to the 1950s, individual happiness today is no longer tied in with the greater good of the collective—neither as contributor nor as beneficent—yet the emphasis on agency (conscious choice) and effort to adopt the right frame of mind is retained. By putting the emphasis on the individual’s ability to be happy, i.e., by making this link between the inability to study and the inability to be happy, an individual person’s level of happiness implicitly also becomes a measure for the individual person’s level of suzhi 素質, a term which has replaced class as the dominant category to describe social hierarchy (Kipnis 2007; Anagnost 2004). Suzhi, a term difficult to translate, now refers almost exclusively to an embodied human quality derived from both nature and nurture. According to Kipnis (2007, 390), it offers a way of speaking about class without using this term. The term “class” seems anachronistic today (or even “uncool”; Lim 2017), despite no substantive change in China’s political system and its underlying ideology. Suzhi anchors quality in the individual rather than a defined collective, but like class discourse, suzhi discourse is decidedly 4. Refer to the introduction to this volume for the core tenets of positive psychology, or see Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000) for a concise introduction.

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unliberal in its assertion of morally justified hierarchies linked to the party’s leadership, which alone can ensure the nation’s success. It is the party itself that has the right to declare who has the highest suzhi (Kipnis 2007, 390). Nonetheless, it is a concept with a lot of currency in the population at large. The concern with the low levels of suzhi in the Chinese population can directly be linked to China’s development aspirations to become fuqiang 富強, rich and strong, the aim underlying all political projects in China over the last 150 years. To raise the “quality” of the people on an individual and a collective level has been seen and continues to be seen as a prerequisite to China’s modernization and development. Once happiness becomes a development target decoupled from the collective project and recast as an ability that can be learned, a happy mind frame becomes a marker of sophistication and superior cultural quality. Placing responsibility for finding happiness with the individual in order to reach target levels of happiness within a certain period of time, as Hu Angang does in his work, is reminiscent of the calls to melt down one’s pots and pans to achieve the great national goal of surpassing Great Britain in steel production as propagated during the Great Leap Forward (GLF). The iron ore produced by individuals during the GLF was mostly worthless and left destruction in its wake. As the novelist Yu Hua put it, “Fakery, exaggeration, and bombast were the order of the day” (Yu 2012, 116). Fakery also plays an important part in reaching the new goal of national happiness. One interesting aspect of positive psychology is the recommendation that pretending to be happy is the first step towards genuine happiness (see for example Wang 2013, 48–50). Han Haoyue (2010), a well-known cultural commentator, argues that what is delivered by the many programs and publications on how to be happy is in fact wei xingfu 偽幸福, or fake happiness. Yang Jie concedes that embracing a state of fake happiness can still be beneficial to the individual. But she also argues that appealing to the inner capacity of people, in particular disadvantaged people, psychologizing them, and helping them to self-actualize, is a form of control (Yang 2013, 296). The Great Leap Forward was an extreme case of target setting with tragic consequences on an epic scale. It exemplified in the most tragic way possible that once a target is set, efforts are no longer directed at finding the best possible solution to a particular problem, but all efforts become oriented towards meeting the target (Ordonez 2009). The focus on happiness—and its accompanying techniques—in China today is the result of a similar logic. Instead of trying to find out what causes people’s unhappiness and what policies can be put in place to respond to this, people are exhorted to study happiness. From the government’s side, positive psychology, which suits both Chinese cultural and socialist approaches towards the human psyche, is the perfect tool to complement role models like Lei Feng or Guo Mingyi in striving to reach its target.

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Ah Q and the “Visible Hand” China is now regularly referred to as a postsocialist society. This somewhat loose term includes notions of ideological contradictions and uncertainty, as well as the potential to herald something new—the loss of certain socialist institutions despite continuously existing socialist structures and practices and the continued circulation and belief in socialist myths and role models, which despite all cynicism continue to resonate (Hockx 2015, 12–18). Whatever the term “postsocialism” describes, socialism, in China, is certainly not “over.” As I have argued elsewhere (Wielander 2016), from its introduction to China, socialism offered the possibility of modernization without Westernization; it vaguely chimed with Chinese cultural values and yet provided a framework and ideological justification for a radical overhaul of Chinese society. From the start, socialism held the promise of a better future, a better China. Socialism represented an “otherness” that had not yet found a realization in the West and thus offered the chance of shaping and defining it in Chinese terms. In this process of shaping, socialism has become a defining element of official Chinese identity; although referred to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” it is apt to say that socialism itself has officially become a Chinese characteristic. It is a conscious placing of China as an Other to the democratic, capitalist West. The emphasis on this otherness has guided China’s engagement with socialism and is encapsulated in Xi’s phrase of the “Chinese Dream” (150). One clear characteristic of China’s continued socialist state is the continued presence of the “visible hand”—a commonly used adaptation of Adam Smith’s metaphor. While Smith’s “invisible hand” is used to describe the (now) “decisive role of the market” (Xi 2013), less attention is being paid to the simultaneous emphasis on the CCP’s “visible hand,” which continues to exert a guiding influence in the cultural and ideological field (and which continues to “guide” dissenting voices into secret locations). The CCP’s “visible hand” now comes in many colorful guises, guiding with the help of glossy publications and advertising. In its effort to retain control of China’s feeling rules, it continues to expect people to engage in emotion work to conform to the expected norm of a “happy Chinese citizen.” The level of happiness in the Chinese population has not only become a development target, but it also serves as a measure of the ruling party’s legitimacy. As Hochschild argues, One can defy an ideological stance not simply by maintaining an alternative frame on a situation, but by maintaining an alternative set of feeling rights and obligations. One can defy an ideological stance by inappropriate affect and by refusing to perform the emotion management necessary to feel what, according to the official frame, it would seem fit to feel. Deep acting or emotional work, then, can be a form of obeisance to a given ideological stance, lax emotion management a clue to an ideology lapsed or rejected. (Hochschild 1979, 567)

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China’s current quest for happiness perfectly encapsulates the postsocialist conundrum. The invisible hand of the market has introduced new values and aspirations; but the visible hand of the party continues to restrict the degree to which people are free to exert their agency to pursue these, hence curtailing subjective feelings of happiness. The visible hand belongs to the central coordinators with a master plan of how to guide China towards target levels of happiness. This master plan includes updated role models (Guo Mingyi) and a new language (appealing to suzhi rather than class). It continues to appeal to agency by urging individuals to adopt the right frame of mind, or jingshen, but without offering the immediate benefits of serving the collective, which the reconstruction work of the 1950s entailed. The promotion of positive psychology as a technique to obtain happiness may seem novel and “Western” in this context, but in reality it is in line with previously adopted approaches to psychology in China, which has always favored behaviorism (on which positive psychology is ultimately based). In his preface to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes the problem of happiness as the problem of “making people love their servitude” (Huxley 1969 [1932], xii; as quoted in Ahmed 2010, 192). As Sara Ahmed continues, “happiness is what holds things together by getting what you desire, and desiring what you get . . . to be conditioned by happiness is to like your condition” (Ahmed 2010, 192). Hu Angang’s visions of groundbreaking social and economic change, expressed with strong references to Mao quotes stemming from a time when he was thinking up the Cultural Revolution, seems to contradict the focus on happiness at the individual level, which encourages people to see the positive side of life, and if not that, then to fake it. Surely groundbreaking social change, as Hu envisages, requires a degree of discontent with the status quo. The revolutionary might be optimistic about the future, but must be pessimistic about the present (Ahmed 2010, 172). Being happy, on the other hand, facilitates acceptance. This leads to the paradox that in China’s postsocialist condition, Lu Xun’s Ah Q—the archetypal low suzhi character being led to his own execution while still feeling happy in himself—has suddenly morphed into a role model. Ah Q’s spiritual victory method is a strategy that allows him to continue to exist under conditions of oppression and victimization, and also a tactic that prevents him from fully recognizing the lowliness of his true social position (Larson 2009, 111). Now that being happy is considered to be a marker of “having arrived,” Ah Q’s spiritual victory method—convincing oneself that all is fine, despite clear evidence to the contrary— comes repackaged as modern psychological method: Ah Q, not Lei Feng (or Guo Mingyi), is the new role model of China’s postsocialist condition.

Figure 1.1 Zhao Yanian, “Ah Q laughing hysterically.” Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

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Jigemei, Tinglai 吉格梅 • 廷萊. 2014. Xingfu shi shenme? 幸福是什麼 [Happiness: A shared global vision]. Beijing: Beijing lianhe chuban gongsi. Kahnemann, Daniel. 2006. “Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion.” Science 312 (2006): 1908–10. Kipnis, Andrew. 2007. “Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People’s Republic of China.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2) (June 1, 2007): 383–400. Knight, John, and Ramani Gunatilaka. 2011. “Does Economic Growth Raise Happiness in China?” Oxford Development Studies 39 (1) (March 2011): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1 080/13600818.2010.551006. Larson, Wendy. 2009. From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Layard, Richard. 2005. Happiness: Lessons from a New Science. 2nd ed. London: Penguin Books. Lim, Louisa. 2017. “How Class in China Became Politically Incorrect.” The China Blog, July 12. Accessed July 27, 2017. http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/chinablog/class-chinabecame-politically-incorrect. Mason, Rowena, and Patrick Wintour. 2015. “UK Steelmakers Urge PM to Confront Visiting Chinese President over ‘Unfair’ Dumping.” The Guardian, October 19, sec. UK news. Accessed January 15, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/oct/19/uksteel-david-cameron-xi-jinping-dumping. McFarquhar, Roderick. 1983. The Origins of the Cultural Revolution 2: The Great Leap Forward, 1958–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ni, Jianmin 倪建民. 2012. “Guo Mingyi de xingfu zhi lu” 郭明義的幸福之路 [Guo Mingyi’s road to happiness]. Qiushi 9 (2012): 55–56. Ordonez, L. 2009. “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side-Effects of Overprescribing GoalSetting.” Academy of Management Perspectives 23 (2009): 6–16. Peng, Hui 彭慧. 1954. “Shenme shi xingfu, zenme chuangzao women de xingfu?” 什麼是幸 福，怎麼創造我們的幸福？ [What is happiness, and how to create our happiness?]. Zhongguo Qingnian 6 (1954): 29–31. Samuels, Andrew. 2014. “Economics, Psychotherapy and Politics.” International Review of Sociology 24 (1) (April 9, 2014): 77–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03906701.2014.894 348. Seligman, Martin, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 2000. “An Introduction: Positive Psychology.” American Psychologist (2000). http://www.ppc.sas.upenn.edu/ppintroarticle.pdf. She, Minghua 佘名華. 1954. “Wei zuguo de xuyao er xuexi shi women zhe yidai qingnian de xingfu” 為祖國的需要而學習是我們這一代青年的幸福 [To study what the country needs is the happiness of this generation’s youth]. Zhongguo Qingnian 10: 8–9. Wang, Weihua 王微華. 2013. Xingfu Zhongguo zhi gongmin xingfu shouce 幸福中國之公民幸 福手冊 [Happy China’s citizen’s handbook of happiness]. Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe. Wei, Wei 魏魏. 1954. “Xingfu de hua wei yongshi er kai” 幸福的花為勇士而開 [The flower of happiness blooms for the brave]. Zhongguo Qingnian 23: 1–6. Welzel, Christian, and Ronald Inglehart. 2010. “Agency, Values, and Well-Being: A Human Development Model.” Social Indicators Research 97 (1) (May): 43–63. http://dx.doi. org/10.1007/s11205-009-9557-z.

Happiness in Chinese Socialist Discourse 43 Wielander, Gerda. 2016. “Chinese Dreams of Socialism: Visions of a Better Future.” In The Politics of the ‘Other’ in India and China: Western Concepts in Non-Western Contexts, edited by Bidisha Chaudhuri and Lion Koenig, 139–52. London and New York: Routledge. Xi, Jinping. 2013. “Communiqué of the Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress.” Accessed July 26, 2017. http://chinacopyrightandmedia.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/ communique-of-the-3rd-plenum-of-the-18th-party-congress/. Yang, Jie. 2013. “‘Fake Happiness’: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho-Politics in China.” Ethos 41 (3) (September 2013): 292–312. Yu, Hua. 2012. China in Ten Words. London: Duckworth Overlook. Zhongguo qingnian 中國青年. 1954a. “Shenme shi qingnian de xingfu?” 什麼是青年的幸 福？ [What is happiness of the youth?] Zhongguo Qingnian 17: 26–27. Zhongguo qingnian 中國青年. 1954b. “Shenme shi qingnian de xingfu?” 什麼是青年的幸 福？ [What is happiness of the youth?] Zhongguo Qingnian 22: 29–31.

2 Tibet and Happiness in Chinese Media Discourses Issues and Contestation Jigme Yeshe Lama

Introduction In 2012, Lhasa, the capital city of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) in China, was awarded the status of happiest city in China by China Central Television (CCTV) in its Economic Survey List of China’s Happiest Cities. Lhasa had won the title for six straight years (China Daily 2012). However, as Chinese media are mostly under the control of the party state, the granting of a title to Lhasa as the happiest city must be analyzed very critically. This is of much importance as Tibet is a zone of contention for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Beijing has faced immense criticism and resistance to its rule in Tibet from Tibetans and also from foreign countries. This is manifested in the form of cultural resistance by Tibetans, protests, and also, tragically, in the form of self-immolations. Hence, terming Lhasa as the happiest city in China can be deemed as a mode to legitimize CCP rule in Tibet and to stave off criticism against it. For China, the Tibet issue is a “core issue” (Bhattacharya 2013) as it forms a major ground of state building for China, which is still in process in the Tibetan regions. Tibet was incorporated into the People’s Republic of China (PRC) by the CCP a year after the formation of the People’s Republic. Mao had directed the People’s Liberation Army to liberate Tibet, which by October 7, 1950, had crossed into Chamdo in eastern Tibet and by October 19, 1950, had defeated the Tibetan army (Shakya 1999, 3). The CCP and Mao tried to legitimize their actions in Tibet through the signing of a Seventeen Point Agreement with the local government of Tibet in 1951, which promised much internal autonomy and noninterference in Tibet’s domestic sociocultural structure. The CCP argued that their actions in Tibet constituted the liberation of Tibet from foreign imperialists. The CCP also delayed the democratic reforms, at least in central Tibet, which would have altered the socioeconomic political structure in the Tibetan regions. Democratic reforms to liberate the serfs were a major plank on which the party tried to garner greater legitimacy, which was accelerated after the crushing of a revolt by Tibetans and the

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exile of the Dalai Lama in 1959. Along with the discourse on Tibet’s liberation, the idea of Tibetans being happy under the CCP has emerged as a dominant narrative in China, one that is widely disseminated through the official media. Thus, the happiness of Tibetans becomes a zone of contention between the party-state and its detractors, with the latter questioning the basic notion of happiness of Tibetans in China. The concluding remarks in the White Paper on Tibet, published by the Information Office of the State Council in 2013, mentions that in the present period, Tibetans are seen to be enjoying a “happy and healthy life,” due to the correct development path brought about for Tibetans by the CCP (Global Times 2013). Hence, notions of happiness through liberation and development of Tibetans by Beijing form a new dominant discourse. It has become one of the essential tropes engendering strong polarization in relation to Tibet. The idea of Tibetan happiness under CCP rule is an important mode of generating legitimacy by China in the present period, where happiness is a major goal following the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2013, along with other goals which were included in Xi Jinping’s “Chinese Dream” of national rejuvenation (China Daily 2013). There is also the linking of an individual’s happiness to the country’s destiny with China’s 1.3 billion–strong population comprising a community of shared destinies (China Daily 2013). Thus, the state is geared to bringing about happiness for its citizens and also, more importantly, directing the type of happiness that its citizens, including Tibetans, should enjoy. The happiness Tibetans are deemed to be enjoying is mostly considered to have been achieved through modernization and economic development. Underlying this project of economic development in Tibet as in most third world cultures is a strong hegemonic influence, where the understanding of hegemony is based on the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who termed it as rule through ideological domination and through deriving consent from the ruled. This type of hegemony applies to a situation where the values and ideas of the ruling class/group live in the minds and lives of the subalterns as a spontaneous expression of their own interest (Jones 2007, 7). Economic growth has emerged as an important goal to be achieved by the modern nation-state, which is interlinked to the project of globalization. It is through economic development that the state is seen to be deriving legitimacy from the governed. What is significant is that development has been turned into a value which is deemed as desired by the governed, as economic development is seen to have permeated deeply into the sociocultural psyche of the population being governed. Thus, development can be termed as perpetuating the hegemony of the government and the ruling classes. Hence happiness for the Chinese state is linked to the economic development and prosperity that has been brought about by the adoption of reforms and opening up of China by the CCP from the third plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress from 1978 onwards, which heralded socialism with Chinese characteristics and socialist

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modernization. The double-digit growth rate that the party has brought to Tibet is viewed as the source of happiness for the local population, forming the major parameter on which happiness rides for Tibetans. This hegemonic discourse has been disseminated widely in Chinese media and abroad. Frequently, Tibetans are portrayed as a population that is enjoying the fruits of happiness in China’s Tibet. However, this chapter attempts to problematize the discourse of happiness in Tibet, through the idea of “hidden transcripts” as propounded by James Scott (Scott 1990, xii). The idea of the hidden transcript is an important way of analyzing power relations, whereby it forms a response to the dominant discourse dubbed as the “public transcript.” While the public transcript can be seen as the ruling narrative or a set of sanctioned norms and ideas in society that maintains the domination of the ruling groups, the “hidden transcript” is the discourse which takes place offstage, beyond the direct observation of the power holders (Scott 1990, 4). As Scott mentions, this discourse can assume various shapes and forms, ranging from rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, jokes, and theater of the powerless. They function as tools through which there is a strong criticism of power, while hiding behind anonymity or behind ostensibly innocent interpretations of the conduct of the dominated (Scott 1990, xiii). Hidden transcripts also challenge the idea of hegemony, as the presence of subaltern criticisms against the ruling narrative shows the absence of complete consent being given by the ruled to the rulers. Significantly, the hidden transcripts have been seen to form the various tactics adopted by the ruled to thwart the rulers, leading to degrees of insubordination that might suitably be termed as an infrapolitics of the powerless (Scott 1990, xiii). It is precisely these infrapolitics which provide an understanding of the various forms of resistance adopted by the Tibetans inside the PRC.

Happy Tibetans in the Chinese Media Discourse In a media report carried out by the web portal China Tibet Online in 2011, the party-state is deemed as bringing happiness to the lives of Tibetans, especially at the grassroots levels. It cites the example of a village head, an ethnic Tibetan named Badro, in a remote village in Lhoka prefecture of TAR, who had brought happiness to the local population through his services (China Tibet Online 2011). The CCP’s portrayal of present-day Tibet as being a land of happiness requires the depiction of pre-1951 Tibet as a period when the majority of the population was unhappy, and where happiness was only accessible to the upper class aristocracy as is depicted in an article published on the Xinhua website. The report is based on the erstwhile Phalha manor in Paljor Lhunpho village, Gyantse County in Shigatse Prefecture, TAR, which was owned by the Phalha family, many of whose members were senior officials in the Kashag governing council of Tibet during the Qing dynasty and Republican China. Hence the report also tries to claim pre-1951 Tibet

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as a part of the Qing and Republican period, when historically Tibet enjoyed de facto independence from 1911. The article also mentions the manor as having a prison where serfs were kept and tortured. It quotes a tourist Zhang Xuefeng as saying that “Tibetan nobles were drunk everyday and whipped their serfs for fun.” The article also interviews a Tibetan named Migmar Dondrup, an old man in his seventies and a former serf, who mentions how he had to work without food and suffered from the lashes. However, with the liberation of Tibet in 1951, the former serfs are depicted as liberated, enjoying prosperity and hence being happy as well as contemptuous of the pre-1951 period (Xinhua 2011). This is highlighted through the fact that the former serf Migmar Dondrup now owned farmland of two hectares yielding about 10,000 kilograms of grain per year and also raised many cattle, from which they made a profit of 50,000 yuan (US$7,738) each year (Xinhua 2011). Through such portrayals, the CCP has tried to conjure up a highly negative image of “old Tibet” and to justify its “liberation” of Tibet, claiming that this has led to Tibetans’ increased happiness. The discourse of happiness brought through economic development works to generate hegemony by the CCP in Tibet, which is also what James Scott terms as a “public transcript” (Scott 1990, 4). This discourse sees happiness as derived from development and informs the values of the ruling class; which has been portrayed by the state media as having also filtered down into the lives of the ruled, who accept these values as being in their own interests. This seems evidenced by the fact that Tibetans do participate in the economic activities coming under the aegis of development brought by the state and hence legitimizing the role of the Chinese state in Tibet. Local Tibetan entrepreneurs are seen to be involved in the real estate business, with a number of them acquiring loans and building hotels in Dartsedo (Kangding). The state is seen to be providing further financial incentives by issuing interest-free, easy-to-get loans to these Tibetans.1 These entrepreneurs, in turn, are seen to be major beneficiaries of economic prosperity heralded by the party-state. It is through development as mentioned earlier that the PRC has tried to exercise hegemony over Tibetans. Furthermore, it is the presence of happy Tibetans who are seen as enjoying the fruits of economic prosperity, which seem to authenticate the hegemony of the party-state. The notion of happy Tibetans came about through a survey conducted by the CCTV in 2012. The survey deemed Lhasa the happiest city, taking into consideration people’s sense of well-being, health, their quality of marriage, along with other factors including the amount of leisure time citizens enjoyed. According to Zou Jun, director of the Jiangsu Institute of Urban Planning and Design in Nanjing, leisure time meant more time for cultural and spiritual interests (China Tibet News 2012b). In the same year, on 20 August, CCTV and the Lhasa Municipal Government coorganized the “Happy City Mayors Forum,” which had the following theme: “City in the future, new points to raise the happiness index of city life” (Shiyong 2015). This 1. Interview with Thubten, Tibetan student in Sichuan University on April 14, 2016.

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was attended by delegations from ten cities, including the mayors of the respective cities and also many noted economists and experts from Peking University, Tsinghua University, China Development Institute, and China Society of Urban Economy. The forum was also expected to outline a “Happiness Sense Evaluation System,” which was to contribute to the 2012–2013 CCTV “Economic and Life Survey.” On July 24, 2012, a “Happy Family Project” was launched in Lhasa by the partystate with the aim of creating happy families in Tibet. The deputy chairperson of TAR People’s Government, Dekyi, termed it a major prerogative of the party-state. She also asserted that the CCP put much emphasis on its development work in Tibet and its people. Under this project, healthy birth and sound care knowledge, along with reproductive care services, would be provided to advance population equalization in Tibet. All Tibetan-populated areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan, along with TAR would be covered (China Tibet News 2012a). The project placed special focus on Tibet’s pastoral population. It covered twenty-one counties in Tibetan-inhabited areas and was sponsored by the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China, the All China Federation of Commerce, and the China Glory Society. The China Glory Society is an NGO with over 800,000 private businesses as members, who are seen to be providing poverty relief, especially through development poverty relief. The members form business partnerships with rural communities for mutual benefit. Through over 20,000 projects, and injecting US$10 million in investment in rural China, it has assisted with lifting 130 million people out of poverty (Zhu et al. 2015, 182). Hence, the China Glory Society provides China’s business entrepreneurs with an avenue for corporate social responsibility, and this is also reflected in their spirit of “balancing justice and benefit, putting justice first” (June Yao News 2015). The NGO is seen to be fostering development through providing investments in the poorer regions of China, including Tibet, which increases the happiness of Tibetans. According to the then mayor and deputy secretary of Lhasa, Dorje Tsedrup, the major reason for happiness in Lhasa was the party’s brilliant leadership and policy, the adoption of Chinese characteristics with unique Tibetan features as the development path, correct ethnic and religious policy, solidarity of all ethnic groups, and the concerted efforts and common prosperity of the nation (China’s Tibet 2012). The article further lists the three sources of happiness specifically for Lhasa: good infrastructure and connectivity, good social welfare measures, and ecological protection and stability.

Official Sources of Happiness in Tibet Efficient traffic infrastructure is a key part of economic prosperity, which is considered to underpin the happiness of all Tibetans. To improve infrastructure in Lhasa the local government is implementing the Lhasa Overall Urban Planning

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(2009–2020). This has already led to the building up of 62.88 square kilometers of urban area, along with the creation of the new districts of Liuyu, Dongcheng, and Dongsa. The project also includes the building of thirty-five new roads amounting to 36.46 kilometers. Communications and logistics have received a boost through the establishment of a 3-D traffic system, the opening of the Lhasa-Shigatse railway and the Nachen bridge, and by allowing night navigation at Lhasa airport. The QinghaiTibet highway has also been extended, and a total of 580.82 kilometers of new roads have been built. This has alleviated the infrastructural bottleneck in Tibet, thus accelerating economic development (China Tibet News 2012c). Economic growth has also received a boost with a major breakthrough in energy construction with the Qinghai-Tibet direct current (DC) interconnection put into pilot work, which would resolve the limited power rationing during peak hours of power utilization (State Grid Corporation of China 2012). Another source of happiness in Tibet lies in social welfare schemes launched by the state, which include the “three guarantees” policy of providing food, shelter, and education, which from 2011 onwards was extended to rural and pastoral areas. Free education is considered to bring large benefits. Social insurance in the form of rural pensions and urban allowances has been provided, with the provision of medical insurance for all, free treatment services and also the setting up of free medical records for residents above the age of forty-five. Free skills training for both urban and rural populations is provided as a measure through which to keep the unemployed family figure at nil, and general unemployment rate has been kept lower than 4 % for many years (State Grid Corporation of China 2012). This is further elaborated in a report on the happiness of Tibetan villagers of Zizirong village in Medrogongar County, Lhasa, where the residents are portrayed as happy as a result of supportive government policies to alleviate poverty. The rural population, specifically, is seen to be enjoying three types of government subsidies. Firstly, their children are seen to be enjoying 100% compensation of higher education costs, with 200 yuan per student of monthly stipend, which continues through graduate school. Secondly, the farmers and nomads enjoy free medical insurance and 100% compensation of any other medical costs after using the benefits, and thirdly, the populations above the age of sixty are enjoying annual pension benefits at increasing monthly rates for the more advanced in age (China Tibet Online 2016). Happiness is also claimed to be delivered through the implementation of housing projects for farmers and herders, especially through the project of sedentarization of nomads. Since 2009, the party-state contends that it has resolved a series of problems for people, through providing facilities such as lifelong support to farmers who had lost their land, and free transport for students and for elderly. A final source of happiness that the CCP declares to have delivered to Tibet comes in the form of a clean and green environment, especially “clean air” in Lhasa. This has been deemed a success due to efforts by the state in establishing twenty-six natural conservation and ecological function areas and in the planting of trees. Happiness

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is also seen to be derived from the ample amount of leisure time that the citizens of Lhasa enjoy in comparison to cities in the Pearl River and Yangtze River delta areas. Along with these, “safety” and “harmony” are also dubbed as an important benchmark for measuring happiness, which can be brought through maintaining stability in the region. The people are termed as making a concrete effort to strive for development and prosperity through maintaining stability and a harmonious social condition (China Tibet Online 2016). This is seen to be a mode of legitimizing the stability measures adopted by the state, especially through its overarching security apparatus which is omnipresent in Lhasa, a fact regularly commented on by Chinese tourists in their microblogs after visiting Lhasa and other parts of Tibet (International Campaign for Tibet 2014).

Happiness in Tibet as Gift from China Happiness was also a theme adopted for tourism in Tibet in 2012. It served as a form of value, which was used to attract tourists as well as serve as a model to other provinces and municipalities. With regard to this, Tsering Dondrup, ethnic Tibetan deputy director of the tourism promotion and cooperation department of Tibet Tourism Bureau, reflected much confidence regarding happiness in Tibet. According to him, Tibetans were happy due to an increase in prosperity, good transportation, and comfortable environment, all made possible under the leadership of the CCP. He termed Lhasa as a synonym of happiness. In order to underscore the touristic element of “happiness,” a “happiest city sculpture” was also erected in front of the Norbu Linka square in Lhasa (ShotonFestival.com 2012). According to a survey entitled “China Happiness Index Map” conducted by the website Tencent.com in early 2013, Tibet scored the highest with 6.7 points out a total of 10 points (China Central Television 2013). The factors which enabled Tibet to score so highly were its air quality, which was deemed the most satisfying (32.09%), followed by social security (14.25%). The variables included in the survey consisted of ten livelihood related indices including income, security, commodity prices, food, transportation, air quality, house prices, education, medical benefits, and employment. With regard to Tibet specifically, one of the respondents, a migrant worker, also mentioned that Lhasa as a city had a sense of security and stability, thus providing an important factor for happiness (China Tibet News 2013). Therefore, with the entire Tibetan region deemed as being stable and secure as well as its air being the cleanest, the whole region can be dubbed as coming under the ambit of happiness. With regard to this, at the Boao Forum2 held in Hainan Province in 2013, one of the Tibetan delegates, Tsering Dorjee, affiliated with the party school in TAR, 2. The Boao Forum was proposed by a few former heads of states from Asia and Australia, to bring about a deeper economic exchange, coordination, and cooperation within Asia and other parts of the world. It was formally inaugurated on February 27, 2001, and holds its annual meetings once a year in Boao, Hainan Province, China, which serves as its headquarters.

Figure 2.1 Lhasa’s Happiness Sculpture. © Tsering Woeser

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when questioned on happiness in Tibet, replied that it was through improving and ensuring people’s livelihood that a sense of happiness was created. This included better housing, clothing, transportation, and communication. Furthermore, it was a series of efforts from the state that had brought about a sense of happiness to local Tibetans (China Tibet Online 2013). The series of state policies were aimed at the improvement of housing conditions as well as the conditions of agricultural and pastoral areas, increasing employment, regulating prices, providing better medical treatment, relieving poverty, and prioritizing education. Through social welfare measures in the form of free medical care, especially for the monks and nuns, a deeper sense of happiness was brought to Tibet. Professor Tsering Dorjee states that Tibetans’ sense of happiness can be derived from their tradition and culture, but also from the special care from the whole country, thereby alluding to the “Aid Tibet” projects that had been started back in 1984. He also mentioned that the happiness of Tibetans lay in the leapfrog development of Tibet, backed by social stability and a good environment. Tibetans’ sense of happiness, according to him, was tied to the party’s proposal to keep on improving people’s livelihoods in Tibet (China Tibet Online 2013a). This idea further gains ground in the notion of good national policies bringing happiness to Tibetans. There is an emphasis on social welfare schemes that the party has initiated in Tibet, which have brought about stronger happiness among them. This is reflected in the form of free education from the primary to secondary levels in Tibet, as well as free medical benefits to all in the Tibetan regions as mentioned earlier with regard to the Tibetan village of Zizirong in Medrogongar County in Lhasa. Happiness has also been brought through the age-old insurance schemes that had covered almost 2.4 million individuals by the end of 2012 (China Tibet News 2013). Clearly, material prosperity is deemed as a key source of happiness for Tibetans, brought through the state-driven, top-down approach to development. There is also the affirmation of the fact that in Tibet, people of all ethnic groups felt a strong sense of happiness, which along with economic development was also due to Tibet’s clean environment. The entire population of Tibet is termed as being covered in the scope of endowment insurance, which is recorded as the highest in PRC (China Tibet News 2013). In official discourse, happiness as a value is also considered to be derived through the strong ethnic unity being present in Tibet which has further resulted in greater economic development and building a harmonious society in Tibet (China Tibet News 2013). This is seen in an article which describes “Number Seven” compound of the Lugu Residential Committee, which housed forty-seven families of different ethnic groups. It focuses on a fruit seller from Anhui Province who had settled in Tibet for the past fifteen years, married a Tibetan, and is described as someone who had adapted himself to Tibetan culture. It also mentions the residential welfare committee, a branch of the party, providing all help required in making a livelihood. Hence, the article emphasizes the point that happiness is derived from

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uniting all ethnic groups and building a harmonious, prosperous family. Thus, a link is created between happiness and material wealth (China Tibet News 2013). The preferential policies brought about by the CCP to Tibet are deemed as a major source of happiness for Tibetans. Through interviews of the beneficiaries of the insurance and social welfare schemes a direct link is created to the presence of happiness in Tibet, which is referred to as “common sense” among all ethnic groups living on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (China Tibet News 2013). A further boost to such preferential policies was made by the TAR People’s Government in 2013 by increasing subsidies for several people’s livelihood related programs, which included education, annuities for retirees, and fiscal subsidies on health care in pastoral areas, which will benefit 90% of the total Tibetan population. Happiness was given a further boost by securing complete employment for all college graduates in 2012; Tibet’s pristine ecology and clean environment, along with the setting up of a heating system project, provide further sources of “happiness,” embedding it in Tibetan people’s daily life. The media coverage on happiness in Tibet in 2013 also included a story on a village in suburban Lhasa, in Nyethang Township, which was renamed Dekyi Village, which in Tibetan means “happiness village.” The happiness of the villagers is considered to be derived from the material prosperity and economic development that had emerged through the post-1959 democratic reforms and accelerated with the economic reforms of the 1980s. Much of its prosperity and happiness had emerged from the establishment of the Dekhan Vegetables Cooperative, which had increased greenhouse crop planting. Furthermore, an investment of 23.34 million yuan on rural reform experimentation in 2012 benefited 1,458 families in the village. Statistics reveal that the village’s general income had reached 78.48 million yuan in the same year, and the annual per capita income had reached 7,050 yuan (China Tibet Online 2013b). The article also mentions the arrival of modernized technology in agriculture that had raised the yield in the village, increasing the total net income of the whole area to 1.9 million yuan. The government’s preferential policies are termed as important ways of generating happiness for the citizens of Dekyi Village (ibid). This report, which relies heavily on data and numbers, clearly emphasized the idea of material growth provided by the state as being the ultimate source of happiness for Tibetans. Bringing happiness to Tibetans through the development of Tibet forms the basis for interaction and consensual dialogue between the CCP and Tibetans; it constitutes the public transcript, which helps in an understanding of happiness as a value proposed by the ruling CCP and Beijing. Going back to Scott’s notion of the public transcript as introduced earlier, in the context of China’s policies in Tibet, economic development and the happiness it brings to its beneficiaries informs the ruling discourse and is presented as the accepted norms and values by all. Economic development forms the accepted basis for interaction and alleged agreement between the subordinated and the ruler (Scott 1990, 4). Happiness of Tibetans

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inside Tibet is a desired target set by the state and expected to be embraced by the local Tibetan population. Tibetans are meant to welcome this project of “happiness” delivered by the Chinese state, which demands acceptance and gratefulness on the part of Tibetans. However, this narrative is being challenged by Tibetans through hidden transcripts which have emerged in numerous instances, in the form of the “infrapolitics of subordinated groups” (Scott 1990, 19). One can witness these in the Tibetan resistance and in the various protests against the Chinese state.

Critique of Happiness in Tibet The basic assumption made by the state that economic progress and prosperity are reliable indicators for progress and happiness of the Tibetan people is fundamentally skewed (Singh 2012). Happiness as a state of mind, a consciousness, is not completely embedded in material prosperity, but also in aspects which transcend the material. Indeed, Chinese socialist discourse does include a notion of happiness as value derived through holistic means. However, in Tibet, the government’s discourse is focused on economic development, as it is the cornerstone of Chinese legitimacy over Tibet and Tibetans. In the context of Tibet, Beijing’s portrayal of it as the “happiest land” in 2012–2013 is ironic and is embedded in strong propaganda. This pronouncement of Tibet as a “happy place” occurred in the same year as a heavy security clampdown was observed in several counties of Tibet, especially the Driru County of Nagchu Prefecture in North Tibet, where Tibetan pro-independence leaflets had been found in 2012–2013 (Dossier Tibet 2012). The dominant discourse of Tibet and Tibetans as “happy” has also been punctured by the 145 selfimmolations committed by Tibetans from 2009 onwards as an act of protest against Chinese government policies towards Tibet (International Campaign for Tibet 2016). While the majority of the self immolations have occurred outside the TAR, it was on May 27, 2012, that for the first time two Tibetans self-immolated outside the Jokhang, the holiest site of Tibetan Buddhism in Lhasa (BBC News 2012). The first self-immolations in Lhasa in 2012 seriously questioned China’s portrayal of the city as the “happiest” city. On the eve of the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2013, five self-immolations took place in Tibet, as a way to convey the unhappiness of Tibetans about the new leadership of the CCP (Voice of America 2012). In response to such protests by Tibetans, the CCP leaders and other authorities stress the point of Tibet being a “happy land,” where happiness has been brought by the party through economic development of the region. According to Che Dalha, the then communist party secretary of Lhasa, the self-immolations in Lhasa were committed by outsiders, and as a result, the state would monitor the entry of outsiders into Lhasa (Beech 2012). In a press briefing by two Tibetologists, Lian Xiangmin and Tsering Yangzom on April 10, 2014, the notion was reaffirmed, as according to them the self-immolators in Tibet were not Tibetans. According to their statements, the self-immolators were

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from the neighboring provinces and were instigated by hostile external forces. This is especially important in the context of happiness, as one among the many questions raised in the press conference pertained to whether the self-immolation was committed due to unhappiness (China Tibet Online 2014). Reports outside Tibet with regard to self-immolations provide a different picture, as seen in the testaments of the self-immolators that have been received by Tibetans in India or abroad. In one such testament, Kalsang Kyab, who self-immolated in Kyangtsa in the Dzoege region of Ngaba, currently in Sichuan in 2012, wrote that “he wished for the sun of happiness to shine on the land of Tibet” (Phayul.com 2012). The self-immolations are a direct critique of the idea of Tibet being a land of happiness as presented in the official discourses, and hence can be seen as an instance of infrapolitics. Another instance has been the 2008 pan-Tibetan protests, which also clearly questioned the idea of happy Tibetans as it spread to almost all Tibetan areas, involving people of all backgrounds. These protests question the idea of happy Tibetans brought through economic development in the region. The idea of happy Tibetans has been further questioned by a report that was brought out by the Gongmeng Law Research Centre based in Beijing, whose researchers had undertaken a month-long survey of the Tibetan areas in the aftermath of 2008 protests. The Gongmeng Law Research Centre is a Chinese think tank established in 2003 by Xu Zhiyong, Teng Biao, Yu Jiang, and Zhang Xingshui from Peking University. Also known as the Open Constitution Initiative, it provided legal advice to victims of official injustice (The Economist 2009). They championed for rule of law and also greater constitutional protections for the citizens. Their findings reveal the failure of China’s developmental practices in Tibet, which had directly fanned the protests in Tibetan regions (China Digital Times 2009). The report describes how Tibetans have been marginalized and how Han Chinese took advantage in the private sector through their ethnicity and language skills. The report also noted the emergence of a “new aristocracy” of corrupt and abusive government officials in Tibet who have systematically portrayed community discontent as “separatism.” The report seems to be questioning the level of prosperity of Tibetans brought about by the party-state, which forms the main plank on which the happiness discourse is built (China Digital Times 2009).3 Along with the protests and self-immolations by Tibetans, resistance against Chinese policies is also seen to be expressed in the form of songs, poetry, literature, and other forms of media, including documentaries made by Tibetans inside Tibet. This is best seen in the case of the documentary Leaving Fear Behind made by Dhondup Wangchen and Jigme Gyatso prior to the Beijing Olympics in 2008. The documentary is shot primarily in Eastern Tibet and provides a glimpse into the hearts and minds of the Tibetan people and their longstanding resentment of Chinese policies in Tibet (Filming for Tibet 2008). The filmmakers captured the 3. See Xu (2017) on the Open Constitution Initiative and their report on Tibet.

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opinions of the common people especially on the issue of the Beijing Olympics, with an overwhelming majority expressing “unhappiness” with the current situation. It was on the eve of the protests in March 2008 that the filming concluded. The directors were arrested, with Dhondup Wangchen sentenced to six-years in prison (Filming for Tibet 2008). The above examples illustrate that the notion of happiness in Tibet brought by the CCP is highly contested. Furthermore, the emphasis of economic development as the source of happiness has also put the spotlight on a major contradiction that has not been resolved by the party-state. This revolves around the question of uneven development, which has benefited mostly the Han migrants in Tibet, who through their language skills and social linkages with their home provinces have been able to carve a better position in the Tibetan economy. This has been well portrayed by Emily Yeh in her book Taming Tibet—Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, where she sees development brought to Tibet by China as a hegemonic project that indulges in a process of landscape transformation and the formation of governable subjects and spaces. Her work focuses on the introduction of modern farming, the impetus to urbanization and greenhouse vegetable cultivation in Lhasa, which are important denominators of development in Tibet (Yeh 2013). Yeh also looks into the party-state’s policies of encouraging Han migration into Tibet for economic development, which can be observed through their “Aid Tibet” projects and the “Aid Tibet” cadres, who are ostensibly there to transfer their skills and expertise to the local population, which does not, however, seem to take place in reality. The author invokes sociocultural elements, seen in the form of networks of kinship and native places, which are advantageous to the Han. The idea of suzhi or high cultural quality becomes important here. As Wielander has pointed out in the opening chapter of this book, suzhi has largely replaced class discourse in contemporary China. In the language of historic materialism, Tibetan society was considered a feudal society, whose transition to the next stage of development was predicated upon the Han Chinese liberation and development of Tibet. This discourse has now been replaced by the more contemporary marker of discrimination. Today, Tibetans are considered to be of lower quality as a result of poor education, low development, and feudal religious practices. What has not changed is the requirement of Han Chinese involvement in order to raise the quality of Tibetans. Yeh also looks into how Tibetans are seen as being spoiled by massive subsidies from the Chinese state, when in reality these measures favor the Han Chinese migrants (Yeh 2013). With economic development not truly benefiting the local population, but leading somewhat to their further marginalization, the idea of happiness as a value derived from development for Tibetans is then much contested.

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Tibetan Buddhism and Happiness The Fourteenth Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of the Tibetans and is the most popular face of Tibet and of Tibetan Buddhism. Through his understanding of Buddhism, the Tibetan spiritual leader has stressed happiness as the most important goal in life. He has written prolifically on the topic and has pointed to the fact that it is through genuine compassion that one can achieve happiness (Tenzin Gyatso; The Fourteenth Dalai Lama 2016). Hence, Tibetan Buddhism propagates happiness as a desired value in human society, which is garnered through compassion and love and is not completely tied to wealth and prosperity. Therefore, religions like Buddhism have their own understanding of happiness which may in many cases stand in contradiction to the idea of happiness as proposed in a modern economic setup, which gives importance to economic development on the road to happiness. Tibetan Buddhism plays an important role in Tibet and forms the crux of Tibetan society. Pre-1951 Tibet was a theocratic society, with the Dalai Lama as its spiritual and temporal ruler. As institutions of learning and worship, the monasteries were both huge congregations of monastics as well as centers of power. This was disrupted with the arrival of the CCP and the institution of democratic reforms, which curtailed the old system. Furthermore, the Cultural Revolution took a huge toll on Tibetan Buddhism. During the period, the majority of religious institutions were closed or destroyed. The reforms and opening up since 1978 saw a resurgence in religious practices in Tibet, which were tolerated by the state. However, religious practices and institutions are continually monitored by the party-state, and the level of surveillance is seen to be increasing (Human Rights Watch 2012). According to the 2013 White Paper on Tibet, 1,787 places of worship with over 46,000 resident monks and nuns and 358 tulkus 4 are present in Tibet, which reflects the CCP’s upholding of religious freedom for Tibetans (Xinhua 2013). As the clergy forms an important part of Tibetan society, their happiness is also taken up by the party state through economic provisions. It is seen in the form of pensions to monks above the age of sixty and also free medical treatment for all members of the clergy. The state also plans to bring monks and nuns fully into the social security system, providing them with endowment insurance and basic cost-of-living allowances. The government also invested US$35 million in the conservation of a few monasteries and temples. Modern technology in the form of satellite televisions, cellular phones, and digital cameras are also considered to have brought happiness to monks and nuns (China Tibet Online 2013c). However, these economic and material benefits do not seem to prevent the clergy in Tibet from forming the focal point for protests and resistance against the state in Tibet. This was seen in the 1987–1989 protests, which were initiated by monks and nuns in Lhasa mostly belonging to the three great monasteries of Sera, Ganden, and Drepung. For instance, the first protest, taking place on September 27, 1987, 4. Tulkus are reincarnated monks.

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was initiated by twenty-one monks from Drepung Monastery in the Barkhor, near the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa (Schwartz 1994, 22). Similarly, there was much participation of the clergy in the pan-Tibetan protests of 2008, which however had a much larger participation from the other sections of the population (Barnett 2009, 6–23). Much of it was linked to the interference of the CCP in religious practices in Tibetan areas in the form of banning the worship and images of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and the closing down of a number of monastic institutions. Since 2011 the “Nine Haves” have been imposed in TAR, covering secular households and also monasteries, through which Tibetans are forced to fly the PRC flag on their rooftops and also display the portraits of the CCP’s great leaders (Woeser 2013). The CCP has launched a series of patriotic education campaigns within the monasteries, through which the state exerts pressure on the clergy to be loyal towards China (Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy 2008). However, religious fervor is strong among the lay Tibetan population, as evidenced by the efforts of the local population to rebuild the majority of religious institutions and the thronging together of thousands of devotees during major religious festivals, as evidenced in February 2016 in Tashikhyil Monastery, Labrang, Gansu, where thousands gathered to participate in the Monlam Chenmo or the Great Prayer Festival (International Campaign for Tibet 2016). Along with economic growth, a revival of religion in China in general and Tibetan Buddhism in particular in Tibet has taken place as a part of the undoing of the policies of the Cultural Revolution. This is evident in the massive resurgence of Tibetan Buddhist institutions, the monasteries, and the monks. For instance, in the Tibetan regions which had been integrated in the provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Yunnan, the total number of monasteries and monks in the 1990s had reached 1,550 monasteries and 99,694 monks (Kolas and Thowsen 2005, 54). The local population in Tibet is also very much involved in the resurgence of religion, especially through providing financial support to the clergy and the monasteries. For instance, in Tsochang Tibet Autonomous Prefecture (TAP), local people from one county have reportedly spent more than US$1.2 million on rebuilding monasteries (Kolas and Thowsen 2005, 54). In most cases, the local population also provides manual labor for the rebuilding of monasteries and temples in Tibet. Hence, much of the wealth accumulated by Tibetans has been redirected towards the rebuilding of religion in Tibet. Ironically, media reports in China have also focused on Han Chinese seeking happiness through embracing Tibetan Buddhism. According to Li Decheng, director of the Institute of Religious Studies within the China Tibetology Research Centre, young Han members and others are seen to be resorting to Tibetan Buddhism as a source of psychological comfort to those lost amid China’s rapid social and economic changes (Lin 2014). For example, Tibetan Buddhism had attracted around 2,000 Han Chinese disciples to Larung Gar Buddhist Institute in Serthar, Sichuan Province, which was subsequently seen as a threat by the CCP (Macleod 2011). This

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mirrors the spread of Buddhism in the West, which is deemed as a panacea to the problems that have emerged due to increased materialism. Tibet is depicted as a land where Han Chinese can find joy and happiness. The CCP has promoted tourism in Tibet by portraying Tibet and its culture as mystical, which has also turned Tibetan culture and the land into products of mass consumerism. Going to Tibet is seen as “cool” for Han tourists (Macleod 2011), who seek to discover themselves and gain joy and happiness. Wang Lixiong writes about large numbers of Han Chinese traveling throughout Tibet, visiting sacred mountains and lakes, and in many cases constituting pursuers of the exotic—treasure hunters who have appropriated Tibetan culture in search of their own happiness (Wang and Shakya 2009, 32). With tourism being one of the pillar industries in Tibet, the party state has attempted to turn Tibet more into a zone of happiness for mainland Han Chinese who seek solace from their fast-paced materialist life. However, many of the same tourists visiting Tibet, through their social media messages, have highlighted the disparate security conditions in Tibet, referring to the militarization of the region and its people. These messages on the Chinese social messaging site Weibo counter the portrayal by the CCP of Tibetans being happy (International Campaign for Tibet 2013).

Conclusion The Chinese state and its propaganda organs are keen to identify the numerous socioeconomic benefits their development programs have brought to Tibet as the source of happiness among the Tibetan population. Economic development in Tibet facilitated by the state forms the main source of legitimacy by the party-state, and constitutes the ruling group’s public transcript inside Tibet. From the perspective of the Chinese state, it is economic development and material growth which leads to happiness of its governed population. This focus on economic growth and resulting improvement of material benefits to the population mirrors the Communist Party’s approach to happiness in the 1950s, when visual propaganda material also linked increased material comfort with an increased happiness of the people. As Wielander has shown in the preceding chapter, this focus on material gains alone has now shifted in the party’s discourse on happiness as far as the general (more developed) Chinese population is concerned, where focus has shifted onto the spiritual aspect of happiness. In Tibet—still lagging behind in development—improvements in the population’s socioeconomic situation trump all other concerns. Previous discourse rooted in historic materialism has now changed, but the principle approach remains: Tibet is backward and requires Han Chinese help in order to improve its material situation. However, for Tibetans—as for the young Chinese people writing in the 1950s— happiness constitutes more than prosperity, which has been emphasized by a number of media reports as shown above. Clearly, Tibetan spiritual culture, including the

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values and rituals of Tibetan Buddhism and the teachings of the Dalai Lama, are of great importance, and much of the newly created material wealth is in fact spent on the regeneration and rebuilding of their religion. Hence, we see the presence of strong alternative ideas and sources of happiness among Tibetans, which stand in contrast to the public transcript on happiness. Much of the alternative discourse is based on Tibetan culture, especially Tibetan Buddhism. This hidden transcript also manifests itself in the infrapolitics of the subordinated and desperate, expressed through protests and, tragically, through fatal self-immolations. From the perspective of the Han Chinese population, Tibet may indeed look like a “happy” place. Most Han Chinese can only dream of the type of welfare support in the form of free healthcare and education, which Tibetans are enjoying as a result of the “Aid Tibet” projects. Indeed, the stripping away of the type of social security enjoyed before the marketization of these aspects in the 1990s is considered a major cause of unhappiness in the various happiness surveys of China. At the same time, many among China’s emerging middle classes who enjoy high levels of material comfort are finding Tibetan Buddhism in their search for spiritual equilibrium. Therefore, viewed from a distance, Tibet may present itself as a desirable place, whose population should be envied. The CCP through its public transcript on Tibet is exploiting this in the hope to shore up legitimacy for its Tibet policy both in Tibet and in China. It is, however, a risky strategy on the part of the Chinese government. Many of those keen to witness Tibetan happiness firsthand discover that the lived reality of Tibetans does not match the rosy image painted by the party-state.

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Tibet and Happiness in Chinese Media Discourses 61 China Daily.com. 2013. “People’s Role Vital in Chinese Dream.” China Daily, March 25, 2013. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2013-03/25/ content_16341585.htm. China Tibetnews.cn. 2012a. “Happy Family Project Launched in Tibet.” China Tibet News, July 26, 2012. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/7888864.html. China Tibetnews.cn. 2012b. “Lhasa: Ancient City of Happiness.” China Tibet News, November 19, 2012. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://english.chinatibetnews.com/Gallery/201211/19/content_1108893.htm. China Tibet News. 2012c. “Lhasa Ranks at Top of Residents’ Happiness List.” China Tibet News, August 21, 2012. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://chinatibet.people.com. cn/7917216.html. China Tibet News. 2013a. “Preferential Policies Bring Happiness to Tibetans.” China Tibet News, March 3, 2013. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://english.chinatibetnews.com/ news/2013-03/26/content_1200848.htm. China Tibet News. 2013b. “Tibet Ranks Top of Residents’ Happiness List.” China Tibet News. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://eng.tibet.cn/2012sy/tb/201303/t20130306_1865902. html. China Tibet Online. 2011. “Happiness of Head of a Village.” China Tibet Online, December 12, 2011. Accessed November 6, 2016. http://chinatibet.people.com.cn/96069/7672792. html. China Tibet Online. 2012. “Better Livelihoods Contribute to Lhasa as ‘Happiest City.’” China’s Tibet, March 12, 2012. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://eng.tibetmagazine.net/ news/201203/t20120314_2469947.htm. China Tibet Online. 2013a. “A Tibetan Professor’s View of Happiness: Boao.” China Tibet News, April 12, 2013. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://chinatibet.people.com. cn/8205848.html. China Tibet Online. 2013b. “A Village of Happiness by Lhasa River.” Tibet Online.com, February 7, 2013. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://en.tibetol.cn/01/04/2013/12/ 201307/t1333830.htm. China Tibet Online. 2013c. “National Investments Significantly Improve the Life of Tibetan Monks.” Tibet.cn, November 18, 2013. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://eng1.tibet. cn/2010jj/xm/201311/t20131118_1951163_1.html. China Tibet Online. 2014. “People in Tibet Never Commit Self Immolations: Tibetologists.” Tibet Online.cn, November 4, 2014. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://en.tibetol. cn/01/02/201404/t1387084.htm. China Tibet Online. 2016. “A Tibetan Village’s Journey to Happiness.” China Tibet Online, October 25, 2016. Accessed November 6, 2016. http://eng.tibet.cn/economy/ news/1477373576648.shtml. Dossier Tibet. 2012. “Tibet: Leaflets Calling for Tibetan Freedom Appeared in Driru.” Accessed November 6, 2016. http://www.dossiertibet.it/news/tibet-leaflets-callingtibetan-freedom-appeared-driru. Filming for Tibet. 2008. Leaving Fear Behind. Accessed November 6, 2016. http://www.leavingfearbehind.com/projects/leaving-fear-behind. Foolsmountainblog.com. 2009. “Chinese Think Tank Investigation Report of 3.14 Incident in Tibet.” China Digital Times, May 20, 2009. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/chinese-think-tank-investigation-report-of-314-incident-in-tibet/.

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His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet. “Compassion and the Individual.” Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.dalailama.com/messages/compassion# Human Rights Watch. 2012. “China: Tibetan Monasteries Placed under Direct Rule.” Human Rights Watch, March 16, 2012. Accessed October 6, 2016. https://www.hrw. org/news/2012/03/16/china-tibetan-monasteries-placed-under-direct-rule. International Campaign for Tibet. 2013. “Has Life Here Always Been Like This? Chinese Microbloggers Reveal Systemic Militarization in Tibet.” International Campaign for Tibet. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.savetibet.org/newsroom/has-life-herealways-been-like-this/. International Campaign for Tibet. 2016. “Thousands of Tibetans Gather across Tibet to Mark Prayer Festival; Lockdown of TAR to Foreign Tourists.” International Campaign for Tibet. February 25, 2016. Accessed October 6, 2016. https://www.savetibet.org/ thousands-of-tibetans-gather-across-tibet-to-mark-prayer-festival-lockdown-of-tarto-foreign-tourists/. June Yao News. 2015. “Wang Junjin Is Reelected as Vice President of the China Glory Society.” Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.en.juneyao.com/q223/5375.jhtml. Kolas, Ashild, and Monika P. Thowsen. 2005. On the Margins of Tibet: Cultural Survival on the Sino Tibetan Frontier. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Lin, Meilian. 2014. “Plateau Enlightenment.” Global Times. April 23, 2014. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/856367.shtml. MacLeod, Calum. 2011. “In China, Tensions Rising over Buddhism’s Quiet Resurgence.” USA TODAY, February 2, 2011. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/religion/story/2011-11-01/tibetan-buddhism-china-communisttension/51034604/1. Phayul.com. 2008. “China Launches Renewed ‘Patriotic Education’ Campaign across All Sections in Tibet.” Phayul.com, April 24, 2008. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www. phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=20881. Phayul.com. 2012. “‘May the Sun of Happiness Shine on Tibet’: A Self Immolator’s Last Words.” Phayul.com, November 29, 2012. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www. phayul.com/news/article.aspx?id=32571. Radio Free Asia. 2016a. “China Steps up Demolition, Evictions at Larung Gar Buddhist Center.” RFA, September 19, 2016. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://www.rfa.org/ english/news/tibet/china-steps-up-demolition-09192016141654.html. Radio Free Asia. 2016b. “More Suicides Reported in Protest of Destruction at Sichuan’s Larung Gar.” RFA August 29, 2016. Accessed November 8, 2016. http://www.rfa.org/ english/news/tibet/suicides-08292016143614.html. Schwartz, Ronald. 1994. Circle of Protest: Political Ritual in the Tibetan Uprising. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, James. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Shakya, Tsering. 1999. The Dragon in Land of Snows. New York: Columbia University Press. Shiyong. 2015. “Pleasant Memories of Shoton.” xzxw.com, January 31, 2015. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://english.xzxw.com/ly/Routes/201501/t20150131_291524.html. Shoton Festival. 2012. “Tibetan Tourism in 2012 Themed Happiness.” ShotonFestival. com. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://eng.tibet.cn/2012zt/2012zlnzt/jrly/201202/ t20120220_1640588.html; http://es.shotonfestival.com/news/6.html.

Tibet and Happiness in Chinese Media Discourses 63 Singh, Bhavna. 2012. “Tibet and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, September 7, 2012. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.ipcs.org/article/ india-the-world/tibet-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness-3716.html. State Grid News. 2012. “Brightness Shines all over Tibetan Plateau.” State Grid Corporation of China, December 24, 2012. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.sgcc.com.cn/ ywlm/mediacenter/corporatenews/11/285789.shtml. The Economist. 2009. “Open Constitution Closed—The State Cracks Down on Civil Society.” The Economist, July 23, 2009. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.economist.com/ node/14098751. Voice of America. 2012. “Five Tibetans Self Immolate Today across Tibetan Regions.” VOA, November 7, 2012. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://www.voatibetanenglish. com/a/1541162.html. VTibet.cn. 2013. “Good Policies Bring Tibetan Happiness.” VTibet.cn, March 27, 2013. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://www.vtibet.com/en/news_1746/ctbnews/201310/ t20131011_124165.html. Wang, Lixiong, and Tsering Shakya. 2009. The Struggle for Tibet. London: Verso. Woeser. 2013. “Have the Chinese Government’s Tibet Policies Been Adjusted?” The Tibetan Political Review, December 6, 2013. Accessed October 6, 2016. https://sites.google.com/ site/tibetanpoliticalreview/articles/havethechinesegovernment%E2%80%99stibetpolici esbeenadjusted. Xinhua. 2011. “Tibetan Manor Tells Story of Past Hardship, Present Happiness.” Xinhua, July 18, 2011. Accessed October 27, 2016. http://english.chinatibetnews.com/news/201107/18/content_743288.htm. Xinhua. 2013. “Development and Progress of Tibet—October 2013.” CCTV.com, October 22, 2013. Accessed October 6, 2016. http://english.cntv.cn/20131022/103080.shtml. Xu, Zhiyong. 2017. To Build a Free China: A Citizen’s Journey. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Yeh, Emily. 2006. “Tropes of Indolence and the Cultural Politics of Development in Lhasa, Tibet.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 97 (3): 593–612. Yeh, Emily. 2013. Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zhu, Ying et al. 2015. Transforming Rural Communities in China and Beyond: Community Entrepreneurship and Enterprises, Infrastructure Development and Investment Modes. Switzerland: Springer International.

3 Happiness “with a Chinese Taste” An Interpretive Analysis of CCTV’s 2014 Spring Festival Gala’s Public Service Announcement (PSA) “Chopsticks” (Kuaizi pian) Giovanna Puppin Introduction: Happiness and Advertising in Contemporary China The first studies on happiness—intended as the object of the newly emerged academic discipline of happiness studies—with specific reference to China demonstrated that, despite the country’s massive improvement in living standards since the economic reform and opening up in 1978, its people have actually been made unhappy by rising material aspirations and growing inequalities (Brockmann et al. 2009; Knight and Gunatilaka 2010). This confirms that “the paradox of happiness” (Layard 2005) applies also to post-Maoist China. As a result of the international reach of “the happiness turn” (Ahmed 2010, 3), China—like many other countries—witnessed the proliferation of “discursive and embodied practices of happiness” (Zhang 2014, 37), including the awakening of an interest in positive psychology, as well as the increase of happiness-related TV programs and publications targeting the entire Chinese population (Yang 2014a; Zhang 2014). In these TV programs, happiness becomes “commodified” as “part of a larger marketing strategy by the party-governed media—that is, using happiness as the ultimate goal to stimulate consumption, for example, Coca Cola’s 2009 Open Happiness campaign in China” (Yang 2014b, 45). Similar commercial slogans that make an explicit use of happiness appeals and claims are revealing of one of the basic mechanisms of advertising, in which the product’s “own symbolic story” (McFall 2004, 38) is intertwined with a story of happiness. Most of the time, this closes on a happy ending: [A]dvertising tells a story of desire fulfilled. The viewer is presented with a vision of happiness where the acquisition of goods and services, or perhaps more specifically brands . . . will allow the consumer to attain a similar level of delight to that depicted. (Miller 2015, 97)

In light of this, one could argue that advertising is a cultural form that, par excellence, follows the basic pattern of what, in her cultural critique of the imperative to

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be happy, Sara Ahmed refers to as “the promise of happiness,” according to which “if you have this or have that, or if you do this or do that, then happiness will follow” (Ahmed 2010, 29). In advertising, commodities are endowed with the power to bring instant happiness and gratification, which in turn are promoted as achievable through the purchase and consumption of the products (or services) being offered. This seems to fit perfectly the capitalist discourse of advertising. What about China, though, a country that still aims “at differentiating Chinese (socialist) advertising from Western (capitalist) advertising” (Puppin 2014, 178)? Given that the country has historically had “a love/hate relationship” (177) with advertising, the situation might be slightly different.

What (Advertising) You See Is What (Happiness) You Get Despite a general lack of studies looking specifically at the relationship between advertising and happiness in contemporary China, one of the numerous Chineselanguage books on the happiness index constitutes an interesting exception, as it includes a subchapter entitled “Advertising and Happiness” (guanggao yu xingfu 廣告與幸福), the opening paragraph of which reads as follows: My name is Over Top [in English], everything I wear is tailored. I am an adman: not bad, I pollute this world. I am the guy who is selling you rubbish, and makes you dream of the things you will never get: a deep blue sky and eternal feminine beauty; a perfect happiness adjusted with Photoshop [in English], a flawless image, and the coolest music track. After you saved money and finally managed to buy the car of your dreams—precisely the one I was promoting during the last sale—I make it become out-of-fashion. I am always trendier than you, farther ahead of you, and I always make you feel inferior. Luxury and glamour are lands that people will never reach. I defile you with the latest trend, and the good thing is that it never lasts and is always replaced by new trends. My sacred duty is just to make you greedy. No one in our profession wants you to be happy, because happy people don’t consume. (Liang 2007, 203–4)1

(Un)surprisingly, no information is provided on the source of this quotation. The author of the book—an economist with a doctoral degree from Fudan University—uses it to support his main argument: “Happy people don’t consume or . . . people who crave for consumption are not happy at all” (Liang 2007, 204), and this results from the fact that “advertising makes us feel unsatisfied and therefore influences our happiness” (ibid.). The author of this disillusioned passage was surely inspired by Layard’s seminal book, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (2005), in Chapter 10 of which he turns his attention to advertising and poses this crucial question: “But does the advertising experience make us happier?” (159). His answer is no, and the reason he 1. All translations from Chinese to English are mine.

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provides is that advertising, by creating new needs and exploiting the assumption that people need to conform and to want more, “can have such a negative effect on the happiness of those it puts pressure on” (161). In line with Layard (2005), Liang (2007) points to the discrepancy between what we see in advertising and what we actually get: people are mistaken if they think that the accumulation of goods and material possessions is the shortcut to happiness. It appears evident that advertising actually does not and cannot make us happy. It is instead a symptom of “the crisis in happiness” (Ahmed 2010, 7). The happy ending we were expecting now sounds more like “a narrative of disappointment,” as “the accumulation of wealth has not meant the accumulation of happiness” (ibid.). Due to the rapid and drastic changes in society which have been brought about by economic reforms, this scenario might be even worse in post-Maoist China, where there is a “widely spread unhappiness resulting from assaulted desires for ‘being rich and glorious’” (Zhang 2014, 38), that even has the potential to destabilize the “neoliberal practice of governance through creating ‘desiring subjects’” (ibid.). Ultimately, China shares the major threats to happiness of the West—namely, “capitalist culture” and “pressures of consumerism” (Frawley 2015, 170)—but the country might react to them differently than Western countries do. My main argument here is that it is precisely the “unhappiness potential” of advertising highlighted above that provides a new opportunity for the Chinese authorities to revamp advertising criticism, which “originates from the center to defend the dominant socialist ideology” (Gao 2003). This is what activates the ongoing ambitious project of happiness promotion carried out by the government and the media (Kong 2014; Yang 2014a). In this chapter, I identify the main tool for the official promotion of statesanctioned happiness in China as a (sub)genre of advertising that is made “to fully realize the ideological role of advertising . . . and give priority to social effects, rather than economic effects” (Gao 2003): gongyi guanggao 公益廣告 (public service advertising, hereafter referred to as PSA). PSA plays a crucial role in the specific context of contemporary China, where “the sermon of socialist spiritual civilization (shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming) survived the growth of a seemingly overpowering material civilization” (Lewis 2002, 140). The main research question that guides this chapter is: What are the happinessrelated cultural representations and signifying practices activated by public service announcements (PSAs), which by definition do not sell a product or commodity as such, but instead promote public goods such as “happiness”? In order to answer this question, I turn my attention to a new category of PSAs which are broadcast during a national media event which has been metaphorically labeled as a “happy gathering” (Zhao 1998, 43): China Central Television’s (CCTV) Spring Festival Gala. After introducing the context and main themes addressed by these PSAs, I will investigate a case study that was purposively selected for its explicit reference to happiness: “Chopsticks” (Kuaizi pian 筷子篇).

Happiness “with a Chinese Taste” 67

In terms of methodology, I will adopt an interpretive approach to textual analysis (Baym 2012). I will first provide a close reading of how signs are chosen and organized in this PSA, what their links are to the context, and what their intended meanings are. Following this, I will develop an argument about their sociocultural significance by drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2010) theory of happiness. If we think of “media content as a text (perhaps a textbook) that offers lessons in how to understand the social, cultural and political worlds within which we live our daily lives” (Baym 2012, 324), then an insightful reading of “Chopsticks” will not only help us to understand the text itself, but also the issue of happiness of which the text speaks.

Promoting Happiness on Top Prime Time: PSAs and the CCTV Gala Gongyi guanggao (gongyi meaning “public service,” guanggao meaning “advertising”) is a neologism that started to spread from the late 1980s and became the subject of dedicated books from the late 1990s onwards (e.g., Gao 1999; Pan 2001; Ni 2003). In its strict definition, it refers to “the advertising works or operations launched by an organization or an individual, with no profit aims, and whose contents promote the safeguard of public morality, political principles, and public interest” (Liu and He 2014, 4). The origins of Chinese PSA are usually traced back either to 1986, when the first TV PSA on water conservation was aired by Guiyang Television, or to 1987, when CCTV began to broadcast its daily PSA program Wide and Spread (Guang er gao zhi 廣而告之) (Puppin 2005, 35). Although the birth of PSA in China was understood as “spontaneous” (Gao 1999, 50), it actually perfectly met the authorities’ need to counterbalance commercial advertising’s tendency to promote an excessive “materialist civilization” (wuzhi wenming 物質文明). As a result, PSA was promoted by the Chinese government as a tool to help with the building of a “socialist spiritual civilization” (shehui zhuyi jingshen wenming 社會主義精神文明), which refers to a kind of ethical and moral code that includes patriotism, collectivism, and socialism, but also professional ethics and family values, as well as revolutionary ideals, good education, and a sense of discipline (quoted in Lewis 2002, 141; see also Barmé 2013, xvii–xix). Throughout the years since they first began to be broadcast, the themes of Chinese PSAs have developed from the narrow to the broad, and now fall into the categories of: social education (e.g., job morality), public service (e.g., AIDS prevention), environmental protection (e.g., conservation of natural resources), charity and aid (e.g., disaster relief), as well as government policies (e.g., fighting corruption) (Zhang 2004, 22–34). The advertising strategies employed are also much subtler and more symbolic—especially if compared to old-style propaganda—and use soft sell/emotional appeals in order to gain empathy from the audience (Cheng and Chan 2009, 208).

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What has remained constant, on the other hand, is the high involvement of the government. PSA campaigns are usually organized jointly by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), the authority in charge of advertising, and the Office of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Guidance Commission on Building a Spiritual Civilization (or Wenming Ban 文明辦, WMB), which works under the aegis of the Propaganda Department, also known as the Publicity Department (Puppin 2009a; Stockmann 2011, 857–59). National media also play a key role in PSA activities: not only do they communicate directly with the audience at home, but they also build a positive image of being socially responsible (Liu and He 2014, 68–71). In particular, CCTV, the national state-owned TV station, has been promoting and supporting PSA campaigns right from their beginnings (Wang and Shu 2000), and has enjoyed the favored status of “civilized unit” (wenming danwei 文明單位) ever since. Nonetheless, the situation has changed over the past few years. A significant novelty is that, from 2013 onwards, PSAs started to be broadcast during CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala (Chunjie lianhuan wanhui 春節聯歡晚會, hereafter “gala”) (Guanggao daguan 2013, 44). It is worth remembering that the first gala was broadcast by CCTV on Chinese New Year’s Eve in 1983, and still constitutes a fitting example of the interaction between state and market forces in the realm of the media. On the one hand, it is highly ideological and packages political messages in an attractive and entertaining way—the quintessence of edutainment. On the other hand, as well as having the highest TV ratings, the gala also has the highest advertising rates and has been characterized by an increasing commercialization (Zhao 1998; Lu 2009). This trend apparently reached a peak in 2011, when the audience made a plea that became quite popular, as it exemplified the level of desperation reached by the viewers: “Please don’t broadcast the gala during the advertising break” (qing bu yao zai guanggao qijian chabo Chunwan 請不要在廣告期間插播春晚) (Wang 2011). As a response to this excessive commercialization, Ha Wen—who directed the gala in 2012—promised a “zero advertising gala” (ling guanggao Chunwan 零廣告春晚) (ibid.). This shift has to be understood in light of the priority for the Chinese leadership—headed by President Xi Jinping—to promote a common value system aimed at uniting and mobilizing the Chinese population, as exemplified by the slogan “Chinese dream” (Zhongguo meng 中國夢) and the concept of the “core socialist values” (shehui zhuyi hexin jiazhiguan 社會主義核心價值觀), launched during the Eighteenth CPC Congress, which was held in November 2012.2 In line with this new political agenda, the messages conveyed by the gala shifted “from ideological indoctrination to moral civic education” (Feng 2016, 89). 2. In President Xi’s words, the Chinese dream is both a national dream and an individual dream: it refers to the collective aspiration of implementing the great rejuvenation of China, as well as the personal aspiration of the Chinese people to achieve happiness. The twelve Core socialist values consist of: prosperity, democracy, propriety, harmony, freedom, equality, justice, rule of law, patriotism, dedication, integrity, and friendship.

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Not by chance, the following year saw the birth of a new category of PSAs, known as CCTV gala PSAs (Yangshi Chunwan gongyi guanggao 央視春晚公益 廣告). This advertising maneuver was aimed at restoring the public service function of the gala, and (re)confirming CCTV as a responsible medium, despite its having decreased its funding for PSA activities (Puppin 2009b; Li 2016). Bearing in mind that “CCTV loses approximately 20 million yuan of profit per month by broadcasting PSAs instead of selling this valuable time for commercial advertising” (Stockmann 2011, 862), it appears clear that CCTV was trying to (re)gain brand reputation by sacrificing the advertising revenue of top prime time. An attentive viewing of all the CCTV gala PSAs that were broadcast from 2013 to 2016 revealed that they mainly portray families who reunite for the Chinese New Year. As is evident from the synopses (Table 3.1), a feeling of happiness is present and promoted—more or less explicitly—by all PSAs, in perfect alignment with their festive broadcast scheduling. Nevertheless, just one of them explicitly uses the word “happiness” (xingfu 幸福) in its closing slogan: the 2014 PSA “Chopsticks.”

Table 3.1 Titles and synopses of CCTV gala PSAs, 2013–2016 Year

Title

Synopsis

2013

1. The belated new dress (Chilai de xinyi pian 遲來的 新衣篇)

A migrant worker couple leaves the city traveling by motorbike and finally reaches their home village, where they reunite with the whole family for the Chinese New Year.

2. The uneasiness of getting married (Guomen de tante pian 過門的 忐忑篇)

For the Chinese New Year, a migrant worker couple travels to the man’s home village, where his girlfriend meets his mother. The couple then gets married.

3. A reunion sixty-three years later (Liushisan nian hou de tuanyuan pian 63年後的團 圓篇)

An old man and his granddaughter travel from Taiwan to mainland China, where they celebrate the New Year with the rest of the family, after having been apart for many years.

4. The flavor of home A young Chinese man leaves Africa in order to go (Jiaxiang de ziwei pian 家鄉的 back home for the Chinese New Year. 滋味篇) 2014

5. Thanks to an extraordinary A number of ordinary Chinese people strive you to overcome hardships in order to fulfill their (Ganxie bu pingfan de ziji pian dreams. 感謝不平凡的自己篇) (continued on p. 70)

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Table 3.1 (continued) Year

Title

Synopsis

2014

6. Chopsticks (Kuaizi pian 筷子篇)

A variety of families across China reunite to celebrate the Chinese New Year and eat together using chopsticks.

7. The Chinese New Year unites the world (Zhongguo nian rang shijie xianglian pian 中國年讓世界 相連篇)

A number of foreigners celebrate the Chinese New Year in their own countries.

8. Names (Mingzi pian 名字篇)

Different Chinese people introduce themselves and explain the meanings of their names through some personal anecdotes.

9. Back in time (Shiguan daoliu pian 時光倒 流篇)

Different scenes depict how life would be if one could go back in time to change things, particularly by spending more time with one’s parents.

10. Just looking forward to today (Zhi pan zheyi tian pian 只盼 這一天篇)

A young boy living in the countryside waits and counts the days until his parents, who work in the city, return home for the New Year.

11. Chinese New Year, Chinese characters (Zhongguo nian Zhongguo zi pian 中國年中國字篇)

People all over the world and from different ethnic minorities in China celebrate the Chinese New Year.

2015

2016

12. Father’s journey An old man decides to leave his village and travels (Fuqin de lücheng pian 父親的 to the city to meet his son, in order to spend New Year’s Eve with him. 旅程篇) 13. The dream shines into the A teacher in the countryside is grateful for what village his father taught him, and is happy to use it to (Mengxiang zhaojin guxiang help the community to thrive. pian 夢想照進故鄉篇) 14. The door (Men pian 門篇)

From the countryside to big cities, in China and elsewhere, the door of one’s home is something that plays an important role in everybody’s life.

15. Luggage (Xingli pian 行李篇)

People from all over China are depicted while they are packing in order to bring some of their treasured belongings to their families for the Chinese New Year.

Sources:  Guanggao daguan 2013; igongyi 2014; igongyi 2015; Chunwan CNTV 2016.

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Analyzing Happiness in the CCTV Gala PSA “Chopsticks” “Chopsticks” was jointly produced by CCTV’s Advertising Center and the advertising agency McCann Shanghai.3 The storyboard was chosen from more than a hundred creative briefs which were submitted to CCTV by more than ten advertising agencies in September 2013, when the brainstorming process for the 2014 gala PSAs began (Feng 2014). This Chinese-language PSA was first screened in its 1.5-minute version around 8:40 p.m. on January 30, 2014, during the live broadcast of the gala, which was watched on television by some 704 million viewers (CCTV 2014).4 The interpretive analysis below is based on the five-minute full-length version that was circulated online afterwards.5 In order to overcome one of the main difficulties in the analysis of audiovisual texts—that is to say, the transcription on paper of what is seen on the screen and heard on the soundtrack—I will break down the narrative of this PSA into main sequences and organize them into a table, including both visual and aural/verbal languages (Table 3.2, see pp. 72–76). The main protagonists depicted in this official promotion of state-sanctioned happiness are all “ordinary people” (laobaixing 老百姓), who live in rural areas, wealthier cities and modest urban settings, or even abroad—in a Chinatown. This selection aims at being representative of China’s population, but is also the result of a recent trend. PSA is not involved in the logic of the consumption of products, but rather transmits positive values and models of correct behavior, and therefore it should not be directed at a specific target, but at society as a whole. Consequently, it should be inspired by the feelings of the common people, use their language, and showcase their personal stories and experiences (Ni 2003, 228–29; Zhang 2004, 200–203). In line with the other 2014 gala PSAs, “Chopsticks” intends to emphasize the diversity of China through the choice of different paradigmatic elements, from linguistic accents to geographical areas, from family generations and interpersonal relations, to regional cuisines, to name just a few. A closer look, though, reveals that all the protagonists are Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China. There is no representative of any of the fifty-five officially recognized minorities. Beyond sharing the same Han ethnicity, the protagonists of this PSA have something else in common: they are all members of a family (in a broad sense), and are portrayed as such, rather than as individuals. Families lie at the heart of each sequence, and are constructed as going beyond geographical boundaries (urban/ rural, China/overseas), across generations (grandchildren, parents, grandparents), 3. McCann Shanghai is part of McCann Worldgroup, a global network of advertising agencies, which belongs to the Interpublic Group. In China, McCann is present in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. 4. The four-hour long 2014 gala is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co_Qhzynkr8 (“Chopsticks” starts at 46’50). 5. This version is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UB5wE3xhQuk.

S2

S1

Sequence

A family of three comes together around the dining table of a flat. The mother teaches her daughter how to use chopsticks, though initially the little girl is reluctant and wants to use the spoon. She then gets upset, cries, and ultimately wants to give up. Thanks to her mother’s explanation and encouragement, the little girl keeps trying until she succeeds and enjoys her food.

(continued on p. 73)

[Melodic piano notes, crescendo] [Written]: Shanghai, Changning Mother (M) [to the family]: “New Year’s Eve dinner is ready!” [to her daughter]: “Today mom will teach you how to use chopsticks, alright? No, don’t use the spoon . . .” Daughter (D): “I can’t pick up the rice . . .” M: “Hold them like this . . .” D: “I can’t do it . . .” M: “Try again, don’t be anxious . . .” D: “But I can’t pick it up . . .” M: “Come on, look here . . .” D [crying]: “What can I do?” M: “Let’s try again, no problem . . . We are Chinese and every Chinese person can use chopsticks, you know? You want to hold them? Good . . . well done! You picked it up, see? Are you happy? Eat up now . . . chopsticks are actually easy to use, aren’t they?” [Written]: Inheritance

Grandmother [from the kitchen]: “Food is almost ready, alright?” Grandfather [from the dining table]: “Alright, alright” [Written]: Canton, Xiguan [Grandfather makes funny and loud gustatory sounds; baby starts to cry] Grandfather [to the baby]: “Let’s try this one . . . good? Yummy, isn’t it?” [Melodic piano notes] [Written]: Guidance

Aural/verbal language

“Chopsticks” (5’)

In a flat, a grandfather lets his grandchild taste some Chinese sauces from a pair of chopsticks, while the grandmother is cooking. After tasting the vinegar, the baby starts to cry, but when offered a sweeter sauce, he/she clearly enjoys it, and happily returns his/her grandfather’s smile.

Visual language

Table 3.2 Main sequences of the gala PSA “Chopsticks,” 2014

S4

S3

A young man walks into a country village, making his way through thick snow. Somebody on the street recognizes him and greets him. The man enters a house, hugs his mother and kisses her on the cheeks. Both of them are visibly moved. While his mother is cooking, the grown-up son steals some food with his chopsticks and eats it before dinner is ready, in a rather childish way. They look at each other and laugh.

In a historical roundhouse in Fujian, some women are washing a bunch of wooden chopsticks and getting ready to cook, while some other adults are setting off firecrackers for the children. As soon as the food is ready, a little boy sits down at one of the round tables. While he is trying to reach the food with his chopsticks, his father stops him. They first let the grandfather make some wishes, then everybody happily begins to eat—including the little boy.

Table 3.2 (continued)

(continued on p. 74)

[Melodic music sung by a woman] [Written]: Jiamusi, Dongsheng Passer-by [to a young man]: “Hey, you are back!” Son (S) [to his mother]: “Mom, I am home! It’s three years I haven’t been back, I missed you like crazy . . .” Mother (M): “Then you should stay longer, this time!” S: “I will . . .” M: “I knew you would love to eat this” [Son looks down and giggles] [Written]: Caring

[Melodic string music] [Written]: Fujian, Yongding Father [to his son]: “Wait a moment! You have to let grandpa eat first . . .” Grandfather: [to the whole table]: “I wish you all the best, let’s celebrate the New Year!” [Written]: Propriety

S6

S5

In a village, a succession of cheerful people passes by in front of a man and greets him. He is alone and looks rather sad, until he is implored to join his neighbor’s family celebrations. While they are sitting and eating all together, the man gets emotional and cries.

From the window of his apartment, an old man looks at the Chinese New Year celebrations taking place in the busy street below, and smiles. He looks at an album of pictures and talks to someone on the phone (in English). He then burns some incense sticks and places a pair of chopsticks and bowls in front of a small shrine. He smiles, makes some wishes, and bows.

Table 3.2 (continued)

(continued on p. 75)

[Melodic piano and string music] [Written]: Sichuan, Xuanhan Passers-by [to an old man]: “Happy New Year, Uncle Wang!” Neighbor (N): “Hey, Lao Wang, come and eat at our place!” Lao Wang (LW): “There’s food at home . . . ” N: “It’s New Year, come on in!” LW: “Really, I am cooking . . . ” N: “I know, it doesn’t matter. One more person, one more pair of chopsticks. Come on, don’t be polite!” N’s wife: “Lao Wang, no need to be polite, it’s just a pair of chopsticks! Today is New Year, we are very happy!” [Written]: Neighborliness

[Sound of firecrackers] [Melodic piano notes] [Written]: San Francisco, Chinatown Man (M) [speaking in English on the phone]: “Ok, I see you guys tonight. Bye bye!” M [to a small shrine]: “Dad, Mom: it’s New Year. I wish you a Happy New Year!” [Written]: Longing

(continued on p. 76)

[Written]: Beijing, Dongcheng District Grandmother (G) [to two relatives who are preparing the table]: “Here, let me check . . . good!” G [to grandchild]: “Soar to great heights!” Grandchild (C) [to G]: “Prosperity through the years!” G [to C]: “Have a bumper grain harvest!” C [to G]: “Long life!” [Written]: Gratitude

S8

In a traditional courtyard, an old woman is supervising the preparations for New Year’s dinner. She takes some expensive chopsticks out of a cupboard and places them on the table. While all the family are eating, the grandmother and her grandchild compete on their knowledge of traditional idiomatic expressions, while they are passing food into each other’s bowls and making auspicious wishes.

[Melodic music sung by a woman, musical notes] [Written]: Jinan, Licheng Woman (W): “Food is ready . . .” Man (M): “Today was a very busy day . . .” W [looking at the small pair of chopsticks and caressing his head]: “You are a fool!” M [to himself]: “In two months I will become a father.” [Melodic music sung by a woman] It is evening, in a city. While a young man is making deliveries outside, [Written]: Expectation a young woman is preparing dinner at home. Once he gets home, he gives her a little gift: a small pair of chopsticks. She caresses his head and he caresses her pregnant belly. They both look at her belly, then look at each other and smile.

S7

Table 3.2 (continued)

S9

Flashbacks to a variety of shots from the previous sequences. The two neighbors of S6 look up into the sky and smile, while firecrackers explode during the celebration of the Chinese New Year.

Table 3.2 (continued) [Written]: A pair of chopsticks has been carrying the emotions of the Chinese for thousands of years Rich in taste, rich in flavor, Happiness with a Chinese taste Unite the strength, transmit civility CCTV Advertising Center

Happiness “with a Chinese Taste” 77

beyond traditional family ties, and—more importantly—beyond space/time limits of our biological life. This is in perfect alignment with the main feature of the gala, intended as a “carefully orchestrated ‘happy gathering’” (Zhao 1998, 43) that “induces an instant sense of national belonging that transcends both immediate families and narrow localities” (ibid.). The exemplary versions of families proposed here fully conform with the dominant ideology of an extended, heterosexual, Confucian family—no alternative family (of any kind) features in this PSA. In The Promise of Happiness, which I have mentioned previously, Ahmed (2010) argues that “in wishing for happiness we wish to be associated with happiness, which means to be associated with its associations” (2). In light of this, it becomes evident that the “family” is here constructed and promoted as a happiness association: being associated with family leads to happiness. This family-related happiness is strictly intertwined with “the values related to the traditional New Year, namely the symbolic meaning of spring and family gathering and reunion” (Wang 2010, 395). But there seems to be more to it than this, as explained by Gao (2016): The creators of “Chopsticks” haven’t implanted the macro-theme of China’s national sentiment in a direct and rigid way into the PSA. On the contrary, they departed from the concept of “family” in order to guide the audience in the transfer of the individual feeling related to a “small family” into the collectivist feeling of the “big family”—the Chinese nation. (194)

This PSA strengthens family-centrism, but also unites families into the metaphorical big “happy family” of the Chinese nation: belonging to a family means happiness, belonging to China equally means happiness. In a rather subtle way, being Chinese is also constructed as a happiness association. From a stylistic point of view, the atmosphere of the entire PSA is intimate and familiar. All sequences portray family dining and communal eating in rather informal settings, and feature private dialogues. There is also a widespread use of interior shots and extreme close-ups of the protagonists, many of which focus on the sign “chopsticks.” As suggested by the name of the PSA itself, this sign plays a crucial role and is significant on several levels. On the connotational level, chopsticks are linked to the long history of China and of its food culture: they are the example par excellence of the cultural differences between China and the West (Wang 2008; Perry 2013, 34). Precisely because chopsticks convey an idea of “Chineseness,” they are a recurrent sign in national advertising campaigns. Their use seems to meet the recent call from the Chinese authorities, supported also by academics and advertisers, to develop “creative advertising with Chinese elements” (Zhongguo yuansu chuangyi guanggao 中國元 素創意廣告), a protectionist turn that came right after China’s entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001 (Puppin 2014).

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The creative idea behind the choice of this multimodal metaphor is that chopsticks transmit not only food but also emotions. As explained by the advertising creative team in an interview, “In a pair of chopsticks, there is a compression of love and emotions of all Chinese around the world” (McCann-Erickson 2014, 102). The PSA “Chopsticks” employs an “emotional creativity” (qinggan chuangyi 情感創意) in that it has the power to move the audience (Li 2016) and, therefore, it has to be contextualized in light of the increasing presence of emotions in Chinese popular media (Kong 2014). Let us now take a closer look at each sequence, in order, and try to uncover the intended meanings and sociocultural significance of “chopsticks.” In the first sequence, the newborn baby is fed by his/her grandfather with a pair of chopsticks, but s/he is also introduced to the concept of “taste.” The latter is used both in its first acceptation (“the sensation of the palate, or the perception of the flavor of a given food or delicacy,” Vercelloni 2016, 5), but also in its figurative acceptation of “taste of life” (rensheng baiwei 人生百味) (Duan 2015, 43). This reading is supported by the reactions of the baby in tasting the different sauces, ranging from disgust to delight—life is made up of bitterness (unhappiness) and sweetness (happiness). It is worth pointing out that it is thanks to the chopsticks that the grandfather acts as an educator. As the Chinese characters appearing on the screen at the end of the sequence explain, the grandfather provides “guidance” (qidi 啟迪) to the baby, developing the infant’s ability to discern good taste from bad, enjoyable experiences from negative ones. The happy ending of this sequence is visualized with the baby smiling after having achieved satisfaction—in this specific case, palatal happiness. In the second sequence, the little girl is learning how to eat independently with chopsticks. She is taught and told how to do it by her mother—another example of a cultural trainer. In China, the training in how to use chopsticks usually begins in childhood and instructions are normally provided at home, although this habit has been declining in more recent years (Wang 2015, 3). The choice of a similar family scene, on the paradigmatic level, attempts to revitalize a tradition that is based on cultural “inheritance” (chuancheng 傳承) and, for precisely this reason, should not be lost. Here, chopsticks are not just an indispensable utensil in daily life, but they become a metaphor for Chinese culture itself: the ability to use them is a prerequisite and synonym for being Chinese. There is a clear dynamic of shaming that recurs quite frequently in PSAs or, in Rutherford’s words “administrative advertising” (2000, 142). It is the fear of cultural unbelonging/exclusion implied by one of the sentences pronounced by her mother (“We are Chinese and every Chinese person can use chopsticks”) that provides the drive for the girl’s determination in learning how to use chopsticks, despite her initial difficulties. In the third sequence, there is an evident shift from urban to rural areas, from a family to a community lifestyle. The little boy is scolded by his father not only for being incapable of resisting the food, but also for not abiding by the social norm of

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showing respect and politeness towards the older generations—or, in other words, respecting social hierarchy. He is taught by authority—his father’s—to abide by the code of “propriety” (mingli 明禮). In this sense, the close-up on the father’s hand holding down his son’s little hand while he is trying to grasp the food and eat before the others is crucial. In light of the fact that in China “the notion of happiness or social harmony . . . has become affective in centralizing people’s attention towards projects of sustaining symbolic, social and political stability” (Yang 2014a, 5), one may argue that, in a similar way to the boy’s father, the party-state—which is interested in maintaining its authority—promotes values like this one, which do not contest social norms but, instead, keep the status quo. The fourth sequence is also set in a village, but it portrays another smaller family unit, made up of a mother and her grown-up son, who returns home after three years (possibly from a faraway place). For the first time in this PSA, chopsticks are depicted as a cooking utensil. In contrast to the fork and knife—the main cutlery items in the West—chopsticks are considered to be “maternal” (Barthes 1982, 16): by them, “food becomes no longer a prey to which one does violence (meat, flesh over which one does battle), but a substance harmoniously transferred” (ibid.). Visually, the sense of intimacy is conveyed through the scene in which the grownup son steals the food while his mother is cooking. The portrayal of the mother while she is preparing one of his favorite dishes is selected as an exemplary act of “caring” (guan’ai 關愛), which is aimed at closing the geographical and temporal distance that kept the two far apart. Aurally, the sound of chopsticks used to beat the eggs in a bowl evokes memories of the preparation of food at home, and amplifies the emotional resonance of this sequence.6 In the sequence that follows, the protagonist—an aged man—places two pairs of chopsticks next to two bowls, which are positioned under a small shrine. In line with the Buddhist tradition, this symbolizes paying respect and mourning the dead. Here, chopsticks are portrayed as a communication tool between this world—the world of the living—and the netherworld—the world of the dead. Although a sense of loss permeates this sequence, the chopsticks bring happiness by guaranteeing a connection between the protagonist and his beloved parents, who are not among the living anymore and are deeply missed. Significantly, this sequence closes on the characters for “longing” (sinian 思念). On the paradigmatic level, the choice of a Chinese expat is quite interesting. His presence can be explained by the fact that the gala also targets Chinese people living overseas, as they too are included in China’s national identity building project. Moreover, the protagonist is the only one in this PSA who is wearing a tie and following an elegant dress code: the implied connotations are professional success and economic achievement.

6. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to the participants in the two-day event “Perspectives on Chinese Happiness,” organized by the University of Westminster (June 29–30, 2016, London), for bringing this to my attention.

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The sixth sequence similarly opens on a slightly unhappy scene. Lao Wang is portrayed on his own, while his neighbor is busy welcoming relatives who have arrived to spend New Year’s Eve with him.7 The viewer understands that nobody is coming to visit Lao Wang, or to celebrate with him, though the source of his loneliness is left undefined (it could be the recent loss of his wife). His unhappiness is made more apparent by being juxtaposed with the happiness of his neighbor, and this contrast is rendered aurally as well as visually (i.e., silence as opposed to noise). The “happy twist” in the narrative happens when Lao Wang’s neighbor invites him to join his family celebration. In this sense, the old man constitutes an exemplary model, as he embodies the value of “neighborliness” (mulin 睦鄰): he acts as a family member and, at the same time, treats Lao Wang as a member of his own family. The family is here represented as going beyond kinship, as it is neighbors who intervene and fill an emotional/affective gap. The expression “to add a pair of chopsticks” (duo jia yishuang kuaizi 多加一雙筷子) is commonly used in its acceptation of making space for an additional, unexpected guest. Its unconventional use in the specific context of the Spring Festival—when usually only relatives and family members (re)unite and eat together—is demonstrated by the initial hesitation shown by Lao Wang, but is then legitimized through the neighbors’ repeated invitations for him to make himself at home (and not to behave unnecessarily politely). The next sequence revolves around marital love and the happiness that derives from the creation of a new family, the latter theme being revealed at the end of the sequence. Chopsticks, due to their unique quality of “inseparableness” (Wang 2015, 14), are a “token for exchanging affection between lovers” (ibid.). Here, a small pair of chopsticks is given as a gift in order to celebrate an important event in the couple’s life: the imminent birth of their child. In this sequence, therefore, “chopsticks are a metaphor, or perhaps a metonymy, for life itself ” (Wang 2015, 122). This reading is further reinforced by means of a close-up on the small, cute pair of chopsticks, suggesting that a new life is coming and conveying a sense of “expectation” (shouwang 守望). From the occupation of the man, the dinner cooked by his wife, the home interiors, and the quality of the chopsticks, one can assume that they lead a rather modest lifestyle. In the eighth sequence, in contrast, we see a pair of expensive chopsticks. A grandmother is shown taking them out of a special box, which is kept inside a cupboard. This initial scene stresses the importance of using precious, festive chopsticks on New Year’s Eve, but also connotes an elegant lifestyle, derived from the high social class of the protagonists. These connotations are conveyed also through the use of elaborate language and, in particular, through the mastery of traditional idiomatic expressions (chengyu 成語). The closing scene is characterized by cultural exhibitionism that is performed through an in-depth knowledge of Chinese 7. It is worth pointing out that, as the youngest relatives pass by and greet Lao Wang, they use the expression “Wang shu” 王叔 (literally: Uncle Wang). In China, “uncle” and “aunt” are used as common informal honorifics and do not imply any kinship.

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traditional culture, and that is transmitted from older generations (the grandmother) to younger generations (her grandchild) as a sign of “gratitude” (gan’en 感 恩). In the closing sequence, the most salient scenes of the PSA are reproduced and the importance of chopsticks is restated in the first part of the final slogan: “A pair of chopsticks carries the millennial emotions of China” (yi shuang kuaizi chengzai Zhongguo shuqiannian de qinggan 一雙筷子承載中國數千年的情感). Another concept of Ahmed’s (2010) which is of use in this critical analysis is that of “happy objects” (21), which are “passed around, accumulating positive affective value as social goods” (ibid.). Happy objects do not necessarily correspond to material or physical things, but to “anything that we imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, styles, as well as aspirations” (29). In this state-sanctioned television text, the “happy objects” correspond to the values which are revealed explicitly at the end of each sequence, in the form of Chinese characters appearing on the screen. Learning, practicing, and mastering these values will lead to happiness, as demonstrated by the “happy families” portrayed in the PSA. This is how chopsticks—the main protagonists—become “happiness means” or “happiness pointers” (Ahmed 2010, 26); in other words, they become tools through which one would find happiness (ibid.). In every sequence, chopsticks have the function of directing the viewer’s attention to the values and behaviors that promise happiness to those who conform to them. This PSA, in line with the (sub)genre of advertising it belongs to, proposes models of good citizenship: what is sold here is “a set of social standards, an array of approved conducts” (Rutherford 2000, 140). Moreover, in line with the specificity of Chinese PSA, it also promotes the ideological work of the party-state, which keeps creating its image as a responsible ruling government and shaping psychocultural norms, through the appropriation of national symbols and elements of popular culture (Barmé 1999, 20).8 Chopsticks, being so closely linked to Chinese identity, play a crucial role in providing happiness with culturally specific symbolic meanings and references— from the cultural pleasure of sharing the same heritage to the sensory pleasure of eating Chinese food. This PSA, by exploiting such a visible sign of national-cultural distinction, tries to reinforce national cultural unity and goes against homogenization forces that constantly try to erode it. In this way, “Chopsticks” fully embodies one of the key features of Chinese PSAs: that of responding to cultural globalization through the revival of national traditional culture (Tian 2014).

8. Interestingly, this PSA shows a clear intertextual reference to A Bite of China (Shejianshang de Zhongguo 舌尖 上的中國), the popular TV documentary on the variety of Chinese cuisines, broadcast in 2012.

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Conclusion: Happiness “with a Chinese Taste” This chapter introduced the context of PSAs in contemporary China, with a focus on the new category of gala PSAs that, in 2013, started to be broadcast on the occasion of the national media event par excellence: CCTV’s spring festival gala. In particular, it assessed the role played by the party-state and CCTV, highlighting the context of the production and broadcast of gala PSAs, as well as the main themes they address. Finally, it carried out an in-depth analysis of how happiness is constructed, visualized, and promoted in the purposively selected case study—“Chopsticks.” It becomes evident that PSAs in China are used instrumentally in order to address one of the main “side effects” of commercial advertising—the “unhappiness potential” which derives from the manufactured need to accumulate wealth through the purchase of material things, though that does not constitute a shortcut to happiness. As a result, PSA can be considered an ideal tool for the official promotion of state-sanctioned happiness. In PSAs, happiness is commodified, not by companies and brands in order to stimulate the purchase and consumption of goods, but by the party-state in order to prompt the adoption of a series of exemplary behaviors and values, with the final aim of stimulating national unity and sustaining social harmony. Underpinning this, ultimately, comes the party-state’s drive to maintain its legacy and power. Because the gala is the example of edutainment par excellence, gala PSAs constitute a crucial component of the party-state’s own symbolic story. Its “promise of happiness,” delivered by means of PSAs broadcast to the Chinese population, relies on a series of happiness associations. In “Chopsticks,” the central one corresponds to being part of a family. In line with the spirit of the gala, the “family” is here conceived in an intimate acceptation, but also in a national acceptation—as the big, “happy family” of the Chinese nation. Consequently, being Chinese is also promoted as a happiness association. Another finding that emerged from the interpretive analysis is that the main protagonists of this PSA—chopsticks—become “happy means” or “happy pointers” (Ahmed 2010, 26). In every sequence, they have the function of pointing towards the state-sanctioned cultural values that promise happiness to those who conform to them. As with chopsticks themselves, these Chinese values play an essential part in every stage of a person’s life, and, like the chopsticks, they can be taught and must be practiced in order to be fully mastered. On the denotational level, chopsticks transport Chinese food into people’s bodies, providing physical nourishment and sensorial happiness; on the connotational one, chopsticks point at the cultural values that characterize Chinese identity and guarantee spiritual happiness. The PSA “Chopsticks” constructs the universal value of happiness as something typically Chinese—therefore, culturally and ethnically specific. Nothing else seems to support this interpretation more than the closing slogan itself: “Rich in taste, rich

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in flavor, happiness with a Chinese taste” (you zi, you wei, xingfu Zhongguo wei 有 滋，有味，幸福中國味).

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4 “As Long as My Daughter Is Happy” “Familial Happiness” and Parental Support-Narratives for LGBTQ Children Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen

What upsets me the most is when parents say that they think their children should sacrifice and change their sexual orientation to save the “face” of the family . . . I ask them, “Is your face more important than your child’s happiness?” —Mama Wu, cofounder of PFLAG China, and mother of a gay son (Fridae 2010) It’s a human rights issue, right? As long as [my daughter] is happy [kaixin 開心], it’s fine. —Young mother in downtown Beijing, when asked how she would react if her child came out as lesbian or gay? (documentary film Mama Rainbow, Fan 2012)

Mama Wu, or Wu Youjian, quoted above, is well known in Chinese LGBTQ communities for her tireless efforts in promoting parental support for gay and lesbian children by way of educating and reaching out to parents. Now a retired magazine editor from the southern city of Guangzhou, she is among an increasing number of Chinese parents who believe that pressuring a gay son or lesbian daughter into a heterosexual marriage and a conventional—“straight”—life is unfortunate and even morally wrong. Guangzhou-native Mama Wu first came out in the Chinese mainstream media in 2005, speaking in support of her gay son in a Chinese-language edition of the glossy fashion magazine Elle. She addressed other Chinese mothers and fathers in particular, urging them to love and accept their children regardless of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Having since acquired hero status in China’s LGBTQ communities, she was a featured speaker at the 2010 Shanghai LGBT Pride Festival. There, she advised parents of gay and lesbian children: “Having a gay child is not a bad thing; having a gay child is not an ugly thing; having a gay child is not wrong; and having a gay child is nothing [i.e., problematic] if you treat it that way” (Fridae 2010). In addition, she runs a popular blog on Sina, has published a book titled Love Is the Most Beautiful Rainbow (Ai shi zuimei de caihong 愛是最

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美的彩虹), speaks frequently to the mainstream media, and participates in LGBTQ community events such as festivals, workshops, and conferences. Mama Wu was a central figure when the organization PFLAG-China was founded in Guangzhou in 2008.1 PFLAG is an acronym for Parents, Friends, Family and Allies of Lesbians and Gays, and is usually translated as Tongxinglian qinyou hui (同性戀親友會) in Chinese. PFLAG was originally an organization set up in the United States in the 1970s, at a time when lesbian/gay activism and identity politics gained traction and support in US society.2 In the decades since, advocacy for LGBTQ rights has developed across the world, and PFLAG has established chapters in several countries such as South Africa, Vietnam, and in South America. PFLAG-China is independent of the US organization (or any other international PFLAG chapter), but is clearly inspired by the US parent organization’s focus on helping families of LGBTQ children towards understanding and acceptance as well as outreach to educate public opinion on the matter of homosexuality. Whereas homosexuality is not criminalized in China, social stigma is persistent, and living openly as LGBTQ is likely to incur considerable cost emotionally, socially, and financially (UNDP 2016). Most of the over 1,000 PFLAG volunteers across China’s more than forty local chapters are mothers, friends, and other family members, and approximately sixty are fathers. Based on a selection of PFLAG narratives in three recent documentary (two) and fictional short (one) films on this topic, this chapter performs content analysis of narrative text in combination with visual and audio material in order to describe the emergence of a distinctively new parenting ideal in relation to having an LGBTQ child; this is termed parental love advocacy, following sociologist and LGBT-family researcher Kendal Broad (2011). On this basis I argue that these PFLAG narratives, as I call them, exemplify ongoing transformations of Chinese parenting norms that see a growing emphasis on personal happiness and individualization in social and familial relationships. These changes, I will show, offer the possibility for improved life quality and biofamilial welfare for LGBTQ children in Chinese societies, as more

Figure 4.1 Mama Wu: “My son is gay,” screenshot from the Chinese edition of Elle (Fridae 2010).

1. The website for the Chinese PFLAG organization can be found here: http://www.pflag.org.cn/. 2. The website for the US PFLAG organization can be found here: https://www.pflag.org/.

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focus is put on parents’ responsibilities to understand their children’s needs and to love them unconditionally. To date there has been minimal academic research on the topic of love advocacy in the LGBTQ and PFLAG context in mainland China (but see Brainer 2015 for a relevant case study of Taiwan, and Broad 2011 for US-based research). I suggest that mapping and analyzing this unfolding discourse and activist terrain through the lens of happiness contributes important new perspectives to the broader debate on “happiness in China” that this volume engages, happiness studies more generally, as well as engaging intergenerational perspectives on the sociofamilial complexities and politics of sexual and gender diversity at a time of rapid changes and transnational collaborations. To illustrate my discussion, I will focus on three recent films where PFLAGChina volunteers (i.e., parents) and their stories feature centrally: First, there are two recent films by the renowned and award-winning Chinese queer filmmaker and activist Popo Fan 范坡坡—Mama Rainbow (2012) and Pink Dads (2015).3 These films present a touching and original portrait of Chinese mothers (Mama Rainbow) and fathers (Pink Dads), by featuring personal stories about coming to terms with having a gay son or lesbian daughter. I have selected these two films due to the fact that they are groundbreaking in documenting parents’ stories and experiences on film in China. Both films are produced with the involvement of PFLAG-China (credited as coproducer); thus I consider the films highly relevant data material for understanding the way that this important organization supports parental love advocacy. Being a trained anthropologist, I approach the films ethnographically and observe the films’ contents in context: spoken word, location, body language, and so on. I draw upon my more than ten years of research and fieldwork on the ground with LGBTQ communities in China, thus appropriating a definition of “participant observation” of sorts that can accommodate the visual and technological medium of film, including its online, digital reach. Due to length issues, I have not included as much descriptive detail and corresponding contextual analysis as desired. For the purpose of this chapter, my selections of narrative excerpts have prioritized aspects that talk directly about concerns relating to happiness and similar emotions and their concurrent relationships with their children. Finally, Fan’s films— including Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads/Papa Rainbow—are also watched widely across China through the ongoing activist initiative of which Fan is a coorganizer, the China Queer Film Festival Tour (Deklerck and Wei 2015; Fan 2015). This tour travels the country and screens queer films produced by Chinese activist-directors in smaller towns and cities, thus doing vital outreach and educational work in a country where considerable stigma continues to be attached to homosexuality.

3. Pink Dads is a shorter and prereleased online version of the full-length 2016 documentary film, Papa Rainbow. By the time I began writing the paper that eventually became this chapter, Papa Rainbow had not yet been completed. I therefore refer to Pink Dads in this text.

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Thus, Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads are documentaries with considerable national audience reception, in addition to being shown in international queer film festivals.4 The third film is a fictionalized short titled Coming Home (Huijia 回家), produced by PFLAG-China, that aired online just before the Chinese New Year in 2015. In Huijia, the struggles and tribulations of reestablishing parental love towards a gay adult son after he comes out to them is the principal story line. I consider Huijia an interesting text in part due to its considerable popularity; as with Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads, Huijia has enjoyed massive audience reception with its online release in time for the New Year, with over 100 million views on various streaming sites over the holiday period that year. Several Chinese celebrities shared the film on their own microblogs; a diverse grassroots response in turn was polarized between being supportive and critical/condemning (Tang 2015).

Happy as in Gay? Connecting Affect, Kinship, and Modernity in China The two quotes that opened this chapter accentuate the divergent definitions of familial relationships and parental roles at a time when homosexuality has emerged as a social category and personal identity alongside the established view that it is a social deviance or mental illness that should be eradicated (Chang and Ren 2016 provide an analysis of contemporary mainstream newspaper coverage on homosexuality). The newer discourse, however, emphasizes that same-sex desire is a positive and normal quality in some people in a modern progressive society and should be tolerated. This discourse challenges dominant—often considered traditional and patriarchal—norms regarding familial happiness and moral values as defined by rigid structural conformity and collective identity. Importantly, these diverging approaches exist simultaneously, and do not exemplify a simplistic progressive development from tradition to modernity or from collectivism to individualism as such (Yan 2011). But this binary dynamic does important regulatory work visà-vis emergent alternative discourses such as those I am concerned with in this chapter. On the one hand, as the interview excerpt with Mama Wu shows, there is the very common view that gay or lesbian identity is something that must be hidden in the private shadows of personal life in order to not upset a family’s respectability (mianzi 面子), and mainstream public discourse often depicts homosexuality as criminal, sick, and immoral (Chang and Ren 2016), if not silenced and censored altogether (Fan 2015). However, a different view has begun to emerge in the new millennium aided by social reforms and advocacy work on the part of LGBTQ networks in the country, namely, that personal well-being and happiness should be the main concern: as long as my daughter is happy, it is fine if she is a lesbian. It is this 4. Regrettably I have not been able to conduct onsite research into audience reception to these specific films— such as observing screenings, interviewing audience members, or systematically analyzing online comments. They would have added useful additional perspectives to the discussion and analysis.

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second discursive trend—connecting tolerance for LGBTQ people with an increasing valorization of individual happiness—that my chapter is concerned with. These conflicting and yet interacting perspectives illustrate a growing normative belief that the onus is on society in general and parents in particular to understand and accept a greater degree of individual autonomy in the kinds of decision-making processes that have great effect upon a person’s life course, especially as regards a marriage partner and romantic love (Kleinman et al. 2011; Stafford 2015). Changing conceptions of what makes for a good life, its scope and virtues, contribute to an opening up of new ideas and desires connected to well-being and happiness, which I have oftentimes witnessed being conceptualized as a kind of attitude or way of thinking (sixiang 思想) (Engebretsen 2014, 60–62). In turn, being gay or lesbian has entered the discursive landscape of possible ways to live well and be meaningfully related to others. This is an important shift. Factors such as socioeconomic status and regional location shape—and limit—these possibilities in ways that promote supportive LGBTQ narratives to a demography that we might call the educated middle class (or those aspiring to be middle class) in urban areas. The glossy and costly fashion magazine Elle, for example, is far from a mainstream type of literature in the country. Thus, for people to afford to prioritize happiness in their lives and wish it for others such as a son or daughter, the broader context in terms of privilege—the relative access to emotional, educational, and material resources—must be considered. In general, homosexuality remains poorly understood and heavily stigmatized in contemporary Chinese society. Although there is no criminalization of homosexuality in China as such, sexual and gender minorities face “extremely low visibility” in society at large, and are at risk of “physical and emotional violence” as well as “rejection and discrimination,” especially from family members (UNDP 2016). Against this background, this chapter examines happiness in China from the perspective of a distinctive and stigmatized minority population in the country, namely gender and sexual minorities. I have elsewhere written extensively about this issue from the perspective of LGBTQ people’s own experiences and narratives, where family and social relationships constitute a problematic that complicates life and love aspirations considerably (Engebretsen 2014; 2016). For this project, however, I have become interested in the perspective of the parents of (now adult) LGBTQ children, especially given that such narratives and related data are increasingly available through PFLAG-supported documentary films, emerging LGBTQ archives, and in social media and mainstream news reports, both in China and globally. On a methodological note, times have changed considerably and with them, research opportunities. In my earlier anthropological research, hailing back to the early years of the new millennium, it was next to impossible for me to gain access to parents and heterosexual family members of my LGBTQ study participants because of the necessary rigid compartmentalization between surface conformity and a

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private gay life. This has however changed considerably in recent years, marked especially by the rise of the PFLAG movement in China since 2008. In the remainder of this chapter, I explore the following questions: How do parents talk about the process of making sense of and accepting a child’s homosexuality? How are figurations of happiness, family relationships, and parenthood constructed in such narratives? And to what extent are these supportive advocacy narratives actually transformative? Is it possible, as has been argued in US-based research on parental love advocacy in the PFLAG movement there, that the framing of emotions and trajectories of going from homophobia to love advocacy actually reconfirm and reproduce a heteronormative order rather than instilling viable alternatives where being gay is entirely equal and accepted? By presenting and discussing a sample of what Kendal Broad has termed “activist parenting narratives” (Broad 2011), and contextualizing these narratives in a broader landscape of changing moral values and notions of happiness and a good life, I will contribute a distinct—and perhaps quite queer—perspective to the study of happiness and wellbeing in an intricate contemporary world.

Rethinking the Meaning of Family Happiness One of the scenes in the Pink Dads documentary (starting at 9’48”) features two middle-aged men playing a gay son and his mother, respectively, in front of a small audience of other parents, relatives, and activists: Son: Mom, I’m home. [Audience laughter as the mom appears as a balding middle-aged man, sitting on a chair in the front of the room, wearing a frilly apron.] Mom: You look happy. Where have you been? Went to see a movie? Son: You just want me to get married. Mom: Of course I do. Can you handle that? We’re old. We want family happiness [Women lao le, wufei jiushi tianlunzhile 我們老了，無非就是天倫之 樂]. Why do you think we worked so hard? It’s not too much to ask for grandchildren. Son: But this is my life, I have my own ideas. Mom: Bullshit! This is China, not some foreign country where you can do what you like. Son: Fine, I’ll bring you back a daughter-in-law. Mom: Good, I’m looking forward to it. [Audience applause, end of scene.]5

5. The translation from Chinese to English in all the film material quoted in this chapter is cited from the subtitling in the film discussed.

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This is a pertinent example of how the question of how to successfully balance the personal desire for happiness—living a life according to your own ideas— and the sociofamilial norm of face (mianzi), such as a gay man bringing back a daughter-in-law to aging parents, is crucial for gays and lesbians when negotiating identity, intimacy, social and family relationships. The “mom” in the excerpt above represents the dutiful life of parents, caring and working for their son to have a good life, with the son paying back the parental care as an adult: marrying and fathering a son of his own, for the sake of “family happiness,” as well as implying eldercare via marital wifely caregiving (in the case of a son vis-à-vis his parents). The questions are vitally important but also impossible: Is saving face more important than being happy? Should a daughter or son sacrifice their personal happiness for the sake of family respectability? Are they selfish and unfilial—bad sons or daughters—if they choose love over family face? In an intriguing directional move that allows us to observe the audience reception of one particular person—Dandan, the adult gay son of the father who plays the mom in this scene—Fan displays this scene in a split screen format. The play itself is performed on the right-hand screen, and on the left-hand screen we are observing the son observing the unfolding play on his laptop. After the audience applause as the scene ends, the screen shows Dandan in full-screen view (starting at 10’29’’). He then comments on his father’s performance: “That was okay. Just his facial expressions were exaggerated. He should tone that down a bit.” The film then shifts to a one-on-one interview with the dad, where he talks about how he felt about his son before he came out. Again, Fan provides a split screen format, showing us the son watching his dad talking about him (starting at 10’50”):

Figure 4.2 Screenshot from Pink Dads: Father and son. Dad: Before he came out, as a father, to be honest, I couldn’t bear what I was seeing. Like some of his living habits. He paid too much attention to himself and cared too much about his looks. [Upon hearing this, the son starts to laugh, slightly shaking his head, and mumbling a response, all the while smiling, appearing much more like he doesn’t quite take his old dad seriously than being upset by what his dad is saying.]

“As Long as My Daughter Is Happy” 93 Dad [continues]: Seeing this from a male point of view I found it hard to accept. [Here, the son’s smile vanishes somewhat before he quickly looks up at the camera with a more serious face. Director Fan then cuts to a full-screen view of Dandan.] Dandan [starting at 11’25”]: Like my father my skin is oily, and acne-prone. I know there are people who wash their faces with tap water only. I can’t do that. I have to do something about my face. If not, I’ll be just like my father. A pimple-face. Director Fan [off camera]: So you blame him for that. Dandan [looking somber]: Yes, I inherited only the bad parts from him.

What are we to make of this narrative or relationship? Another father-son dialogue in the film shows the son sitting together with both his parents on a couch, talking amicably about the parents’ process of coming to understanding and loving their gay son. Somewhat in contrast, the clip with Dandan and his father, shown in split screens, and the combination of words spoken, body language, and facial gestures suggest unresolved tensions. Fan’s two films do not’ shy away from showing struggles, sadness, and tensions in this way, some more directly so than others, and I discuss one such narrative later in this chapter. This diversity shows the complexities of establishing and rearranging kin relations, especially as it pertains to the felt pain and anguish of having a “different” child and living with the implications this may have in smaller towns, or traditional kin networks. Anthropologists working on China have long noted how kinship and family— both as institutions and lived everyday lifeworlds—are central referents for what constitutes a happy and satisfying life in the personal domain (Kleinman et al. 2011; Stafford 2015). Within this structural environment conformity is valued, whereas difference is considered problematic, if the difference in question, such as being gay and refusing a heterosexual marriage, which is often taken to reject partaking in the ancestral lineage line, means breaking with the expectation of conformity (Berry 2001; Engebretsen 2014). For most Chinese LGBTQs coming out remains the exception, and most will marry heterosexually in adult life and relegate a samesex love life to a silent privacy, tacitly negotiated in the shadows of a respectable straight life. However, considerable modifications to this heteronormative order have emerged in the most recent two decades or so. Since the turn of the new millennium, a nationwide LGBTQ grassroots movement has emerged and created a lasting, if still shaky, foundation of advocacy and support for sexual and gender minorities (Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015). In the changing conceptions of a good life in general society and within LGBTQ grassroots groups and their media platforms such as websites, blogs, and documentary films, various formulations of happiness figure as a significant value. As we saw in Mama Wu’s introductory quote, happiness or being happy is articulated as a relational quality or a state of social being or becoming, in that parental approval of a child’s homosexuality is a precursor to “your child’s happiness.” Happiness, therefore, following much recent anthropological writing on the subject

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is not considered an object of value to strive to attain for oneself on an individual level, but an aspect of establishing and maintaining social relationships and kinship (Mathews and Izquierdo 2008; Stafford 2015; Stoller 2014; Walker and Kavedžija 2015). In this sense, Mama Wu’s question: “Is your face more important than your child’s happiness?” indicates that parental respectability and a lesbian or gay child’s happiness are fundamentally intertwined, in ways that merge social and familial values with person’s sense of happiness—on the part of the gay or lesbian child as well as the parents. The uneven relationship between personal desires and social values is central to understanding how different figurations of happiness work in contemporary life. The traditional phrase (chengyu 成語) “family happiness” (tianlunzhile 天倫 之樂) appears in Fan’s Pink Dads. The film features four fathers who talk openly about their respective journeys towards accepting their gay or lesbian children, becoming activists who support LGBTQ families, as well as conversations between family members including the gay son or lesbian daughter, as we have seen earlier in the chapter already. The film is groundbreaking in portraying especially how fathers—being men in what is after all an intensely patriarchal society—deal with their preconceptions of LGBTQ issues by participating in advocacy groups’ orchestrated drama workshops. They take part in writing and staging drama performances with a focus on family relationships based on their personal experiences, playing the roles of their initial homophobic selves, or alternatively a gay son coming out to their fathers face to face. They are powerful performances that, although being staged and scripted, do provide us with rich narrative data on complicated relationships and shifting sensibilities. In her many public speeches and media appearances, Mama Wu has debated tirelessly with anxious parents who have discovered that their child is lesbian or gay and who may often suffer from shame and despair as a result. Mama Wu’s moral and social agenda is to educate parents to move away from such a position of despair to one of love, support, and advocacy for LGBT equality. Mama Wu argues: “Acceptance from family members is the first step .  .  . but understanding from society is the most important thing” (Fang 2010). I would suggest that PFLAG narratives indicate a close relationship between new indicators of happiness as a moral imperative that combines preexisting social norms connected to filiality and more recently arrived discourses of individual happiness discourses, including those to do with parental identities. They are poignant indicators for what is at stake more broadly in Chinese society today as inequalities are growing at the same time as growth and globalization enable consumerist desires to flourish—at the very least imagined desires. Linguistic differentiation in terms of labels and identities is a principal aspect of these transformations. LGBTQ and similar terms such as lala 拉拉 (lesbian), tongzhi 同志 (comrade), ku’er 酷兒 (queer) have emerged as social identities in China (Engebretsen 2014; 2016; Kam 2014). These discursive changes

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are indicative of alternative lifeways and relationships beyond compulsory heterosexuality and marriage becoming more visible in society. As noted by anthropologists Harry Walker and Iza Kavedžija in their recent article Values of Happiness, inquiring into happiness is important in order to understand how people in different contexts approach life’s fundamental questions and challenges: how to live well, for oneself and with others, and what it means to be human. The idea of happiness as a starting point for inquiry involves questions of meaning, but also those to do with moral value and affect. What matters to people in the context of shifting and differentiating circumstances? How do a person’s aims and ambitions evaluate life’s conditions and the inherent connection to a wide spectrum of cultural values that in turn inform the process of evaluation? In the context of East Asia—and perhaps China in particular—the contrasting of individualistic and collectivistic cultures of relationships and values has tended to structure much of the cross-cultural and interdisciplinary study of happiness and well-being (Kleinman et al. 2011; Stafford 2015). However, an ethnographic inquiry into happiness in the context of supportive parental narratives of LGBTQ children offers a more nuanced approach in this regard, and demonstrates that happiness is best understood as relational and intersubjective aspiration informed by broader cultural expectations beyond the issue of accepting homosexuality per se. In addition, the focus on practices and discourses in settings such as outreach and activist work to support family members of gay and lesbian children, with its focus on pleasure and well-being in an individual as well as social context, exemplifies the central existential conflict in happiness studies between the social realities of individual lives on the one hand, and the broader structures of moral virtue that shape, but also significantly limit the ways in which we engage our social realities. In other words, studying happiness requires attention to “the social and cultural as well as moral and political dimensions of human experience” (Walker and Kavedžija 2015, 6).

Narratives of Parental Support and Happy Alternatives Whereas the topic of parental acceptance of gay and lesbian children has not been studied in the Chinese context previously, the theme features with some regularity in US and European interdisciplinary family and kinship studies (Broad 2011; Broad et al. 2008; Gray 2009; Martin et al. 2010). The study of kinship in anthropology took up gay and lesbian families and kinship in Western societies in the early 1990s, marked by the publication of Kath Weston’s seminal study from San Francisco, USA—Families We Choose: Gays, Lesbians, Kinship (1991). Weston skillfully demonstrated that queers were no exiles from kinship and instead forged meaningful and lasting social relationships, proving that dominant folk models of kinship that foregrounded blood, genetics, and heterosexuality as the necessary foundation for family and kinship, were simply that: models.

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Much interdisciplinary research on queer life outside Western societies focus on the emergence of distinct queer subcultures and identity politics in a homophobic or, at the very least, conformist society, where sexual and gender minorities are poorly understood or even criminalized. As a consequence, this research literature documents and analyzes the variegated ways that LGBTQ people negotiate life’s many challenges, for example, the universal marriage imperative in China (Engebretsen 2016) or Islamic law in Nigeria (Gaudio 2009). Little research on sexual and gender minorities outside North America and Western Europe has delved into the terrain of problematizing heterosexuality in everyday life, such as narratives of strained family relationships and difficult emotional processes when overcoming initial lack of understanding for a gay or lesbian child.6 It is exactly this perspective that is provided in parental support narratives such as those in the PFLAG documentaries to which I now turn. This material offers a rich contemporary archive of feelings and experiences, on the part of parents who find out they have a gay son or lesbian daughter. I connect these support narratives— or discourses of “love advocacy”—to a broader conversation about the changing moral landscape in China (Yan 2011) through a conceptual and ethnographic lens of happiness—both in China specifically (Stafford 2015) and in anthropological and cross-disciplinary debate more generally (Mathews and Izquierdo 2008; Stoller 2014; Walker and Kavedžija 2015). If anything, the excerpts of film narratives here serve to reflect on the various ways in which happiness as a shared goal—expressed through terms like kaixin 開心, xingfu 幸福, le 樂—now features centrally in emerging parental narratives of accepting one’s son or daughter as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender or similar. Through presenting and analyzing this material in the context of my previous ethnographic research and activist involvement in queer Chinese communities and movements (Engebretsen 2014; 2016; Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015), I want to suggest that this discursive change and conceptual diversification indicate broader changes regarding attitudes to sexual morality in general and homosexuality in particular. This is happening at the same time as structural norms and values to do with family, kinship, and gender status also are transforming. For this reason I am interested in documenting and exploring what I consider to be a certain prescriptive, rather than a straightforwardly descriptive, narrative trajectory emerging in parental discourse of gay/lesbian offspring. In other words, happiness as a moral issue seems to be a central script in the PFLAG discourse, underlining the importance of good parent-child relations (e.g., as long as my daughter is happy, it’s fine if she’s a lesbian), and being a good parent, by being understanding and treating their son or daughter as their own person who deserves love and understanding no matter what. 6. For examples of Western literature that problematize heterosexuality and heteronormativity, see Rich (1980), Jackson (2006), and Katz (1990).

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By extension, I consider the PFLAG happiness narratives as indicators of broader changes in moral values in postmillennial Chinese society, and especially the aspirations of the emerging middle class for loving and nonhierarchical relationships between family members of different generations. I speculate that the findings from US-based research on LGBTQ families might hold some relevance also in the contemporary context. Perhaps the “love advocacy” narratives in the PFLAG movement is predominantly articulated as a form of ideal parenting practice, and that implicitly in much of the narrative, what is at stake is just as much a refiguration of ideal motherhood and fatherhood as is the concern for LGBTQ positive advocacy and recognition (Broad 2011; Broad et al. 2008). In the following, I pursue this perspective through an examination of Fan’s recent documentaries Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads.

Activist Parenting as a New Ideal A prominent factor in the parental narratives in Mama Rainbow and Pink Dads is the thoughtful and well-articulated reflections that mothers and fathers present as a form of coherent story on the conditions for a good life. In turn, this tells a story about what it means to be a good parent, and what values are central to defining parental identity. Happiness, moral values, and a harmonious balance between personal desires and social expectations, between private life and society, are central. This is aptly illustrated by one of the mothers in Mama Rainbow, Meiyi, when discussing her lesbian daughter: All the experiences they have during their growing up process deserve respect. Regardless of their sexual orientation, these experiences should be respected, cherished, and protected . . . As a parent I have several principles: Are you happy [ni shibushi xingfu 你是不是幸福]? Can you handle your responsibilities? When you are together [with your same-sex partner], can you contribute to society? All these conditions must be met. It’s not right to be together just to resist social pressure and ‘subsist’ [shengcun 生存]. It’s not OK to be depressed, it’s not right that you don’t realize the things you want to realize. That’s a negative life [fumiande shenghuo 負 面的生活], a life that you shouldn’t choose for yourself, right?

First it is pertinent to comment on the fact that “happy” here is translated from the Chinese xingfu, which also expresses a sense of being content, at peace, blessed, and so on. Xingfu is often used in Chinese greetings for happiness and blessings, such as birthday and New Year greetings, which typically also involve family and kin relationships. Thus, this form of happiness is distinctively different from the more subjective, perhaps more momentarily experienced gaoxing 高 興, which in principle is also translated as “happy.” In any case, the articulation of xingfu in mother Meiyi’s narrative above points to a complex meaning of happiness; its meaning encompasses intersubjectivity (the daughter’s xingfu is also relevant

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Figure 4.3 Screenshot from Mama Rainbow: Mother and lesbian daughter.

to the mother’s experience of xingfu), moral values, and a desire for lasting happy sensibilities into the future. This interpretation is further ascertained when reading on, and the mother lists the necessary components of xingfu: handling responsibilities, contributing to society, and so on. There is a distinct conditionality to the mother’s approval and support; sexual orientation figures as one factor amongst several in order to define the kind of positive life that you should want to choose for yourself. Interestingly, happiness is listed first, followed by “responsibilities” and then “contribute to society.” These three factors together are “conditions that must be met.” Just reacting to conformist pressure and to “subsist” is not sufficient; mother Meiyi defines this as “a negative life,” a life “you shouldn’t choose for yourself.” This narrative sequence illustrates well the ways that happiness is simultaneously personal and social, an individual desire and cultural expectation. It also illustrates, I would argue, a common narrative structure that emerges in many of the parental narratives in Pink Dads and Mama Rainbow, where moral concerns for the parent-child relationship as well as parental identity are articulated by referencing happiness and well-being. Let me give two more examples to illustrate some further nuances and gendered specificities to these narratives. In Pink Dads, the 2015 follow-up documentary to Mama Rainbow, director Fan documents the stories of fathers of gay and lesbian children and their journey towards accepting and understanding their child’s orientation and life choice. As with the mothers portrayed in Mama Rainbow, there is a moral tone to the fathers’ accounts, mapping the desirable against the undesirable components of good fatherhood and father-son relationship. Says Papa Weifeng about how he found out his son was gay and his reaction:

“As Long as My Daughter Is Happy” 99 I kept on questioning him and then he told us he’s gay. Of course, when he told us he felt grief and he wept. But I was quite calm afterwards, not like those families who see it as the end of the world, who are confused and sad. I wasn’t like that. I had some knowledge about gay people before his disclosure. I was calm. I said: “If this is the case, it’s okay. Sexual orientation is a natural thing. I don’t blame you, and I don’t blame myself. It’s not a choice. I just hope that you live like other normal kids. Work hard, play hard. Live your life fully, and I don’t care how you live it. I’m an open-minded dad.”

For many if not most LGBTQ people in China, a central problem vis-à-vis their blood-families is the central role of strictly defined—and heteronormative—family values, whether in personal aspirations or collective normative structures. Papa Weifeng explicitly references the kind of families that have a hard time accepting a gay son as somewhat bad and implies they lack knowledge and education. As Papa Weifeng puts it in the film, “I had some knowledge about gay people before his disclosure. I was calm . . . I’m an open-minded dad.” This is an interesting unpacking of the happiness concept, linking being happy to the “good quality” (gao suzhi 高素質) state-sponsored modernity rhetoric: being educated, in a composed manner (i.e., self-control and cultured) and open-minded (see also Wielander in this volume). Mama Zhao in Mama Rainbow, on the other hand, centers her narrative on family values and relationships, but reveals a more complicated journey towards acceptance and understanding. In talking about the common longing for conventional family relationships she articulates happiness as a core value in personal as well as social life, and the sorrow that can follow from not meeting normative cultural expectations: The pursuit of happiness dominates human life. People think they’ll be happy [kuaile] once they have kids. I also used to envy other families with kids, thinking that they were so happy [kuaile] and joyful [xingfu]. Having a daughter-in-law and then also a grandson, it’s portrayed as total bliss [tiantian dou kuaile 天天都快樂]. But people only see the surface. We’re happy on the surface, but actually there is great pain inside our hearts, and we can’t talk to others about it. [She is crying as she speaks.] Do you think I can tell others that my child is gay [tongxinglian]? People always ask me why my kid is still single. Then I say: who knows, he’s just single. Then they tell me that he’s too picky. And then I don’t know what else to say. [She pauses.] In my heart I feel pain [wo hen tongku 我很痛苦] but I can’t tell others the truth [pauses, slight sobbing]. If I told them, they wouldn’t understand [she dries her eyes with a napkin].

This narrative excerpt uses the two terms kuaile and xingfu to convey variegated nuances of happy sensibilities. It is difficult to contrast them in any categorical way, since both are often used in greetings, as I described for xingfu earlier, but it is safe to say that they both point to moral, intersubjective, and wishful aspects on the range of happiness sensibilities.

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In terms of the intended and actual audiences for these documentary films, given that public screenings of LGBTQ-content films are illegal in China, Fan’s films generally circulate within advocacy community spaces and not to the general Chinese public (Fan 2015). Mama Rainbow was, however, publicly available for online streaming until authorities removed it last year. Fan successfully pressed charges and won, surprisingly, against the censorship authorities (Schwankert 2015). As per November 2016, however, his film is not yet up online. In this context it is highly interesting that a PFLAG-supported short film, Coming Home (Huijia), emerged for public online viewing last year, just ahead of the country’s New Year holidays.

Going Viral: Come Home, Son! Coming Home is a short fictionalized account directed at parents of LGBTQ children, which resonates heavily with the words by Mama Wu. Going back to her 2010 Elle magazine interview, she expressively advised parents to change their attitudes about having a gay son or lesbian daughter; at the same time she also encouraged gays and lesbians to live openly and not fear their parents’ reactions. Having a gay child is not a bad thing; having a gay child is not an ugly thing; having a gay child is not wrong; and having a gay child really is nothing if you treat it that way. With the change in attitude of the mainstream media and more knowledge about homosexuality, parents can learn to look at things from different perspectives and accept their children. I encourage the children to live their lives open in the sun and be their true selves.

Coming Home picks up on Mama Wu’s encouragement. It is a short film that was released online just prior to the Chinese Spring Festival in February 2015. It provides an interesting, and to some extent different and critical, perspective on the typical—and decidedly heteronormative—Chinese New Year’s family gathering than Chopsticks, discussed in Giovanna Puppin’s chapter in this volume. Coming Home was created by PFLAG China, and tells—mostly via voice-over—a fictionalized story about a young gay man, Fang Chao. He is a dutiful good son, but struggles with his relationship to his parents, because he is gay and consistently fails to bring home a girlfriend for the New Year’s holiday, thereby shattering the parents’ customary dream of their son’s wedding and grandchild. The film tells of how Fang Chao played the customary role as the dutiful filial son for a long time, but eventually realized that hiding and avoiding was not the way forward, and that he needed freedom in order to live. In his own words, Running away, always avoiding, always evading, from university, to graduation, to my first job. That is, until I started dating Da Bao. Love showed me the path forward. It was in that moment that I decided to set myself free.

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The following sequence is concerned with Fang Chao coming out to his parents, who, in turn, do not take the news well and consequently reject him: Mother: Are you really that shameless! Have me and your father raised you for nothing!? How could you have turned out like this? Father: Since you’re already leaving, don’t bother coming back. The son I once knew is dead to me.

This sequence may perhaps be perceived as overly dramatic in a society that values face/respectability. But as the recently published UNDP report Being LGBTI in China points out, family pressure and (fear of or actual) rejection are the most commonly felt complications in LGBTI people’s lives. In a nationally distributed questionnaire with over 28,000 respondents, over 50% reported that families were the source of the lowest degree of acceptance, selecting “low acceptance” or “complete rejection” in the survey (UNDP 2016, 16). Respondents reported verbal and physical abuse, being forced to marry heterosexually, enter into therapy, and being forced to behave and appear within heteronormative scripts (UNDP 2016, 26–27). Part of what makes Coming Home so interesting and important is what happens after the initial scene of confrontation (i.e., his coming out) and parental rejection. One year passes and the film shows how the parents suffer greatly from missing their son. Fang Chao also experiences moments of melancholia, and regret even, but he is also happily in love, living an authentic life. The parents eventually attend a PFLAG meeting, together with many other parents and relatives of LGBT children. In turn, the film turns to a more straightforward documentary-style section, where several parents speak frankly and directly into the camera about their situations and emotions: “I only want for him to be happy.” [Wo zhi shi xiwang ta neng xingfu. 我只是希望 他能幸福。] “No matter what kind of person you are, you are still my child. Please come home.” [Wulun ni shi shenmeyang de ren ni dou shi wo de haizi. Huijia ba! 無論你是什麼 楊的人，你都是我的孩子。回家吧！]

The film’s message falls into three intersecting parts: First, directed at LGBT people, it argues that it is better to come out instead of suffering in silence, hiding and avoiding one’s families. Second—and this is quite a bold move—it tells parents and families to support their LGBT children and not contribute to alienating or exiling them from the family. Third and finally, the film’s general online release and high-quality production attracted considerable interest with over 100 million visits in the first couple of days. By simultaneously appealing to LGBTQ people, their parents, families, allies, and the general public, the film’s broader message is that happiness and well-being can only be a social, collaborative project. The film illustrates the slow changes taking place, with an increasing focus on the need for transforming broader social structures. In exposing the personal identity struggles,

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stifling social norms, and the mutual responsibilities to make change happen, the story becomes less a one-sided, identity-based coming out narrative, and more a collaborative one, about intersubjective negotiations and relationships, both normative and alternative ones.

Concluding Discussion The individual stories of support and advocacy that feature in the documentary films described here do point to how established—some might perhaps describe them as “traditional,” although that simplifies a more complex temporality to the life and process of normative values—notions of virtue, moral conduct, and family relationships are being refigured in contemporary society. On the one hand, the narratives on the part of LGBTQ people show that there is a strongly felt desire to maintain family bonds and comply with social expectations, sometimes at the expense of one’s own personal desires and happiness. Concern and compassion for parents and family are central motivators, as is the more diffuse field of personal autonomy and agency. The strategies involved in negotiating family bonds and lala and gay intimacy and lifestyle include a broad field of symbolic and material factors, as well as aspirations for the good life. We have seen here that individual experience of personal autonomy, or the possibility of it, is a primary factor in this regard (Engebretsen, 2014). Principally, personal autonomy involves living space away from parents, but also an imaginative space to embody and articulate sixiang or attitude, financial independence, as well as being a way of thinking, whereby surface compliance and personal desires are possible and desirable, where a lesbian or gay life can be articulated in ways that maintain family bonds on the surface. The most common strategy to negotiate such space is the subjective efforts to establish and maintain a tacit compartmentalization of lala or gay love and community life that is kept away from the family sphere. This is well represented by Fang Chao in the Coming Home short film discussed here. What emerges as the main problem with regards to experiencing exclusion or marginalization is not sexual identity (i.e., being or not being LGBTQ) in and of itself, but rather when an intimate relationship “interferes with the ability to perform one’s role in the family” (Berry 2001, 215), or—as is the case in Coming Home—is feared to interfere with this role, for example, by not having children or living what is considered to be a normal life. Elsewhere, in earlier work where my research was conducted prior to groups like PFLAG-China emerging, I have identified that the problem arises when “being LGBTQ” becomes an exclusive identity that traverses these fields and challenges dominant social and family expectations about appropriate gendered behavior (Engebretsen 2014). What the more recent and contemporary PFLAG-China narratives show, however, is that parental/family advocacy and outreach work is having a transformative impact, at least to some degree. At the same time, the dominant narrative practice seems to reproduce certain hetero/

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normative values, thus entailing what I suggest is a considerably prescriptive quality beyond just a surface level of descriptive storytelling. In other words, the film narratives point to the complex terrain of changing moral imperatives and desires as alternative scripts for defining a good life, well-being, happiness, and romantic and familial love, and how they are circulating and negotiated across generations within families. Happiness emerges as a central ambition, but is difficult to define and place in any straightforward way in the various parental narratives we have seen here. This complexity of sensibilities is demonstrated linguistically by the different terminologies that are used: kuaile, kaixin, le, and so on. They seem to incidentally overlap with each other in daily use, thus indicating the elusiveness, perhaps, of any strict and stable definitions of what happiness really means. But in the end the project of happiness is intensely a social project, to do with process, practice, sociality, and intimacy rather than (individual) essence and (state of) being as such. This is clearly brought out in the films I have discussed. We have seen that a diverse range of happy sensibilities, or at least sensibilities attached to the project of happiness—becoming happy, searching for happiness, struggling with unhappiness and so on—are central to social relationships, attachments to others, becoming one’s own person in a rapidly transformational society. In sum, then, the films I have discussed demonstrate that it is not a given that happiness is a quality most ideally contained in and experienced at an individual personal level, or that its meaning is straightforward. Rather, happiness is best captured as always shaping relations, and being shaped by them in turn, perhaps belonging in an ideal future rather than at the rather messier moment of the here and now. At the same time, happiness is clearly predicated upon preexisting norms for sociofamilial harmony and collective equilibrium in a stable, harmonious society. In the PFLAGChina narrative context, it is clear that emerging possibilities for alternative lifeways are negotiated carefully and (attempted at being) contained within dominant limits for proper and improper behavior, which in turn are always gendered and classed, shaped by generational cohort and related demographic specificities. The broader sociofamilial terrain, then, brings together multiple and different allegiances and desires for connection and relationships, for defining and pursuing happiness, in variegated conceptualizations, temporalities, and imaginations.

References Berry, Chris. 2001. “Asian Values, Family Values: Film, Video, and Lesbian and Gay Identities.” Journal of Homosexuality 40: 211–31. Brainer, Amy. 2015. “Mothering Gender and Sexually Nonconforming Children in Taiwan.” Journal of Family Issues 38: 921–47. Broad, Kendal L. 2011. “Coming out for Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays: From Support Group Grieving to Love Advocacy.” Sexualities 14: 399–415.

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Broad, Kendal L., Helena Alden, Dana Berkowitz, and Maura Ryan. 2008. “Activist Parenting and GLBTQ Families.” Journal of GLBT Family Studies 4: 499–520. Chang, Jiang, and Hailong Ren. 2016. “Keep Silent, Keep Sinful: Mainstream Newspapers’ Representations of Gay Men and Lesbians in Contemporary China.” Sociology and Anthropology 4: 597–607. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. 2014. Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography. New York and London: Routledge. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. 2016. “Under Pressure: Lesbian-Gay Contract Marriages and Their Patriarchal Bargains.” In Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the 21st Century, edited by Stevan Harrell and Gonçalo Santos, 163–81. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L., and William F. Schroeder, eds. 2015. Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Fan, Popo 范坡坡. 2012. Mama Rainbow [Caihong ban wo xin 彩虹伴我心], short version. YouTube video, 28:08, posted by Queer Comrades, September 4, 2012. Accessed August 29, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFaKcCQCxKE. Fan, Popo 范坡坡. 2015. “Challenging Authorities and Building Community Culture: Independent Queer Film Making in China and the China Queer Film Festival Tour, 2008–2012.” In Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures, edited by Elisabeth L. Engebretsen and William F. Schroeder, 81–88. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Fan, Popo 范坡坡. 2016. Pink Dads [Papa Rainbow, Caihong laoba 彩虹老爸]. Accessed March 7, 2016. http://open.163.com/movie/2016/1/N/5/MBDIFHLJ0_MBDIFQKN5. html. Fang, Yunyu. 2010. “PFLAG China Meets in Beijing.” Global Times, November 1, 2010. Accessed July 26, 2016. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/588290.shtml. Fridae. 2010. “Wu Youjian, Activist and Mother of Gay Son: Accept and Love Your Children as They Are.” News editor, October 28, 2010. Accessed June 10, 2011. http://www.fridae. asia/gay-news/2010/10/28/10406.wu-youjian-activist-and-mother-of-gay-son-acceptand-love-your-children-as-they-are. Fullerton, Jamie. 2015. “China’s Attitude toward Homosexuality Is Beginning to Shift, with Parents Leading the Way.” Vice News. April 9, 2015. Accessed February 1, 2016. https:// news.vice.com/article/chinas-attitude-toward-homosexuality-is-beginning-to-shiftwith-parents-leading-the-way?utm_source=vicenewsfb. Gaudio, Rudolph P. 2009. Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Gray, Mary. 2009. Out in the Country: Youth, Media and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York and London: New York University Press. Kindle edition. Jackson, Stevi. 2006. “Gender, Sexuality and Heterosexuality: The Complexity (and Limits) of Heteronormativity.” Feminist Theory 7: 105–21. Kam, Lucetta Yip Lo. 2012. Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Katz, Jonathan Ned. 1990. “The Invention of Heterosexuality.” Socialist Review (1990): 7–33. Kleinman, Arthur, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, Jinhua Guo. 2011. “Introduction: Remaking the Moral Person in a New China.” In Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about

“As Long as My Daughter Is Happy” 105 China Today, edited by Kleinman et al., 1–35. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Martin, Karin A. et al. 2010. “Advice When Children Come Out: The Cultural ‘Tool Kits’ of Parents.” Journal of Family Issues 31: 960–91. Mathews, Gordon, and Carolina Izquierdo, eds. 2008. Pursuits of Happiness: Well-Being in Anthropological Perspective. New York: Berghahn. Murphy, Colum. 2015. “Video on Coming Home, Coming Out at Lunar Year Goes Viral in China.” The Wall Street Journal: China Real Time Report, February 19, 2015. Accessed February 2, 2016. http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/02/19/coming-homecoming-out-at-lunar-new-year/. Rich, Adrienne. 1980. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5: 631–60. Schwankert, Steven. 2015. “Gay Filmmaker Fan Popo Declares Victory, but Banned Film Still Can’t Be Viewed.” The Beijinger, December 30, 2015. Accessed December 1, 2016. https://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/2015/12/30/gay-filmmaker-fan-popo-declareslegal-victory-banned-film-still-cant-be-viewed. Stafford, Charles. 2015. “Being Careful What You Wish For: The Case of Happiness in China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5: 25–43. Stoller, Paul. 2014. Yaya’s Story: The Quest for Well-Being in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tang, Rose. 2015. “Now Viral in China: Tolerance.” Foreign Policy. March 11, 2015. Accessed March 15, 2017. http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/03/11/now-viral-in-chinatolerance-lgbtq-coming-home-film/. Tao, Jiu. 2015. Coming Home: Celebrating Chinese New Year (Huijia 回家). YouTube video, 6:46, posted by “Kar Chin.” February 13, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= DJhmAdT-mb8. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 2016. Being LGBT in China: A National Survey on Social Attitudes towards Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Gender Expression. http://www.cn.undp.org/content/china/en/home/library/ democratic_governance/being-lgbt-in-china/. Walker, Harry, and Iza Kavedžija. 2015. “Special Issue Introduction: Values of Happiness.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5: 1–23. Weston, Kath. 1991. Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. New York: Columbia University Press. Yan, Yunxiang. 2011. “The Changing Moral Landscape.” In Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person; What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today, edited by Arthur Kleinman et al., 36–77. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

5 Smile Yourself Happy Zheng Nengliang and the Discursive Construction of Happy Subjects Derek Hird

“Happiness is consistently described as the object of human desire, as being what we aim for, as what gives purpose, meaning and order to human life” (Ahmed 2010, 1). This twenty-first century “happiness turn” owes much to the positive psychology movement and its founding figure, Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, professor of psychology, and director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Seligman contends that happiness comes principally from individuals’ cultivation of positive emotions (Seligman 2002, xiii). He aims to restore “the rugged individualism and sense of individual responsibility that used to be [America’s] hallmark,” and asserts that positive thinking can overcome any kind of psychological or social challenge (ibid., 68). However, critics of positive psychology cite poverty, racism, sexism, low social status, and trauma caused by childhood abuse and neglect as examples of socioeconomic, psychological, and structural factors that are not easily overcome in the quest for happiness (Ferguson 2007). According to Barbara Ehrenreich, Seligman’s approach reproduces a victimblaming narrative that claims that illness, unemployment, poverty, and depression are the hallmarks of losers responsible for their own misfortune (Ehrenreich 2009, 115, 146, 168–69, 206). Ehrenreich also sees Seligman’s approach as having its roots in the positive thinking movement spawned by the American Protestant minister and self-help guru Norman Vincent Peale in his 1952 international bestseller book, The Power of Positive Thinking (ibid., 92, 102).1 Yet the ideas behind positive psychology can also be traced back to William James’s advocacy of positive subjective experiences for personal development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the postwar humanistic psychology of Abraham Maslow (Froh 2004, 18–19).

1. The introduction in this volume addresses some of the multiple influences upon the current generation of positive psychology advocates.

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Scholars in China and elsewhere have raised concerns that the normative tenets of positive psychology are based on research that insufficiently attends to the diversity of attitudes towards happy lives found around the world and in different sections of society, and to the fluidity of attitudes during an individual’s life course (Ren and Ye 2006, 790–91). “Western” cultural and moral values are deemed to be implicitly embedded in positive psychology, acting as underlying assumptions in its conceptualizations of virtue and the good life (Wang and Li 2010, 51). In particular, positive psychology is charged with privileging a set of values principally popular among white, metropolitan, middle-class Americans (Ren and Ye 2006, 791). Psychologists Wang Qian and Li Hui (2010, 50) argue that culturally normative virtues in China, such as xiaodao 孝道 (filial piety), compel individuals to consider the happiness of others even before their own. Furthermore, they suggest that in China a certain amount of “negative emotion” (xiaoji ganqing 消極情感) is not necessarily considered undesirable. For example, a student who feels guilty about not living up to her or his parents’ expectations, and consequently works harder, is generally considered to display virtue (meide 美德) and maturity (chengshu 成熟) in not wishing to hurt those close to her or him (ibid.). Wang and Li fear that without sufficient attention to local culture, positive psychology becomes twisted, unreflective of sociocultural realities, and ultimately unacceptable to the local population. In other words, they argue for a culturally aware interpretation and implementation of positive psychology. That the autonomous self is called forth in contemporary positive psychology and happiness discourses is no accident, according to Sam Binkley, as this kind of subjectivity is formed through the “micro-practices of self-government” typical of neoliberal modes of governance (2011, 372). In his reading, the construction of happiness as a daily regimen fits the neoliberal agenda to produce independent, resourceful, enterprising subjects: To govern oneself through the maximization of one’s potential for happiness is to govern oneself as a subject of neoliberal enterprise: agency, autonomy, freedom from dependence and external constraint, and the cognitive wherewithal necessary for the pursuit of self-interest are metonymically aligned with the content of happiness itself. (ibid., 391)

While the privatized pursuit of happiness may enable the practitioner to feel happier at least some of the time, the emphasis on individual responsibility for one’s emotional state relieves governments and businesses of their responsibility for workers’ unhappiness, and encourages individuals to contentedly accept the world as it is rather than seek to change external conditions that cause unhappiness. The current pervasiveness of the idea that self-directed inner change is the route to happiness is also exemplified in the happiness-promising, Buddhist-inflected “mindfulness” programs that Western businesses, governments, and health services have

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enthusiastically coopted during the last couple of decades.2 Such programs directly serve the interests of big business and governments, according to Matthias Steingass, because they depict the (often unpleasant) socioeconomic relations of capitalism as an inevitability that the individual must adjust to: “Meditation becomes a Trojan Horse to control the mind from within,” as it is “just another tool to enhance individual auto-regulation with an agenda not set by the meditator” (2013, 201). Positive psychology and mindfulness programs promise happiness through “neoliberal” self-governing regimens. Yet the propagators of such programs often have additional objectives: Seligman’s positive psychology agenda is deeply steeped in American foundational myths of self-reliance and is tied to reinvigorating American national character; corporate mindfulness programs teach employees that they are the source and resolver of their own stress and frustration, not the employers. This individualization of happiness is deeply attractive to political and business elites beyond America with their own objectives. In China, happiness levels have been falling in stark contrast to the marked rise in living standards in the post-Mao reform era. This phenomenon is partly due to the increasingly unequal division of wealth, as a result of which “most income groups find themselves in a more disadvantageous relative position, despite absolute income gains,” giving rise to “frustrated achievers” unhappy about their “relative deprivation” (Brockmann et al. 2009, 389, 391–92). Yet rather than tackle such obvious socioeconomic causes of unhappiness, the Chinese government has responded to this malcontent with its own version of individual-centered positive psychology, which encourages those people marginalized by economic reforms to embrace counseling and learn to “perform happiness” (Yang 2013, 292). China Central Television (CCTV) documentaries on this topic claim the route to happiness requires a smile and cheery demeanor regardless of how miserable one might feel (ibid., 297–98). Unsurprisingly, some commentators have called this “fake happiness” (wei xingfu 偽幸福) (ibid., 293). The Chinese government’s promotion of happiness is part of a shift to a “psychologization” mode of governance, according to Jie Yang, which “manage[s] socioeconomic issues in psychological terms . . . glorifies the psychological well-being of the marginalized and mobilizes their emotions and potentials for political reordering and economic advancement” (2013, 294). The government’s goal is twofold, Yang argues: first, to encourage entrepreneurial individual responses to setbacks; and second, to neutralize negative responses to setbacks that could potentially result in self-harm, family conflict, or social unrest (ibid., 298). This individualized approach is aimed at distracting from the government’s unwillingness to address structural issues behind job layoffs and other hardships, and in effect “psychologizes” the consequences of state policies: for example, the negative consequences of state economic restructuring are depicted as primarily psychological problems, such as depression, rather than political and social ones (ibid., 300). 2. Significant numbers of young Han professionals in China are also turning to Buddhism as an antidote to their high-pressure jobs (Jigme, this volume).

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The individual as entrepreneur of her own soul, propelled to find personal solutions to structurally caused problems, is a core element of both Seligman’s and the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) varieties of “neoliberal” positive psychology. Nevertheless, despite these resemblances, positive psychology programs around the world are not necessarily predicated tout court on a psyche of “rugged individualism.” Formulations of happiness in China combine “preexisting cultural values, folk ideologies, and expert knowledge” (Yang 2013, 297). In particular, the psychologization mode of governance in China infuses therapeutic psyche-centered practices from the West with long-embedded Chinese health paradigms that favor “embodied and holistic” approaches (ibid., 294). A good example of how positive psychology and happiness trends in China have charted their own course is the vibrant discourse linking happiness and wellbeing to zheng nengliang 正能量 (“positive energy”), which draws from Western and Chinese cultural resources.3 Zheng nengliang was the title chosen for the bestselling Chinese edition (published in 2012) of Rip It Up, a British positive psychology selfhelp book by Richard Wiseman. At the same time, ancient Chinese cosmological notions such as dao 道 and qi 氣 have also shaped the interpretation of this concept. Additionally, zheng nengliang as a discursive practice is inseparable from wider processes that connect emotional intelligence and happiness with subject-making and socioeconomic stratification in the reform era. As Sam Binkley (2011, 372) argues, “contemporary formations of happiness [are] implicated in a more general logic of neoliberal subjectification” that facilitates particular “emotional subjectivities.” Similarly, Eva Illouz has noted how “new hierarchies of emotional well-being” have emerged under contemporary capitalism (2007, 73). In just a few years, calls to cultivate zheng nengliang have become pervasive in popular, academic, and political debates about happiness in China (Liu and Chang 2016, 61). However, there has been little critical analysis of discursive manifestations of zheng nengliang or the kinds of subjects associated with it. To help fill this gap, this chapter examines the holistic and embodied dimensions of zheng nengliang in popular discourse, and provides a Barthian analysis of how zheng nengliang is used to express emotional well-being and socioeconomic stratification in four public service adverts (PSAs): three on handgrips in Beijing’s subway system and one in large poster form at a bus stop shelter. It thus contributes fresh insights into how happiness is promulgated and how happy subjects are constructed in China, and extends the scholarly literature at the intersections of Chinese studies, happiness studies, and media studies. My aim is not just to explore how analysis of zheng nengliang in PSAs can help inform our understanding of the kinds of happy subjects that inhabit Chinese discourse today, but also to contribute to broader discussions on modes of subjectmaking in China’s postsocialist modernity. According to my analysis, the subway 3. I retain the Chinese term zheng nengliang throughout this chapter, rather than the literal English translation “positive energy,” to convey a sense of its Chinese cultural associations.

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adverts speak to a sophisticated, emotionally aware, self-governing subject that uses zheng nengliang to cultivate inner happiness, whereas the bus stop shelter advert addresses a relatively unsophisticated and potentially unruly subject who needs firm guidance on how to spread zheng nengliang and create happiness among others. I argue that these differences suggest multiple imagined subjects in contemporary happiness initiatives, which include but are not limited to the “neoliberal” self-governing subject. In the remainder of the chapter, I examine zheng nengliang in Chinese-language media discourse, then analyze the subway and bus stop shelter PSAs, and finally conclude with reflections on the kinds of happy subjects that they construct.

Zheng Nengliang in Media Discourse The term zheng nengliang came to prominence on the Chinese internet in 2012, reaching number fourteen out of twenty in a media experts’ poll of the “hottest” internet expressions; at number two was the phrase “are you happy?” (ni xingfu ma 你幸福嗎?) (Barmé and Goldkorn 2013, 313). The online encyclopedia Baidu Baike entry for zheng nengliang relates the wide use of the term in popular discourse: Currently, Chinese people stick the zheng nengliang label on all positive, healthy, endeavor-encouraging, power-bestowing, hope-filled people and things. It has already risen to become full of symbolic meaning and deeply intertwined with our feelings, expressing our hopes and expectations. (“Zheng nengliang”)4

The entry further states that “positive energy” was originally a term from physics referring to magnetic fields coined by the English physicist Paul Dirac in the 1920s but only became popularized in its Chinese translation of zheng nengliang as the title for Rip It Up, Richard Wiseman’s positive psychology self-help guide, published in China in August 2012 just a month after its original UK publication. According to its English-language marketing blurb, Wiseman’s book “turns conventional self-help on its head and demonstrates how simple actions represent the quickest, easiest, and most powerful way to instantly change how you think and feel.” In short, it argues: “Forget positive thinking, it’s time for positive action” (“Rip It Up”). The book draws on the 1880s’ argument of William James that one can smile oneself happy or frown oneself sad (Wiseman 2012a), which “turned the conventional view of the human psyche on its head” (Wiseman 2012b, 336). Wiseman argues that physical actions, postures, and surroundings can significantly change an individual’s feelings and thoughts; hence, awareness and manipulation of actions and expressions can create a state of happiness. Wiseman “rips up” the

4. All translations are my own. The Chinese-language text reads: “當下，中國人為所有積極的、健康的、催 人奮進的、給人力量的、充滿希望的人和事，貼上「正能量」標簽。它已經上升成為一個充滿象徵意義 的符號，與我們的情感深深相繫，表達著我們的渴望，我們的期待。”

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idea of thinking oneself happy and instead advocates acting oneself happy—such as smiling and moving about confidently—in order to trick the mind into a happy state. Wiseman’s approach has similarities to the “fake happiness” practices of the “psychologizing” CCTV documentaries mentioned above, such as in the account that Jie Yang provides of Song Shuru, a woman in her eighties, who is featured in the CCTV series Secrets of My Happiness (Wode xingfu jinnang 我的幸福錦囊): [Song] began by describing how faking happiness had helped her to overcome her fear upon being diagnosed with breast cancer during the Cultural Revolution. She forced herself to fake happiness and to try to smile, even though her life was miserable. She had a serious illness. Her husband was far away at a labor camp. Red Guards subjected her to torture. However, her will to live was strong; she sang and played the accordion at night and smiled (secretly, in her heart), willing herself to stay happy and positive. Song discovered that when she felt happy, her tumor became smaller. She then decided to try and improve her physical health by faking happiness, regardless of the circumstances of her life. After several months, her tumor miraculously disappeared. (Yang 2013, 302)

Song and Wiseman both emphasize that faking or acting happiness is vital to achieving true happiness and well-being. This embodied understanding of happiness is emphasized in the psychologization mode of governance in China, which is more holistic and corporeal than the psyche-oriented approaches commonplace in mainstream Western positive psychology (Yang 2013, 294).5 Embodied and holistic connotations are also more prominent in the Chineselanguage version of Rip It Up than in the English-language text. According to Baidu Baike, the Chinese-language version compares human bodies to magnetic “energy fields” (nengliang chang 能量場) that operate according to the laws of physics in the universe’s all-encompassing magnetic field (despite there being no such reference in the English-language edition, nor indeed to the term “positive energy” itself): People are magnets, the universe is a magnetic field. There is a scientific law in the world called the scientific law of attractive force. Whatever you want from the universe, the universe will give you. So there is a kind of positive, healthy, endeavorencouraging, power-bestowing, hope-filled energy. This energy will promote your speedy success: this is zheng nengliang. (“Zheng nengliang”)6

Stimulating the innate potential of one’s bodily energy field enables people to manifest a more confident and energetic self. Zheng nengliang in this sense refers to “healthy, optimistic, and positive upward forces and feelings” (jiankang leguan, 5. Here I am making an observation about the emphasis on embodiment in faking happiness techniques, not a judgment about whether faking happiness has the potential to realize “true” happiness or its potential consequences on an individual’s capacity to think and express herself critically. 6. “人就是一個磁體，宇宙就是一個磁場，世界上有一種定律叫：吸引力定律，你向宇宙要什麽，宇宙就 給你什麽，所以有一種積極的、健康的、催人奮進的、給人力量的、充滿希望的能量，這個能量會促進 你快速成功，這就是‘正能量’。”

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jiji xiangshang de dongli he qinggan 健康樂觀、積極向上的動力和情感) that bring about happiness in both transitory (kuaile 快樂) and enduring (xingfu 幸福) varieties. At the same time, the universe’s positive energy is a “regulating force” (zhiyue li 制約力) that will limit the parameters of the possible if people deviate from the “specific properties” (texing 特性) of the universe. Large-scale societal disasters may also ensue if people do not keep themselves in line with these properties (“Zheng nengliang”). The alignment of individual bodies with the properties of the universe is a more holistic approach to positive psychology than those which position the psyche as foundational. It brings into play the historically prominent idea in Chinese philosophy of the “dynamic harmony” (Chang 2011, 14) between humans and nature: the dao 道 is the ineffable unity of the universe and all things in it, with which individuals should align themselves in their daily activities to lead serene and joyful lives. Thus, through bodily taking up zheng nengliang’s discursive invocation to act happily, one places oneself in tune with the positive energy forces of the universe. The correlation of cosmological forces with energized bodies is a reform-era phenomenon found in popular discourse that echoes premodern usage in distinction to relatively materialist understandings of the body in medical discourse since 1949. Nancy Chen draws on Judith Farquhar’s research on shifts in the meaning of qi (“vital energy”) to show that in traditional texts qi was both “cosmic force” and “bodily substance,” and the body was regarded as “a microcosm of the universe.” Although contemporary medical texts present qi as purely bodily, present-day practitioners and qigong manuals depict it as a transformative atmospheric or environmental “universal force” (Chen 2002, 319). This reform-era revival of historical formulations of the body as a “microcosm of the universe” helps illuminate the notion that zheng nengliang resides in the related energy fields of the universe and individual bodies. The correlation was very evident in two phrases that became popular in the Chinese blogosphere during the 2012 London Olympics torch relay, when the Olympic torch became a symbol of zheng nengliang. The first phrase called upon people to “ignite zheng nengliang, detonate a small universe” (dianran zheng nengliang, yinbao xiao yuzhou 點燃正能 量，引爆小宇宙); and the second phrase delivered the message: “If you ignite zheng nengliang, your luck won’t be blocked” (dianran zheng nengliang, yunqi dangbuzhu 點燃正能量，運氣擋不住). These two phrases are inspired by the Chinese edition of a well-known 1980s Japanese manga and anime series, Saint Seiya, also known as Knights of the Zodiac (Shengdoushi xingshi 聖鬥士星矢), which subsequently became very popular in China (“Shengdoushi xingshi”). The series’ catchphrases— “Burn, my small universe!” (ranshao ba, wode xiao yuzhou! 燃燒吧！我的小宇 宙！) and “Small universe, explode!” (xiao yuzhou baofa! 小宇宙暴發！)—refer to the idea that there is a little universe inside everybody, which, if cultivated, will explosively unleash amazing powers (“Xiao yuzhou baofa”). This example also underlines the significance of East Asian regional circulations of cultural products

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in the shaping of contemporary popular discursive formations in China (Berry, Liscutin, and Mackintosh 2009). The extent of the popularity of zheng nengliang is demonstrated on the Zheng nengliang Filling Station (zheng nengliang jiayou zhan 正能量加油站) website, which features a vast range of zheng nengliang–associated quotations, articles, books, films, songs, videos, and more.7 The concept is deployed by a variety of individuals and organizations. Many popular TV reality shows are permeated with zheng nengliang in the themes they promulgate, the attitude and aims of the participants, and the slant the program makers produce through captions and audiovisual editing. One typical example is the CCTV reality/variety show “Infinite Challenge” (Liaobuqi de tiaozhan 了不起的挑戰) (Liu and Chang 2016, 61–64). An example of NGO use of zheng nengliang comes in a Chinese LGBT organization’s video, which describes the increasing number of gay films made in China as a manifestation of zheng nengliang.8 In religious circles, Dayuan fashi (大願法師), a leading Buddhist monk in Guangdong, claims in his popular talks for students and entrepreneurs that there is a scientific basis for the production of zheng nengliang through the Buddhist practice of “right mindfulness” (zhengnian 正念) (Li 2013). Business studies experts, too, are keen to advocate the merits of zheng nengliang in fostering a more productive workforce: the leadership guru Liu Jian’s 2012 book Cultivating employees’ zheng nengliang (Peiyang zheng nengliang gong 培養正能量員工) mixes Western management theory, Daoism, Buddhism, and the classical Chinese philosophical, historical and literary works associated with “national studies” (guoxue 國 學) (“Peiyang zheng nengliang”). The rise of zheng nengliang in cultural, religious, and business spheres has coincided with Xi Jinping’s elevation to the top offices of state in China, commencing in November 2012 with his confirmation as CPC general secretary at its Eighteenth National Congress. Xi has harnessed zheng nengliang for his policy aims at global, national, and local levels. In December 2012, Xi called for China and the US to bring more zheng nengliang into their relationship-building (“More ‘positive energy’”). In January 2013, following an announcement during the Eighteenth Congress that the CPC aimed to spread more zheng nengliang online, the head of Beijing’s propaganda office urged Beijing’s “2.06 million propaganda workers” to advocate zheng nengliang in their online posts, reportedly leaving some bloggers “bemused and angry” (Phillips 2013). In November 2013, Xi urged China’s citizens to use zheng nengliang to help implement reforms aimed at achieving the CPC goal of a “moderately well-off society” (xiaokang shehui 小康社會) (“Xi Jinping”). In February 2014, he expressed his desire to “make cyberspace become clear and bright” (rang wangluo kongjian qinglangqilai 讓網絡空間清朗起來), and in October of the same year he 7. The Zheng Nengliang Filling Station website address is: http://www.upsbus.com. 8. The LGBT organization is Tongzhi Yi Fanren 同志亦凡人 (Queer Comrades). The video “10 Great Chinese Mainland Gay Films” (Shibu dalu nan nan tongzhi dianying 十部大陸男男同志電影) is available at: http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ux5zpOp0rpg.

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called on online authors across China to use more zheng nengliang in their writing (“Wangluo kongjian”). According to a flurry of microblog posts, but without official confirmation, on September 3, 2015, Xi associated zheng nengliang with the Buddhist-inflected notion of right mindfulness in his speech at the military parade marking the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Japanese occupation of China (“Jinri dianji”).9 Xi’s interventions come in the context of state media campaigns that have linked the expansion of zheng nengliang in society to citizenship values such as “patriotism” (aiguo 愛國), “dedication to one’s work” (jingye 敬業), “honesty” (chengxin 誠 信), and “friendliness” (youshan 友善), the cultivation of which are said to be the basis of the “strength” (qiangda 強大) and “happiness” (xingfu 幸福) of the nation and its citizens (“Hexin jiazhiguan”). The myriad ongoing appropriations and promotion (and occasional derision) of zheng nengliang highlight its circulation and exchange among multiple spheres of life in contemporary China.

Zheng Nengliang in Public Service Advertising I came face to face with vivid depictions of zheng nengliang during a research visit to Beijing in June 2013. While traveling round Beijing, I observed the term zheng nengliang prominently displayed on three handgrip designs on subway line ten and on a large bus stop poster near Renmin University (see also Puppin in this volume on the promotion of happiness in public service advertising in China). While my choice of these four manifestations of zheng nengliang promotion as objects of study reflects my personal itinerary in Beijing, huge numbers of local commuters and pedestrians were also exposed to them on a daily basis. However, I have not yet gathered data on the reception of zheng nengliang campaigns. To analyze these adverts, I draw from Roland Barthes’s semiotic approach to text and image in advertising. Barthes’s now classic reading of a Panzani advertisement shows how texts and images work in tandem to convey both literal and connoted messages. Barthes chose to analyze advertising for three reasons: its signification is intentional and emphatic; its signifieds, which must be presented clearly, are determined by attributes of the product; and the signs in the image, which refer back to the signifieds, are fully formed for an optimum reading (Barthes 2004, 152–53). These conditions are also present in public service advertising, despite the intangibility of the “product.” Barthes identifies three key messages in the Panzani advert: the “linguistic message” of the text, which includes a literal denoted aspect and a nonexplicit connoted aspect; the coded, connoted “symbolic message” of the signs in the image; and the noncoded, denoted “literal message” of the identifiable objects in the image, which is the support for the symbolic message (ibid., 153–54). He also introduces the 9. Xi reportedly said: “The future China will be a realm of people with right knowledge, right mindfulness and zheng nengliang” (Weilai de Zhongguo, shi yiqun zhengzhi, zhengnian, zheng nengliang ren de tianxia 未來 中國，是一群正知，正念，正能量人的天下).

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concept of “anchorage,” which refers to how the text guides the reader to preselected signifieds of the image while avoiding others, and “relay,” a possible function of the linguistic message that occurs when the text provides additional information not found in the image (ibid., 156–57). Although relay most commonly occurs in films and comic strips to advance the plot, it is also used to convey the details of an intended message when readers may not have time to take in the connotations of an image.

Zheng Nengliang in the Subway All three subway handgrip designs share one side in common (Figure 5.1), on which rests the slogan “zheng nengliang every day” (meitian zheng nengliang 每天正能量) in large, white, sans serif characters in strokes of equal thickness on a predominantly blue, sky-like background on which float wispy clouds. In the bottom right corner in a small gray speech bubble sits the telephone number for the subway advertising company and the words “subway handgrip investment hotline” (ditie lashou zhaoshang rexian 地鐵辣手招商熱線) in the same typeface as the main slogan but in smaller font size. Small yellow, green, and pink hearts appear to the left of the telephone number. The inclusion of the advertising company’s telephone number indicates a commercial motivation to attract advertising business (and expectation that decision-making professionals will read the ad) that is not a feature of “pure”

Figure 5.1 “Zheng nengliang every day” (meitian zheng nengliang). © Derek Hird

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PSAs.10 Nonetheless, the handgrip images and texts solely seek to promote zheng nengliang, and as such it is the PSA function that I focus on here. The principal linguistic message reads literally as “every day positive energy,” and all that is needed is knowledge of the Chinese language to understand this. For readers familiar with popular media culture, the term also connotes holistic self-help discursive practices such as those discussed above, which may include adopting a happy demeanor, and which draw from Western psychotherapeutic and Chinese cosmological traditions. The blue sky with its wispy clouds conjures up notions of calmness and clarity, timelessness, perhaps even hope, ambition, and creativity. Although the concept of “blue-sky thinking” is not commonly used in Chinese, transnationally oriented professionals with English-language and Western cultural knowledge may understand this as signified in this instance. The hearts, suggestive of love and empathy, link the agency phone number with the sky and the main linguistic message. The large, strong, bold strokes of the characters in the phrase “zheng nengliang every day” connote strength of mind, and the phrase itself directs the reader to the beautiful blue sky’s abiding presence, and in doing so anchors this very positive, eternal image with the notion of zheng nengliang. On the other side of the first handgrip design (Figure 5.2) there is a blue-sky background with a shining sun, a few clouds, and a paragraph of text on a white, cloud-shaped background. Small blue, pink, and yellow hearts dot the cloud shape. The title of the text, “Live a bit more gracefully” (huode youyaxie 活的優雅些), is presented in large, sky blue, brush-style, semi-cursive characters. The main text, in sky blue, calligraphic regular script, reads as follows: Perhaps your life is not at all prosperous; perhaps your work is far from good enough; perhaps right now you are in a difficult position . . . whatever the reason, when you walk out of your house please make sure you wear a smile on your face (yiding yao rang ziji mian dai weixiao 一定要讓自己面帶微笑), and face life with a calm and composed manner (congrong ziruode miandui shenghuo 從容自若地 面對生活). As long as you genuinely keep this up (zhenzheng chengqilai 真正撐起 來), no matter what, other people will not be able to wear you down (yabukua ni 壓不垮你).11

Self-help pop psychology mingles with a slight tone of moral injunction in this text, which acknowledges that the reader is likely to be in an unpleasant work or financial situation, and prescribes both bodily (“wear a smile”) and psychological (“calm and composed manner”) strategies for dealing with it. The goal of such “fake happiness” practices is couched in terms of individual benefit—one is not “worn down” in the face of hostility from others. The connoted message is that if you are unhappy, it is through your own failure to perform happiness and maintain a sense 10. I thank Giovanna Puppin for pointing out that noncommerciality is a common precondition when defining a PSA. 11. The texts of all three messages also appear, with slight variations, on innumerable websites, blogs, forums etc. without attribution.

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Figure 5.2 “Live a bit more gracefully” (huode youyaxie). © Derek Hird

of calm; or to put it another way, each individual is responsible for their own mental well-being, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in. The combining of bodily and psychological strategies connotes holistic harmony. The symbolic imagery is almost identical to the other side of the handgrip and needs no further comment, save in one respect: lying behind the regular-style brushstrokes of the body of the text and the semi-cursive brushstrokes of the title is the notion of calligraphy as an art form practiced by self-cultivating Confucian gentlemen. In this tradition, well-formed and aesthetically pleasing brushstrokes express the composed and cultivated disposition of the calligrapher. What is more, the act of putting brush to paper is conceived in cosmological terms: yin and yang relationships are realized with each brushstroke, starting from the very first touch of black ink on blank paper—the latter representing the “undifferentiated oneness” of the pristine universe—until the work is completed and reconciled harmoniously with the dao (Fong 1992, 122). The calligraphic typefaces’ evocation of cosmological, philosophical, and aesthetic traditions reinforces the holism of the linguistic message through an affective and intellectual connectivity with a reader sensitive to these traditions. The second handgrip image (Figure 5.3) consists of a green grassy hill, a large expanse of blue sky, some white fluffy clouds, a rainbow, a wind turbine, and a couple of colorful hot-air balloons. As with the first design, it delivers its linguistic message in sky blue text on a white, cloud-shaped background, dotted with little blue, pink, and yellow hearts. The title of the text, again in brush-style, semi-cursive characters, reads: “Optimism is an attitude” (leguan shi yizhong taidu 樂觀是一種態

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Figure 5.3 “Optimism is an attitude” (leguan shi yizhong taidu). © Derek Hird

度). In brush-style regular script as before, the body of the text gives the following advice: Don’t tire yourself out, don’t get so busy that you exhaust yourself; when you feel vexed find a friend and meet up, when you feel like sleeping just topple over (daoxiaqu 倒下去) and go to sleep; a placid mind (xintai pinghe 心態平和) is always the most beautiful, one should be happy (kuaile) every day.

Although the title of this message advocates a positive psychological disposition, its actual solutions to vexation and tiredness are bodily: social interaction with a friend eases vexation, sleeping helps solve tiredness. No deep explorations of the psyche are required. The living-in-the-here-and-now dimension of going for a friendly chat and toppling into bed connotes a Daoist-like response to tiredness and vexation in its existential immediacy and alignment with natural rhythms. A “placid mind” state (xintai pinghe) is a long-established Daoist prerequisite in “life cultivation” (yangsheng 養生) practices such as qigong and taijiquan, and also lies at the core of Buddhist meditation and neo-Confucian self-cultivation techniques. The concluding phrase of the message suggests that happiness (kuaile) is both a normative feeling and the effect of bodily self-management practices. The injunction to be happy every day links the feeling of happiness with the opposite side’s slogan “zheng nengliang every day”; in this way the reader is guided towards associating zheng nengliang with an ever-present feeling of happiness. The green hill, blue sky, and wispy clouds are reminiscent of the famous Microsoft Windows XP desktop background image of the Napa Valley, an association easily

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Figure 5.4 “Hello happy times” (meihao de shiguang nihao). © Derek Hird

made by the computer-savvy white-collar commuters on the subway. This lends the image an air of the good life in California, affluent, relaxed, and hi-tech. The rainbow reinforces the beauty of the scene, the hot-air balloons convey a sense of freedom and escape from earthly woes, and the wind turbine signifies an aspiration for the clear skies and clean air that Beijingers can currently only dream of. The text does not anchor particular signs in the image, although the reference to the beauty of the placid mind perhaps evokes the beauty of the image, but in Barthes’s sense of relay it adds information to the image, giving the reader clearer instructions to achieving zheng nengliang than the image alone is able to do. The imagery and coloring of the third handgrip message (Figure 5.4) differs somewhat from the first two. The visual focus, on the right-hand side, is the golden brown and yellow head of a sunflower, half of its petals bathed in sunlight, with a fuzzy background of sunflowers in the same warm colors. The linguistic message sits to the left in the familiar cloud-like shape, although this time the cloud is brown. As before, a few little blue, pink, and yellow hearts dot the cloud shape. The overall effect is one of warmth and coziness. The title, in the familiar semi-cursive calligraphy, this time colored yellow, reads “Hello happy times” (meihao de shiguang nihao 美好的時光你好),12 below which sits the text, colored white, and in calligraphic regular script as before: 12. Dictionary entries translate meihao variously as happy, lovely, fine, and glorious. Because the handgrip messages prescribe practical steps to feeling good about oneself, “happy” seems as appropriate a translation as any here.

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This handgrip’s linguistic message advocates a large set of positive dispositions and the body-centered practice of smiling as the recipe for “happy times.” Complex psychological introspection is played down in favor of being “simple,” “happy,” and dismissing one’s troubles as “imaginary.” The dispositions often include an embodied factor: for example, the phrase tashi wushi (“practical and pragmatic”) emphasizes the concrete over the abstract, kailang (cheerful) suggests a happy expression and an upbeat manner of speech, jianren (“tenacious”) a physical hardiness, wennuan (“warm”) an air of geniality, tanran (“calm”) a state of stillness, and kangkai (“generous”) the act of giving. The final sentence lifts the reader out of the present and into his or her future dreams, a sign of the linkage of dreams and happiness in contemporary discourse (for more on this see Inwood’s chapter in this volume). Reading between the lines, the message is that worrying, complaining, protesting, and feeling upset are negative emotions and behaviors that should be dispelled. As with the previous handgrips’ texts, this text prescribes an embodied, holistic formula for happiness that places responsibility and effort squarely on the shoulders of the individual reader. The sunflower connotes actively seeking out warmth and brightness in one’s life, just as growing sunflowers turn towards the sun. The text implies that the reader can emulate this natural tendency of sunflowers by being a “simple person” without a care in the world, simply smiling warmly and nurturing dreams (but not fantasies!) of better things to come. In this way, text and image convey the meaning of zheng nengliang. To summarize the three handgrips: the blue skies convey a sense of timeless calm, relaxation, freedom from worries, and clarity of thought; the hearts connote love and tenderness; the calligraphy and emphasis on nature draw the reader towards enduring cosmologies and self-cultivation practices that emphasize holistic harmony between person and environment. Underlying all of the above is the message that the individual is responsible for and capable of managing her emotions; and since happiness is a normative emotional state she should nurture her happiness through bodily and psychological self-management. Structural conditions—political, economic, social, environmental, and so on—are not acknowledged as the cause of unhappiness, as is the case with Seligman’s positive psychology

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and the CPC’s fake happiness practices; rather, it is the individual alone who has the power to smile herself happy.

Zheng Nengliang at a Bus Stop I encountered a rather different rendering of zheng nengliang in an advert (Figure 5.5) across the back of a large bus stop shelter in the northwest corner of Beijing’s third ring road. This always busy bus stop is near a large supermarket, cinema, and several streets of restaurants and small shops. On the left-hand side of this wide advert sits a large pink heart, streaked through with white; on the right-hand side two large red figures with pink crosses for hearts leap in the air amid numerous small red and pink hearts. The background is white. Across the pink heart in tall black characters a slogan reads: “Offer compassion [literally ‘loving heart’]; transmit zheng nengliang” (fengxian aixin chuandi zheng nengliang 奉獻愛心  傳遞正能量). The characters are in a sans serif typeface, and are machine-made looking with thin, angular strokes of equal width, yet are softened considerably in the first half of the slogan by little hearts and curved linking lines. Stylized electric pulses, as if on an electrocardiographic heart monitor, connect yet also form a boundary between the slogan’s two parts, and reappear in red in the character “能,” and a red cross is highlighted within the character “量.” A secondary slogan underneath in smaller, yet bolder, black, sans serif, regular script characters, with no stylizations, reads: “Being

Figure 5.5 “Offer compassion; transmit zheng nengliang” (fengxian aixin; chuandi zheng nengliang). © Derek Hird

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respectful and courteous makes our city happier” (zunzhong, lirang, rang women de chengshi geng meihao 尊重，禮讓，讓我們的城市更美好). Terms like respect and courtesy are frequently used in state-sponsored civility campaigns together with wenming 文明 (“civilized”) in phrases such as “be a civilized and courteous Chinese person” (zuo wenming youli de Zhongguo ren 做文明 有禮的中國人).13 This kind of language is pervasive on the national civility website and its counterparts at province, city, and district levels.14 In this interpretation of zheng nengliang, offering a “loving heart” is defined as being courteous and respectful; it calls upon the reader to modify the way in which she interacts with others, so that the city can be a happier place for all. Concisely stated moral injunctions aimed at society’s happiness in the bus shelter advert replace the subway handgrip messages’ kindly, empathetic guides to individual corporeal and psychological strategies for individual happiness amid the myriad stresses of life. The bus shelter message does not acknowledge that the reader herself may be stressed or indeed may wish for personal happiness; rather, it implies that the reader is the cause of unhappiness in others. The electric pulse signs, cross symbol, and heart crosses of the jumping figures likely allude to the positive energy charges associated with the term zheng nengliang in the study of magnetic energy fields in physics. The leaping human figures evoke vitality and a happiness achieved together with others. The hearts, as in the subway adverts, link this erstwhile scientific term with compassionate, empathetic relations between humans, and reinforce the term aixin in the linguistic message, which itself acts as anchorage to the heart images in that it directs the reader’s attention towards them. The secondary slogan acts as a form of relay in that it provides additional information not found in the image—be courteous and respectful—and thus delivers a blunt, unambiguous message for the benefit of the reader with little time to decode the image, unclear about its symbolism, or unsure of the meaning of zheng nengliang. Reading the subway and bus shelter messages together, one is tempted to surmise that one of the stresses the emotionally self-governing subjects of the subway messages have to stoically bear as they go about their business in the city is the uncouth public behavior of the subject in the bus shelter message. The subway handgrip subject emerges as a self-regulating and thoughtful model individual with feelings; the bus shelter poster subject as thoughtless, unruly, and in need of firm, top-down moral directives. Whereas the subway messages help the reader find ways to stay sane and serviceable as a professional employee; the bus shelter message endeavors to effect a society-wide improvement in civility between citizens. Although both the subway and the bus shelter adverts speak to aspects of China’s socioeconomic development project and its disciplinary ambitions, they 13. See, for example, http://archive.wenming.cn/lyxx/2010-08/16/content_20629476.htm. 14. The national civility website is at http://www.wenming.cn; the Beijing equivalent can be accessed at http:// www.bjwmb.gov.cn.

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aim at the distinctive “needs” of differently imagined types of subject: on the one hand self-development, and on the other hand a civilizing process. The subway adverts assume the civility of the reader, but the bus shelter advert assumes the need for the reader to be civilized. Premised on the assumption of a linear civilizing process, the subjects that the adverts call forth are imagined to be at different stages of development: the bus shelter advert assumes a not-yet-modern-enough citizen in need of the appropriate manners for a developed society; the subway adverts speak to a postmodern subject, capable of drawing from eclectic traditions of diverse origins to better manage her emotions.

Zheng Nengliang and Middle-Class Emotional Habitus Subway advertising in Beijing is mainly seen by young, educated, middle-class, urban residents, and evokes different scales of community belonging, from the local to the transnational (Lewis 2003, 262–65). Commercial adverts in particular “appeal to the idea of a transnational citizen: a transnational consumer citizen” (Lewis 2012, 778). Whereas the bus shelter zheng nengliang advert aligns with the many public service adverts in China that “make overt appeals to local government development interests and issues” (Lewis 2003, 263), the subtle cosmopolitanism of the subway zheng nengliang adverts has an affinity with the commercial adverts that evoke a transnational community of urbane but stressed-out white-collar professionals seeking strategies to remain physically and mentally healthy enough to climb the corporate ladder. Compared to the bus shelter advert, the subway adverts are more sophisticated in their tenor and more radical in their implicit abrogation of government and business responsibility for the well-being of citizens and employees. The class undertone of the adverts highlights the role of public service advertising in the discursive production of national and global classed identities. Contemporary sociocultural stratification processes involve the construction of distinctive emotional selves, posits Eva Illouz: “There are now new hierarchies of emotional well-being, understood as the capacity to achieve socially and historically situated forms of happiness and well-being” (2007, 73). Due to the circumstances of their jobs, Illouz suggests, today’s middle classes develop an “emotional habitus” and “emotional intelligence” that privilege them in the economic marketplace, and better equip them to achieve what is considered to represent well-being and happiness: Emotional intelligence reflects particularly well the emotional style and dispositions of the new middle classes which are located in intermediary positions, that is, which both control and are controlled, whose professions demand a careful management of the self, who are tightly dependent on collaborative work, and who must use their self in a both a creative and a productive way. (ibid., 66)

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Emotional intelligence can be viewed as a kind of social capital, since it helps build the relationship networks that help people make more money, gain promotion, and so on; yet it is also acts as cultural capital because it facilitates relatively highly valued styles of behavior (ibid., 66–67). The self-cultivation and controlled display of emotions advocated in the subway zheng nengliang adverts are attainable and relevant for aspiring white-collar workers, whose emotional intelligence is already honed and receptive. From the perspective of the construction of class, moreover, the subway adverts should not just be seen as a response to the needs of pressed-upon corporate employees, but also as part of a panoply of discursive materials that train—or “psychologize”—a middle-class habitus or subjectivity to manifest well-mannered compliance with government and business requirements. In the words of Michel Foucault, “one of the prime effects of power [is] that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals” (1980, 98). In similar vein, Jie Yang argues that psychologization is “a process through which psychology as an array of practical modes of understanding and acting penetrates people’s social imagination of who they are or what they might be” (2013, 301). In this sense, the psychologization of the middle classes involves its own distinctive “fake happiness” practices, which aim not only to encourage individualized responses to setbacks and neutralize potentially damaging ones, but also help to effect a model of successful middle-class emotional subjectivity that combines grace, sensitivity, warmth, and placidity of mind. Such coaxing to cultivate a personalized zheng nengliang reflects and instills a mode of emotional self-governance that distinguishes the aspiring middle classes from other social groups.15

Conclusion This chapter has shown the influence of multiple traditions in the evolution of zheng nengliang, including Martin Seligman’s positive psychology revolution, CPC-promulgated “psychologization” and “fake happiness” practices, the magnetic energy fields of physics, William James–inspired action-centered happiness therapy, the circulation of qi, and the notion of the body as a microcosm of the universe. This assemblage of elements mixes together the idea of the self-governing neoliberal self with an embodied and holistic worldview that does not focus exclusively on the psyche. In religion, popular culture, civil society, the media, the business world and government policy, zheng nengliang is held out as a pathway to happiness, harmony, and stability. The subway zheng nengliang adverts address weary white-collar commuters with soothing and appealing texts and images, and convey the message that personal happiness lies a few simple steps away, completely within the control of every 15. On this point, see also the discussion of suzhi in Wielander, this volume.

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individual. Their wording acknowledges the pressures the reader faces, and guides her through the physical and psychological measures she needs to take to be happy, such as wearing a smile, staying calm, resting at will, cultivating a tranquil mind, being pragmatic, cheerful, warm, generous, hopeful, and nourishing a dream or two. The flowing calligraphic brushstrokes of the characters lull the eye. The underlying message of the texts assures the reader that she and only she can bring herself holistic happiness. Clean blue skies, fluffy white clouds, green grassy hills, colorful rainbows, soaring hot-air balloons, and yellow-brown sunflowers provide the idyllic images upon which the texts sit. The images reinforce this message of wellbeing with seductive pastoral scenes that signify timeless, joyful calm, and freedom. The self-help style of the texts echoes positive psychology’s focus on individual responsibility, yet the frequent mention of bodily actions and the use of calligraphy suggest a coordinated mind-body solution that brings to mind historical Chinese self-cultivation practices. That this prescribed route to happiness is an individual one is left in no doubt; nowhere mentioned is the responsibility of government and businesses to address unhappiness-causing societal structural issues. A stark contrast in text and imagery presents itself in the bus shelter zheng nengliang advert. An electric current seems to run through the main slogans and the leaping figures, “transmitting” zheng nengliang across the city. The secondary slogan’s abrupt command to be respectful and courteous seems curiously old-fashioned compared to the subway messages’ gentler tenor. No dreamy pastoral idyll backgrounds the text: there is no need for it, nor for a personal tone. The happiness of the imagined reader of the bus shelter advert is not at issue; but her public behavior is. She is a directed subject, not a self-governing one. She is told succinctly to be polite to others, not caressed by self-fashioning body-mind guidance. Her good manners will lead to a kind of communal happiness, the leaping figures seem to signify. Whereas the bus shelter advert’s multiple hearts reinforce the main slogan’s call to offer up a loving heart to others; the small number of hearts in the subway adverts would seem to signify self-love, as that is the focus of the texts they adorn. In contrast with the bus shelter advert, the subway adverts thus reflect and help fashion an emotionally self-governing middle-class subjectivity, transnationally oriented yet locally situated, a Chinese intervention in the hierarchies of well-being that Illouz has identified as core to neoliberal capitalism. Zheng nengliang here serves as a stratifying tool for the development of a class-specific emotional habitus. Much research remains to be done on zheng nengliang, its manifestations in popular media and everyday life, and how it varies across gender, class, age, religious, regional, and other boundaries. One might ask: What individual and social costs does the practice of zheng nengliang entail? And more specifically: What is lost and what is gained through developing emotionally placid habitus? This paper’s research could be extended by ethnographic investigation, on, for example, how notions of suzhi 素質 (personal “quality”) might affect interpretations of the two contrasting styles of messages (Kipnis 2007). The reach and distinctive journeys

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of zheng nengliang across China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Sinophone populations elsewhere require careful mapping, as the middle classes in different locales seek to avoid stress and find happiness in ways that may seem comparable, but upon closer inspection differ in certain respects. Critics of zheng nengliang should be taken seriously.16 At stake is nothing less than understanding how zheng nengliang and wider psychologization processes are used to manipulate how people think, act, and understand themselves.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barmé, Geremie, and Jeremy Goldkorn, eds. 2013. China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China. Canberra: Australian Centre on China in the World. Barthes, Roland. 2004. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Visual Rhetoric in a Digital World: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Carolyn Handa, 152–63. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins. Berry, Chris, Nicola Liscutin, and Jonathan D. Mackintosh, eds. 2009. Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Binkley, Sam. 2011. “Happiness, Positive Psychology and the Program of Neoliberal Governmentality.” Subjectivity 4 (4): 371–94. Brockmann, Hilke, Jan Delhey, Christian Welzel, and Hao Yuan. 2009. “The China Puzzle: Falling Happiness in a Rising Economy.” Journal of Happiness Studies 10 (4): 387–405. Chang, Chung-yuan. 2011. Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art and Poetry. London and Philadelphia: Singing Dragon. Chen, Nancy. 2002. “Embodying Qi and Masculinities in Post-Mao China.” In Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities: A Reader, edited by Susan Brownell and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, 315–29. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World. London: Granta. Ferguson, Iain. 2007. “Neoliberalism, Happiness and Wellbeing.” International Socialism 117, December 18. Accessed September 12, 2014. http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=400#117 ferguson13. Fong, Wen C. 1992. Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy 8th–14th Century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Two Lectures.” In Michel Foucault: Power/Knowledge, edited by Colin Gordon, 78–108. Brighton: Harvester Press. Froh, Jeffrey J. 2004. “The History of Positive Psychology: Truth Be Told.” NYS Psychologist 16 (3): 18–20. “Hexin jiazhiguan ningju shehui zheng nengliang” 核心價值觀凝聚社會正能量 [Core system of values coheres zheng nengliang in society]. 2014. Xinhua Net [新華網], February 24. Accessed November 21, 2015. http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/201402/24/c_126183352.htm. 16. See for example the call for more fu nengliang 負能量 (“negative energy”) at http://www.douban.com/group/ topic/42590177.

Smile Yourself Happy 127 Illouz, Eva. 2007. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. “Jinri dianji: Weibo re chuan Xi Jinping de yiduan ‘jiang hua’” 今日點擊：微博熱傳習近平 的一段「講話」[Today’s clicks: Microblogs fervently spread a section of Xin Jinping’s “speech”]. 2015. New Tang Dynasty Television [新唐人電視臺], September 8, 2015. Accessed January 24, 2016. http://ca.ntdtv.com/xtr/b5/2015/09/08/a1222302.html. Kipnis, Andrew. 2007. “Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People’s Republic of China.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (2): 383–400. Lewis, Steven. 2003. “The Media of New Public Spaces in Global Cities: Subway Advertising in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17 (3): 261–72. Lewis, Steven. 2012. “The Potential for International and Transnational Public Service Advertising in Public Spaces in American and Chinese Global Cities: Conclusions from a 2010 Survey of Advertisements in Subways in Beijing, New York, Shanghai and Washington, DC.” Public Relations Review 38: 765–78. Li, Changliang 李昌亮. 2013. “Dayuan fashi: zheng nian chansheng ‘zheng nengliang’ you kexue yiju” 大願法師：正念產生“正能量”有科學依據 [Master Dayuan: Right mindfulness’s production of zheng nengliang has a scientific basis]. China News Net [中國 新聞網], July 16, 2013. Accessed November 21, 2015. http://www.chinanews.com/ cul/2013/07-16/5046656.shtml. Liu, Na 劉娜, and Ning Chang 常寧. 2016. “Zheng nengliang huayu zai zhenren xiu jiemu zhong goujian he chengxian” 正能量話語在真人秀節目中的構建和呈現 [The construction and representation of zheng nengliang discourse in reality shows]. Journalism Bimonthly [新聞大學] 138: 60–67. “More ‘Positive Energy’ for China-U.S. Partnership: Xi.” 2012. People’s Net [人民網], December 14, 2012. Accessed November 21, 2015. http://en.people.cn/90883/8058271. html. “Peiyang zheng nengliang yuangong” 培養正能量員工 [Cultivating employees’ zheng nengliang]. n.d. Psychspace.com. Accessed January 25, 2016. http://www.psychspace.com/ space/viewnews-56087. Phillips, Tom. 2013. “Chinese Spin Doctors Urged to Spread ‘Positive Energy’ Online.” The Telegraph, January 18, 2013. Accessed November 21, 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/worldnews/asia/china/9810857/Chinese-spin-doctors-urged-to-spread-positiveenergy-online.html. Ren, Jun 任俊, and Ye Haosheng 葉浩生. 2006. “Dangdai jiji xinlixue yundong cunzai de jige wenti” 當代積極心理學運動存在的幾個問題 [Several problems with contemporary positive psychology]. Journal of Hubei TV University [湖北廣播電視大學學報] 30 (2): 50–51. “Rip It Up.” Accessed August 7, 2013. http://www.ripitup.biz/. Seligman, Martin. 2002. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Simon and Schuster. “Shengdoushi xingshi” 聖鬥士星矢 [Saint Seiya]. Weiji baike [維基百科]. Accessed November 17, 2015. https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/聖鬥士星矢. Steingass, Matthias. 2013. “Control.” In Cruel Theory/Sublime Practice: Toward a Revaluation of Buddhism, edited by Glenn Wallis, Tom Pepper, and Matthias Steingass, 157–208. Roskilde: Eye Corner Press.

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Wang, Qian 王倩, and Li Hui 李輝. 2010. “Dui jiji xinlixue zai Zhongguo fazhan de jidian sikao” 對積極心理學在中國發展的幾點思考 [Several reflections on the development of positive psychology in China]. Advances in Psychological Science [心理科學進展] 14 (5): 787–94. “Wangluo kongjian qinglang libukai zheng nengliang zhuli” 網絡空間清朗離不開正能量 助力 [A clear and bright cyberspace needs the assistance of zheng nengliang]. 2014. Wangyi News [網易新聞], October 20, 2014. Accessed November 21, 2015. http:// news.163.com/14/1020/17/A911450300014JB6.html. Wiseman, Richard. 2012a. “Self Help: Forget Positive Thinking, Try Positive Action.” The Guardian, June 30, 2012. Accessed October 6, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/ science/2012/jun/30/self-help-positive-thinking. Wiseman, Richard. 2012b. Rip It Up: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life. London: Pan Macmillan. “Xiao yuzhou baofa” 小宇宙爆發 [Small universe, explode]. Baidu baike [百度百科]. Accessed November 17, 2015. http://baike.baidu.com/view/2940951.htm. “Xi Jinping: Huijuqi quanmian shenhua gaige de qiangda zheng nengliang” 習近平：匯聚 起全面深化改革的強大正能量 [Xi Jinping: Bring together a strong zheng nengliang to comprehensively deepen reforms]. 2013. Xinhua Net [新華網], November 28, 2013. Accessed November 21, 2015. http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2013-11/28/c_ 118339435.htm. Yang, Jie. 2013. “‘Fake Happiness’: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho-Politics in China.” Ethos 41 (3): 292–312. “Zheng nengliang” 正能量. Baidu baike [百度百科]. Accessed August 7, 2013. http://baike. baidu.com/subview/4318053/11048433.htm.

6 “Happy Housewives” Gender, Class, and Psychological Self-Help in China Jie Yang

Judging by their presence in popular media, housewives (jiating zhufu 家庭主婦) seem to take over China. These housewife-mothers are called “hot mom” (la ma 辣 媽), “tiger mom” (hu ma 虎媽), “super mom” (chaoji mama 超級媽媽) and “studyaccompanying mom” (peidu mama 陪讀媽媽).1 They are busy taking care of their children and their families, but they are content and happy. Abounding in women’s magazines, on television and on the internet, they wear cooking aprons, beaming over their dishes and vacuuming floors. They smile as they shop for home appliances and accompany their children to various schools and afterschool events. They cook, blog, and publish their dishes and recipes online. Their emotional lives are discussed in great detail by experts on love, marriage, and family psychology, as they are viewed as the souls of their homes; their happiness and health are key to the well-being and success of the whole family. Their happiness pervades various advertisements in women’s magazines and TV programs, is viewed as contagious and used by companies as a selling point. Indeed, they are depicted as the ones holding the purse strings, responsible for making purchases for the home and family. Their domestic femininities have also led to success: some have become celebrity chefs after years of “enjoying” cooking at home; others have become maternity matrons because of their experiences of caring for their own children; still others emerge as writers of bestsellers because of their blogging on innovative cooking or superb child care, or as artists due to their dedication to cross-stitch embroidery while passing the time at home. Such representations are idealizing discourses which highlight the ideal roles of women as mother, housewife, and consumer. But who 1. The data used for this chapter was collected between 2002 and 2013 for a project on the rise of therapeutic culture and therapeutic governance, particularly through the state-led psychotherapeutic intervention in mass unemployment in Changping, Beijing. I did ethnographic field research in Changping and conducted interviews with women and men in working-class communities on the effects of psychotherapeutic intervention (including happiness campaigns launched by the government and media). I also surveyed the vast literature on psychological self-help or the genre of xinling jitang 心靈雞湯 (chicken soup for the soul) in Beijing.

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are these housewives? Why have they become so popular at this point of Chinese history? And are they really so happy? This chapter answers these questions and highlights the discrepancy between the media images of happy housewives and the actual experiences of women who do unpaid or underpaid domestic work. First, the women being represented as housewives in China fall into two main groups: unpaid women who do domestic labor at home, and domestic workers, who generally work for pay in the homes of others. Within the former group there are subgroups: stay-at-home women by circumstance, and stay-at-home women by choice. According to official figures from 2005, 62.8% of retrenched and unemployed workers were women. In some parts of China, women made up 70–80% of the total numbers of unemployed. At the same time, women made up only 23% of the number of employees that were redeployed (China Labor Bulletin 2005). Most of these unemployed women become “housewives.” In terms of sheer numbers, as of 2005, stay-at-home women made up about 73 million of China’s population, and 14% of females over the age of sixteen; that is, one out of seven women in China was a housewife working at home without pay (Liu and Ma 2011). Many of those who stayed home did so because they could not find paid work due to a grim job market as a result of privatization since the mid-1990s, while those who stayed home by choice did so to embrace a particular lifestyle. A 2005 statistic showed that many highly educated urban women now stay at home and take on the role of “housewife” as their identity (ibid.). These women view the home more as a modern, privileged location than one of avoidance from competition for employment. Their consumption habits are conspicuous, and they are frequently targeted by advertisers (Yu 2011). Meanwhile, paid domestic laborers are often drawn from the ranks of the women who are at home by circumstance. Since the mid-1990s urban women workers in China have suffered disproportionately from both unemployment and poverty (Wang 2003; Dai 2004; Yang 2007), and housework has been listed as among the top reemployment opportunities for these women, who had been laid off as a result of state enterprise restructuring (see also the introduction in this volume). Given the number of unpaid Chinese housewives, however, this strategy for reemployment is questionable, at the very least exposing the already diminished social standing of these women due to unemployment and intense market competition. Second, why are housewives popular? This is mainly due to a flourishing media discourse since the mid-1990s about “reemployment stars” (Dai 2004; Yang 2007), which describes both the suffering of laid-off workers—including housewives (by circumstance) and domestic workers—and the strategies to overcome this. This discourse in general represents some of the laid-off-workers-turned-housewives or domestic workers as happy, psychologically healthy reemployment stars (even though some of them are not paid), highlighting the effects of government intervention in both reemployment and the psychological health of the underprivileged. Enriched by the language of psychology and the recent interest in the potential of

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psychological concepts and techniques for managing personal and social issues such as unemployment and mental illness (Yang 2013), this discourse emphasizes the connections between psychology and gender in an effort to put individual emotions to work in transforming peoples’ attitudes, confidence, and potential, a focus that downplays socioeconomic inequality. Having a huge reach in China, this discourse tends to blur lines between unpaid housewives (both subgroups) and domestic workers. Domestic workers (including both urban laid-off women and rural migrants) are often represented as experiencing the same contentment and happiness, enjoying equally the labor of cooking, shopping, or caring for children (see Yan 2003; Sun 2009). Such representation reduces the complex subjectivities of domestic workers who are trying to live up to an unspoken ideal of homemaker (embodied by middle-class housewives) while living in adverse conditions. Such represented enjoyment or happiness thus lacks a moral map and overlooks class stratification intensified by unfolding privatization and economic restructuring in China. Advertisers fully embrace and bank on the domestic femininity of all these women. Working with psychologists, they promote a therapeutic ethos—by invoking the languages, ideas, and practices of therapeutic expertise—that is, housework and the home (including consuming for the home and family) are therapeutic, nourishing, and full of (market) potentials. That is, the consumption that brings about happiness and fulfillment is a kind of therapeutic consumption. Commodities become transforming objects, and consumption constitutes a process of transformation, through which one’s subjectivity identifies with the happiness and lifestyles of the models/celebrities—here the happy housewives in the advertisements. Reemployed domestic workers and housewives are represented in the self-help media as subjects who happily engage in either entrepreneurship derived from the humble duties of housework, or consumption for the home and family. In other words, happiness enhances their participation in entrepreneurship and consumption, apparently narrowing the class gap between the groups of women, even while in reality workingclass domestic workers/housewives are often precariously reemployed in the homes of middle-class families. Such happiness is supposedly adding value to the commodities those housewives are associated with (as a consumer or advertiser) and appealing to other consumers across class boundaries. In this sense, happiness, more than a political technology that produces social norms (Ahmed 2010), constitutes a source for enhancing value, entrepreneurial capital, and consumption. Happiness is an affect, a psychosocial contagion, tying individuals to the broader social, economic, and political process (Ahmed 2004). The construct of the “happy housewife” plays a central role in subjecting housewives and domestic workers to the demands of a market-led economy. Through its links to psychology, the concept operates as a technology of the self (requiring Chinese wives to develop attitudes and behaviors of domestic selflessness). More than a commodity or a marketing strategy, this

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happiness creates a fantasy of hope and harmony covering up the widened income gap and intensified social stratification. Consonant with the broad turn towards happiness in academia, government, and the international realms (Ahmed 2010), China has recently witnessed the emergence of numerous counseling programs, self-reflexive projects, confessional TV talk shows, and self-help literatures that promote happiness and positive psychology (Yang 2013). In dozens of programs at the nationally viewed China Central Television and on local cable televisions, counselors often appear, using Chinese terms like xingfu 幸福, kuaile 快樂, huanle 歡樂, or kaixin 開心, all of which can be roughly translated as “happiness.” Also, since 2006, happiness has been adopted as an index in China to evaluate economic growth and governing efficiency, particularly in relation to the new political project of constructing hexie shehui 和諧社 會 (“a harmonious society”), which claims to be people-centered and socially and economically sustainable. Happiness then becomes a governing technology to sustain social harmony, as well as a measure of success. With the construction of a harmonious society since 2004, the rise of psychology as part of its promotion is designed to alleviate the effects of social and economic dislocation. Key to the harmonious society is happiness. Constructing a happy social atmosphere compels people to “feel” happy in a “harmonious society.” Here the notion of happiness in the representation of happy housewives serves not only as a governing technology that sustains social harmony and social norms, but also constitutes a source of productivity and entrepreneurial capital and a site for enhancing value and consumption.2

Two Venues for Happy Hearts To better understand this burgeoning media discourse on housewives, I concentrate on two media productions appealing to and commodifying women’s “hearts” through the representations of housewives. One is a counseling program at China 2. China’s self-help movement has its roots in its American counterpart. Many of the country’s bestselling selfhelp books are actually translations of US publications. For example, Spencer Johnson’s (1998) Who Moved My Cheese?—an all-time bestselling work in translation in China, teaches people how to cope with change. Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937/1953) described the use of repeated positive thought to attract happiness and wealth by tapping into an infinite intelligence. The basic structure of these books is, first, a suggestion that there is a flaw in people because of the culture that guides or programs them, and, second, a suggestion of what might be done to solve this problem. That is, self-help books offer both a critique of the culture and a solution to it (Dolby 2005, 4–5). Yet the books actually maintain the stability of culture, ensuring that some elements of it go unquestioned and are therefore preserved (Dolby 2005, 11). The US selfhelp movement has since grown vast and varied, serving the desire of an American audience that supports self-awareness, self-reliance, and self-education (Dolby 2005, xii; see also Nehring et al. 2016 on self-help culture and popular psychology from a transnational perspective). In China, meanwhile, self-help genres (particularly for women) also flourished early—starting in the 1920s after the May Fourth Movement. In recent years, the genre of xinling jitang 心靈雞湯 in China has received increasing criticisms from readers for its role in numbing and pacifying the masses, which serves the government’s interests in maintaining sociopolitical stability (see Yang 2017).

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Central Television 12, Xinli Fangtan 心理訪談 (Psychology Talk Show, hereafter XLFT).3 The other is a psychological self-help magazine, Xinli Yuekan 心理月刊 (Psychologies, hereafter XLYK).4 The two venues are representative in terms of content and popularity among women. They are related: some of the psychotherapists counseling people on XLFT published counseling scripts or wrote articles for XLYK. XLFT combines psychotherapy and media. In its daily broadcast (airing at 11:15 a.m. and repeating twice the next day at 2:45 p.m. and 11:25 p.m.), the hostess facilitates a counseling session, offering pragmatic advice and informal interpretations of psychological problems, while guest counselors provide expert diagnoses and prescriptions. XLFT also showcases members of marginalized classes as role models of happy, virtuous subjects who, I argue, promote a certain slant on happiness intended to enhance entrepreneurship and consumption (see Yang 2013). XLFT resembles the genre of psychotainment shows (Illouz 2008) that has gained popularity by focusing on participants’ psychosocial transformations. The other self-help venue I focus on, the magazine of XLYK, also promotes transformation of the self. The magazine is part of an international chain originating in Germany and was first issued in China in 2006. It combines gender and psychology as a marketing strategy targeting women. It uses happiness (as therapy) to sell cosmetics, jewelry, home appliances, new lifestyles, and even tourism as ecopsychology—all forms of what I call “therapeutic consumption.” That is, as a result of consuming these products, women will allegedly become happy and confident, triumphing the boredom, drudgery, and exhaustion of housework. The happiness of these women as a result of consumption is therapeutic, also potentially influencing other women to enjoy such therapeutic consumption. The magazine intersperses translated articles on Western psychotherapy with essays by celebrity women on coping skills and experiences of psychological disorders, and with multiple images of women, both Chinese and Caucasian, young and middle-aged, narrating their life stories and showcasing their achievements after surviving major affective disorders or other difficulties. On the margins of these stories are advertisements for spa centers, ecotours in Beijing and Shanghai, and different brands of cosmetics, jewelry, and so on. These two media productions share commonalities: both have close ties to the state and to one another. CCTV’s XLFT is predominantly funded by the government, and XLYK, despite its international origin, is sponsored by the Chinese Physical Education Bureau, a government agency. The state also has a hand in gendered psychological self-help through the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), a self-claimed NGO largely funded by the government and responsible for implementing state policies concerning women. Counseling sessions appearing 3. Launched in 2004, Psychology Talk Show at CCTV 12 is the first TV counseling program in China to broadcast individual counseling live. Its motto is “to open the door to the soul, listen to inner stories, and advocate for a happy life.” For a Chinese introduction, see baike.baidu.com/view/575827.htm. 4. See its Chinese introduction at www.psychologies.com.cn, accessed July 20, 2013.

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on XLFT are often republished as scripts in XLYK. In addition, counselors at XLFT also contribute articles and commentaries on psychological and emotional health for the magazine. While both promote happiness as a commodity and a marketing strategy, XLYK is the more explicitly commercialized and saturated with more advertisements than XLFT. Additionally, they both draw heavily upon the Chinese tradition of the “heart.” Psychology is translated in Chinese as “the study of the heart’s reasoning.” The heart is viewed as the origin of cognition, virtue, and bodily sensation (Hall and Ames 1998). It controls both the mind and the body. If we understand that the psychosocial is central in the mediated production of subjectivity (Illouz 2008) by focusing on women and the happiness of their hearts, these two venues implicitly seek transformations in feminine subjectivities—in this case, towards forms that suit the increased entrepreneurship and consumption the government has promoted. The venues both promote this transformation by emphasizing a happiness that is twofold: happiness as it arises from consumption, where consuming commodities imbued with psychological precepts putatively helps housewives relieve stress and achieve self-fulfillment (see below); and happiness as it accrues directly from housework (paid and unpaid), exemplified in the promotion of cooking by Sister Han (see below). I argue that entrepreneurial and consumption-oriented happiness constitutes a felt space for possibility and potentiality that intensifies women’s attachment to commodities and to the world; consumption and entrepreneurship are supposedly enhanced by happiness, while class-based differences are elided. Indeed, this is a central goal of advertising more generally—to make it appear that the purchase of certain goods will enrich one’s life. What is unique in China is the cultural and historical specificity of these strategies—the emphasis on the heart as the more fundamental component of being and the moral core of human agency and on the notion of family. The traditionally family-oriented Chinese society is now mobilizing female homemakers and their hearts to become new sources of productive labor, and their traditionally assigned gender roles have become new sites for enhancing consumption and promoting the psychotherapy industry in an increasingly competitive world market. Happiness promotions via self-help media transfer people’s personal happiness into collective affective potentials. The process entails fantasy, which mediates between formal symbolic structures and the positive value of objects encountered in reality; it provides a schema, according to which certain objects function as objects of desire, filling in gaps created by limited structures of opportunity in society (Žižek 1994). Fantasy working within ideology obfuscates the true horror of a situation: instead of a full rendering of the antagonisms and inefficacies that traverse society, the government and social programs advocate a notion of a harmonious society as an organic whole with each component “happily” in place. In this sense, happiness is an affect creating a sense of belonging and connectivity to bring distinct groups of the population into relation. The governing rationality of optimizing

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happiness invokes within subjects pleasurable responses not readily accessible to critical evaluation and minimizes opposition while sustaining social stability. These examples from both the talk show and magazine demonstrate how psychological experts and expertise shape politics, economy, and people’s everyday lives in China since the mid-1990s. While the impact of domestic work and homemaker roles is not universally positive or negative, but rather depends upon role-related experiences (Aneshensel 1992), my analysis, and especially interviews with real housewives show that, in answer to the final question “Are they happy?”, in my research in Beijing, I never once found a woman who actually fitted the image of a happy housewife. I did meet able women juggling multiple tasks and fulfilling their roles as wives and mothers with limited resources. Yet all of these housewives pointed out that housework was endless, boring, repetitive, and did not offer much satisfaction. They also recognized that it did not require much expert knowledge.

Happiness through Consumption and Commodifying the Heart While in Mao’s era production served as the main site for identity or subject formation, in the reform era consumption serves the same purposes. Through consuming products, women become happy and confident, triumphing the boredom, drudgery, and exhaustion of housework. The housewives represented in the media as content and successful are used to affect other consumers—across class boundaries—to consume. For example, both rural migrants and urban women impoverished by economic restructuring since the mid-1990s (two distinct class groups) are targeted through the media to buy the same “right” things in order to achieve middle-class status (Yan 2003; Sun 2009). Nostalgia in media representation of home life similarly narrows class gaps widened by privatization, appeasing those who lagged behind in the new market economy. For example, in the media some middle-class housewives now prefer and promote the use of the old style steaming device made of straw, seeing it as more organic and healthier than the newer steel models—a choice that dovetails with the wide use of these older style steamers in most suburban working class communities in Beijing. First-person storytelling in the media achieves this uniting goal by personalizing and making “heartfelt” connections to commodities. The following is part of the text in an advertisement for a “heart-pleasing coffee maker” (xinyi kafeihu 心儀咖啡壺). The woman in the advertisement is a Chinese lady with an English name, Tina: Perhaps influenced by my father, I have formed a habit of drinking coffee. Now drinking coffee is something I share with my husband every afternoon. This coffee maker made in Switzerland is my third one, 10,000 yuan, but its technologically advanced design and user-friendly operation have surprised me . . . While drinking

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The purchase of products like a coffee maker for the home-and-family dramatizes the fun and pride that is derived from the process of coffee making in the Chinese context, where tea is the traditionally celebrated daily drink. The significance of the shift to coffee shows the emergence of a cosmopolitan lifestyle in big cities in China. Like other advertisements, this one morphs via first-person account into a family story: her coffee drinking has gone from a daughterly to a wifely experience. She is the one who makes coffee and feels happy and fulfilled with the company of men in her life. While ego-orientation is often celebrated through individuality, in this advertisement, ego-orientation is translated into togetherness and familyorientation. The coffee maker helps this woman reach and please both her own heart and the heart of her husband. Heart soothing can also occur via the environment. The home environment is promoted in these media as a place where a woman’s creativity and identity are nurtured and her heart is relaxed and satisfied. And she feels fulfilled. For example, in July 2011, XLYK ran a column entitled “The corner at home which most resembles me” (wuzili zui xiang wo de jiaoluo 屋子裡最像我的角落). One piece in this section was called “The kitchen brings me back to my simple, true self ” (chufang dai wo huidao jiandan zhenshi de ziwo 廚房帶我回到簡單真實的自我). The author, Liu Zi, a freelance actress and interior designer, wrote: My day begins with the kitchen: in the morning, I drink a cup of tea, thinking of what to prepare for breakfast for my family, [how] to arrange dishes . . . I am in charge of all the meals for the family. I carefully chose and purchased utensils for the kitchen, including dish pads, spoons, cooking pots, blenders. I arrange things in the kitchen. I also cherish those utensils I have used since childhood; the familiar taste makes me feel comfortable as if returning to my childhood. I find my true self in the kitchen as I design and decorate it myself. It becomes my other self. It is where I discover myself and find freedom. I have a studio, which only stores my books. It is in the kitchen where I read and write, while drinking tea. The peace and freedom only belong to me. (Liu 2011,72)

The piece promotes an increasingly popular lifestyle that emphasizes interior design that is “simple,” creative, and therapeutic, strengthening the solidarity and harmony of family life. The writer emphasizes memories of her childhood or the kind of home appliances associated with the (socialist) past. As discussed earlier, this nostalgia allows for broad appeal to readers across class boundaries, even though the kitchen and bedrooms represented are explicitly from well-to-do middle-class households. This aspirational form of marketing has worked, as my ethnography shows, insofar as it is popular with a range of women. As one of the woman owners of the bookstand in the corner of the community where I lived in Beijing in summer 2011 put it: “I enjoy reading those glossy magazines with beautiful women, elegant clothes,

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nice jewelry, high-end cosmetics, but they can only give me pleasure for my eyes, I cannot afford any of the accoutrements, even though those magazines sell well.”

Women’s Status and Self-Help By focusing on women and the happiness of their hearts, these self-help venues transform feminine subjectivities towards forms that suit increased entrepreneurship and consumption promoted by the government. These images described above all have in common the happiness of the housewife, which, as mentioned, is aimed outwards, extending to women like the newsstand owner. Understanding both her enjoyment of these media and the limits of her happiness requires a broader view of this emotion in China today. Happiness promotions in China also derive from the fact that there has recently been widespread reported unhappiness, particularly among underprivileged groups (see the introduction to this volume for data). The government’s capacity to deliver goods and services has faltered in the face of people’s increased expectations in the reform era, resulting in widespread discontent and complaints in society (Brockman et al. 2008; Smyth and Qian 2008). Reports of declining happiness are a potential threat to government and social harmony. To reduce this threat, the government, alongside limited socioeconomic solutions, has turned to psychological or affective interventions. Appeals to happiness optimize people’s pleasurable fantasies, which not only tend to be immune to criticism or resistance, but can also be allied with broader political and economic objectives— including downplaying economic inequalities. The happiness turn in China is unique, as well, for resulting in part from what Kleinman (2010) calls the country’s “psychoboom,” that is, the rapid rise since the 1990s of psychology, psychometrics, and techniques of psychotherapy. Self-help is a key part of this boom because it allows people to gain psychological insights without risking their social status and their “face,” given the strong stigma attached to mental illness in China.5 Furthermore, China’s twin processes of marketization and privatization, including the reduction of medical and social services, have increasingly led individuals to make their own decisions and choices. In stark contrast to life in the prereform era, individuals now become “experts” on their own, and learn to make their own choices, to be responsible for themselves and to “help themselves.” Not everyone needs the same help, however. Self-help is acutely gendered, as exemplified in the placement of self-help literature in Beijing bookstores and newsstands; it is often found next to women’s books and magazines. As mentioned, XLFT and XLYK are also highly gendered. Yet while women live the identities of housewives and domestic workers, the formulae dictating the new housewife image 5. The notion of mianzi 面子 “face” and the stigmatization of mental disorders since Mao’s era often prevent people from seeking a psychotherapeutic assistance (Kleinman 1995).

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are often created by and serve the interests of men (see also Friedan 1965). Indeed, it is not merely that most authors and counselors are male in the two media, but also that the values and gender ideologies imbued in the key message are male-oriented. The self-help formulas created for women in these venues reflect male bias and normative masculine ideologies. Women are encouraged to be nurturing and flexible in their marriage, for example. Wang Xiaoxing 王曉嫻, a housewife and an author of bestselling cooking books, who was celebrated by All China Women’s Federation, compares women to potatoes because they perform flexible femininity, acting not only as impressive garnish but also as soft “mashed” accompaniments. Men, she claims, resemble noodles: no matter what kind of dressing you put on them they are essentially the same. Women should not try to change their husbands, but perform flexible domestic femininity—mash themselves (Yu, 2011). Similarly, for Sister Han (“Sister,” a kin term is often used by members of lower classes in China to show affinity and ordinariness), a well-known representative of working-class housewives who appears on various cooking and counseling programs on CCTV including XLFT, achieving happiness means laboring at home without complaint. Han indicated that she always cooks while her husband watches TV or reads newspapers. Han summarized her approach to happiness in a 2008 counseling session at XLFT: “If you don’t like your environment you change it; if you cannot change it, you have to change your mood, attitude, or yourself, to love your environment.” This form of male-defined self-help for women has a long history in China. It can be traced back to the 1920s after the May Fourth Movement, when Xia Mianzun 夏丏尊 (1886–1946), an accomplished educator and translator, argued in the journal Xin Nüxing 新女性 (New Women) that bitterness or happiness was not determined by one’s external environment but by one’s heart-attitude. Xia (1926) used a farming analogy to make this point: unlike gardeners or farmers who see their work as toil or even torture, people who treat gardening and horticulture as a hobby do not consider watering plants and laboring early in the morning hard or bitter because they see it as an enjoyable, self-fulfilling practice. This is all about doing it for oneself or for others. Xia advocates for a shift in women’s heart-attitude towards being a mother and a wife. He argues that if women could just think of their status as more important than that of men because they produce babies and fulfill wifely duties (glorious, sanctifying roles), they would naturally demand acknowledgment of their value from society. It is only because women lack self-consciousness of their own value that they are relegated to a degraded status (Xia 1926). Regarding the demands of traditional women’s work, he wrote: Since you have to be busy, do not humiliate yourself in your busyness. Instead, you should exert yourselves, realize yourselves and highlight your advantages, so that you can make the nation, society, and, your rivalry, men to recognize and appreciate your value and status through your busyness. (Xia 1926, 67)

Mao Dun, famous writer and literary critic, critiqued this self-oriented path to women’s liberation, arguing instead that women’s liberation should be part of an

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overall social and political liberation movement, which is the path the Chinese Communist Party took after 1949 (Wang 2005). From that point on, the state has maintained a direct hand in gender politics (Barlow 2004). However, since the mid1990s when privatization was initiated, the way Xia Mianzun advocates—liberation via self-conscious embracing of gendered roles—has returned to prominence, with the heart as the vital force for change.6 But now gendered self-consciousness is married to forms of consumption, as seen above in the magazine ads, and through entrepreneurship.

Unlocking Potential and Entrepreneurship Probably the best example of how women’s experience of domestic happiness allows women to flourish comes in the figure of Sister Han. As “a housewife representative” (jiating zhufu daibiao 家庭主婦代表) Sister Han has appeared in XLFT and other cooking programs, talk shows, and counseling programs, working with professional chefs, nutritionists, and counselors to promote healthy diets and happy living. Han’s success began with a phone call she made to a Beijing TV (BTV) program offering an alternative method of defrosting meat. Later, in February 2008, two sessions of XLFT focused on her, with the hostess, A Guo, and two counselors “counseling” her. Han described to them how she achieves psychological balance: As a mother and wife, you have to cook. But I choose to enjoy it. Once you enjoy cooking, you can be innovative, and your food tastes good. Everyone is happy [gaoxing] at home. I plan it well. I cut vegetables, and put them in the frying pan. While cooking, I will clean the knife, cutting board, and other utensils and arrange things in the kitchen. After finishing cooking, the kitchen is almost clean . . . Then I put the dishes on the table and call everyone to the table. (Anonymous 2008)

Han’s optimism got her a job at Beijing TV, where, for four years, she did cooking demos of more than 200 dishes, while writing books and blogs. Her success story, as part of the discourse of full-time housewives, offers a solution to gendered layoffs (Wang 2003). Unlike Martha Stewart or other US women who cook on TV and share recipes independently, Sister Han is always cast as a representative of millions of housewives and must share the stage with professional cooks and nutritionists offering alternative methods of cooking. Han’s self-image and self-representation always seem tied to cooking; her happiness is the actualization of her potential in cooking. This depoliticized subjectivity dovetails with the conceptualization of post-Mao subject formation: subjectivity is often divorced from politics and redirected towards individual desire and its fulfillment (see McGrath 2009). That is, domestic femininity/selflessness represented through Han’s story constitutes a site for generating value and entrepreneurial capital. 6. See also Liu (2008) on the role of heart-attitude in changing one’s fate.

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Housewife in Chinese is jiating funü 家庭婦女 or jiating zhufu 家庭主婦. In Mao’s era, the word funü 婦女 was often used in or associated with the compound noun jiating funü 家庭婦女 “housewives.” Women referred to using other categories with the addition of the prefix for female (nü) not funü, enjoyed a much higher social status than housewives (nü yuhangyuan, 女宇航員 female astronauts). When most urban women were “liberated” through their participation in social labor, jiating funü, who had to devote their time and energy to family responsibilities, were excluded from the glorious rank of socialist constructors. They were seen as relics of the feudal society or even dependents or parasites (jiashu 家屬), and the term jiating funü acquired derogatory connotations (Wang 1998). The reform era witnessed a shift from this thinking. In the 1990s, at a time when jobs were disappearing and women were the first to be let go from state enterprises (Wang 2003; Yang 2007), domestic management courses were established to prepare women for the adjustment to domestic life (Yang 1999). Nowadays, within the context of the psychoboom, women receive advice and guidance from growing armies of marriage and child-guidance counselors, psychotherapists and psychologists. Counseling at XLFT and advertisements in XLYK suggest that consumption for the home and family offers housewives a sense of identity, purpose, self-realization, and even marital bliss. Housewives are represented in the two media as embodying successful readjustment through psychological transformation; they play the role of vanguard for female subjectivity in the postreform era in advocating psychology and psychology’s market potentials. The goals that psychology claims to achieve are in line with ideals promised by communism, or with the political project of a harmonious society, which claims to make people happy and wealthy in a sustainable way. While on the surface it appears that China is participating in a global trend towards self-help, and while entrepreneurship among housewives appears similar to American experience (through AVON, for example), in the Chinese context, the strategy of mobilizing happy housewives is more hegemonic, as it attempts to redress a unique history: Mao’s gender ideologies, which masculinized women in order to maximize their labor both inside and outside the home (see Yang 1999; Barlow 2004); that is, since Mao’s era, women were too exhausted and now they should return to the private sector and to the home. Indeed, the emphasis on hyperfemininity and domestic femininity in the post-Mao era facilitates and legitimates this gendered move. However, representations of Sister Han clearly mobilize experiences from Mao’s era for her current entrepreneurship. In her televised counseling sessions on XLFT, Han historicized her cooking. I grew up in a big residential yard, the kind of collective life typical in Mao’s time. People cooked together, children played together. Once a dish was ready in one household, children playing around were called upon to have a taste. So nowadays, many of my recipes come from my memory of tasting those dishes in the yard. I

“Happy Housewives” 141 myself tried cooking. One day when I came back from school and wanted to cook something myself, there were only leftover vegetables at home: onions, tomatoes, potatoes, and green peppers. By imagination, I thought I would first put onions in the oil, then I added tomato and potato, cooked for a while, and I put the pepper in last . . . Now I have given this dish a name called “frying four fresh vegetables” [chao si xian 炒四鮮] and it has become popular among TV audiences. (Anonymous 2008)

For Han, such socialist collective ethics prepared her for her today’s success. Her experience in the courtyard is now an asset in the market. In this sense, the subject-making in the market economy is not entirely based on liberal ideologies but also derives from experiences with Maoist socialism. Counselor Yang nevertheless contrasted Han with his cook in the countryside, where he was “sent down” for rustication during the Cultural Revolution.7 Yang indicated that the cook had been a grumpy housewife, and before cooking every meal she would complain loudly about what to cook and why she had to cook. Her complaints and psychological imbalance contributed to the bad taste of her food. As Yang put it: She saw cooking almost as a torture and never enjoyed it. She almost cursed the dishes so her food didn’t taste good at all as she felt imbalanced while others worked in the field. After finishing cooking, she often said something like sai ba, sai ba 塞 吧塞吧 “fill you up, fill you up,” which are derogatory Chinese words to describe the way animals eat. (Anonymous 2008)

Domestic work, deemed unproductive in Mao’s era, directly produces value in the post-Mao socialist market economy. Unlike Mao’s socialist era, when identity, prestige, and honor were derived from politics and the public domain, China today celebrates individualism and family life (Rofel 1999). Happiness in Mao’s era was realized in the deep commitment to communism and to the public, but has been rechanneled in the post-Mao era through privatization and through self-realization. The recent discourse of happiness encompasses both motifs of individual self-interest and collective socialist ethics. Life in general, both current and past, becomes a site of value extraction; the difference is that now the individual him- or herself becomes a “wealth.” The private, the individual, and the affective life constitute the very domains for current governing. Han’s success is thus celebrated as a result of both her pursuit for happiness and enjoyment in daily chores, and her ability to capitalize on her past experience of socialist collective life. Such representations encourage others to dedicate themselves to whatever they do in their everyday life—in such everyday dedication they will identify and unlock their potential and maximize their social and economic value. Han’s dress, speech, and cooking are represented as typical of workingclass housewives; millions of people follow her blogs including many of my 7. Chairman Mao sent about 3 million urban youth to the countryside in 1969–1972 in order to solve the problem of urban unemployment and rusticate urban youth.

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informants—workers in Changping, Beijing. The way Sister Han is represented in the media is that everyone can become a Sister Han, if he or she takes initiative in participating in cooking programs. However, no matter how well the show has presented the subject, the audience has remained skeptical. One commentator on the XLFT webpage questioned the likelihood of others repeating Sister Han’s success, “How many housewives would be lucky enough to become a star chef at BTV?” Another commentator added, “We don’t know who is behind her, right? Perhaps her husband is the mayor of Beijing, who knows?” Although the public’s distrust of propaganda makes the efficacy of such happiness promotion uncertain, the representations of people like Han as role models for neoliberal subjects are efficacious in the sense that they engender a surplus of hope, which points to possible solutions and broad potentialities. Indeed, the promotion of happiness as a way of enhancing consumption and entrepreneurship—part of the success studies in China has been criticized for its emphasis on individual efforts and downplay of socioeconomic factors. In an article on China’s psychological self-help, Luo Dong (2016) contends that the success models of a small group of Chinese elite cannot be copied by ordinary people in a country with a large population and limited resources.

Gender, Class, and Affective Subjectivity The happiness of housewives is represented in the two media venues as derived from their dedication to fulfilling their roles as mothers and wives. They pursue happiness by being content with whatever they have and can control, not placing their happiness in what is outside of their control—for example, permanent jobs in the state sector. The promise of happiness can supposedly “cure” or justify their present drudgery, fatigue or even suffering. Indeed, as Marilyn Frye states, “It is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation” (1983, 2). In both media, underprivileged women (laid-off women in particular) are constructed as the objects of hope for the new order. They are made happy by hope. Indeed, it is women, in particular, who negotiate the gap between the public and the private; women embody the market and nonmarket structures (physiologically and socially) and negotiate and mediate the contradictions between them by engaging in part-time work, home work, and casual labor, and by stretching to meet more needs with fewer resources (Kingfisher 2002; Lee 2006). In China, although women have largely borne the brunt of urban economic restructuring (Yang 1999; Wang 2003; Dai 2004), they are often mobilized to play a vanguard role of bridging the stagnant planned economy and a vibrant market economy (Lee 2006). As Arif Dirlik (2007) observes, gender (and race) have replaced class as the analytical and political foci because of the failures of class politics in China. It is thus important to investigate how gender expresses (or replaces) class.

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In these two media, class distinctions are downplayed in representing the ways that happiness and “equality” may derive from consumption and entrepreneurial activities. Meanwhile, images of happy housewives are circulated in the media to accumulate value as a way to affect other people to consume and to be entrepreneurial. The more happy objects circulate, the more they accumulate affective value (Ahmed 2004), thus creating a “blanket” that covers disharmonious social stratifications. I see gender not as a fixed subject position or form, but as a fluid affective space through which ideologies are invested and made efficient and affective (see Ahmed 2004). Indeed, the meaning of affect (i.e., happiness) and its circulation and distribution are organized political processes. The designation in mass media of housewives as affective subjects delivering norms, commodities, and therapy is an intentional political process that conceals gendered exploitation intensified by privatization. In a way, China’s recent romanticization of the housewife parallels that of the US postwar period. Betty Friedan’s (1965) analysis of what lies behind the image of the happy American housewife provides a useful frame of reference for China’s situation today. She suggested that the happy housewife was a fantasy figure that erased the signs of labor under the sign of happiness. The claim that women are happy and that happiness is behind the work they do functions to justify gendered forms of labor and exploitation. Such happiness justifies an unequal distribution of labor (Ahmed 2010). In China today, representations of happiness among underprivileged groups including laid-off-woman-turned-domestic-worker and rural-migrant-turned-domestic-worker not only conceal unrecognized, unpaid, or underpaid domestic and emotional labor undertaken by women, but also legitimate gendered layoffs or gendered poverty caused by economic restructuring (see Yang 2007, 2013).

Everyday Happiness as Entrepreneurship and Resistance There is another important feature of the notions of fulfillment and happiness promoted in the two media venues: these notions are based on everyday life and everyday labor. Appeals to everyday pleasure and fostering commonly achievable goals engender more social cohesion and make social ideals and norms (i.e., economic growth, social harmony) more affective and inclusive (Ng and Ho 2006, 63). Indeed, one of the most noteworthy proponents of such happiness is the famous Chinese writer and counselor, Bi Shumin 畢淑敏. In 2007, Bi (2008) turned her essay entitled “Awakening Happiness” (tixing xingfu 提醒幸福), originally published in a Chinese elementary school textbook, into a public lecture. The response was immense. She later delivered the lecture on a Shanghai TV program, to prisoners in Beijing, and in 2008 to the May 12 Sichuan earthquake survivors. In all versions of her lecture, Bi promotes a notion of happiness that refers to the pleasure of everyday life. She gives four examples of people she believes to be the happiest in the world: a mother

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bathing her child and then holding him or her in her arms; a child creating a sandcastle on the beach; a doctor seeing off his or her recovered patients; and a writer putting a period to her or his last sentence. Happiness is thus achieved through everyday labor, through fulfilling one’s designated duties and social roles, and through embracing whatever one is given, regardless of the circumstances—an attitude that echoes both Xia Mianzun and Sister Han. Bi says that this happiness is something we all have (yet, the four images Bi offers are arguably all middle-class). One simply needs to be reminded of one’s happiness to become self-consciously happy. Such happiness is not confined to a certain elite group, but belongs to every individual. Happiness, in Bi’s perspective, is a right. Given the popularity of Bi’s take on happiness, and its potential for use by those in power, I now turn back to state-promoted happiness. This happiness is important in the sense that it constitutes a felt space of possibility and potentiality. It has the ability to affect others and be affected by their support and interaction. Promoting everyday happiness of the kind Bi describes creates an emotion that can resonate across classes. For example, after several short stints of traveling between Beijing and Guangdong buying clothes with a loan and reselling them, a laid-off worker, one of my informants from Beijing, suffered serious symptoms of insomnia and anxiety. The pressure of repaying the loan undermined any pleasure she may have derived from this business. She learned that for her, lack of sufficient resources or social support, entrepreneurship, which entails intensive competition—contrary to what is espoused on shows like XLFT—cannot make her happy. Instead, after watching one of the TV lectures delivered by Bi and TV series promoting everyday enjoyment of members of underprivileged groups widely popular in Beijing Television (see Yang 2013), she agreed with Bi’s argument that happiness is derived from enjoying small things in everyday life. However, for her, without a stable job, danwei 單位 (work unit), or social security, the pleasure of everyday life is only xiao que xing 小確幸, “small but certain happiness.” The term xiao que xing, invented by famous Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami, has been widely circulated in Chinese media, happiness campaigns, and everyday discourse particularly among the working class. Xiao que xing refers to happy moments in life, which last from three seconds to three minutes (Cui 2011). It highlights that happiness consists of daily life details; everyone can enjoy it. Xiao que xing resembles the psychological concept of flow, referring to the moment when we pay attention to something while forgetting ourselves totally (ibid.). It is a fleeting moment when one feels real but subtle happiness. It is the feeling when picking up the phone, hearing the voice of a friend one is missing, the contentment when one lines up for goods and finds that they happen to be on sale, and her line is shorter and faster. A similar term workers used to refer to such happy moments in Changping is qiong huanle 窮歡樂 (here huanle is a verb), meaning “being poor but enjoying life.”

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For these un/underemployed workers in Changping, their meager income from miscellaneous manual labor or taxi-driving offers not much for them to live a decent life, but they try to make the best of it by enjoying themselves and their solidarity with their former coworkers and neighbors. They play poker together on evenings when they do not need to go out for extra work. They share tips on how to save water in order to slow down the water meter, where to buy cheap vegetables, and where to fetch mineral spring water free of charge rather than buy bottled water. In Changping, workers’ practice of qiong huanle also constituted a carnivalesque strategy to express their grievances or anger because of their downward mobility and devastating living conditions as a result of mass layoffs. In the wake of the SARS outbreak in May 2003, over 300 taxi drivers (most of them reemployed laid-off workers) in Changping took over the streets, blocking traffic in front of the district government for three days in order to pressure the government to regulate the taxi industry and create more jobs for laid-off workers. Because of the panic constructed by the media during the outbreak, people were seldom outside. Taxi drivers did not have business and the situation did not change much after the health epidemic was contained. Instead of staying idle, the drivers organized a strike and broke the spell of fear. The folk saying fa bu ze zhong 法不責眾 (if too many people violate the law, it is likely that no one will be penalized) vitalized the strike. Many took comfort in their numbers and were unafraid. They were laughing, joking, playing poker, or listening to music; they made noise through whistling and blowing their horns. They had the self-comforting attitude of being qiong huanle; for these underprivileged workers, the best vindication for the state-led antiworking class policy is to live happily and healthily, a survival mentality or strategy adopted by many in Changping. The practice of qiong huanle resembles a state of mind conveyed through the Confucian notion of le, a term often translated as “joy,” referring to the acceptance of adverse circumstances in terms of the absence of worry and anxiety. Le emphasizes not a state of emotional exhilaration but a state of moving along at ease with the flow of things, calmly and smoothly (Shun 2011). However, while workers claimed to practice qiong huanle to downplay their political motivation, their organized protests showed that through such collective challenge to authorities, they aimed at ultimately achieving something for their own benefit. The function of the practice of qiong huanle was to remove the burden of anxiety and fear of repression. Laughter and noise as a weapon to confront authority made the acts of insubordination less scary to the participants (see also Flam 2004, 184). Their protest revealed their contempt for current antiworking-class policies and their longing for resolution and happiness. While their collective action helped them feel less fearful, protesters tried to avoid extreme tactics which might provoke the hostility of the police and the government. The organizers did not expect any concrete resolution but believed that an open and collective display of anger could at least serve as a wake-up call for the government to become aware of laid-off

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workers’ economic difficulties and the kind of power they could muster if there were no changes in the desired direction. Useful in justice when treated as substantive and deserving of attention, anger can yield a sense of liberation (Lyman 2004), but it must first find its voice. Incidents like this may partially help workers find their critical voices. Un/underemployed workers’ strategic displays of grievances in the form of qiong huanle differ from Sister Han’s understanding of happiness and success. At the end of her 2008 counseling session at XLFT, the hostess asked her and other participants to summarize their key points. Han said to the camera, I only want to make life more beautiful and had never thought of cooking on TV. [I would say] love your job and dedicate yourself to what you are doing. Even in everyday life, you can actualize your potential and maximize its value; then you will succeed. [See note 6.]

While all three participants emphasized the relationship between happiness, potentiality and their inner self, the common theme, as Han said, is that success derives from happily sticking to and maximizing what one has in oneself, in one’s everyday domain. However, unlike Han who succeeded in transforming her daily domestic duties into lucrative entrepreneurship, workers in Changping, while celebrating their happy moments, are still struggling with their livelihood and precarious employment. In their own words, “We have nothing but xiao que xing.”

Conclusion I have addressed three dimensions of happiness: first, governmental and corporate promotions of happiness as contentment with what life offers, contributing to a harmonious society and avoiding social disruptions from those disgruntled; second, promotion of happiness through consumption that eases the burdens of housework and contributes to leisure-oriented lifestyles; and finally, promotion of happiness as a site for actualizing one’s potential and celebrating one’s social roles and everyday skills with a view to entrepreneurial development of these skills. My focus is the relationship between gender, psychology, and the consequences of privatization. This involves the prevalence of women among the recently unemployed and underemployed, the targeting of these women by the media for the three purposes identified above, and the role of men as business leaders who are constructing images and alternatives for women. These efforts replace social concerns about class stratification with a generalized social interest in happiness. Indeed, happiness has emerged as a culturally and historically specific psychotherapeutic tool for the governance of gender that operates to paper over class divisions between two types of “housewives,” and to render them docile in the face of gendered layoffs. The happiness discourse thus also serves to stabilize society and legitimate the consequences of China’s state-enterprise restructuring.

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Happiness, as both a psychologizing technology and a mode of self-regulation, is evoked to govern subjects in terms of their inner strength and self-fulfillment (which however lacks a moral orientation). Happiness is a mode of subject formation. It derives from human agency, and the power to seek happiness is a mode of self-governance that can be coopted for broader political and economic ends. By tapping into women’s desires for happiness and enjoyment in everyday life and addressing the potential locked in their domestic femininity, the counseling programs and women’s magazines discussed here mobilize women for entrepreneurship and consumerism. While “naturalizing” psychology as a method to free the self, such psychological self-help media also instill in women a specific sort of expert interpretation of who they are and what they want. The rhetoric and imagery compel people, whether explicitly or subliminally, to associate their behaviors and thoughts with self-imposed states of happiness and well-being, thereby achieving an element of social control. In this way, psychology oppresses women by rendering their emotions, hearts and internal lives sites of regulation and value extraction. While the psychological self-help media target women, mobilizing them to play the role of vanguard in promoting and performing “happiness” and self-help, their message points to male politics. The new image of women as happy housewife-mothers is largely oriented to satisfying men’s needs through the capacities of women. The desires of men, addressed by self-help media, promote the need for a happy housewife at home serving men and their children. The representations of happy housewives are less an economic conspiracy directed against women, and more something that happens to women when the business of producing, selling, and investing is organized to serve men’s needs efficiently (Friedan 1965). The happiness industry in China, through the rhetoric of promoting the well-being of the people, appropriates happiness as an affect to intensify people’s attachments to commodities and entrepreneurial capital, to certain incarnations of each other, and to the world. The process enhances consumerism and entrepreneurship while concealing a gender ideology complicit with state interests. Moreover, the pursuit of happiness through self-help operates as tool for the governance of gender and class, highlighting the role of psychological discourses in contemporary governance.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2008. “The Happiness Turn.” New Formations 63: 7–14. Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Aneshensel, Carol S. 1992. “Social Stress: Theory and Research.” Annual Review of Sociology 18: 15–38. Anonymous. 2008. Accessed December 21, 2013. http://space.tv.cctv.com/article/ARTI 1203677764642313.

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Barlow, Tani. 2004. The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brockmann, Hilke, Jan Delhey, Christian Welzel, and Hao Yuan. 2008. “The China Puzzle: Falling Happiness in a Rising Economy.” Journal of Happiness Studies 10: 387–405. China Labor Bulletin. 2005. “Many of Them Work as Domestic Workers at Others’ Homes.” E-Bulletin No. 29 (2005-10-17) 17/10/2005. Accessed July 15, 2015. http://www.clb.org. hk/content/china-labour-bulletin-e-bulletin-no-29-2005-10-17. Cui, Jianping 崔建平 (Jiafeimao 加菲貓). 2011. Nihao, xiao que xing 你好，小確幸 [Hello, xiao que xing]. Nanjing: Fenghuang chubanshe. Dai, Jinhua. 2004. “Class and Gender in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Literature.” In Holding Up the Half Sky: Chinese Women Past, Present and Future, edited by Tao Jie, Zheng Bijun, and Shelley L. Mow, 289–302. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Dirlik, Arif. 2007. Global Modernity: Modernity in Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Dolby, Sandra K. 2005. Self-Help Books: Why Americans Keep Reading Them. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Flam, Helena. 2004. “Anger in Repressive Regimes: A Footnote to Domination and the Arts of Resistance by James Scott.” European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2): 171–88. Friedan, Betty. 1965. The Feminine Mystique. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Frye, Marilyn. 1983. The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory. Trumansburg: Crossing Press. Hall, David L., and Roger T. Ames 1998. Thinking from the Han: Self, Truth, and Transcendence in Chinese and Western Culture. Monograph Collection (Matt-Pseudo). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hill, Napoleon. 1953 [1937]. Think and Grow Rich. Cleveland, OH: Ralston Publishing. Illouz, Eva. 2008. Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. Berkeley: University of California Press. Johnson, Spencer. 1998. Who Moved My Cheese? New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Kingfisher, Catherine. 2002. Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women’s Poverty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kleinman, Arthur. 1995. Writing at the Margin: Discourse between Anthropology and Medicine. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kleinman, Arthur. 2010. “The Art of Medicine: Remaking the Moral Person in China: Implications for Health.” The Lancet 375 (9720): 1074–75. Lee, Haiyan. 2006. “Nannies for Foreigners: The Enchantment of Chinese Womanhood in the Age of Millennial Capitalism.” Public Culture 18 (3): 507–29. Liu, Yuli 劉余莉. 2008. Xintai gaibian mingyun 心態改變命運 [Heart-attitude changes one’s fate]. Beijing: Guojia xingzheng xueyuan yinxiang chubanshe. Liu, Zi 劉紫. 2011. “Chufang, dai wo huidao jiandan zhenshi de ziwo” 廚房帶我回到簡單 真實的自我 [The kitchen brings me back to my simple, true self]. Xinli Yuekan 60: 72. Lyman, Peter. 2004. “The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics.” European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2): 133–47. McGrath, Jason. 2009. “Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China.” World Picture 3. Accessed January 12, 2013. http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_3/McGrath.html.

“Happy Housewives” 149 Nehring, Daniel, Emmanuel Alvarado, Eric Hendriks, and Dylan Kerrigan. 2016. Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Ng, Yew-Kwang, and Lok San Ho. 2006. Happiness and Public Policy: Theory, Case Studies and Implications. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Shi, Kan 時堪. 1999. Xiagang zhigong zaijiuye zhiye zhidao de lilun yu yingyong 下崗職工 再就業職業指導的理論與應用 [Job guidance for the unemployed: Theories and practices]. Beijing: Beijing xicheng qu zhiye zhidao shiyan jidi. Shun, Kwong-loi. 2011. “On Anger: An Experimental Essay in Confucian Moral Psychology.” In Zhu Xi Now: Contemporary Encounters with the Great Ultimate, edited by David Jones and He Jinli, 1–25. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Smyth, Russell, and Qian Xiaolei. 2008. “Inequality and Happiness in Urban China.” Economic Bulletin 4 (24): 1–10. Sun, Wanning. 2009. “Mapping Space for the Maid: Metropolitan Gaze, Peripheral Vision and Subaltern Spectatorship in Urban China.” Feminist Media Studies 9 (1): 57–71. Tie, Warwick. 2004. “The Psychic Life of Governmentality.” Culture, Theory, and Critique 45 (2): 161–76. Wang, Limin 王利民. 2005. “Wenge yougan” 聞歌有感 [Thoughts on a folk ballad]. In Pingwu zhuren: Xia Mianzui zhuan 平屋主人：夏丏尊傳 [The master of House Ping: A biography of Xia Mianzui], edited by Wang Limin, 213–24. Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe. Wang, Zheng. 2003. “Gender, Employment and Women’s Resistance.” In Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, edited by Elisabeth Perry and Mark Selden, 159–82. New York: Routledge Curzon. Xia, Mianzun 夏丏尊. 1926. “Wenge yougan” 聞歌有感 [Thoughts on a folk ballad]. Xin Nüxing 7: 62–67. Yan, Hairong. 2003. “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/ Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks.” Cultural Anthropology 18 (4): 493–523. Yang, Jie. 2007. “Reemployment Stars: Language, Gender and Neoliberal Restructuring in China.” In Words, Worlds, Material Girls: Language, Gender and Global Economies, edited by Bonnie McElhinny, 73–102. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Yang, Jie. 2013. “Fake Happiness: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho-Politics in China.” Ethos 41 (3): 291–311. Yang, Jie. 2018. Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance. Cambridge and New York: Polity Press. Yu, Ying 于穎. 2011. “Xinyi dianqi” 心儀電器 [Heart-pleasing electronics]. Xinli Yuekan 62: 120. Zhang, Yanhua. 2014. “Crafting Confucian Remedies for Happiness in Contemporary China: Unraveling the Yu Dan Phenomenon.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, 31–44. London and New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 1994. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality. London and New York: Verso.

7 Cultivating Capacity for Happiness as a Confucian Project in Contemporary China Texts, Embodiment, and Moral Affects Yanhua Zhang

Happiness (xingfu 幸福) in China today has many faces and takes various voices and forms, and it has been propagated and appropriated extensively for diverse political, social, and personal means and ends. From the rhetoric of GNH (Gross National Happiness),1 to the state-sponsored TV programs and community projects for happiness counseling,2 to books, articles, and public lectures on the science of happiness (xingfu xue 幸福學) and positive psychology (jiji xinlixue 積極心理學),3 and to grassroots activism for good life and harmonious communities, happiness (xingfu) has been constantly invoked in legitimizing economic goals and political agendas, in moving and distributing social resources and material goods, and in promoting ways of life and transforming affective and moral experience in contemporary China. What is particularly noticeable about the discourse on Chinese happiness, especially since the beginning of the twenty-first century, is its convergence with the popular revival of national learning (guoxue re 國學熱), particularly of Confucian learning (ruxue re 儒學熱). Such convergence is epitomized in the “Yu Dan phenomenon.” In October 2006, Yu Dan, a college professor from Beijing Normal University, was given prime time on China Central Television (CCTV) to lecture on the Analects of Confucius. Her lecture notes were then edited into the book Lunyu Xinde 論語心得 (The Analects of Confucius from the Heart), which sold millions of copies instantly. The popular excitement generated by her book on Confucianism

1. The journal of Xiaokang 小康 [Moderate Prosperity] affiliated with the CCP’s Public Relation Department, since its inception in 2004, has included the information on “happiness index” in its annual report and even devoted the November issue of 2012 to the topic of happiness with the cover story of “Are you happy now?” (ni xingfu le ma 你幸福了嗎？). See http://www.chxk.com.cn and http://news.hexun.com/2012-1105/147616543.html, accessed April 28, 2016. 2. Such programs and projects are largely directed to the marginalized populations. See Yang 2015. 3. For example, the website of the Center for Quality of Life and Public Policy in Shandong University consistently features various types of research, statistics, and information on happiness-related sciences and topics. http://www.pspa.sdu.edu.cn/shzlyj/, accessed October 6, 2016.

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for happiness of the heart was overwhelming,4 and Yu was affectionately dubbed “cultural nanny” (wenhua naima 文化奶媽) and praised “for forging an affect-based cultural link between the Confucian tradition as a source of happiness and everyday life in the fast-paced market-oriented contemporary China” (Zhang 2014). Obviously, there has been a “Confucian turn” in how happiness is conceptualized, talked about, imagined, and performed in the postreform China. When the market-oriented reform was initiated and implemented in China in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the combination of Confucianism and the pursuit of happiness did not seem to be inevitable. In the official rhetoric, happiness was then promised as a “moderately prosperous society” (xiaokang shehui 小康社會) to be achieved through the economic reforms and the process of modernization led by the state and guided by the party. For common citizens, happiness was generally envisioned and propagated in the mass media as a way of life in the image of the developed West, which included privately owned beautiful houses, luxury cars, and enormous consumer goods and wealth. To an extent, the dominant ethos of the early reform era was to leave behind “the yellow earth” of traditional China and to embrace “the blue sea” of “the advanced civilization of the West.”5 It is true that the revived interest in national learning in Chinese academia had generated some momentum since the early 1990s with the obvious ideological support from the state.6 However, the discursive engagement of Confucian learning then remained largely in academia, and the interlocutors were mainly scholars and intellectuals in and outside of China, although some discussions on “affect-based Confucian tradition” and the role of le 樂 (joy, joyfulness) in Confucian moral experience provided intellectual inspirations for the later popular invocation of Confucianism for happy life.7 Then, how can we make sense of the present “Confucianism for happiness” movement that traverses diverse plains of social life and motivates participants from all walks of life,8 and what accounts for such a Confucian turn in happiness 4. To make a point about the popularity of Yu’s Confucius from the Heart, Daniel Bell (2010, 163) compares it to the little red book of Chairman Mao’s Selected Quotations, which was the last book in China to attract so much attention more than fifty years ago. 5. The metaphors that associate China with the closed and conservative civilization of agriculture (nonggeng wenming 農耕文明) and the West with the open and adventurous civilization of seafaring commerce and exploration (haiyang wenming 海洋文明) were made popular in the 1980s, and its usage extended well into the 1990s. In a sense, the popular expression of the time xia hai 下海 (“get into the sea”) meaning leaving the security of the state job to start or join a private business is partly indexical to the metaphor that associate the sea with commerce, business, and also with greater risk. 6. For example, in the early 1990s some major universities started to set up centers or institutes devoted exclusively to Chinese classics and Confucian learning, such as the Research Center for Traditional Culture at Peking University and the Institute of National Learning at Tsinghua University. 7. Such as Li Zehou’s discussion on qing benti 情本體 (affect-based ontology) and legan wenhua 樂感文化 (an optimism-oriented culture) (2005); Meng Peiyuan’s exploration of qinggan rujia 情感儒家 (affective Confucianism) (see 1999, 2001); and Pang Pu’s discussion of youle yuanrong 憂樂圓融 (care-happiness fluidity) (1991). 8. For example, Guangming Daily had a full page coverage of “the Confucian Festival for Common People” held in Qufu, Confucian hometown with the title “Confucianism making people’s life happier,” the sponsors and

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production in today’s China? This chapter focuses on such a distinctive Chinese happiness engagement that moves away from the external object-oriented happiness seeking9 to attend to Confucian self-cultivation as relational, dialogical, and embodied social practices for developing the “moral character and inner capacity for happiness” (xingfu pinge/nengli 幸福品格／能力). I first situate the reinvention of Confucianism for happiness in the historical context of the drastic social and economic transitions in market-oriented postreform China. I then draw on the diverse public discourses on “the Confucian notion of happiness” (rujia xingfu guan 儒家幸福觀) and the relevant textual sources to examine how Confucian “le,” also known as Kong-Yan zhi le 孔顏之樂 (“the enjoyment of Confucius and Yanhui”), is interpreted to articulate different needs for happiness in contemporary Chinese life. Particularly, I show how Confucian happiness has acquired a meaning of cultivated inner capacity for good life through the dialogical processes of engaging Confucian texts and negotiating among multiple social and political interests and concerns. Based mainly on the visual and textual data collected online from a private Confucian Academy in Beijing, I then examine the ritual dimensions of engaging Confucianism and explore the role of li 禮 (Confucian propriety/rituals) in cultivating happiness capacity. Attention is given to the embodied practice of morally charged affects of xiao 孝 (familial reverence) and jing 敬 (attentive respect).10 Informed by anthropological discussion on everyday life and embodiment in contemporary China (see Farquhar 2002; Farquhar and Zhang 2012) and the anthropology of moral affects and experience in general, I also show that the idea of “happiness as a Confucian project” is deeply political and ideological. Yet, the politics of happiness is more complicated and multivalent than the simple divides between the governing technology by the state and the docile or resisting bodies of the masses. Confucian happiness has emerged out of dynamic interactions between many players—the state, the markets, global and local interests, and particularly out of the practices of ordinary people, who in their everyday life engage Confucianism as a cultural resource in negotiating and strategizing for a life that is habitable, enjoyable, and meaningful.

From Happiness Object to Happiness Capacity Undoubtedly, the recent emergence of “Confucianism for happiness,” both as part of the revival of Confucian learning and as a shift in the public discourse and participants of which included local government officials, well-known scholars from universities, and peoples from nearby towns and villages. See http://www.wenming.cn/xj_pd/gddt/201512/t20151224_3042599.shtml. 9. See Ahmed (2010, 21–49) for her discussion on “happy objects.” 10. Xiao is commonly translated as filial piety or filial obedience and jing as reverence or respect. In everyday use, Chinese also use them together as xiaojing. To me, the combination reflects the inseparability of filial deference to one’s elders and the heartfelt care in Confucian family ethics.

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popular imagination of happiness has everything to do with China’s postreform socioeconomic transformation and moral reconfiguration. The “come-back” of Confucianism has been explained variously: in terms of a growing cultural pride as China ascends onto the global stage; the need of the state for cultural legitimacy in governing; a generally felt anxiety over the loss of cultural identity in the face of ongoing modernization and globalization; and ever more frequently, in terms of moral crises resulting from the excessive commercialism and consumerism of China’s market-oriented economic reforms and the need for culturally rooted spiritual guidance for everyday living (see also Bell 2010; Sun 2014). Indeed, as one online commentary on the Yu Dan phenomenon goes, “We Chinese live in an era of market economy and intense competition that values material gains over spiritual pursuit. We have difficulty finding a home for our soul . . . We need comfort, selfunderstanding, and support . . . Yu Dan came to our side . . . feeding the hungry crowd with the sweet milk of our cultural tradition” (Huang 2007). It is true that, with increased privatization and the opening to the global capitalism, China in the 1990s witnessed a fast economic growth and increased social mobility, as well as the ideological shift and moral reconfiguration that gave rise to the new type of “enterprising and the desiring self ” centering on individual rights and self-realization (Kleinman et al. 2011). In the public media, “becoming rich by one’s own effort” (qinlao zhifu 勤勞致富) was a common theme and a peddler of melon seeds-turned-millionaire became a new type of hero that was both inspirational and transformative for many ordinary Chinese who had limited means but many hopes and desires. A general mood of optimism was evident in the early stage of the reform era, which is supported by the increased GNH index in the late 1980s and the early 1990s as cited in Yu Dan’s lectures (Yu 2006,10). For the rising new middle class, who have benefited greatly from China’s economic reform, happiness is concrete and measurable, coming in the form of privately owned houses, cars, and a big income. These become “happiness objects” associated with the imagined happy life in the developed countries (see also Fong 2011).11 With these objects, the new middle class “hope to create a good life of material comfort and social distinction” (Zhang 2010, 8). Revealingly, many newly constructed upscale residential communities are deliberately given Western-sounding names, such as “Eastern Santa Clara,” “the Mediterranean Sunshine,” and “Eton Villa,” to mention just a few in the coastal city of Dalian, in order to create “approximate happiness” to attract potential middle-class buyers. However, entering the new millennia, in spite of the continuous economic expansion, increased material comfort, and improved living conditions in general, Chinese people are not feeling happier. In fact, many are quite angry. For example, Jie Yang (2016) examines various forms of anger experienced and expressed by the marginalized groups displaced by China’s economic transition. The state has also 11. In her Paradise Redefined, Fong shows Chinese citizens often talk about affluent developed countries as paradise (tiantang 天堂).

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acknowledged that the pursuit of only material prosperity would not naturally lead to the increase of happiness. It calls for the local governments to pursue a “happiness-centered economy” and to “catch the rat of happiness” instead of only pursuing GDP (Lu 2014).12 A shift in the public discourse on happiness is also noticeable. Happiness is less talked about as some clear object-oriented goal to be achieved, but has become more or less a problem or a topic for investigation and a set of knowledge and skills to acquire and cultivate. This is especially true following a series of highly publicized “unhappy” incidences of public knife attacks and workplace suicides. Encouraged and supported by the state, many types of happiness-related institutions, investigations, and industries have proliferated in the public space and the market. A large number of scientific researches and policy studies have been carried out to investigate what contributes to the experience of happiness, to identify underlying factors causing feelings of unhappiness, and to locate ways to improve Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH) and the quality of life. For example, the CCTV has started its annual survey of 100,000 people since 2006 to analyze Chinese people’s well-being; and the Chinese Positive Psychology Association (CPPA) was formed in 2009 in joint force with Tsinghua University to promote the science of happiness in order to improve Chinese people’s outlook on happiness in face of drastic social and economic changes. In addition, happiness-related media products such as self-help manuals and books offering recipes for and the knowledge to achieve happiness have been enthusiastically consumed, including Yu Dan’s lectures that teach Confucian wisdom to “happiness of the heart.” Is there a particular Chinese notion of happiness? Can the traditional wisdom about happiness help improve the Chinese experience of well-being in everyday life? In one of his public lectures, Wang Yonghao, a Chinese professor in Fudan University, points out that current discussions on happiness mostly follow the Western line of thinking and pay little attention to China’s own cultural resources for happiness. He suggests tapping into China’s own rich cultural traditions to develop an alternative Chinese theory of happiness and well-being that is based on “sincere inner moral sources” and capable of articulating a particular Chinese subjectivity in contemporary China (see Wang 2011). Yang Lihua, a popular Confucian scholar and a professor at Peking University, is more specific in his lectures on the “Confucian notion of happiness” (rujia xingfu guan). He tells his audience, “Happiness does not depend on external conditions, but comes down to if you possess the character or capacity for happiness,” which can be acquired through Confucian self-cultivation (Yang 2012). Thus happiness is not understood so much as a fixed object to be pursued, or external material possessions to be accumulated, or social status to be achieved, but rather is conceived as immanent in the process of everyday living—in the way one relates to others, 12. The article plays with Deng Xiaoping’s famous saying that “no matter white or black, as long as the cat can catch a mouse, it’s a good cat,” to indicate both the continuity of the reform spirit and the change of the object to catch from GDP to GDH.

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to one’s family and the community, and to one’s social and natural world. In other words, it takes the cultivated heart and mind to find pleasure and joy in the myriad forms of life in whichever situation one finds oneself, no matter one is qiong 窮 (limited in means) or da 達 (successful). When happiness is defined as a capacity that can be acquired through personal cultivation, starting with learning and practicing to be one’s best at one’s roles and relations within one’s intimate social world, then happiness as a concept and practice can be motivating and unifying. That is possibly why Yu Dan’s lectures became a phenomenal success and “Confucianism for a happy life” became a popular movement that has attracted Chinese from all walks of life.13 Many have turned to the cultural tradition of Confucianism as a resource and an inspiration for the good life and self-improvement, and thus making Confucianism intimately relevant to everyday living. In other words, the contemporary popular engagement of Confucianism is not so much about a hermeneutic project in search for authentic meanings of the Confucian texts as often found in scholarly debates and classroom settings, but is rather about “being intimately familiar with and affectively close to Confucian teachings” (qinjin jingdian 親近經典) and making the Confucian way of living— family-centered and care-oriented ethics and rituals—“ordinary” in contemporary Chinese social life. To an extent, to be happy and to become a morally effective person informed by Confucianism practically affirm each other. Such an understanding of happiness involves reinventing “the Confucian notion of happiness,” which is able to find resonance among people who see themselves as belonging to different social stratums (jieceng 階層) and having different life perspectives and experience.

From Le to a Contemporary Notion of Confucian Happiness The Master said, “To eat coarse food, drink plain water, and pillow oneself on a bent arm—there is pleasure to be found in these things [le yi zai qizhong yi 樂已在 其中矣]. But wealth and position gained through inappropriate means—these are to me like floating clouds.”—The Analects of Confucius 7:16 (Ames and Rosemont 1998, 128) The Master said, “A person of character is this Yan Hui! He has a bamboo bowl of rice to eat, a gourd of water to drink, and a dirty little hovel in which to live. Other people would not be able to endure his hardships, yet for Hui it has no effect on his enjoyment (hui ye bu gai qi le 回也不改其樂). A person of character is this Yan Hui!”—The Analects of Confucius 6:11 (Ames and Rosemont 1998, 120)

13. Anna Sun (2013) discusses diverse forms of popular revival of Confucianism, including personal practices of traditional and reinvented Confucian rituals in Confucian temples, such as burning incense, praying to the tablet or image of Confucius, writing prayers cards, etc. for the purpose of asking for blessings on exams or other life events. My reference to the popular revival of Confucian learning is more about the revived interests in Confucianism as a way of life, moral values and affects, and as cultural resources for communities.

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The above passages from The Analects of Confucius are frequently referenced as Kong-Yan zhi le (enjoyment of Confucius and Yan Hui)14 and are part of the textual sources for the contemporary remaking of the Confucian notion of happiness (rujia xingfu guan). Translating le as illustrated in The Analects and other Confucian classics into the modern concept of xingfu (happiness), contemporary Confucian advocates seek to reformulate “a traditional Chinese concept of happiness”—a style of happiness based on Confucian self-reflection and cultivation—an alternative to the mode of happiness marked by “an orientation toward the objects” (Ahmed 2013) and associated with Western modernity. Then, what is a Chinese notion of happiness, or specifically the Confucian notion of happiness? Kong-Yan zhi le often serves as a textual reference for the discursive engagement of Confucianism for happiness, and its multivalent nature allows for situated interpretations. That is, Confucian le can be made meaningful and relevant to the experiences of a diverse Chinese population. Among the popular promoters of Confucianism for happiness known in the public media, Yu Dan’s initial platform—the CCTV Lecture Hall (Baijia jiangtan 百家講壇)—is intended for a general population, including those with a limited education who have been marginalized by the China’s recent social and economic transitions. Whereas, the participants attending the lectures given by Yang Lihua, a philosopher at Peking University, are predominantly those who have benefited the most from China’s reforms, including business elites and successful entrepreneurs. Also popular in the media is Liu Yuli, a professor of philosophy and ethics at the Central Party School, who often gives her lectures to current or future officials and cadres of the CCP at various levels. But does the Confucian notion of happiness mean the same to each of these different demographic groups? In other words, can the messages on Confucian le be crafted for an audience with various subjective positioning and sociopolitical interests and needs? In The Analects of Confucius from the Heart (Yu 2006), Yu Dan invites her audience and readers to reflect on the story of Yan Hui, Confucius’s favorite disciple, who, with only a small bowl of rice to eat, a gourd of water to drink, and a dirty little place to sleep in, still found le in what he had. She explains that what is really admirable about Yan Hui is not his endurance of hardship, but his attitude towards life. When others found such living conditions unbearable and would moan and complain incessantly, Yan Hui never veered from his positive attitude. This is why Confucius praised Yan Hui as a true virtuous person, a person of moral character, who was able to transcend material paucity and maintain peacefulness of the heart.

14. Contemporary scholarly discussions of “Kong-Yan zhi le” attribute the concept to the neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties (Song-Ming lixue 宋明理學), which made “le” a major issue of philosophical contemplation (see Meng 1999, 2001; Pang 1991). The philosophical debate of “le” as Confucian moral heartmind (xin 心) is beyond this chapter. Instead, my analysis focuses on how “Kong-Yan zhi le” is popularized to inform everyday living in China today.

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According to Yu Dan, Kong-Yan zhi le is about “how to find one’s inner peace.” She thus formulates her Confucian view on happiness: Happiness is a feeling, which has nothing to do with being wealthy or poor, but has everything to do with one’s inner heart. The Analects of Confucius teaches how to find happiness in life . . . It is ideal that a person not only finds peace in poverty and refuses to trade his dignity for material gains, but also feels joyful and happy in the heart. Such happiness cannot be deprived by poverty or spoiled by wealth; and such a person is a junzi (exemplary person of character) who will always be happy and content in the heart and will always be refined and courteous. (Yu 2006, 12)

Yu Dan’s interpretation that makes “finding one’s inner peace in poverty” (an pin 安貧) the center of Confucian happiness has met with harsh criticism. Daniel Bell (2010, 173) points out that the story of Yan Hui is not a good example for Yu Dan’s message, since personal happiness was not the goal of Yan Hui and “only emerges as a by-product” of his moral commitment to Confucian learning. To Bell, Yu Dan’s “Confucian heart for happiness” is depoliticized and deflects attention from the sociopolitical conditions that contribute to people’s suffering and therefore is “complacent, conservative, and supportive of the status quo” (2010, 173). While it is true that Yu Dan’s Confucian happiness tends to mitigate the critical potency of Confucianism in her interpretation of “Confucian heart for happiness” and to focus on individual responsibility and the ability to find moral inner strength for a positive attitude towards life, it does find resonance in millions of Chinese in contemporary China. One explanation could be that Yu Dan’s Confucian advice is offered against the background of an extreme materialism where social prestige is associated with material possessions, the rich are glorified and admired, while the poor are socially devalued and disrespected. A good example of such a blatant materialistic trend can be found in the Chinese television dating show Fei Cheng Wu Rao (非誠勿擾 If you are the one). In an episode that aired on January 17, 2010, a female contestant, when asked by the male guest if she would like to ride a bicycle together with him, declared on the stage, “I’d rather be sitting in a BMW crying.”15 Yu Dan’s Confucian message that pleasure and happiness can be found in simple life and that material poverty should not be a hindrance to becoming a junzi (君 子 a person of moral character) gives moral agency to those who are marginalized economically and, in concomitance, socially and politically. This partly explains why her Confucian message is heard by many as warming and even empowering, and why her Confucius has a wide appeal to the masses and, to an extent, is talked about as the “Confucius of the masses” (dazhong de Kongzi 大眾的孔子).16 It may be “a bowl of chicken soup” with limited efficacy, yet it somewhat reflects the deeply seated Chinese cultural psychology or, in the words of Li Zehou, “the 15. See http://v.qq.com/x/cover/2dk8c3xfbhek8hy/u00169ot260.html, accessed October 25, 2016. 16. In the preface to Yu Dan’s Lunyu Xinde [The Analects from the Heart], Yi Zhongtian refers to Yu Dan’s Confucius as “our Confucius, Confucius of the masses, Confucius of the people, and Confucius forever” (Yu 2006, 2).

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optimism-oriented culture” (legan wenhua 樂感文化) (Li 2005), a set of internalized aesthetic orientations that value the ordinary experience of living in this world and affirm the meaning and pleasures derived from this process of “being-in-the world.” Interestingly, Yu Dan reminds me of a traditional Chinese medical doctor I once worked with in Beijing. Yu’s advice, such as “everybody, moving through life, may inevitably experience regrets and disappointments, and we may not be able to change the reality, but we can change our attitude towards these matters” (Yu 2006, 20), echoes the advice given to the patients who came to see this doctor for treating various emotion-related disorders. For example, the doctor tended to remind his patients that “one needs to assume the heart of ordinariness” (pingchang xin 平常 心) “to accept imperfection as the way of the world” and to “attune one’s heart-mind accordingly to the flow of one’s social and natural world” (Zhang 2007, 134–35). Yu Dan makes an pin (finding inner peace while living a life of material obscurity) the center of Kong-Yan zhi le and gives moral significance to keeping a positive attitude and finding happiness in unfavorable life circumstances. Undoubtedly, an pin takes self-cultivation and a developed moral capacity. Although Yu Dan is faulted for not offering a clear path as for how to develop such a moral capacity besides simply changing one’s attitude and perspectives (Bell 2010), she has nevertheless brought Confucianism to the living rooms of millions of Chinese and made engaging Confucianism—reading, viewing, and discussing Confucian teachings— “ordinary” for many as a pathway towards self-strengthening and self-improvement. However, if an pin is elaborated as the heart of Kong-Yan zhi le and thus a central component of Confucian notion of happiness, then how is it relevant to those who are well-off, enjoy a high social status, and have access to valuable social, cultural, and material resources? It is remarkable to notice that the rising urban middle class have been ardent participants in engaging Confucianism and major consumers of all sorts of products of traditional Chinese learning. To a large extent, they are the driving forces behind the recent popular revival of national learning. In fact, the first private Confucian academy in contemporary mainland China was founded for “scholar-businessmen” (ru shang 儒商) in Chengdu in 2003.17 Many Chinese universities have also been offering courses on Chinese national learning designed specially for nontraditional students, most of whom are successful business entrepreneurs, managerial professionals, and sometimes government officials. What do these well-off professionals and entrepreneurs see in Confucian learning, and what do they hope to gain by engaging with Confucianism? China’s middle class did not exist some thirty years ago, before full-fledged economic reform was under way. This middle class is the very product of China’s social and economic transitions following the postsocialism market reforms. The labeling of the group of wealthy citizens in China as the “new middle class” is not without controversy, as the formation of the “Chinese middle class” has taken place 17. See http://www.chinawriter.com.cn/2013/2013-12-24/186113.html.

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in a very different historical, cultural, political, and global environment and does not equate to the concept as it is used in the West (see Goodman 2010; Osburg 2013). The term does not so much denote a fixed category of social class, but more a fluid and constantly performed social status and identity, and its meaning is in negotiation. As John Osburg (2013, 12) argues, the “new rich” in China is “not a coherent class defined by income level or occupation, but an unstable and contested category that is constituted by the practices and performances of a diverse group of entrepreneurs, professionals, artists, and government officials.” Various terms are used by Chinese to refer to the new rich, such as baofahu 暴發戶 or recently tuhao 土豪 (nouveau riche), dakuan 大款 (moneybags), and fuhao 富豪 (rich and powerful). To a certain degree, all of these terms have the negative implication of having money but being vulgar and lacking in culture and social conscience. In contrast, the terms zhongchan 中產 (middle class) or gao shouru jieceng 高收入階 層 (high-income stratum) are preferred by the wealthy themselves to describe their status, which is seen as associated not only with money, but also with certain lifestyles and choices, values, tastes, and increasingly, with education and engagement in activities for the public good. This is a diverse group with different backgrounds, who achieved their success through different means and with complicated connections to the states and to the local governments. Their position within the present Chinese sociopolitical landscape is uncertain, their relationship with the state is ambivalent, and their attitude towards China’s future is conflicted. As Osburg (2013, 13) shows in his studies of China’s new rich, many rich entrepreneurs and managers he encountered in Chengdu “were beset with an array of anxieties about their position within Chinese society” and “were unhappy with aspects of their professional and personal lives.” On a deep personal level, they share and operate within the cultural meaning systems that center on affect-based interpersonal ethics, which may provide some form of moral anchor and emotional comfort in everyday living and point to a pathway for achieving a happy and inspired life. On the other hand, engaging with traditional Chinese cultures and the Confucian learning is another way of performing the middle-class identity in order to claim affiliation with the long, rich cultural heritage of the past, and to transform the image of the “nouveau riche” into that of the cultivated cultural elite of the future. On the surface level, such appropriation of cultural resources is similar to the practices found in other consumer societies where the emergent urban middle class seek to emulate the styles and tastes of “cultural nobility” (Bourdieu 1984) as a way to scale up social status and legitimate “class distinctions.” Denise Lett’s book In Pursuit of Status: the Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class (1998) is a good example. It shows how the Confucian legacy, more specifically, the legacy of the yangban (scholar-officials of the Korea’s former Confucian state of the Choson dynasty 1392–1910) has been appropriated in the making of South Korea’s contemporary urban middle class. However, if the claim of “yangban status” by the contemporary Korean middle class focuses mainly on cultivating status symbols

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such as education, marriage connections, and family genealogy, the engaging of Confucian legacy by the new Chinese middle class has a unique moral and affective dimension of cultivating an inner capacity for a fulfilled good life. This moralistic Confucianism has been deliberately promoted by the state as the form of governance in the effort to build a happy and harmonious society, and the interests of the middle class lie with China’s continuous economic growth and social stability. Therefore, to certain extent the new rich of China have both interest and motivation for advocating Confucianism in contemporary China. Clearly, Kong-Yan zhi le needs to be refocused to articulate the life and experience of the middle class. Like Yu Dan, Yang Lihua makes happiness a topic of focus for his public Confucian lectures, such as his series of lectures given at China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) on July 11–12, 2009, with the title “Cultivating the Art of Happiness in the Spirit of Confucianism.”18 These lectures are largely attended by successful business entrepreneurs and professionals. Yang describes his audience as gaoduan renqun 高端人群 (a high-end crowd) and da qiyejia 大企業家 (big entrepreneurs). He teaches Confucian happiness not so much as a method to find inner peace when poor, but as a way to cultivate the moral character and virtue (de 德) for happiness through practicing Confucian ethics of jing 敬 (reverence) and you 憂 (care). Jing, as Yang Lihua explains, is a moral attitude towards “the sacredness of life”—a deeper awareness of others’ and one’s own existential conditions and a presence with sincerity and dignity. With jing, one tends to be sensitive and caring towards others and, accordingly, to act responsibly and respectfully, which gives meaning and purpose to the mundane everyday life. Practicing jing can positively affect one’s interpersonal ambiance and worldview, and therefore enhance the experience of happiness. Yang’s emphasis on you (care) as one of the Confucian moral imperatives essential to happiness is also closely relevant to China’s middle-class living. The new rich are notorious for their practice of “conspicuous consumption”19 and their lack of social conscience and moral values. Yang Lihua suggests that Confucian learning may help them find a way to rise above their materialistic and uncultured images and to become a positive social force and true cultural elite—shi junzi 士君子 (scholar-person of moral character) in Confucian terms. He makes 18. References to Yang Lihua’s lectures, interviews, and reports in this chapter mainly come from the following online sources (accessed October 25, 2016): (a) “儒家精神與現代生活” [Confucian spirit and modern life] http://biz.163.com/06/1124/11/30MLLE2M00021E6Q.html; (b) “楊立華教授談儒家幸福觀” [Professor Yang on Confucian notion of happiness] http://www.wenku1.com/news/7E24578B3E86864C.html; (c) “在儒家精神中修煉幸福技藝” [Cultivating the art of happiness with Confucian spirit] http://cn.ceibs.edu/ media_c/archive/42074.shtml#; (d) “孔子的精神家園” [Confucius’s spiritual home] http://blog.sina.com. cn/s/blog_4a0434cc010009to.html; (e) “從現代的虛無中解脫” [Free oneself from the modern nihilism] http://www.ceibsonline.com/commentary/show/index/classid/9/id/1094; (f) “復興儒學想像更美好的生活” [Revive Confucianism and imagine a happier life] http://www.ccstock.cn/finance/people/2012-11-24/ A985941.html. 19. John Osburg (2013, 34) points out that conspicuous consumption among the new rich in China takes a different form from that derived from the experience in the West. The Chinese form of conspicuous consumption has a lot to do with displaying one’s social capital and power in connection to one’s guanxi 關係 network.

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you (care) the focus of his attention. To him, you is one of the core Confucian concepts, a moral affect that connects and transforms personal and social relationships. Once a person develops you for another human being, he or she naturally assumes the responsibility of “care” for the well-being of that person. The best example is “the care” assumed by the parents for a child, which is also the basis for developing the highest Confucian virtue of ren 仁 (benevolence). A junzi (person of moral character) extends his “care” from his or her immediate family outwards to the larger social space. Reinterpreting Mencius’ famous words lao xin zhe zhi ren 勞心者治人 (only those who “care” for the people are legitimate to rule), Yang Lihua encourages his audience, the business elite, to extend their “care” from the narrow concerns of their own material interests to the larger social arenas to become a real Confucian junzi. Yang’s interpretation of you echoes another Confucian scholar’s, Pang Pu’s, view on Confucian you. He argues, this type of you, “the feeling that comes from the deeply seated moral conscience is the result of one’s self-cultivation, and the affective manifestation of what makes a junzi a junzi” (Pang 1991, 91). Although differently emphasized, Confucian messages on happiness by various Confucian scholars share the same core meaning of the virtue-based inner capacity for happiness that transcends external social and material constraints; it is the capacity that enables one to embrace whatever moment one finds oneself in and to make the best of a situation for a positive, meaningful, and rewarding life experience. In this sense, the Confucian notion of happiness is very much a Confucian moral capacity for living an inspired human life, which can only be acquired through diligent self-cultivation.

From Li 禮 to Happiness as Moral Experience Where does Confucian self-cultivation start? As can be found in The Analects and in other Confucian classics, personal cultivation starts close at home through embodied performance of “family-based ritualized roles and relationships” (li) to achieve “relational virtuosity” that extends beyond the immediate family relations and informs the way one lives one’s roles and relates to others in a larger community and social world (see Ames 2011). As Ames affirms, in the Confucian moral world, “family feeling is the ultimate source of the civility and propriety that is fostered within our ritualized roles and institutions” (Ames 2011, 103). In other words, the Confucian family feeling, embodied in concepts such as xiao 孝 (familial reverence) and jing 敬 (attentive respect), serves both as the source to ground li and as moral and personal identity achieved and expressed through the “li-constituted performance” (Ames 2011, 113). Although translated variously as social rules, rituals, rites, and propriety, li should not be simply taken as externally generated social rules and norms imposed on individual members of a community, but rather as an affectively charged process of embodiment that gives meaning and “form to a

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communal life lived together.”20 Li is transformative and plays an important role in jiaohua 教化 (education; moral cultivation) and is, therefore, particularly salient in what it does and achieves through an embodied social engagement of learning. In the summer of 2009, at a conference in Confucius’s hometown of Nishan, a casual conversation unfolded among the conference participants about bringing back Confucianism to everyday Chinese social life as a solution to the perceived moral deterioration in family and communal life. This was considered as of particular importance in rural areas, where the traditional family is falling apart as able adults migrate to the cities for jobs while leaving behind aging parents and children without proper support and care. A local Confucian activist suggested teaching Confucian li to children at schools, starting with performing Confucian bows to their elders and teachers on a daily basis. This way, he hoped, through such routinized embodied practices of li, Confucian values could be brought back to common Chinese families and communities and be internalized as a natural and ethical way of life within one or two generations. I remember feeling skeptical about the feasibility and significance of the idea. However, within only a few years, li-integrated Confucian education as a grassroots movement has indeed been brought back to many communities, and now private academies, schools, and classrooms devoted to classic Confucian education can be found in cities, towns, and the villages, demonstrating the vitality of popular (minjian 民間) Confucianism in today’s China. The situation envisioned by the Confucian activist even features in the 90-minute documentary on Confucius’s life and teachings produced jointly by China’s Central Television Station (CCTV) and Britain’s Lion and screened in January 2016. It shows various forms of popular engagement with Confucianism in a township close to Confucius’s hometown in Shandong, such as the early morning loudspeaker broadcast of Dizi Gui 弟子規 (Rules for Students and Children), a simple manual of Confucian teachings written in the seventeenth century for teaching children Confucian morals. Other practices include slogans promoting Confucian values displayed on the village walls, villagers gathering at the Confucian classroom to attend the Confucian lectures, children reciting from The Analects, and the performance and display of Confucian rituals. In the documentary, the head of a village claims that since introducing Confucianism to the village life, family and neighborhood relationships have improved and it has become much easier to manage village affairs. “The Rebirth of Confucianism,” a Guangming Daily Online report on the same township, shows children learning the correct posture to show reverence to Confucius as well as the changes in the villagers’ attitude towards attending Confucian lectures, moving from initial reluctance to attentiveness and even tearful enthusiasm (see Zheng 2014). On December 24, 2015, Guangming Daily also published a series of speeches by a group of officials and scholars under the title “Confucianism Making Life Happier,” devoting an entire 20. See note 18 (item d) above, on Yang Lihua.

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page to the revival of Confucian rituals in Qufu, Shandong. In one of the articles, liyu 禮育 (li education) was suggested as an important element to be incorporated into primary education.21 To a large extent, the type of education found in many privately run Confucian workshops, schools, and academies can be described as liyu.22 In the same documentary film on Confucius’s life mentioned above, some footage showing children learning and performing Confucian rituals came from a well-established private Confucian academy based in Beijing. This traditionally styled private boarding school has just celebrated its tenth anniversary and regularly enrolls about 200 students ranging in age from three to sixteen. The curriculum mainly consists of Confucian classics supplemented by other courses, such as math and English, as well as some hands-on activities. Daily life in the academy is saturated with li, from paying respect to Confucius and reciting Confucian classics, to the mundane activities of interacting with teachers, receiving guests, having meals, playing with friends, and engaging with nature. The academy’s successful operation for the past ten years and its established reputation as a well-developed traditional-styled Confucian education in the urban space offers a good example for understanding the process of cultivating a moral capacity through li education. In addition, the information on the curriculum and activities of the academy is readily accessible online. A recurrent introductory class of “familial reverence—the beginning of human relations” (xiao—renlun zhi shi 孝—人倫之始) for new students at the academy’s summer camp is a good example to show how intimate family feelings are evoked to ground li, thus making li performance both an affective expression and a moral duty.23 One such class started with the teacher introducing the concept of xiao (familial/ filial reverence) as “the root of de (virtue) and the source from which jiaohua (education; moral cultivation) originates.”24 With the question “why we should practice filial reverence,” the teacher showed a sand painting video that depicts in a poetic tone a mother’s physical and emotional journey from the beginning of pregnancy to giving birth and highlights the labor and sacrifice that a mother has made for nurturing a new life within her own body. The teacher then presented a few more video clips to show how a mother lovingly and patiently attends to her baby’s every need and how she affectionately responds to the baby’s every move. By this time many students were in tears, moved by the images and by memories evoked of similar moments in their own life. Students then were asked to talk about the most memorable moments they experienced with their parents and to express their feelings of 21. See the link to the paper: http://epaper.gmw.cn/gmrb/html/2015-12/24/nbs.D110000gmrb_07.htm, accessed October 25, 2016. 22. See examples in “Confucian life education at Shaoxing Happiness Lecture Series” Shaoxing xingfu rensheng—Ruxue shengming jiaoyu (紹興幸福人生—儒學生命教育), http://www.rujiazg.com/article/id/3950/, accessed October 25, 2016. 23. See the official website of the academy for the information on the classes. http://www.sihaishuyuan.com. 24. The reference comes from one of the Confucian classics, Xiaojing [Classics of filial reverence]. See the website http://www.sihaishuyuan.com for all the information on the class discussed here.

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love and gratitude for their parents in words and pictures. Sometimes when parents attended the class with students, students were also instructed to perform li of offering tea to their parents to embody “familial reverence.” From classroom interactions and the responses from students and parents, it is evident that the learning experience was transformative. Here, xiao was not taught as an abstract moral concept but learned as lived experience of an intergenerational ethics of care and deeply felt reverence for “the great kindness” (da de 大德) of life giving and nurturing.25 Such affect-based embodied experience in performing wholeheartedly one’s roles and relations in everyday life can serve as “the existential ground” (Csordas 1994) for what Li Zehou (2005) calls the Confucian legan wenhua (optimism-oriented culture), or to put it differently, lesheng wenhua 樂生文化 (lifeaffirming culture). In this Confucian moral world, the life-generating creativity of nature is accorded great virtue (da de) and human affect of heartedness (ren), and thus the perceived continuity between the human affair and the natural-spiritual world or tianren heyi 天人合一 (nature and the human world are integrated as one) (see also Li 2005, 181). Judith Farquhar and Zhang Qicheng notice the ordinary residents in Beijing who engage life-nurturing (yangsheng 養生) practices “tacitly assume that yangsheng activity participates in the natural power and virtue of giving life to life.” In other words, “we cannot delimit or objectify life, but we can generate it, feed it, train it, make it flourish” (Farquhar and Zhang 2012, 14). If the primary objectives of reviving Confucianism in the villages and townships (xiangcun ruxue 鄉村儒學) are to bring intergenerational responsibilities back to the family, to cultivate interpersonal ethics, and to promote the simple, harmonious communal life, the Confucian education at the private academy in Beijing sees itself more as educating the future elites of the society—the modern-day shi junzi (Confucian scholar-person of moral character), and providing in the contemporary urban space “a spiritual home for shi 士”—“the elites of the society and the mainstay of the nation” (see Shen 2013). In fact, the academy itself functions as a community of Confucian practice, where all the participants—students, parents, and teachers—come together through engaging each other in reading Confucian classics, cultivating the character of junzi, and becoming a moral person. Students are mainly from financially comfortable families with parents who are themselves quite involved in learning Confucianism and who share with the academy a faith and enthusiasm in national learning and the ideal of Confucian education. Teachers at the academy see themselves not as conventional educators in the modern system of education but assume a moral role of the parent to their students in the Confucian tradition. Most of all, they see themselves as students of Confucianism and practitioners of the Confucian way of life. As shown in Shen’s news report, Teacher Wang, on her way to a graduate school abroad, stopped in Beijing to pay a visit to her friend working at the academy and found herself 25. The reference here is tiandi zhi da de yue sheng 天地之大德曰生 (the great virtue/kindness of the cosmos is life-giving) from one of the Confucian classics, Book of Changes (Yi jing 易經).

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fascinated by the Confucian culture and the cause of the academy, and decided to stay on to become a teacher. In her words, the academy is such a community where “people share a faith in Confucianism, and they are uplifting, caring, devoted to self-cultivation, and doing their best to be a good role model for children. Here, I feel a sense of belonging, and I see beautiful things every day. This kind of happiness is beyond my words” (Shen, 2013). Here, the capacity to be happy is intimately related to the cultivation of moral competence in one’s roles and relations in the community, and Confucian happiness is the happiness created and enjoyed together. Such an intense sense of belonging “is the substance of felt religiousness” (Ames 2011, xiv) and the source for experienced spirituality.

Conclusion In sum, the narrative and enactment of happiness in contemporary China have acquired distinctive Confucian moral-affect sensibilities centering on personal cultivation for becoming a virtuous and caring member of the family and, by extension, the community and the society. At the same time, through the diverse ways in which “happiness” is enacted through Confucian self-cultivation and communal practice, Confucianism as a living tradition is being regenerated, transformed, and made not only relevant to, but to a large extent, part of “ordinary affects” as “the varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences,” in the words of Kathleen Steward (2007, 2). Indeed, for Confucian activists, the vitality of Confucianism lies in its “thisworldly spirit” (rushi jingshen 入世精神)—its active engagement with everyday life. Confucian learning has been actively promoted as a system of wisdom for “finding one’s position and purpose in this life” (anshen liming 安身立命) that can be actively put into practice. It teaches one how to relate to others, to one’s communities, and to one’s own body-heart (shenxin 身心) through self-cultivation and embodied practices of li—the affect-based and role-bearing ethics of reverence and care. As the example of Teacher Wang shows, happiness emerges as one is “active in cultivating, crafting, and nurturing the forms of life that are good, for themselves, their families, their communities.” (Farquhar and Zhang 2012, 15). This popular Confucianism (minjian ruxue 民間儒學), or rather “practice-oriented everyday Confucianism,” as shown in Yu Dan phenomenon, the village Confucian movement, and the Confucian academy education, has played a major role in the recent revival of Confucian tradition in China. Although popular Confucianism is often presented as “spontaneously formed” (zifa xingcheng 自發形成) out of the needs and interests of the ordinary people and the local business entities, it has been supported and promoted, directly or indirectly, by the state and local governments and has involved prominent Confucian scholars and intellectuals in and outside China. As shown in the above discussion,

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cultivating a capacity for happiness as a Confucian project is indeed ideological and permeated with politics and power. It is also evident that the complexity and dynamics of the Confucian happiness movement cannot be simply explained in terms of governance by the state or as a form of resistance or docile submission of the populace. The complexity could be seen as multilayered negotiation, appropriation, competition, and collaboration that bring “ten thousand things” (wanwu 萬 物) or diverse forms of social and material forces and existence into the play of the everyday. This is such that, with the unison claims for Confucianism as the cultural source of happiness, there has been dynamic, lively, creativity underneath that is open to other spiritual and intellectual traditions and gives possibilities to the imagination of new Confucian forms of good life.

References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Ames, Roger. 2011. Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Ames, Roger, and Henry Rosemont Jr. 1998. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Random House. Bell, Daniel. 2010. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Csordas, Thomas. 1994. “Introduction: The Body as Representation and Being-in-the World.” In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, edited by Thomas Csordas, 1–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Csordas, Thomas. 2014. “Afterword: Moral Experience in Anthropology.” Ethos 42 (1): 139–52. De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Farquhar, Judith. 2002. Appetites: Food and Sex in Postsocialist China. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Farquhar, Judith, and Qicheng Zhang. 2012. Ten Thousand Things. Brooklyn: Zone Books. Fong, Vanessa. 2011. Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Goodman, David. 2010. “The New Rich in China: Why There Is No New Middle Class.” Arts: The Journal of Sydney University Arts Association 32: 13–36. Huang, Quanwang 黃旺權. 2007. “Boshi men, Yu Dan meiyou shuo nimen shi ta de erzi” 博士們，于丹沒有說你們是他的兒子 [Doctors, Yu Dan didn’t say you are her sons]. Accessed October 25, 2016. http://news.163.com/07/0305/10/38QHMF88000121EP. html.

Cultivating Capacity for Happiness as a Confucian Project in Contemporary China 167 Kleinman, Arthur, Yunxiang Yan, et al. 2011. Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person, What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lett, Denise. 1998. In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “New” Urban Middle Class. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asian Center. Li, Cheng, ed. 2010. China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Li, Chenyang, and Peimin Ni, eds. 2014. Moral Cultivation and Confucian Character: Engaging Joel J. Kupperman. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Li, Zehou 李澤厚. 2005. Shiyong lixing yu legan wenhua 實用理性與樂感文化 [Pragmatic reason and a culture of optimism]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian. Lu, Junqing. 2014. “A Cat That Can Catch Happiness Is a Good Cat.” Translated by Feng Jun. Guangming Online. Accessed October 25, 2016. http://en.gmw.cn/2014-01/06/ content_10027168.htm. Meng, Peiyuan 蒙培元. 1999. “Rujia lun le” 儒家論樂. In Zhongguo zhexue de quanshi yu fazhan 中國哲學的詮釋與發展 [Interpretation and development of Chinese philosophy]. Beijing: Peking University Press. Meng, Peiyuan 蒙培元. 2001. “Mantan qinggan zhexue” 漫談情感哲學 [Reflections on philosophy of affect]. Xin Shi Ye 新視野 [Expanding horizons] 2001 (1): 47–49. Osburg, John. 2013. Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality Among China’s New Rich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pang, Pu 龐樸. 1991. “You le yuanrong—Zhongguoren de renwen jingshen” 優樂圓融—中 國人的人文精神 [The Chinese people’s humane spirit]. Journal of Twenty-First Century 6. Accessed October 25, 2016. http://www.cuhk.edu.hk/ics/21c/zh/issues/c006.html. Peng, Kaiping 彭凱平. 2011. “Zhongguo zheng mianlin xingfu zuiqiu de zhuanxing” 中 國正面臨幸福追求的轉型 [China is facing a transition in the pursuit of happiness]. Accessed October 25, 2016. http://www.tsinghua.org.cn/xxfb/xxfbAction.do?ms=read PDF&docId=10095153. Seok, Bongrae. 2013. Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy. London: Lexington Books. Shen, Zhengrong 沈崢嶸. 2013. “Chonghui minjian de xiandai shuyuan—Sihai Kongzi Shuyuan zoufang” 重回民間的現代書院—四海孔子書院走訪 [A visit to the Sihai Confucian Academy]. Accessed October 25, 2016. http://www.chinavalue.net/Media/ Article.aspx?ArticleID=103754. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sun, Anna. 2013. Confucianism as World Religion: Contested Histories and Contemporary Realities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Wang, Yonghao 汪湧豪. 2011. “Yangzhi yu lesheng: Zhongguoren de xingfu guan” 養志 與樂生：中國人的幸福觀 [Nurturing spirit and enjoying life: The Chinese notion of happiness]. Accessed October 25, 2016. http://www.chinanews.com/cul/2011/0425/2995951.shtml. Yan, Yunxiang. 2016. “Intergenerational Intimacy and Descending Familism in Rural North China.” American Anthropologist 118 (2): 244–47. Yang, Jie. 2015. Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Yang, Jie. 2016. “The Politics and Regulation of Anger in Urban China.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40: 100–123. Yang, Lihua 楊立華. 2012. “Yong rujia jingshen jianli xingfu pinge” 用儒家精神建立幸福 品格 [Establishing the moral character of happiness with Confucian spirit]. Accessed August 31, 2017. http://www.rwwhw.com/Rjwh/Zhsj/2012-10-29/9147.html. Yu, Dan 于丹. 2006. Lunyu xinde 論語心得 [The Analects from the Heart]. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju. Zhang, Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Zhang, Yanhua. 2007. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Zhang, Yanhua. 2014. “Crafting Confucian Remedies for Happiness in Contemporary China: Unraveling the Yu Dan Phenomenon.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, 31–44. New York: Routledge. Zheng, Yi. 2014. “The Rebirth of Confucianism.” Accessed October 26, 2016. http://en.gmw. cn/2014-10/14/content_13532632.htm.

8 Talking of Happiness How Hope Configures Queer Experience in China William F. Schroeder

Wo yuanlai yizhi yiwei xingfu he kuaile shi yihui shi, qishi bu ran. 我原來一直以為幸福和快樂是一回事，其實不然。

[I had always thought xingfu and kuaile were the same thing. Turns out they’re not.] —Anonymous author of a happiness meme

Debates about different experiences of happiness and how to attain both emotional fulfillment and the frisson of joy have been central in the creation of tongzhi 同志 community in the postmillennial People’s Republic of China (PRC).1 One of the major techniques for imagining and constructing such a community in the early 2000s was to set up online queer lifestyle portals for sharing stories, expressing feelings, and planning events. The portal that housed the forum I refer to in this chapter called itself “the world’s biggest Chinese-language queer events community” (quanqiu zuida zhongwen tongzhi yundong shequ 全球最大中文同志運動 社區) and contained several dozen different recreational and leisure organizations’ forums (luntan 論壇). For groups that maintained these forums, online activities existed in tandem with offline ones, such that members developed and nurtured their positions in organizations by combining online posts with regular participation in offline events. In connecting these two aspects of community building, my informants from these groups in Beijing created dynamic discursive and emotional spaces that allowed them to experience a queer togetherness they were otherwise denied in mainstream society.2 1. On the development of the term tongzhi, see Wong (2005). I have chosen to alternate between “queer” and tongzhi 同志 in this chapter to indicate that informants are themselves not consistent in the terms they use or the contexts in which they use them. Among academics and activists, too, debates about translating sexuality in the PRC go on (see Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015). People who might be labeled “queer” in English, for example, would today more likely be labeled tongzhi (“comrade”) in mainland Mandarin than ku’er 酷兒, which is a transliteration of “queer.” Indeed, informants also use a range of other terms, which are beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss. 2. I conducted the bulk of my research with these groups from 2005 to 2006 and followed up with an extended

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Although both the particular forum and the portal from which I draw examples in this chapter are no longer accessible online, they were vibrant places, alive with discussion on a host of important topics. This vibrancy led me to save and download key threads and pay attention to the effects they had offline on my informants’ interpretations of both self and community. When taken as a whole, the emotionalism of these posts established, to use Ann Cvetkovich’s (2003) language, a unique archive of feeling. The contents of this archive are an excellent example of “emotion talk,” which has been a central way of analyzing how people in various cultures interpret sentiments (see Heelas 1986). In this chapter, I would like to tap into one part of that archive’s emotion talk—the one that comes from what I will call the “Brightness Yoga Club” forum—to explore what it means to discuss, look for, and feel happiness in the queer PRC. The yoga club, made up almost entirely of men born and raised on the mainland, regularly gathered up to forty practitioners on Saturdays in rented spaces in Beijing but hosted at least one hundred members in its area on the portal site. What I notice when examining the discursive strategies taken in many of the posts about happiness in that archive is that, far from merely demonstrating cultural patterns, the posts more often refuse definitive accounts of what happiness is and use the concept as a foundation for creating contexts in which joy becomes imaginable. Members propose a diffuse notion of this elusive emotional experience and, drawing from a wide range of cultural logics, pin their relationships on hope, which should be understood less as an emotion and more as an indicator of affect because of its reliance on the virtual qualities of potential. By exploring some examples of emotional talk from the yoga group, I hope to elaborate on why approaching the question of happiness through theories of affect can be a productive way to study contemporary Chinese feeling.

Queer Happiness The camaraderie created in the yoga group’s space was particularly emotional and expressive. Members of the group demonstrated their intimacy with one another by encouraging the exploration of a host of topics that focused—not surprisingly for a marginalized group of people seeking refuge from the daily emotional struggles of being outcasts—on the discussion of both xingfu 幸福 and kuaile 快樂, two terms field visit in 2010, as well as embarking on frequent trips back to Beijing ever since. All of the texts referred to in this chapter were posted online during that first period of fieldwork. I chose to focus in my fieldwork on these leisure groups because they were some of the most popular sites of organizing, gathering, and communicating among queer urban mainlanders at the time. Bar-going and other activities that are frequently assumed to be primary opportunities for queer fellowship simply did not command the popularity they might have elsewhere. I would go so far as to suggest that researchers and activists around the world look beyond bars, traditional political associations, and social networking apps to construct a full picture of queer life. During field work, I learned of the importance of the groups featured in this chapter by following standard anthropological methods of participant observation, which encouraged me to take part in online forums as well as offline events. I also collected textual material both on- and offline and conducted semi-structured interviews with organizers and participants.

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that are often translated as “happiness” in English. As this chapter’s epigraph—which comes from the happiness meme discussed in this chapter and reposted by a yoga club member—suggests, differentiating between these emotional concepts is not easy. Although sexuality scholar and queer rights proponent Li Yinhe (2014) writes that “xingfu is often not an intense feeling but a balanced one” (xingfu changchang bing bushi yizhong jilie de ganjue, er shi yizhong pinghe de ganjue 幸福常常並不是 一種激烈的感覺，而是一種平和的感覺), contrasting with the momentary nature of kuaile, many of my informants used the two interchangeably or in connection with one another to refer to something like a satisfied and optimistic sense of wellbeing. The difficulty of distinction between these two terms applies, in fact, to all emotions, even seemingly opposite ones, such that the only way to explore them is through the rich contexts in and through which they are cited. Indeed, as affect theorist Brian Massumi (2002) suggests, there is always a part of an emotion that exceeds people’s ability to describe it, because emotions are merely the linguistic labels we apply to sensory reactions and experiences, which themselves are events that are far too complex for words alone. It is easy enough for most people to recall having had trouble describing precisely and fully the emotional content of a particular happening. In the expansive universe of feeling, yoga club members had to venture far beyond merely xingfu and kuaile to talk about happiness, often referring at the same time to fun (kaixin 開心), comfort (shufu 舒服), satisfaction (manyi 滿 意), tranquility (xinjing 心靜), friendliness (youhao 友好), effortlessness (qingsong 輕鬆), harmony (hexie 和諧), and encouragement (guli 鼓勵). This analogic dimension of the emotions they explored in their happiness talk suggests not only that a range of factors contributes to the Chinese understanding of happiness or joy, but also that emotional experience itself can never be described merely by generalizing cultural models. “Affect” is the recognition that although language is one of the primary ways human beings interpret the sensorial, words still never feel like quite enough for capturing the fullness of such an experience, which is more like a process or a becoming than a codifiable entity (see also Wetherell 2012). However, this inability of expression need not lead to exasperation; on the contrary, the life of emotion derives its vitality from what spills over the boundaries of description and leads one into different states and different realms of feeling. My informants themselves seem to realize such a fact in their happiness talk, as evidenced by their general lack of interest in programmatic understandings of the good life that try to delimit the meaning of happiness and other emotions. Thus, emotion talk is not something that merely externalizes a cultural pattern and “defines what people should feel if they are to be ‘themselves’ as social beings” (Heelas 1986, 260), but something that creates a space in which discussants can explore the boundaries of feeling. As far as happiness is concerned, for my informants the atmosphere created in talking about it was as important as any experience that could be called happy or not. And

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for queer yoga practitioners, it was precisely the differences in group members’ approaches to happiness that bound them together. Similar realizations are what make critical happiness studies also about more than just the definition of an emotion. Well-known theorists such as Sara Ahmed wish to understand “happiness as possibility” (2010, 220),3 or something like the joy of not being told how to be happy. Those who take this flexible approach to happiness maintain a certain openness to the interpretation of emotional experience, though they can sometimes seem suspicious of people who choose too common a way of trying to be happy. As part of this chapter’s discussion, I suggest that it is perhaps not the commonness of an approach that arouses suspicion but its dogmatism. The foreclosing aspects of a dogmatic approach cause trouble precisely because of what affect theory emphasizes as the difficulty of capturing and targeting, not to mention maintaining, any sort of emotional state. For queer Chinese yoga club members, who were indeed suspicious of the kinds of normative rhetoric and practices that throughout her book Ahmed calls “happiness scripts,” the response was more complicated than merely to realize that “[narrating] unhappiness can be affirmative” (107; see also 213–17). For them, trying for happiness was not necessarily a problem. In fact, happiness, joy, pleasure, and humor constituted at least as big a part of club members’ experiences as melancholy, sadness, anger, trauma, and other disaffections that scholars often consider to be the mainstay of queer sensibilities (see, for example, Cvetkovich 2003; Halberstam 2008; Love 2009). Perhaps the most interesting thing is that both negative and positive emotions alike energized hopefulness, which some queer theorists have begun to take seriously as a core feature of queer subjectivity (see Muñoz 2009).

Talking Happiness and Hope Hopefulness seemed to emerge organically from the online archive of feelings that the yoga club members created, and it sustained the group offline during my field work. When members shared their experiences of challenges to happiness, their doubts about what it could mean and how to achieve it, and their elation about moments that seemed truly joyous, their fellows reacted with a spirit of acknowledgment, camaraderie, and encouragement. This sharing of feelings and experiences created an intimacy that sustained offline friendships and group activities. The contrasting type of post, however, provides insight into how and why some kinds of happiness talk were more successful in bringing about togetherness and generating hope than others. 3. Throughout her book, Ahmed (2010) uses “possibility” in conjunction with “hap,” as in “happenstance.” Possibility thus seems to mean “openness,” “accident,” or “potential.” Compare with Massumi, who says, “[p]ossibility is a variation implicit in what a thing can be said to be when it is on target. Potential is the immanence of a thing to its still indeterminate variation, under way” (2002, 9). I try to maintain Massumi’s distinction in this chapter.

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One member’s sharing in 2006 of a rather scripted version of what happiness could be led to far less engaging and energizing reactions—and mostly indifference—from members than other examples did. The content of the post came from outside the group and had nothing directly to do with the poster’s experience—or at least the poster did not characterize it in that way—and instead was provided for the sake of contemplation (fansi 反思). The text was that meme that many people before and since have shared on the Chinese-language internet. Although there could be many reasons the meme did not generate a keen response, I suggest that the sharp contrast in tone and presentation when compared with more successful emotive posts, the use of negative comparison as a basis for evidence, and the generally programmatic approach of the text all turned readers away from entertaining its applicability and elaborating on its ideas. The text never became the object of discussion in yoga practices and meetings like the heartfelt messages in other posts did, and it generated but a few responses in the forum. The meme itself is long and has an obscure provenance, appearing on an array of sites at different times, from individual blogs to self-help portals.4 It seems to have been written by a heterosexual Chinese man who was residing in the USA when producing it.5 The meme’s author takes a comparative approach to suggest that many of the reasons contemporary Chinese people are unhappy is that they are not enough like Americans. The comparative nature of the meme suggests much more about how the author thinks one comes to know happiness than it does about the accuracy of its aphoristic content, because every one of the text’s ten concrete claims could be debated. As the author puts it, being happy is like “when you have food and see that your neighbor’s family cannot get anything to eat” (xingfu shi ni you chide shihou, kandao linju jia chibushang fan 幸福是你有吃的時候，看到鄰居 家吃不上飯)—one knows it only by perceiving its negative counterpart. Using this rather cruel and competitive understanding of happiness, the author suggests that, among other things, Americans are happier than the Chinese because Americans are religious; believe family is the biggest source of happiness; emphasize the goal of making children happy; enjoy a system of governance “by the people, for the 4. The year in the meme gets changed from posting to posting, though it seems to have appeared originally in 2005. By searching the internet, I quickly found a 2011 posting in which the year in the text had been changed to 2007 (http://wenku.baidu.com/view/e8b8b3313968011ca3009188.html). I also easily found another blog from 2011 using the text with the year reference removed (http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/ blog_495568800100vhah.html). A blog entry from 2015 uses the same 2005 text (http://blog.sina.cn/dpool/ blog/s/blog_85c58a360102vlsu.html?vt=4) as the yoga posting does. These variations seem to confirm the endurance of the meme. 5. The author is a self-described “Chinese person in America” (zai meiguo de huaren 在美國的華人). It is easy to assume, but not with any certainty, that the author is a heterosexual man, mostly because of the opinions expressed on a number of ideas involving gender, especially marriage. The meme is full of discrepancies, likely a result of its jingoistic approach, in which the jingo matters more than the content. While I am in no position to judge the quality of the Chinese language, prosaic or conceptual inconsistencies are easy to recognize, such as the emphasis on equality in one place and the blatant sexism in another, or the failure to carry a metaphor through. I have tried to keep to the original in my translations as much as possible, so any oddities of style, I should hope, were already there.

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people”; understand that the logic of health is the logic of happiness; use wealth as a source of capital to invest in happiness; believe that equality is the source of happiness; and so on. The signal message of the meme encourages Chinese people to be different from the way they are now in order to be happy, and that such a change needs to come about urgently. The meme’s focus on self-care and individual responsibility would have appealed to many of the post’s readers, who, as I discuss in the next section, tend to agree that emotional success has something to do with self-determination. The meme’s author suggests at the end of the text that “heaven and hell are in our own hearts, it just depends on how we choose” (tiantang yu diyu, jiu zai women ziji xinzhong, jiu kan women ziji ruhe xuanze 天堂與地獄，就在我們自己心中，就看我們自己 如何選擇). In addition, certain themes would have spoken to the queer readers of the meme. For example, in tackling the particular problem of marriage, which is a major source of emotional distress for tongzhi, the meme’s author similarly tries to expose the insidiousness of what he sees as a general Chinese principle of conjugality. “Many of us Chinese see love and marriage as a responsibility. Not being married is considered ‘having problems,’ and in the gaze of people around you, they make you feel inferior. Where’s the happiness in that?” (Women xuduo huaren ba hunlian kanzuo shi yige zeren. Bu jiehun jiu shi “you wenti,” zai zhouwei ren de yanguang jiu bi ni zibei, na lai kuaile? 我們許多華人把婚戀看作是一個責任。不結婚 就是“有問題”，在周圍人的眼光就逼你自卑，哪來快樂？) The meme’s author’s solution to this problem is a misogynistic one that amounts to women changing the way they behave in marriages. This condescending solution reflects the tone of much of the text, whose imprecision is yet conveyed in an insistent, almost nagging voice. In general, concrete advice amounts to little more than making happiness a goal, suggesting that the meme’s author himself senses ultimately that happiness cannot be prescribed. The particular coda with which the refrain of goal-making concludes is what I would like to focus on, however, because it encapsulates the meme’s demanding approach and gives the text the character of a dressing-down, a nebulous call to account for cultural misdeeds. Like a parent chastising a child through exaggerated insinuations of a foreclosed future, the meme’s author asserts that if Chinese people do not take heed of his insights, they will not be able to become happy (kuaile bu qilai 快樂不起來). The author’s phrasing here makes “happy” into a negative verb construction, relying on a particular convention of Chinese grammar called a “potential complement,” whereby a particle or infix (the “bu” in the pinyin above) expresses the verb’s connection to a result (see Wu and He 2015, 386–89). In other words, the verb phrase denotes both an action and the likelihood of its outcome, with bu signifying what many Chinese linguists describe simply as “impossibility” (bukenengxing 不可能性).6 That sense of impossibility deflates readers’ hopes for 6. The nuances of this construction seem to engender an arcane debate in Chinese linguistics about whether the potentiality of this construction arises from the infix alone or from the structure of the phrase itself (see Wu

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success, leaving them less with a choice than an unachievable expectation. Indeed, as Ahmed writes, “To turn happiness into an expectation is thus to annul its sense of possibility” (2010, 220), and then to throw in that particle of despair makes it a veritable drudgery. By shutting down potential, the meme’s author removed from happiness the hope that invigorates people to pursue it and turned the queer yoga readers away. Unable to imagine specifically how to put the author’s suggestions into action, those few yoga club members who did respond to the posting of the meme focused rather on celebrating their connection to or support for the poster himself. Though some respondents said in very brief terms that the meme was profound (you shendu 有深度) and worthy of consideration (zhide sikao 值得思考)—and yet others followed anticlimactically with the commentary that it was a “really long article” (hao chang de wenzhang 好長的文章)—most referred to the poster’s wisdom and status in the community. They called him “old man” (laodie 老爹) as a mark of familiar respect, joking that he “likes to think about profound ideas now” (laodie xianzai xihuan kaolü gaoshen de wenti 老爹現在喜歡考慮高深的問題). Others followed, saying, “But he’s always been a deep person” (renjia benlai jiu shi gaoshen de ren me 人家本來就是高深的人嚒), cheekily celebrating his erudition. On the whole, the thread containing the happiness meme was more phatic than substantive, more performative than constative, expressing togetherness, intimacy, and a certain respect for the man who posted it. Perhaps oddly, by ignoring the specifics in the meme’s guidelines for happiness, participants announced their own joy in camaraderie. Suggesting simply that they might think about the meme’s precepts, the participants in the thread then dropped it, never mentioning it again on the website’s forums or in the yoga practices I attended. Not surprisingly, they also never came to a conclusion about the difference between xingfu and kuaile.

Scripting Happiness Making happiness imaginable by encouraging an understanding of it as potential— perhaps starting with swapping out that negative infix for its encouraging counterpart de 得—is what queer yoga members would rather have focused on. Although they never rephrased happiness in such a way, other examples of their happiness talk prioritized the potentiating aspects of hope in a manner that helps explain why the meme’s strident enumerations were ignored. Such talk also suggests that it was not the conventionality of happiness scripts that yoga club members turned away from, but a more open-ended understanding of what happiness could do that they would rather have turned towards. Therefore, it is not necessarily the script that matters in judgments about the usefulness or accuracy of an emotional paradigm. Indeed, what seems more relevant in the case of the meme is the incessantness of its 2002, 19). Limitations of space prevent discussion here, and it is of little consequence to my argument.

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tone and the negativity of its grammar, as well as its demand for wholesale change. Neither of these inspired the readers in the yoga group. In broader anthropological terms, to imagine that scriptedness in and of itself here is a problem would be to ignore what culture theorists have long argued: that emotions “are no less cultural and no more private than beliefs. They are instead, cognitions—or more aptly, perhaps, interpretations—always culturally informed, in which the actor finds that body, self, and identity are immediately involved” (Rosaldo 1984, 141). Emotions, that is, would not exist without the cultural scripts through which human beings interpret them. But culture is not a script in and of itself, just as it is not a statistically verifiable likelihood of action—a mere template for behavior—rather, it is the very working out of meaning among people in particular times and situations. To put these ideas into the language of affect theory, although it is possible that feelings arise as a result of neuronal events and synaptic transfers, and that these are both understood and expressed in part by linguistic means, the stimulus, its bodily response, and what a person might call that response in emotional terms together still do not complete the story of feeling. Human beings instead rely on complex relational processes and feedback loops that take sensory stimuli and route them through language, link them to subjective experiences and shared knowledge, and create contextual interpretations that are called emotions but that can be replicated as well as interpreted and debated.7 The problem in studying emotions is therefore not the scripts per se, but their abundance and the human ability to improvise and deviate from them. The range of interpretive possibilities even within one culture, if one dared attempt to bound or identify such a thing, seems endless when one considers the complexity of subjective emotive response. In addition, the age of globalism and the internet has expanded the range of potential scripts even more. The tongzhi groups I worked with sourced part of their understanding of what it means to be happy, to be queer, to be a person, from a variety of discourses that emerged in such disparate times and places as 1960s Stonewall, New York; first-century BCE China; and the contemporary PRC (Schroeder 2012). These sources of meaning would then have been applied to the unique subjective experience of each individual and interpreted relationally among peers in a wonderfully complex and generative, not limiting, way. In what follows, I will discuss this complexity by means of an exchange over several threads and posts among yoga club members about two happiness scripts in particular. The first one should be familiar to readers who know about contemporary queer identity politics in many places around the world. This politics stresses that being able to be honest about one’s sexuality is an important feature of living 7. These and similar processes have been tracked and theorized by a range of thinkers, from early linguisticdeterminists like David Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (see Sapir 1949 [1929]), to classic anthropologists like Clifford Geertz (see Geertz 1973), to linguists interested in how the human brain relies on language centers to process even basic stimuli (see Deacon 1996), and to affect theorists who understand discourse as but one element of the process of human emotional response (see Massumi 2002; Sedgwick 2003).

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a full queer life. Although in the PRC this script is an increasingly popular one, and its sociocultural politics there create part of the backdrop of the tongzhi debate about how to be happy, it is not the main story of interest.8 The one I will deal with at length instead remains tethered to a familiar kind of suffering in Chinese culture. This is the story of suffering that begets satisfaction and in turn leads to a hopefulness about future rewards. Even though both of these stories rely on a script, when told, each ends up engendering the kind of openness that sustains hope, being presented as neither wholly hegemonic nor utterly subversive but as having arisen out of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the “middle ranges of agency that offer space for effectual creativity and change” (2003, 13). Contemplating these middle ranges, which require trade-offs to keep relations going, allows for a closer look at the experience of happiness, especially when it comes to the main challenge in both scripts: family. This “unavoidable question” (bukeraokai de wenti 不可繞開的問題) of family, to use queer sociologist Wei Wei’s language (2016, 167), preoccupies contemporary queer Chinese people especially, although it is also a core problematic in many discussions of happiness, including the meme from the previous section. Although resigning oneself to the expectations of family in the hopes of maintaining bonds that sustain normative sociality may seem “cruelly optimistic,” as Laurent Berlant might point out, these bonds are also “attachments that organize the present” (2011, 14), without which one would become unmoored. Such attachments are frequently characterized in terms of parent-child relationships, which are at the center of the Chinese family drama, and many Chinese people seem willing to sacrifice a level of comfort in the here and now for the sake of these attachments, if adhering to them promises a hope for the future. In a deep and culturally resonant way, such a hope resembles the displacement of personal satisfaction onto the future completion of what is often understood as a cycle of filial nurturance.9 Seeing personal hope through the family in these terms makes incorporating filial piety into a tongzhi narrative much less far-fetched—after all, as Muñoz contends, queerness itself “is primarily about futurity and hope,” “always in the horizon” (2009, 11).

Modeling the Out and Proud Queer One yoga member summed up the problems with queer parent-child attachments in this way: “Society’s atmosphere of intolerance towards and misunderstanding of tongzhi has made the emotional gap between us and our parents wider. For this reason, every tongzhi has a responsibility to think actively of ways to make this social atmosphere better” (Dui tongzhi bu lijie, bu kuanrong de shehui huanjing, layuan le women yu fumu de ganqing juli. Weici, meige tongzhi dou fu you zeren bing 8. On the growth of this position and its debates, see, among others, Chou (2000), Engebretsen (2014), Engebretsen and Schroeder (2015), Fu (2012), Kam (2013), Kong (2011), and Wei (2012, 2015). 9. See Stafford (2000) on the cyclical aspects of Chinese relational ethics, especially as concern filial piety.

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yao jiji xiang banfa shi shehui huanjing biande geng hao! 對同志不理解、不寬容 的社會環境，拉遠了我們與父母的感情距離。為此，每個同志都負有責任並要 積極想辦法使社會環境變得更好!). The logic behind repairing the social atmosphere suggests that making queer orientations more widely acceptable would not only encourage parents to embrace their queer children’s sexualities, but would also allow children more easily, in the interest of being filial, to protect parents’ social reputation and feelings. Until such a social change occurs, however, many tongzhi remain troubled about how to achieve balance between queer self-actualization and filial piety. In light of such anxiety, the most nuanced and thoughtful explorations of happiness in the queer yoga archive arose when members both celebrated and reacted to achievements in the realm of family. Some of the most elated of these outpourings occurred when parents suddenly or finally accepted a queer child’s sexuality. One member of the yoga club, whom I will call “Bright” (an indirect translation of the nickname he used with tongzhi friends), posted a celebratory message about his parents’ acceptance of his sexuality and encouragement of his lifestyle, suggesting that one of the best ways to make parents happy was to allow them to know the reality of the child’s queer life. Although this original post has been lost with the disappearance of the queer portal it was on, I noted at the time of my field work that it catalyzed a host of expressive emotional responses both on- and offline, which I saved. For Bright and a growing number of mainland tongzhi, this understanding is tied to the global queer discourse of coming out of the closet (chugui 出櫃)—or not hiding one’s sexuality and related desires from anyone else, most especially parents and relatives. The increasing popularity of such a perspective is reflected in a 2013 public service video called “Wedding Plan,” created by popular online queer information and video portal queercomrades.com.10 The video tacitly supports the coming-out narrative and suggests that parents often know more than children think. In the video, a queer man and woman have made a pact to enter into a nominal marriage (known as xingshi hunyin 刑事婚姻)—an arrangement in name only—to deceive their parents on the question of sexuality. After announcing their wedding intentions, the man’s mother reveals that she knew the man had a male partner all along and that she did not wish them to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of conforming to social expectations to marry heterosexually. Many members of the growing PRC version of PFLAG, or Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (Tongxinglian Qinyou Hui, www.pflag.org.cn), maintain a similar perspective, through which they encourage sons and daughters to come out and to have faith that parents will continue to love and support queer children (see also Engebretsen’s chapter, this volume). In theory, revealing one’s sexual orientation would help to manage parents’ expectations and alleviate the great pressure to marry heterosexually that most queer Chinese people feel. Although this theory is not always borne out, because of the experience many 10. See http://www.queercomrades.com/en/videos/queer-comrades-videos/queer-comrades-documentaries/ 形式婚姻-2/.

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“out” queer children have of parents continuing to encourage them to marry heterosexually for the sake of social correctness and procreation, proponents of the strategy say that doing so makes one’s heart calm (xinli tashi 心裡踏實). Such calmness comes from the decreased amount of energy required to maintain two sets of life stories—one for parents, coworkers, and straight friends, the other for queer comrades—a situation that my informants claim causes one to live an exhausting life (huo de hen lei 活得很累). Bright said later about his own experience of the decision to come out to his parents that he achieved a certain state of satisfaction by doing so. Because of his parents’ positive reactions, he felt luckier and happier than his animated friend “Splendid Dancer” (another nickname), who, behind an external presentation of happiness, suffered the same worries and difficulties as most other queer Chinese people do. “When I see Splendid Dancer, who [at every yoga practice] is so joyous and happy, [realizing that] behind it all he has the same worries and hardship as most queer people, in comparison, I’m really lucky and happy” (Kanzhe meici dou hen kaixin kuaile de [Splendid Dancer], beihou ye youzhe he daduoshu tongzhi yiyang de fannao he kunnan, xiangbijiao, wo zhende shi xingyun he kuaile de 看著 每次都很開心快樂的 [Splendid Dancer] ，背後也有著和大多數同志一樣的煩惱 和困難，相比較，我真的是幸運和快樂的). In this single context of coming out, Bright uses kaixin and kuaile to reference the visibly happy qualities of his friend, and xingyun 幸運 (fortune, luck) and kuaile to refer to his own ongoing state. His use of the same word—kuaile—once to refer to a longer-term and settled happiness and another time to refer to Splendid Dancer’s outward and more situational presentation of joyousness could suggest several interpretations. On the one hand, Bright could be using the same concept to refer to different contexts because he, like most people, does not talk about emotions formulaically or in predictable or precise terms. This interpretation points to the fluidity of meaning and experience that emotion talk can only ever attempt to capture. But on the other hand, Bright could also be referring to his assumptions that it is a good idea to connect one’s internal emotional state with one’s external presentation, pointing to a deep sense of the connection between emotion and personhood in contemporary China (see the range of different views on this connection in Hsu 1971; Potter 1988; Rofel 2007; Yan 2003). For the purposes of this chapter’s interest in exploring ways that queer Chinese happiness can be read and understood, it does not so much matter which of these interpretations is “correct.” Indeed, even people acting within the context of Bright’s declarations and responding to his discussions could never precisely know Bright’s intentions and would have been able to read his post in a variety of ways. What most of the queer yoga club members connected to in Bright’s celebration of his coming out in any case went beyond these interpretive possibilities to focus on the perception that Bright had taken his happiness into his own hands. From this kind of mindset comes the argument that not only is this problem of the closet one that

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comes from pressure one puts on oneself, but also that this pressure is unnecessary, because parents are often supportive of children’s desires for happiness and honesty. It is difficult to say just how many contemporary tongzhi agree with this strategy of coming out, because few would suggest that it is necessarily a bad practice, even if they are not prepared to follow it themselves. In addition, coming out is rarely a clear-cut act, because people might not divulge their sexuality in some circumstances but might do nothing actively to hide it in others, a strategy many of the queer yoga club members followed. Indeed, in any culture, such an act of revelation would have to be constant to create the stark division between in and out that the metaphor of the closet suggests. Therefore, chugui should be understood as one of an array of methods available to queer people in the PRC for dealing with their relationships with parents and others. Although in reality many more people probably follow a strategy like the one I present below of not revealing their sexuality to parents and biding time—or in rarer cases proceeding with nominal marriages to other gay or lesbian friends—I hesitate to make this resistance to coming out into an ontological argument about the differences between western and Chinese approaches to self and sexuality. The very existence and proliferation of the coming out approach suggests an ability as well as a desire among queer Chinese people to connect internal feelings and external actions. My informants’ treatment of the coming out question as a conscious but difficult choice suggests that far from being an existential problem of body and self, coming out or not falls in the realm of relational ethics, in which one makes an emotional judgment about how to act based on the potential harm done to a loved one by providing certain information. Much of my own ethnographic data indeed suggests that the primary goal of queer filial piety, however it might be achieved, is giving parents peace of mind (rang fumu anxin 讓父母安心; see also Fei Xiaotong 1985). Some of the best examples of a similar relational ethic come from the culture of Chinese health care, in which terminally ill patients’ family members might not necessarily reveal to the patient the extent of illness in the interest of preserving the patient’s good spirits and mental-emotional well-being (see Fan 2015). Thus, the question of coming out is not an ontological one, but a contextual one (see Martin 2000).

Cruising Filial Piety This sometimes quite restless and exhausting calculation of harm feels similar to the energy-sapping hustle that the contemporary pressure to succeed socially and financially has leveled on many Chinese children. Success in this kind of environment often tempts children to travel great distances from their parents and to sacrifice some of the benefits of proximity in favor of more economically promising routes to filial piety. Despite any promise of being able to care for parents materially through economic migration, however, authorities fear that the emotional facets of

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filial piety might be eroding and have attempted to legislate the sentiment, creating a good deal of skeptical debate about how best to serve one’s parents.11 Worries about how to be filial and about one’s inability or lack of talent in fulfilling parental expectations have deep roots in Chinese culture and have coalesced into what could be called a normative discourse of inadequacy, regardless of the reasons that might lie behind various lamentations about it. Indeed, a queer poster in another forum used the ancient expression “the tree desires peace, but the wind will not stop; the child wishes to be filial, but the parents are gone” (shu yu jing er feng bu zhi, zi yu xiao er qin bu zai 樹欲靜而風不止，子欲孝而親不在) to signify the challenges he felt in being filial as a queer child. These challenges centered on the continual worry that comes from weighing the benefits and drawbacks of coming out with the limited time he had left to make his parents happy before they died. The scripting in this and similar scenarios is thus not of happiness per se but anxiety, with the intention of producing what many Chinese people nevertheless consider a positive outcome: a feeling of filial responsibility. This narration of unhappiness seems affirmative not of a marginalized experience, then, but a mainstream one. Such normative anxiety indicates that trying to be happy could itself sometimes be seen as a queer move. If worry is filial, however, some tongzhi find that the anxiety associated with not coming out—or more specifically, not fulfilling the globally circulating ideal of the out-and-proud queer—is part and parcel of being a good child, inasmuch as being anxious that one is not filial enough is a marker of respect for one’s parents. Not coming out then becomes an act of filial devotion that has many dimensions in addition to the possible suffering the queer child will have to bear. These multiple dimensions make not coming out much more complex than a simple act of surrender or willful self-delusion and denial. Splendid Dancer himself initiated a thread in which he outlined these complexities, maintaining that “loving them [parents] has nothing to do with coming out” (ai tamen, yu chugui wuguan 愛他們，與出櫃無關). In his and many other members’ opinions, protecting the feelings and reputation of parents takes precedence over the individual desire to come out, and a parent’s unwillingness or inability to understand and support queer lives comes from a desire that children not suffer in the pursuit of success. Tongzhi widely acknowledge, following normative paradigms, that parents have undergone enormous sacrifice to nurture and protect children and that such a sacrifice should be met with an equal or greater one from the child (Fong 2004). In his post about not coming out, Splendid tells a touching story of a childhood nurtured through parental sacrifice and suffering but that was at the same 11. Prescriptive filial piety as set down in the 2001 Marriage Law and in more recent attempts to make, for example, regularly visiting parents a legal responsibility, has witnessed a stream of critical response in China. A report on popular responses to changes in the “Guarantee of Elderly Rights Law” (《老年人權益保障法》) can be found at http://news.sohu.com/20130702/n380504183.shtml.

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time full of the kind of support and love required for a child to develop into a selfpossessed and well-adjusted person. He said his parents raised him and his brother in a relaxed (qingsong) and harmonious (hexie) way that was more encouraging (guli) than criticizing (piping 批評), for which he was grateful, and which he said led to his developing a self-confident (xiangxin ziji 相信自己) personality. Because of this upbringing, he said he never had the kinds of self-doubt that come from the pain and bewilderment (tongku he mimang 痛苦和迷茫) accompanying many tongzhi experiences of coming to terms with a queer sexuality. But he felt anxious about being filial. Just before he and his brother were grown, his mother died, leaving his father as the sole focus of his and his brother’s devotion. As a result—and paradoxically from the perspective of the out-and-proud narrative—it was precisely his level of comfort with his own sexuality and his general confidence that made him unwilling to risk hurting his father’s feelings by divulging a queer orientation. It was as if he were suggesting that being well-adjusted and accepting of one’s own sexuality could be satisfaction enough. So, when pressure to marry heterosexually began to mount at about the time of his father’s retirement, Splendid decided to move away from his hometown, out of fear that his continuous refusal of a heterosexual match would come to seem odd to people in his father’s social network. Leaving town had the added benefit of looking filial because of the previously mentioned social reality of economic migration and the remittances he might be able to send back to his birth home for the care of his parent. Yet Splendid’s father also developed over the years of his son’s absence an increasingly anxious mood (jiji de xinqing 焦急的心情), attributing Splendid’s inability to find a bride to an overly busy life in the city and a lack of appropriate housing. The father, it seemed, had his own worries to balance with his sense that his son should be allowed to pursue success. As a son, Splendid did not hold his father’s anxieties against him, casting them as expected reactions from someone who, “as a father” (zuowei yige fuqin 作為一個父親), would have wanted his son to have “the same kind of existential space” (yiyang de shengcun kongjian 一樣的生 存空間) as others, “the same kind of fair environment” (yiyang de gongping huanjing 一樣的公平環境) as others, “the same kind of happy family” (yiyang de xingfu jiating 一樣的幸福家庭) as others, and “even the same kind of worries and anxieties” (shenzhi yiyang de fannao youchou 甚至一樣的煩惱憂愁) as others. But at the same time, Splendid felt his “father’s love followed him like a shadow” (fu’ai ruying suixing 父愛如影隨形), casting a pall over their relationship of mutual angst. This pall was less ominous than disquieting, in the sense that the father’s over-worry and restlessness about the future was as much a part of Splendid’s person as the shadow his own body threw. Realizing that this worry was both an image of himself and an image of his father, Splendid understood that he had to live with it. Yet, even though father’s and son’s anxious dispositions conformed with normative understandings of good parent-child relations in the contemporary PRC, they emerged from and

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gave birth to a range of other emotional attitudes besides the superficially negative ones associated with worry. For Splendid, crucially, these other attitudes did not include resentment or anger about being unable to come out. Indeed, he emphasized that his father “definitely would not believe that homosexuality was sin, and he certainly would know that homosexuality has no connection to questions of good and evil or morality” (kending buhui renwei tongxinglian shi zui’e, ta yiding zhidao tongxinglian yu shan’e wuguan, yu daode wuguan 肯定不會認為同性戀是罪惡，他一定知道同性戀與善 惡無關，與道德無關). The definitiveness of his language seems to belie his uncertainty about coming out and maintains a relationship of potential to that scenario, because in all honesty, Splendid could not really calculate the likelihood—the possibility—of his father’s acceptance. Therefore, Splendid did not feel targeted in any special way because of his homosexuality, and as a result would not blame his father for any perceived ill-doing. Splendid imagined that the best thing to do was alleviate his father’s own nervous relationship with the future, even though at the same time Splendid did not know precisely what he ought to do about his father’s increasing worry. Splendid thus decided at minimum he should not add to it, saying he “absolutely would not admit [things] to [his] father” (juedui buhui xiang fuqin chengren 絕對不會向父親承認) and that he would rather “let [his] father live in hope” (rang fuqin shenghuo zai xiwang zhizhong 讓父親生活在希望之中). Splendid’s evocation of hope is hard to understand from the perspective of increasing tongzhi encouragement of coming out, because the hope described in the thread is pinned on the father’s never knowing his son’s sexuality. Viewed from the perspective of coming out’s often insistent logic, this kind of hope would very much dissolve that ambiguous border with delusion. What kind of personal happiness could be gained from denying oneself and deceiving one’s parents? For a committed out-and-proud tongzhi, an attachment to this kind of hope might represent a self-deception that should be overcome or acknowledged. But what followed from Splendid’s post encourages a deeper understanding of why people do not discard such optimisms, why some people “do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it” (Berlant 2011, 28). Splendid’s and his father’s reciprocal immiseration are well-known to sons and daughters in China whose depth of feeling and commitment are often demonstrated rather than spoken, and whose reticence on matters of suffering and sacrifice is an emblem of good character linked to the paradigm of forbearance (ren 忍). It is forbearance, then, that links Splendid’s actions most closely with ideas about a hopeful queer future. In forbearing, Splendid confirms that the emotional connection between him and his father is not fully figured because it is based on a form of deception, which nevertheless contains a transformative but latent power. This power is fed by a force that arises out of being able to maintain relationships

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with others, creating a store of emotional potential energy, as it were, that could be harnessed in a variety of ways. This kind of energetic emotionalism relates to what queer and affect theorists identify as the core of “potential” itself: “Unlike a possibility, a thing that simply might happen, a potentiality is a certain mode of nonbeing that is eminent, a thing that is present but not actually existing in the present tense” (Muñoz 2009, 9).12 Splendid’s relational understanding of queer hope embraces the potential of relationality itself. Although his understanding might challenge Muñoz’s theory of hopefulness by staying moored to such a mainstream value as filial piety, Splendid’s hope cruises the same horizon of a queer future that Muñoz finds so important. Thus, Splendid’s act encourages a reading of queerness that goes beyond the paradigms of resistance and antifuturity that can seem to dominate canonical queer studies. Splendid’s version of hope, connected apostrophically to a father who is not physically there, works to allow him to reconcile the present of being a son with the future of being queer and a feeling that because of his past he is satisfied with who he is and could become.13 Thus hope is a kind of “hermeneutic,” which helps Splendid interpret his situation and come to terms with it, and which keeps him “ontologically humble” (Muñoz 2009, 22). He is not sure that his approach is the correct one—nor does it trouble him enough to make him act in ways that feel counter to his intuitions. Therefore, he cannot stand for his decisions as one would stand for a politics of acting one way or another, and his approach eludes enumeration and replicability. Although his hope for certain kinds of connections denies Splendid the opportunity to come out, it does not deny him self-determination, which allows him to think through the problems he faces and protects him from the exigencies of choosing. Locking oneself into a risky situation because of a pressure that feels political—here the increasing pressure some tongzhi feel to be a certain kind of globally recognizable queer—would seem to trap someone like Splendid, whose “critical investment in utopia . . . is profoundly resistant to the stultifying temporal logic of a brokendown present” (Muñoz 2009, 12). His investment in the future utopia of celebrated and accepted queer orientations, where both he and his father might become happy, may not mature for some time, just as his father’s utopia of a happily married son may never come to pass. But the hope generated in Splendid’s approach funds an emotional relationship that he has decided is worth preserving.

12. The quotation from Muñoz has been copied correctly. That he means “immanent” for “eminent” seems clear (especially because he uses eminent in its dictionary sense later in the book on page 148), but the suggestion in the use of “eminent” that this kind of potentiality is an emphatically appropriate or positive understanding of the queer would underscore his commitment to countering the antirelational, negative guise of much of queer theory. 13. Berlant makes apostrophe a core part of her theory of “cruel optimism.” Apostrophe, she says, is “an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalizing movement of rhetorical animation” (2011, 26). Splendid evokes his father in his posting about childhood memories and current troubles, imagining a connection with him that subsists in hope but has no physical corollary because of the earthly distance that lies between the two people.

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Conclusion: Hopefully Happy Splendid never claimed to be happy or unhappy, but his postings were part of a community discussion of a huge range of sentiments, feelings, and emotional states that created a discourse of what it meant to consider not only the question of xingfu, kuaile, and their analogues, but also their opposites. In coming to terms with happiness, Splendid even admitted to a certain shame (xinzhong de kuiyi 心中的愧意) in the face of his friends who had come out, echoing the meme’s understanding of happiness as a cruelly relative state. Citing this relativism, he closed his post with a comment addressed to Bright: “Compared with my quandary, what more could Bright want???” (Yu wo de ciqingcijing, [Bright] gengfuheqiu 與我的此情此 景，[Bright] 更復何求？？？). It is difficult to know how to read such an address, which was expressed with a classicism that indicates politeness and erudition but as a result could at once be heard as sarcastic, self-pitying, or full of respect and admiration. In this way, Splendid’s comment seems richly nuanced. Follow-up postings in the thread suggest that no one heard Splendid’s remark in a negative way, given its immediately preceding expression of seemingly genuine regard, which clarified that one of the goals of the posting on the whole was to wish Bright well in life (xiexia zhe duan changchang de wenzi, yi shi zhufu [Bright] de shenghuo 寫下這段長長的文字，一 是祝福 [Bright] 的生活). But the rhetorical nature of the question, however it is taken, encourages readers to reconsider the obviousness of any answer and is rather brilliant in the context of theories of queer hope and potential. Splendid suggests that even in the situation of being out and proud, perhaps tongzhi will be left wanting more, or at least wanting otherwise. He followed with advice about reflecting carefully before coming out (chugui yiding yao sansi 出櫃 一定要三思), because such an act has to do with more than just the consideration of sexual orientation (jue bu jinjin shiguan quxiang de wenti 絕不僅僅事關 取向的問題). Coming out, in other words, is a relational gesture with emotional consequences that, although it feels important, should not be regarded as a panacea. Splendid thus places the desire to be out and proud in a realm of potential, where coming out is not necessarily a guarantee of happiness but could be. In this way, the future of happiness is not a goal, as the meme suggested it ought to be, but a virtuality; it is utopian in the sense that it is a promise that something better will come (Muñoz 2009, 7), even if what is better about it has yet to be defined beyond the hopefulness of self-determination. Splendid’s resolve to make his present livable succeeds, judging by the unanimously supportive responses from fellow yoga club members to his emotional confessions. Bright’s ultimate response to Splendid was especially telling. He replied not that Splendid had made the wrong choice or had abandoned the tongzhi cause, but simply that life is full of complications and challenges (rensheng jiu shi quzhe er jiannan 人生就是曲折而艱難). His response reflects common assumptions about

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the difficulty of existing, and an ironically normative cultural resistance to the idea that people could ultimately and enduringly be happy. Other respondents, instead of naively indulging in a promise of happiness or insisting on a particular path through life’s twists and turns, all celebrated what a “good and strong person” (jianqiang erqie shanliang de ren 堅強而且善良的人) Splendid was. They exhorted him to “unwaveringly stay his own course” (jiandingbuyi de zou ziji de lu 堅定不移地 走自己的路) in not coming out, saying, “We will all support you” (women dou hui zhichi ni de 我們都會支持你的). Such responses enhance that livability Splendid sought by creating a space in which “multiple forms of belonging in difference adhere to a belonging in collectivity” (Muñoz 2009, 20). This adherence is achieved by encouraging a kind of phatic emotionalism that transcends the meaning or the content of any particular emotion and steers a person, fueled by hope and optimism, towards the future. Indeed, in a final gesture to his father, Splendid promised just these things. Closing his posting with a moving address, he wished his faraway father good health and said, “Don’t worry for your son. Even though city life is difficult, I’ll take good care of myself and greet each day in good spirits and with optimism” (Buyao wei erzi danxin, suiran chengshi shenghuo jianxinbuyi, dan wo hui haohao zhaogu ziji, yi zhenfen he leguan yingjie meige yi zaochen 不要為兒子擔心，雖然城市生活艱辛不易，但我會好好照顧自 己，以振奮和樂觀迎接每個一早晨). Such a hopeful stance towards the future is a condition without which the actual of the present could not be understood or processed except in reactionary or binaristic terms, to which Splendid was not ready to capitulate. Looking to the future, it seems quite beside the point what the difference between xingfu and kuaile might be, for everyone has an opinion right now. And it certainly seems less than paramount which emotional script one’s talk suggests affinity for. What does seem to matter is the way that what one says in speaking of emotion, especially happiness, leaves open the opportunity for different approaches to exist, even if those approaches very much straddle a border between comfort and self-will, tranquility and action, principle and context. In those middle ranges, being oneself is less about being in or out of a proverbial closet than tapping into the energy one has left after managing a life and its relations. It would seem that this leftover is made of the same stuff that remains when the name for an emotion fails to capture an experience. One cannot know precisely what that rest is and cannot grasp it with any certainty, but it contains an animating power that drives subjectivity. Massumi explains, “If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them” (2002, 35). Therefore, leaving room for potential through talk generates something for the people who live in and through it. Perhaps, then, happiness is what remains after one has finished talking it over.

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References Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chou, Wah-shan. 2000. Tongzhi: Politics of Same-Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies. New York: Haworth Press. Cvetkovich, Ann. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deacon, Terrence. 1996. “Prefrontal Cortex and Symbol Learning: Why a Brain Capable of Language Evolved Only Once.” In Communicating Meaning: The Evolution and Development of Language, edited by Boris M. Velichkovsky and Duane M. Rumbaugh, 103–38. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L. 2014. Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography. London: Routledge. Engebretsen, Elisabeth L., and William F. Schroeder, eds. 2015. Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. Copenhagen: NIAS Press. Fan, Ruiping. 2015. Family Oriented Informed Consent: East Asian and American Perspectives. Cham: Springer. Fong, Vanessa L. 2004. Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China’s One-Child Policy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fu, Xiaoxing 富曉星. 2012. Kongjian, wenhua, biaoyan: Dongbei A shi nantongxinglian qunti de renleixue guancha 空間、文化、表演：東北A市男同性戀群體的人類學觀察 [Space, culture, performance: An anthropological study of gay men’s communities in A city in China’s northeast]. Beijing: Guangming ribao chubanshe. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Halberstam, Judith. 2008. “The Anti-social Turn in Queer Studies.” Graduate Journal of Social Science 5: 140–56. Heelas, Paul. 2007. “Emotion Talk Across Cultures.” In The Emotions: A Cultural Reader, edited by Helene Wulff, 31–36. Oxford: Berg. Hsu, Francis L. K. 1971. “Eros, Affect and Pao.” In Kinship and Culture, edited by Francis L. K. Hsu, 439–75. Chicago: Aldine. Kam, Lucetta Yip Lo. 2012. Shanghai Lalas: Female Tongzhi Communities and Politics in Urban China. Hong Kong University Press. Kong, Travis. 2011. Chinese Male Homosexualities: Memba, Tongzhi and Golden Boy. London: Routledge. Li Yinhe’s Blog. Accessed September 23, 2014. http://t.163.com/yinheli. Love, Heather. 2009. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Martin, Fran. 2000. “Surface Tensions: Reading Productions of Tongzhi in Contemporary Taiwan.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6, no. 1: 61–86. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. Potter, Sulamith Heins. 1988. “The Cultural Construction of Emotion in Rural Chinese Social Life.” Ethos 16, no. 2: 181–208.

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Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rosaldo, Michelle. 1984. “Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling.” In Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, edited by Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine, 137–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sapir, Edward. 1949 [1929]. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science.” In Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality, edited by David G. Mandelbaum, 160–66. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Schroeder, William F. 2012. “On Cowboys and Aliens: Affective History and Queer Becoming in Contemporary China.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 4: 425–52. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stafford, Charles. 2000. “Chinese Patriliny and the Cycles of Yang and Laiwang.” In Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship, edited by Janet Carsten, 37–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wei, Wei 魏偉. 2012. Gongkai: Dangdai Chengdu “tongzhi” kongjian de xingcheng he bianqian 公開：當代成都“同志”空間的形成和變遷 [Going public: The production and transformation of queer spaces in contemporary Chengdu]. Shanghai: Sanlian shudian. Wei, Wei 魏偉. 2015. Kudu Zhongguo shehui: Chengshi kongjian, liuxing wenhua he shehui zhengce 酷讀中國社會：城市空間，流行文化和社會政策 [Queering Chinese society: Urban space, popular culture and social policy]. Guangxi: Guangxi shifandaxue chubanshe. Wetherell, Margaret. 2012. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. London: SAGE. Wong, Andrew D. 2005. “The Reappropriation of Tongzhi.” Language in Society 34, no. 5: 763–93. Wu, Fuxiang 吳福祥. 2002. “Nengxing shubu jiegou suoyi” 能性述補結構瑣議 [Some remarks on the potential verb-complement construction in Chinese]. Yuyan jiaoxue yu yanjiu 語言教學與研究 [Language education and research] 5: 19–27. Wu, Fuxiang, and He Yancheng. 2015. “Some Typological Characteristics of Mandarin Chinese Syntax.” In The Oxford Manual of Chinese Linguistics, edited by William S-Y. Wang and Chaofen Sun, 379–92. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yan Yunxiang. 2003. Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949–1999. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

9 Chinese Happiness A Proverbial Approach to Popular Philosophies of Life Mieke Matthyssen

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of nonessentials. —Lin Yutang

Introduction Publicly planting a wishing tree where people can write down their wishes and worries on paper leaves can be a rewarding way to investigate about their level of happiness. This is what Gerard Lemos did in China in 2007, in the area of Chongqing, obtaining valuable results from respondents of different ages.1 In the book he wrote about this experiment, he concludes that “Deng Xiaoping’s new China had created a dream in the 1980s, but a dream for others. For most people, the dream, so quick to take shape, had just as swiftly died” (Lemos 2012, 81). Indeed, decades of drastic economic and societal transformations have put great challenges on the hopes and dreams of the Chinese people. Social relationships have become more inconsistent, society has become more unstable and complex, the “from cradle to grave” social welfare system is lost, and the plurality and complexity of life in general are increasing. All this has resulted in growing public perception of a moral degeneration, inequality of rich and poor, biasing influence of social positions, and social injustice (e.g., Kleinman et al. 2011). These new social realities cause people to have strong feelings of powerlessness, social and financial insecurity, and overall pressure; they experience a huge gap between reality and their personal dreams and ideals. Consequently, their power of resilience is also challenged, and Chinese people are increasingly looking for ways to improve their well-being. The state recognizes 1. In 2007, by planting such a wishing tree the size of a large advertising board in three different locations, Lemos (2012, 59–81) examined the worries and wishes of 1,427 ordinary Chinese people. His study revealed that health and health care (41.3 percent), the family (32.8 percent), and financial insecurity and unemployment (31.9 percent) were the three main topics, followed by politics (both positively and negatively commented on) (28.8 percent), and ambition and social mobility (22.8 percent).

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this phenomenon, which resulted in 2011 under Premier Wen Jiabao in the proliferation of happiness campaigns, happiness surveys and happiness promotion measures in order to meet this new demand in society (see also Wielander’s chapter in this volume). But already earlier than this official happiness obsession, the state started to support the boom of the self-help sector. Evidence of this can be found in the average Chinese bookstore, where, shelf after shelf, books on self-help, selfimprovement, and self-health are packed. Apart from the hugely popular translations of Western self-help books, an even greater part consists of books on popular “philosophies of life” (rensheng zhihui 人生智慧). These books are filled with wellknown Chinese proverbs that are a common good for the average Chinese, and thus accessible to all. The contents of these proverbs often contain common words for joy and pleasure (le 樂, kuaile 快樂), happiness (fu 福, xingfu 幸福),2 and contentment (zu 足) rooted in Chinese philosophy and cosmology. As a result, they show characteristics of ancient Chinese thinking, morality, and rhetoric. These popular wisdoms of life are publicly discussed on individual blogs, in online reading, and in popular magazines and books. The philosophies of life herein expressed represent characteristically Chinese strategies to improved well-being. Investigating these wisdoms of life leads us to the root of Chinese notions of (un)happiness. This article will discuss a few of these proverbs and maxims, and their most frequently associated sayings, and will include some of their psychosocial implications.3

The Art of Beneficial Suffering (Chi Kui Shi Fu) The saying “Suffering brings good fortune” (chi kui shi fu 吃虧是福) derives from a famous calligraphy written by scholar-official Zheng Banqiao (1693–1765).4 The calligraphy is formally often displayed and sold together with another famous 2. According to Lu Luo (2010, 328), the disyllabic word xingfu 幸福 did not enter Chinese colloquial vocabulary until recently. Research has even shown that Chinese students were found to be less familiar with the concept of happiness than were their American counterparts. 3. The findings of this article are based on extensive thematic analysis of different kinds of popular web sources, and popular magazines (e.g., magazines aimed at students, the elderly, literary magazines), academic articles, 23 self-improvement books, 22 interviews, and a (exploratory) survey among Chinese university students (50 respondents). These sources were chosen based on their discursive relevance for my doctoral research on the calligraphy/saying nande hutu 難得糊塗, its philosophical and historical background, and use and interpretation in contemporary China. It turned out that in particular the popular discourse that discusses the meaning of the wisdom of nande hutu was filled with references to sayings related to happiness. For more detailed information, please contact [email protected]. 4. Better known under his style name Zheng Xie, Zheng’s fame is due in part to his highest official degree (jinshi 進士) and to his artistic recognition as an accomplished poet, painter, and calligrapher. However, his eccentricity and his popularity up to the present day (as a popular TV serial, a memorial hall, and even comic books about his person show) are certainly also based on his character, being known as an unrestrained and eccentric bohemian in his younger years, but in his later years as official, as an outright, courageous defender of the poor and weak against the rich and powerful. Inevitably, this idealism often left him very disillusioned about officialdom, and after twelve years he retired to write and paint in Yangzhou rather than to compromise his integrity. Later, about a hundred years after his lifetime, he became known as one of the so-called “Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou.” For more on Zheng Banqiao, see, for example, Matthyssen (2013); Pohl (1990).

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Figure 9.1 Chi kui shi fu 吃虧是福 and nande hutu 難得糊塗, photograph taken at Zheng Banqiao Memorial Hall in 2009. © Mieke Matthyssen

calligraphy, Zheng Banqiao’s nande hutu 難得糊塗 (“It is difficult to be muddled”) as an antithetical couplet. Chi kui shi fu expresses a deep wisdom of life. The ancient dictionary Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 describes kui 虧 as “damage of vital energy.” In popular speech, chi kui can mean both to suffer losses or to lose out, and to be taken advantage of. Its Western counterpart would be related to the slogan “No pain, no gain,” which emphasizes the relevance of adversity, pain, bother or effort in the pursuit of happiness. The monosyllabic fu 福—as opposed to the more recent disyllabic xingfu meaning “happiness”—can here be translated as “good fortune, luck, blessing,” as it is known in its classical meaning, and in the modern word fuqi 福氣. For instance, the Shuowen jiezi correlates fu to you 祐, “(divine) protection or blessing.” Allegedly, this calligraphy was attached to a letter Zheng Banqiao wrote to his brother Mo with regard to a family issue. One day, brother Mo wrote Zheng Banqiao—who at that time served as an official of the Qing Court in Weixian County—a letter to say that the neighbors were making trouble of a wall that was part of both their houses, and that brother Mo wanted to tear down to rebuild the house. The neighbor argued that this was part of their ancestors’ house and therefore did not allow him to tear down the wall. Brother Mo wanted to sue them and asked for Zheng’s help, but Zheng advised him to let the matter go in order to keep the good relationship. As the calligraphy suggests, he wanted brother Mo not to make a fuss out of it, to put things in perspective, and consider this issue as too minor for disrupting the relations with the neighbors (Lei 2008, 5). Formally, the calligraphy contains a paradoxical phrasing that turns the generally accepted order upside down: suffering is not a bad thing, because there can be no luck without suffering. This dialectical phrasing emphasizes the circularity of

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things and events (nothing is absolute) assumed in Chinese cosmology, and consequently the unavoidability and even necessity of kui, grief or losses. Once this insight is gained and consciously lived, unfortunate events and conflicts cannot cause much harm. Here, a famous idiom (chengyu 成語) comes into play that stresses the impossibility of absolute judgments and the relativity of good and bad: the story of the old man losing his horse, sai weng shi ma 塞翁失馬, originally occurring in the Huainanzi (The Masters of Huainan, 139 BC).5 It can be translated as “A loss may turn out to be a gain,” or “Every cloud has a silver lining.” As a full saying, it becomes sai weng shi ma, yan zhi fei fu 塞翁失馬焉知非福, translated as “When the old man from the frontier lost his horse, how could one have known that it would not be fortuitous.” Lin Yutang (1963, 385) retells the story as follows: There was an old man at a frontier fort in the north who understood Taoism. One day he lost his horse, which wandered into the land of the Hu tribesman. His neighbors came to condole with him, and the man said, “How do you know that this is bad luck?”. After a few months, the horse returned with some fine horses of the Hu breed, and the people congratulated him. The old man said, “How do you know that this is good luck?” Then he became very prosperous with so many horses. The son one day broke his legs riding, and all the people came to condole with him again. The old man said, “How do you know that this is bad luck?”. One day the Hu tribesmen invaded the frontier fort. All the young men fought with arrows to defend it, and nine tenths of them were killed. Because the son was a cripple, both father and son escaped unharmed. Therefore, good luck changes into bad luck, and bad luck changes into good. The workings of events are beyond comprehension.

The story closely relates to the observation by Laozi in Chapter 58 of the Daodejing: “Bad luck leans on good luck, and good luck is concealed by bad luck. Who knows where this will end?” The moral of the story tells us that it can be difficult to foresee the twists and turns which compel misfortune to beget fortune, and vice versa. Misfortune begets fortune, and fortune begets misfortune, and this goes on without end and cannot be (rationally) grasped or changed. The old man’s stoical attitude of not hastily concluding if circumstances are favorable or not, embodies the (Daoist) sage who knows how useless and futile it is to react emotionally or even rationally on bad luck. Following the natural law of circularity and constant change, one cannot foresee, let alone judge (in advance) the—either detrimental or beneficial—consequences of an event or experience. This acceptance of change as a natural condition of life, together with the ignorance about the concrete form this change will take, causes any kind of moral judgment or evaluation of good and bad to be useless and, even more so, detrimental to one’s peace of mind.

5. The Huainanzi is a textual compilation filled with Legalist, Daoist, and Confucian elements, ascribed to Liu An (179–122 BC), prince of Huainan. This eclectic work reserves the highest praise for the teachings of the Daoist school. Liu An himself was reputed for having ascended to heaven in broad daylight (Lin 1963, 385).

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The saying often appears on popular blogs and forums where people narrate and try to give meaning to the weal and woe of their lives, and in self-help books, where it is discussed in terms of its meaning but sometimes also (ab)used for its meaningful but also appealing phrasing. In 2011, a popular TV serial narrating the ups and downs of four graduates in the thirty years after their marriage bearing the title Chi kui shi fu was broadcasted. One of the more interesting discussions found in these sources relates to the phenomenon of Ah Q-ism (A Q jingshen 阿Q精神).6 Ah Q, the famous protagonist in Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q (Ah Q zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳) is presented as a weakling who constantly rationalizes the humiliations and insults he repeatedly suffers by claiming “spiritual (or moral) victory,” being a pitiful product of the autocratic society (see also Wielander’s chapter in this volume). Popular author Gao (2011) makes it very clear in his blog that one should not make the mistake of comparing chi kui shi fu with Ah Q’s “moral victories”: Chi kui shi fu cannot be easily obtained; one needs tolerance and magnanimity. Chi kui shi fu is not the easy Ah Q-ism, but the interdependence of good fortune and misfortune, the dialectics of life’s costs and gains. It is a profound wisdom of life. 吃虧是福並不是輕易能做到的，需要有容忍雅量。吃虧是福並不是簡單的阿Q 精神，而是福禍相依、付出與得到的生活辯證法，是一種深刻的人生哲學.

Thus, as we read here, luck, and the happiness resulting from this, does not automatically follow suffering and losses. It requires not only tolerance and magnanimity, but great wisdom.

The Art of Being Muddled (Nande Hutu) A saying that also draws on a famous calligraphy by Zheng Banqiao, which is closely related to chi kui shi fu, and that without doubt also expresses a “profound wisdom of life,” is nande hutu, “It is difficult to be muddled.” The wisdom of nande hutu relates to chi kui shi fu on two levels. Firstly, as mentioned above, both as calligraphy and as proverb nande hutu is often presented in pairs with chi kui shi fu. The simultaneous appearance of both sayings in one article (e.g., Xiao 2002) and one blog (e.g., Gao 2011) occurs frequently, and all books discussing one of the two sayings will without exception also discuss the other. Secondly, this saying contains the same paradoxical phrasing: although it is generally considered to be hard to attain wisdom and intelligence (because the mass is considered to belong to the naïve and

6. In the first half of the century, the phenomenon of so-called Ah Q-ism, originating in the protagonist Ah Q in Lu Xun’s The True Story of Ah Q became quite popular. In this novel, Lu Xun used the person of the foolish and ignorant Ah Q to illustrate what he describes as two of the worst characteristics of Chinese people: their tendency to make “spiritual victories” out of severe setbacks, and their “slave mentality” which made them either oppressors or oppression’s willing victims. (Hutchings 2000, 286). See also Chapter 1 in this volume, “Happiness in Chinese Socialist Discourse: Ah Q and the ‘Visible Hand’.”

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stupid people), the saying turned the generally accepted order upside down: in the logic of nande hutu, not intelligence but foolishness is difficult to attain.7 Few reliable indications of how the content of Zheng Banqiao’s calligraphy should be conceived exist. Most valuable for understanding the meaning of the calligraphy is the postscript Zheng Banqiao himself wrote to the four-character-saying, stating the following: “Being smart is difficult. Being muddled is also difficult. But it is even more difficult to turn from being smart into being muddled. Let go for once! Take a step back! Present peace of mind requires no plans for future blessings.” (Congming nan, hutu nan, you congming er zhuanru hutu geng nan. Fang yi zhao, tui yi bu, dang xia xin an, fei tu houlai fu bao ye 聰明難，糊塗難，由聰明而 轉入糊塗更難。放一著，退一步，當下心安，非圖後來福報也。)8 Knowing his background and difficulties as an official (see note 4), Zheng Banqiao wanted to express his disappointment with officialdom by saying that for him, as an official, it is difficult to have understood the mundane world and its limitations without being able to change anything about it; that it is evenly difficult (to pretend) to be ignorant about abuses and corruption and these limitations; but that it is the hardest to enter from “having understood” into a detached, muddled state of mind without actually ignoring the injustice, conflicts, fears, and worries inherent to worldly life, and still be able—and courageous enough—to do something about it and keep one’s integrity. This is only possible when there is no concern for future fame and gain. The first thing that strikes in the postscript is that the notions of being smart and being muddled appear to be not what they are generally accepted to be; the hutu Zheng Banqiao referred to should be considered as a kind of muddledness that goes beyond common smartness, and that—under certain conditions, explained further in the postscript—will result in inner peace. Philosophically, the core influence of nande hutu primarily comes from Laozi’s and Zhuangzi’s suggestions for a happy, carefree life (Li 2005; Liu and Huang 2005; Pohl 2007). More concretely, the philosophy of life as expressed in nande hutu corresponds with the two first chapters of the Zhuangzi—Xiaoyao you 逍遙遊 and Qiwulun 齊物論. The first chapter, Wandering Carefree and at Ease (Xiaoyao you) is a symbolic expression of pure happiness, a natural state of mind without judgments or worries.9 It is a metaphor for the state of mind of the illuminated man. This expression depicts the Daoist ideal of spontaneity and carefree living resulting from true knowledge of the dao. Variations of xiaoyao you as a state of pure happiness that often occur in popular discourse such as blogs and popular magazines are the expression xiaoyao zizai 7. Pohl (2007) also suggests a comparison with a saying of the Western cultural sphere: “O sancta simplicitas.” This Latin phrase literally means “O holy simplicity!” To be simplus in Latin is both “to be innocent, humble and modest,” but can also mean “to be ignorant, credulous and naïve.” 8. For more on this, see Matthyssen (2013). 9. Feng (1997) translates as “Happy Excursion,” Watson (2003) as “Free and Easy Wandering,” Coutinho (2004) as “Wandering Beyond.” Coutinho (2004, 69) explains his translation of xiaoyao you as “wandering beyond” by emphasizing the meaning of yao 遥, “distant, remote.” According to him, it is not just “careless and free wandering,” but wandering into the distance, by transgressing boundaries and limitations (of the mind).

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逍遙自在, “be at peace with the world and oneself; be leisurely and carefree,” and xiaosa 瀟灑, “lighthearted; be lifted above the sordid bustle of life; being natural and unrestrained” (e.g., Wei 2006; Xiao 2008; Xie 2009; Yang 2007). The second chapter, On the Equality of Things (Qiwulun),10 discusses ways of how to reach this ideal state of happiness, namely through the leveling of controversies (right and wrong, this and that, and so on). This abstaining from judgments and from taking position, can make a person on the surface look like a muddled, ignorant foolish person who is unaware of the situation, but his muddledness is truly an expression of great tolerance, broad-mindedness, of being experienced in life, and ultimately of inner peace and peace with the world. Thus, it is not real foolishness, but a consciously pretended muddledness. Once again, Lu Xun’s Ah Q enters the popular discussion. Being the prototype of the stupid and ignorant victim of society, he is a genuinely hutu person. In a sense, he approaches life with naïve but cheering optimism, but he does so certainly not out of smartness, but having no other tools for self-protection and self-consolation than acting like a real fool. Further in the postscript, Zheng Banqiao gives suggestions for how to attain this peaceful muddled state of mind. One of his advices is to let go and take a step back. In the many interpretations on the saying, this part urges us to distinguish how and when to let go of things instead of rigidly adhering to them, and to put things in their proper context and not be reluctant to let go. One important thing one should let go of, is striving for fame and gain, to which self-improvement author Yang Tao (2007, 189–211) dedicates a complete chapter. As Zheng Banqiao made clear in his calligraphy, particularly—and understandably, though even more difficult—in times of setbacks, conflicts, worries and feelings of powerlessness, letting go is the advised course. In the more philosophical (academic) explanations, this “letting go and retreating” is often discussed as “letting nature or dao take its course.” This positive reasoning about taking a step back again resonates strongly with the traditional dialectical thinking, in which retreating will ultimately lead to its opposite, advancing. This idea finds its expression in the saying “retreating in order to advance” (yi tui wei jin 以退為進). The theme of “retreating in order to advance,” is very prominent in the Book of Changes (Yijing). Throughout the sixty-four hexagrams, the Yijing outlines the (moral) conditions for advancing and withdrawing, and for engaging and disengaging. For instance, hexagram sixty-two, xiao guo 小過, “predominance of the small,” emphasizes that one must know the appropriate moments to advance and to retreat. In the commentary, we read the following:

10. Feng (1997) translates as “On the Equality of Things,” Watson (2003) as “Discussion on Making all Things Equal,” and Legge (1970) as “The Adjustment of Controversies.” Thomas Michael alternatively (and also provisionally) translates Qiwulun as “Harmonizing (qi) Objects of Experience (wu) and Theories about Them (lun),” and discusses the different options of translation depending on the emphasis on qi or lun (Michael 2005, 79–80).

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Mieke Matthyssen When it comes to the great matter of nature and life, one must know the appropriate moments to advance and withdraw, to sustain and negate, one must know the principles of filling and emptying, effacing and fostering. (Cleary 2003, 225–28)

Consistent with a dialectical and cyclic worldview, retreating will always turn to some degree of its opposite, and thus does not necessarily mean that things are given up. There is simply no turning without returning, no grasping without letting go, no approaching without retreating. In this sense, retreating does not reflect a passive attitude, but rather, if applied wisely, a way of advancing in the natural course of life towards more balance. From this perspective, taking a step back and pretending to be muddled is not cowardice; on the contrary, it is a kind of wisdom that allows one to take a more relaxed look on life, which will ultimately benefit inner and social harmony. It is this positive and active interpretation of retreating that is adopted and reformulated by many popular authors (e.g., Gao 2011; Qing 2008; Sun 2009; Wang 2005; Wei 2006; Wu 2007). As demonstrated, being happily hutu and consciously retreating are not easy actions, and require the same preconditions as for the art of beneficial suffering. Some popular authors (e.g., Gao 2011; Qing 2008; Zhong 2008) discuss ren 忍, tolerance and endurance as the main precondition for succeeding in the “art of suffering” and “the art of being muddled.” In one blog, we find the conviction of Bo Yang (2007) that “if one cannot be tolerant, one cannot be hutu, but if one cannot be hutu, one can even less be tolerant.” Pretending to be muddled, and not being clear and sharp-eyed the whole time about missteps and weaknesses, should be done in a spirit of great tolerance in interpersonal relationships. Ren is a vital concept in the Confucian moral etiquette, as well as a major point of attention in a person’s selfcultivation (xiushen 修身).11 Self-cultivation in turn, is imperative for developing a mature, harmonious, and socially successful personality. In doing so, a person should not only be tolerant towards others, but also endure stress and suffering. These at the surface negative experiences can be beneficial through strengthening will, resilience and inadequacies. This vision is echoed in the writings of Mencius (Gaozi xia, quoted in Cheng, Lo, and Chio 2010, 400): When Heaven is about to confer a great office to any man, it first exercises his mind with suffering, and his sinews and bones with toil. It exposes his body to hunger, and subjects him to extreme poverty. It confounds his undertakings. By all these methods it stimulates his mind, hardens his nature, and supplies his incompetence.

In its contemporary interpretation, ren is still associated with both tolerance with regard to people, and endurance and patience with regard to (difficult) situations. 11. Xiushen 修身 in the first place refers to the cultivation of one’s personality in order to obtain social harmony, but in a later phase also became associated with attaining more personal freedom. See for example Ivanhoe (2000) and Rosker (2008). For its importance as a Confucian project in the search for happiness, see Chapter 7 in this volume, “Cultivating Capacity for Happiness as a Confucian Project in Contemporary China: Texts, Embodiment, and Moral Affects.”

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In all situations, it refers to restraining oneself to obtain peace of mind, articulated in the expression neng ren zi an 能忍自安, “forbearance brings a peaceful mind.” More than 250 years after its creation, the calligraphy is still very popular. Not only is the marketing of the calligraphy proof of this (a visit to any Chinese antique shop or even online nande hutu shopping attests to this), but the abundance of articles both in academic and in popular discourse, as well as the existence of popular self-improvement books on “The Art of Being Muddled” (Hutuxue 糊塗學) are evidence for the popularity of this wisdom of life. In these discourses, hutu has lost some of its philosophical loftiness, and is mostly used in terms of feigning stupidity and pretending to be muddled or ignorant (zhuang hutu 裝糊塗). One popular way of describing the practice of nande hutu, is “to turn a blind eye to something” (literally: closing one eye, keeping one eye open, zheng yi zhi yan, bi yi zhi yan 睜 一隻眼，閉一隻眼). This pretended muddledness is predominantly invoked as a coping strategy to deal with unfortunate events and conflicts, often by rationalizing feelings of resentment, disappointment, powerlessness, anger and angst. As such, it is broadly applicable, in many domains of life, including handling affairs and interpersonal relations, such as marriage. One of the older respondents of a survey conducted on the popularity and use of the saying explained: In making friends and socializing, harmony is the most precious; in handling affairs, one should be tranquil and even-tempered. In the case of marriage, nande hutu is in fact a kind of tolerance, it is love that is at work. In family issues, being a bit tolerant, and sincere and kind, and a little muddled, is for the sake of giving the other person a little face, of giving some leeway in alleviating contradictions, to add some hazy beauty to family life. 交友社交以和為貴，對待事情心平氣和；「難得糊塗」就家庭而言，實際上 是一種寬容，關鍵是愛心在起作用。在家庭問題上，寬容點、厚道點、糊塗 點，是為了給對方留點面子，給矛盾緩解留點餘地，給家庭生活增添點朦朧 美。

In particular women seem to use this strategy to protect their marriage. In her article “Happy ‘stupid’ girl: pretending to be stupid is an art” (Xingfu ‘ben’ nüren: zhuang sha shi men yishu), female author Lin Xi (2007) urges women to have their eyes half shut and pretend to be a bit foolish. Only then will they be able to “settle down in the besieged fortress [called marriage, in analogy with Ba Jin’s famous novel Weicheng]” and their husband will be “happy and joyful” (huanle kaihuai 歡 樂開懷). We find another example of the concrete application of nande hutu in the ethnographic work among respectively marginalized workers and the elderly in Beijing by Yang (2016) and Boermel (2006), who discuss nande hutu as a popular way of anger expression and stress management. Boermel (2006, 408) recalls that When I asked Mr. Liu and his wife Ms. Lu about the meaning of nande hutu, they explained that one should not be overly conscientious and serious, not ask “Why?”, not get angry, but instead relax more and stay calm. They made me aware

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Whatever its popular application, nande hutu is described as a kind of inner sphere (xinli jingjie 心裏境界), as a pleasure and delight, and even a great luck. As one of the popular self-help book covers states: “Nande hutu truly is the most enjoyable and pleasant stage in human life” (Shi 2009). This is true on two levels, as also the examples of marriage and anger and stress regulation above show. On the personal level, pretended muddledness can mean to consciously and smartly pretend to be ignorant about an issue to maintain or obtain inner equanimity by regulating one’s emotions and thoughts. A second level, is that nande hutu can regulate interpersonal relationships. In such relationships, it represents the virtue of a low-profile, modest, moderate, compromising and tolerant attitude towards others, aimed at maintaining or obtaining social harmony. It is for this reason that it is often associated with upright social conduct (zuoren 做人) and the importance of self-cultivation herein.12

The Art of Knowing Contentment (Zhi Zu Chang Le) Another proverb dealing with how to be happy is “Knowing contentment brings (long-term) happiness” (zhi zu chang le 知足常樂), a saying with a long history. Zhi zu, “knowing contentment,” is an important “knowing” (i.e., experiencing) in the Daoist tradition. In the Daodejing we find “knowing contentment” in several verses, such as in Chapter 33, “He who knows contentment is rich,” and in Chapter 44, “He who knows contentment will avoid disgrace, and he who knows when to stop will not be in danger and will [live] for a long time.” Further (Daodejing, Chapter 46), it is stated that: “No disaster is greater than not knowing contentment; no blame greater than the desire for gain. Therefore, being content with knowing contentment is the eternal contentment.” The Zhuangzi (Miscellaneous Chapters, Rang wang, 11) echoes this observation: “He who knows contentment will not become tired from seeking profit.” The idea is that the person who is not occupied by a desire for worldly achievements will be in a state of constant contentment, and will not tire his mind or body. This idea was later expressed in the proverb zhi zu chang le. The saying resumes the idea of being content with one’s lot, with what one has and encounters without being envious, disappointed or judgmental. It is this feeling of being content and satisfied, that is also associated with the meaning of xingfu (personal communication with Chinese PhD students, Ghent, 2016). Just as nande hutu, this contentment applies to both personal and interpersonal domains of life, 12. For an in-depth analysis of the saying, its popularity and functionality in contemporary China, see Matthyssen (2015).

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such as marriage, social position, work, family situation, and even health. An online author explains the importance of zhi zu as a strategy for longevity on the People’s Web in an article on health among the elderly: When faced with the important life event of retirement, those who have a good life, their life just as before have meaning. Those who don’t have a good life, they will develop feelings of loneliness and inferiority. Long-term loneliness, especially in widowed old age, can even develop a psychopathology that is often jokingly called “old child.” Therefore, those old retired fellows should learn to make the best out of things, and to be content and joyful. In this way can they be mentally healthy, and enjoy a pleasant and happy [yukuai xingfu] old age. (Chen 2004) 當面對離休、退休這一關口時，過得好的老年人，生活依舊有趣味，過得不 好的老年人，就會產生孤獨感和自卑感。長久的孤獨，尤其是老年喪偶者， 甚至會產生變態心理，常被戲稱為「老小孩」。所以，退下來的老年朋友都 應學會隨遇而安，學會知足常樂。如此方能心理健康，晚年生活愉快幸福。

Another author of a self-help book narrates the example of a professor in psychology who wanted to clarify to his students the principle of zhi zu (Xing 2009, 257–58). He brought an exceptionally beautiful cup to the classroom, and while the students were admiring the cup, the teacher purposely dropped the cup as if it were an accident. The students all expressed their regret for the broken cup, but the teacher said: “You certainly all regret the broken cup, but these feelings will not bring the pieces back to their original shape. As from today, please remember the cup whenever in your life you encounter events you cannot change back in life” (Xing 2009, 257). According to the author, the teacher wanted to let them experience that in dealing with unfortunate events, one should accept their invariableness and accommodate to them. This strategy also applies to society. Self-help author Si Zhe (2007, 223) laconically expresses it as follows: There are a lot of people who complain about the malpractices of this society, but complaining cannot change reality. Why not change oneself in order to accommodate society? Since you cannot transcend the mundane world, then why not happily accept it? 有許多人抱怨這個社會的種種弊端，但是抱怨不能改變現實，何不改變自己 來適應社會？既然不能超脫世俗，那就痛痛快快地接受它吧？

The saying thus also emphasizes being content as a choice, and consequently also the responsibility for this choice. In any given situation, a person can (and should) try to live in harmony with his environment by adjusting the self. In other words, one should accept the arrangement of fate (see also further), since there is little that can be changed about fate; the only thing we can change, is ourselves.

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The Art of Rejoicing in Fate (Le Tian Zhi Ming) Following zhi zu chang le in its idea of accommodating to one’s lot, another happiness related saying is le tian zhi ming 樂天知命, “knowing and rejoicing in fate,” freely translated as “being easily contented.” Le tian zhi ming alludes to an attitude of enjoying what is natural and complying with what is destined, and thus advises one to be happy with one’s lot. This saying derives from the Yijing (Xici shang), generally considered a Confucian text, but is also found in the Liezi, a Daoist text (Chapter 39). Especially enjoying (le) fate is crucial in this respect; just accepting is not good enough. To better understand this saying, we should start with the shorter phrase often found in popular discourse, “knowing the mandate of heaven” (zhi tianming 知天 命). Tianming has seen a lot of philosophical debate throughout Chinese intellectual history. Tianming literally means “the command or decree from heaven,” and is generally conceived as the harmonious interrelation between heaven-earth-man (tian-di-ren 天地人). As such, the concept has played an important role in the legitimacy of the Emperor, who received his command (ming) from heaven (tian). On the personal level, Confucius assumed that, since tian does not speak directly, the universe must have allocated to humans an intrinsic “categorical imperative,” called tianming. This personal tianming can be described as one’s personal nature, one’s natural talents and inflictions. At some point in later Confucianism, ming became to mean the totality of existent conditions and forces of the whole universe, such as one’s lifespan, one’s social and economic status, one’s physical health. For the external success of our activity, the cooperation of these conditions is required (Feng 1997, 45). However, tianming should not be understood as a passive, absolute force beyond one’s control, as the translation as fate or destiny implies. In trying to (culturally) appropriately understand tianming, Hall and Ames (1998, 277–78)—following Tan Junyi in his argumentation—favor emphasizing the relation between tian and human beings, and in particular the mutuality of the relationship. This then also means explicitly rejecting the very Western notion of irrevocable fate or destiny. In other words, if you put your trust in tianming, you allow room for situations to transform or change in accordance with tianming. This results in more inner freedom, instead of the impasse resulting from disappointment, frustration and feelings of powerlessness. In addition, it should be stressed that the quality of zhi tianming can be learnt, namely through self-cultivation and experience. Obviously, this is not easy; it reflects a stage in a person’s lifelong development towards a more “humane,” that is, morally upright person. As the Lunyu (XX, 3) indicates, zhi tianming is the ultimate wisdom of the “superior man,” the exemplary man who serves as a model. In fact, Confucius himself recognizes this particular “knowing” as a spiritual stage in the

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development of his life. In the famous verses in the Lunyu (II, 4), he admits he only managed to know the mandate of heaven at the age of fifty: The Master said: “At fifteen, I had my heart set on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the mandate of heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ [for the reception of truth]. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”13 子曰：吾十有五而志於學，三十而立，四十而不惑，五十而知天命，六十而 耳順，七十而從心所欲，不逾矩。

Whatever the philosophical background, tianming is often—especially in contemporary Chinese dictionaries—conveniently translated as fate or destiny, and even vocation. Most broadly, it is associated with the overall cosmic scheming, and is used in situations that are greatly out of one’s control, and can thus not be avoided, such as environmental disasters. In the practice of daily life, knowing and accepting fate becomes especially relevant in dealing with (moral) dilemmas, feelings of powerlessness, resentment, angst and anger, precisely the situations in which also a detached, “muddled” and contented approach is required to maintain inner peace. In this respect, this idiom has unmistakably come to play an important role in terms of realizing the Chinese Dream, and regularly appears in public discourse. Li Sisi, a popular television host and media personality most notable for hosting the CCTV New Year’s Gala, expressed her own view on the saying in a public appearance as follows: In one’s whole life, not everything can be pleasant. Complaining will not bring you contentment, so one better learns to rejoice in one’s fate [le tian zhi ming]. If things that happen in life accord with one’s wishes, then that is good fortune [fuqi]. If not, then it is an experience. In this way, everything has its meaning. (Heyuanzu 2016) 人活一生，不可能事事順意，抱怨不會換來滿足，不如學會樂天知命。生活 中發生的事，如果合乎心願，即是福氣，如不，則是經驗，一切都是有點意 思。

This quote is exemplary for the importance of “knowing fate” in the process of selfcultivation, where every experience can become meaningful as an exercise in the right knowing, and ultimately in finding meaning in life, and inner peace.

Discussion In the different discourses discussing the proverbs related to happiness and wellbeing, the therein expressed moral virtues often (re)appear together. For instance, one online anonymous writer offers advice on how to avoid stress and enjoy a long life: one should know contentment and always be happy (zhi zu chang le), as well 13. This explains why zhi ming has become a metaphor for the age of fifty in China.

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as be hutu (Anon. 2002). Even formally, these virtues are sometimes combined in one idiom, as for instance in the expression: “Taking a step back and one will be as boundless as the sea and sky; tolerance for a moment will bring forth calm seas and gentle breezes” (tui yi bu haikuo tiankong, ren yi shi fengping langjing 退一步海闊天 空，忍一時風平浪靜). Not only do these wisdoms of life reinforce each other; they also have common characteristics. Firstly, the ways towards happiness they present seem to promote a rather passive way of coping. Endurance, suffering, pretending to be muddled, resignation and contentment, accepting fate, at first glance express passive attitudes that emphasize self-refrain, self-concealment, self-effacement, and retreat. On a deeper level however, they reflect a deep insight in the dialectical natural principle known in Chinese cosmology. Take for instance chi kui shi fu. In view of this law of constant change, there can be no good fortune and happiness without losses, disadvantage and grief. If practiced to the full, this circular thinking promotes a kind of emotional and moral indifference that is not only typical for Chinese philosophy, but also for Chinese psychology and how people take stand in life events. It shows how ordinary Chinese people give, or try to give, meaning to their lives; nothing is absolute, and there is no use in getting emotional about how things turn out in life, because at some point there will also be a reverse situation to it (Lin, Tseng, and Yeh 1995, 289–90).14 Living up to this insight is one way of intentionally, that is, actively creating more peace of mind. “Knowing contentment” as a characteristically Chinese philosophy of life also illustrates this. It can be argued that the Chinese, conditioned by a long history of disasters and injustice, indeed have developed a strong disposition to be content with what they have and make the best out of it. Lin Yutang (2007, 65) relates this to the “negative” approach of the Chinese towards happiness: the question of happiness is always reduced to the question of a man’s wants and desires. And in this, the Chinese take the negative approach through their philosophy of contentment. Another way of explaining the inclination to contentment, is by recognizing that Chinese people basically put no trust in extreme emotional conditions. Consequently, an emotion as happiness is always put in perspective, and needs and tolerates unhappiness. This however, has nothing to do with a passive attitude; it is a fundamental—though culturally conditioned—insight in life. It is certainly not surprising either that fate as the mandate of heaven is mentioned in Chinese conceptions of happiness. Until the present day, Chinese have a rather affectionate relationship with fate. In this respect, Bond (1992, 61)—who calls fate “the great leveler”—rightly observes the strong contrast of Chinese people with Westerners. Westerners are very combative with fate, regarding her as “the measure of their ignorance and their inability to bend Nature to their wills.” And he 14. This observation is consistent with the findings of Lu Luo (2010) who conducted a comparative study on Chinese well-being, in which one distinctive dominant feature is the complementary relationship between happiness and unhappiness.

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continues: “They struggle mightily with her dictates and often respond to failure in life’s struggle with depression.” Chinese on the other hand, although often unconsciously, accept the inevitability of good and bad that happens to them, convinced that everything is part of the natural cycle of dao. This conviction of cyclic recurrence as a dialectical interaction between two extremes reassures them that negative experiences and events will also sooner or later take a (more) positive turn, without having to proactively work towards this change. Moreover, a person who really understands the full impact of tianming knows when it would be appropriate to act, and when futile. Confucian thought believes in the inherent individual potential (part of a person’s tianming) to obtain mental maturity and happiness. However, in this process, everyone is at a certain stage of self-education. So no matter how great the individual efforts to use this potential to “improve” a situation, if a person fails in spite of all these efforts, he is advised to accept his fate and his limitations without any resentment towards others or himself (Tseng, Chang, and Nishizono 2005, 137). Still, in the mundane life of the average Chinese person, zhi tianming does not prevent him from adopting other ways to actively deal with fate and take—at least to some extent—responsibility for his life. Practices of “fate management” (sometimes also called “metaphysical risk management” or “fate control”) such as geomancy (fengshui 風水), fortune telling (suanming 算命), face reading (mianxiang 面相), auspicious numbers and homonyms on which a lot of money is spent, and occasional but sometimes simultaneous Daoist and Buddhist worshipping in local temples, are vital aspects of Chinese people’s daily life. Some of these practices, however, have lost their relevance among the younger generations, especially in mainland China.15 They look for other, more “modern” ways to actively improve their quality of life. One of my younger informants, a PhD student studying abroad, pointed towards the popularity not only of self-help books, but also of blogs and books on “changing one’s fate” (gaibian mingyun 改變命運) to illustrate this trend.16 Here however, the difference between two Chinese compounds often rendered fate in English—namely, tianming and mingyun 命運—becomes relevant. Tianming is the overall cosmic scheme, whereas mingyun is to some extent controllable or apt to change, and associated with an identity, such as an individual, a company, and even a nation. That also explains why rejoicing in the uncontrollable (tian)ming in its ancient association with the legitimacy of the emperor is publicly promoted, whereas the individual citizen can and should work hard to improve his personal mingyun and also that of the nation. Ultimately, both rejoicing in tianming and controlling mingyun are aimed at peace of mind and social harmony. 15. During the Cultural Revolution, these practices were considered to be superstition, and therefore strongly forbidden and mercilessly punished. They remained unchanged and popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong. 16. See, for instance, the book by Li Xiaopeng, Xuexi gaibian mingyun—Meige xuesheng dou yinggai du de shu 學習改變命運—學生都應該讀的書 [Learning how to change one’s fate—a book that every student should read]. Beijing: Xin shijie chubanshe, that became extremely popular among students around 2007.

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This brings us to the second striking common characteristic. Chinese happiness (xingfu, le) and luck (fu, fuqi) are deeply entangled with inner peace (an 安) and social harmony (he 和). Obtaining this peace and harmony is a question of subtle balancing and adjusting of emotions, thoughts, and deeds while obeying the specific conditions (as part of tianming) of the context at stake. From a Chinese medical and philosophical point of view, the most effective path to overall well-being is to adhere to the philosophy of the propensity for the middle way—the Zhongyong.17 The Zhongyong is in fact a long essay written as a practical guide for managing and adjusting one’s inner being and outer behavior, in order to be morally focused and in harmony with one’s dao. Feng Youlan (1997, 173) explains this state of mind with the following part in the Zhongyong: to have no emotions of pleasure and anger, sorrow or joy, welling up: this is to be described as the state of chung [focus]. To have these emotions welling up but in due proportion: this is to be described as the state of ho [harmony].

Thus, the problem is not that people have strong emotions such as happiness or joy, but that these emotions, if they arise, should be balanced with the outer world. The Zhongyong advocates emotional self-restraint, primes people to control their impulses and take a moderate attitude towards all states of mind, including happiness. In the Lunyu (III, 20), this absence of extremes is articulated as “to be happy without excess, and be grieved without feeling distressed” (le er bu yin, ai er bu shang 樂而不淫哀而不傷). Clearly, this kind of thinking is evenly rooted in the law of constant change, which guarantees that situations, thoughts and emotions never remain what they are. Moreover, the more extreme, the sooner they will tend towards their opposite. Thus, such extreme states as being overly sad, happy, emotionally or intellectually engaged are considered to be harmful for one’s physical and mental health, and ultimately, one’s social well-being. A reflection of this was shown in the above example on obtaining longevity for the elderly by applying the art of being muddled and knowing contentment. To summarize, the proverbs and expressions discussed in this chapter not only represent ancient philosophical ideas on well-being and happiness, but are also practical guides for pursuing inner peace and social harmony. Although they do not encourage immediate action, they are active (intentional) strategies for coping with stress and unfortunate events. Understandably, these virtues and attitudes are not easy to accomplish. They constitute vital elements of the process of self-cultivation. The emphasis is on training and educating the self, and on consciously and contextually adjusting one’s emotions and thoughts towards a more balanced, harmonious situation. This is a challenging and difficult lifetime process which comes with age 17. Also often referred to as the “Doctrine of the Mean.” For an etymological description of Zhongyong and for its changing interpretation in the philosophical theories, see e.g. Ames and Hall (2001), Chan (1970), and Zhang (2005).

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and experience. In the meantime, practicing these ideals of endurance, pretended muddledness, tolerance, contentment, and rejoicing in fate equips the Chinese with a strong resilience. Yanhua Zhang (see Chapter 7 in this volume) highlights the important role of (Confucian) self-cultivation in the search for happiness in contemporary Chinese society. If this trend continues, the characteristically Chinese resilience will be able to withstand the unsettling dynamics inherent to modernization and globalization, and keep the road to well-being open.

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Li Sisi shows her new book You dian yisi and goes on stage on the Changsha Hisense Plaza to promote her book]. Accessed September 25, 2016. http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/ blog_5e7e30b30102yhb5.html. Hutchings, Graham. 2000. Modern China: A Companion to a Rising Power. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Ivanhoe, Philip J. 2000. Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Co. Kleinman, Arthur, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Evereth Zhang, Tianshu Pan, Fei Wu, and Jinhua Guo. 2011. Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person; What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Legge, James. 1970. The Chinese Classics. Vol. I. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Lei, Legeng 雷樂耕. 2008. “Guanyu Zheng Banqiao suowei ‘nande hutu’ lun de bianzheng jiedu” 關於鄭板橋所謂“難得糊塗”論的辯證解讀 [Dialectical reading about the socalled “woolly-headed” by Zheng Banqiao]. Shaoyang xueyuan xuebao (Shehui kexue ban) 7 (5): 3–6. Lemos, Gerard. 2012. The End of the Chinese Dream: Why Chinese People Fear the Future. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Li, Shaolong 李少龍. 2005. “Zhongguo chuantong wenhua zhong de ‘nande hutu’ sixiang” 中國傳統文化中的“難得糊塗”思想 [The “occasional muddleheaded” thought in traditional Chinese culture]. Nankai Xuebao (Zhexue shehui kexueban) 6: 70–79. Lin, Tsung-yi, Wen-Shing Tseng, and Eng-Kung Yeh, eds. 1995. Chinese Societies and Mental Health. New York: Oxford University Press. Lin, Xi 林溪. 2007. “Xingfu ‘ben’ nüren: zhuang sha shi men yishu” 幸福“笨”女人：裝傻 是門藝術 [Happy “stupid” girl: Pretending to be stupid is an art]. Chuanqi wenxue xuankan (Qinghua): 2–24. Lin, Yutang. 1963. Translations from the Chinese: The Importance of Understanding. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company. Lin, Yutang. 2007. My Country and My People. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Liu, Hong 劉紅, and Mingfeng Huang 黃明鋒. 2005. “Zheng Banqiao ‘nande hutu’ xin tan” 鄭板橋“難得糊塗”新探 [New investigation into Zheng Banqiao’s Nande hutu]. Taizhou zhiye jishu xueyuan xuebao 5 (2): 14–16. Lu, Luo. 2010. “Chinese Well-Being.” In The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Psychology, 327–43. New York: Oxford University Press. Matthyssen, Mieke. 2013. “Scholars Should Be Considered the Last of the Four Classes: The Case of Scholar-Official Zheng Banqiao.” Journal of Asian History 47 (2): 219–44. Matthyssen, Mieke. 2015. “Zheng Banqiao’s Nande hutu and ‘The Art of Being Muddled’ in Contemporary China.” Contemporary Chinese Thought 46 (4): 3–25. Michael, Thomas. 2005. The Pristine Dao: Metaphysics in Early Chinese Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press. Pohl, Karl-Heinz. 1990. Cheng Pan-ch’iao: Poet, Painter and Calligrapher. Monumenta Serica Monograph Series. Nettetal: Steyler Verlag. Pohl, Karl-Heinz. 2007. “ ‘Nande hutu’—‘Schwer ist es, Einfalt zu erlangen.’ ” In Zurück zur Freude. Studien zur chinesischen Literatur und Lebenswelt und ihrer Rezeption in

Chinese Happiness 207 Ost und West. Festschrift für Wolfgang Kubin, edited by Marc Hermann and Christian Schwermann, 217–77. St. Augustin: Steyler. Qing, Yue 清月. 2008. Nande hutu de chushi zhihui 難得糊塗的處世智慧 [Nande hutu: The wisdom of how to conduct oneself in society]. Haikou: Nanhai chubanshe. Rosker, Jana S. 2008. Searching for the Way: Theory of Knowledge in Pre-modern and Modern China. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press. Shi, Yuan 石源. 2009. Hutu zuoren, congming zuoshi 糊塗做人聰明做事 [Muddled in social conduct, smart in handling affairs]. Beijing: Dangdai shijie chubanshe. Si, Zhe 思哲. 2007. Hutu zuoren de zhexue 糊塗做人的哲學 [The wisdom of muddledness in social conduct]. Beijing: Zhongguo zhigong chubanshe. Sun, He 孫和. 2009. Nande hutu de rensheng zhexue 難得糊塗的人生哲學 [The philosophy of life of nande hutu]. Beijing: Dizhen chubanshe. Tseng, Wen-Shing, Suk-Choo Chang, and M. Nishizono, eds. 2005. Asian Culture and Psychotherapy: Implications for East and West. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Wang, Xiuhua 王秀華. 2005. Renji jiaowang hutuxue 人際交往糊塗學 [Interpersonal relations and the art of being muddled]. Beijing: Zhongguo sanxia chubanshe. Watson, Burton. 2003. Zhuangzi: Basic Writings. Translated by Burton Watson. Translations from the Asian Classics. New York: Columbia University Press. Wei, Qingyue 魏清月. 2006. Shenghuo zhong de hutuxue: Congmingren de rensheng zhihui 生 活中的糊塗學：聰明人的人生智慧 [The art of being muddled in life: The philosophy of life of smart people]. Beijing: Dizhen chubanshe. Wu, Xuegang 吳學剛. 2007. Zuoren de hutu zhehui 做人的糊塗哲學 [The muddled wisdom of social conduct]. Beijing: Zhongguo shangye chubanshe. Xiao, Shengping 肖勝平. 2008. You yi zhong mingbai jiao hutu 有一種明白叫糊塗 [There is a smartness called hutu]. Beijing: Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe. Xiao, Zhou 曉舟. 2002. “Hutu yangshengfa” 糊塗養生法 [Hutu as a nourishment of life]. Accessed September 5, 2016. http://www.people.com.cn/GB/other4789/20021010/ 839148.html. Xie, Zhiqiang 謝志強. 2009. Hutuxue de zhihui 糊塗學的智慧 [The wisdom of being muddled]. Beijing: Yuanfang chubanshe. Xing, Yanguo 邢延國. 2009. Xiao hutu da zhihui 小糊塗大智慧 [Minor muddledness, major wisdom]. Beijing: Dizhen chubanshe. Yang, Jie. 2016. “The Politics and Regulation of Anger in Urban China.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40 (1): 100–23. Yang, Tao 楊濤. 2007. Zuoren zuoshi de hutu yishu 做人做事的糊塗藝術 [The art of being muddled in social conduct and in handling affairs]. Beijing: Huayi chubanshe. Zhang, Dainian. 2005. Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy. Translated by Edmund Ryden. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press. Zhong, Ling 鍾靈 2008. “Hutu gonglüe (san)” 糊塗攻略（三）[The strategy of being muddled—part three]. Dianzi chanpin shijie: 159.

10 The Happiness of Unrealizable Dreams On the Pursuit of Pleasure in Contemporary Chinese Popular Fiction Heather Inwood

In the opening chapter of the hit Chinese internet novel Top Quality House Servant (Jipin jiading 極品家丁) by Yu Yan 禹岩, the story’s hero, Lin Wanrong 林晚榮 (Lin Late Glory), makes his first appearance lazing beside Nanjing’s Xuanwu Lake 玄武 湖, reflecting upon the misfortune that has beset him since he fell off the peak of Mount Tai during a business excursion many hundreds of years in the future and found himself flung back into an imaginary period of premodern Chinese history. “If you had to find a single phrase to sum up Lin Wanrong’s feelings at that moment, it would be ‘out of luck’: shit out of luck.”1 While he glares at the talented men and beautiful women flirting with each other atop pleasure boats encircling the lake, the first sign emerges that Lin’s fortunes may be about to change: “As Lin Wanrong shot a vicious gob of saliva into the lake, his mood started to lift a little and a carefree feeling overcame him. Dammit, it felt good to spit! Lin hadn’t felt so overjoyed in a very long time. He was pretty sure there weren’t going to be any old ladies in red armbands coming over to fine him fifty bucks in this era.” Lin Wanrong’s luck does, indeed, undergo a dramatic reversal in the 691 chapters that follow. After being endowed with enhanced physical strength, mental powers, and an ancient sex manual by a mysterious elderly benefactor who rescued him from the lake just over a month ago, Lin proceeds to claim victory over thousands of contestants to secure a much-coveted position as a house servant for the local noble family, the Xiaos 蕭. From this new position of gainful employment, Lin wins the respect and envy of his fellow servants and the admiration of the young ladies who reside within and beyond the Xiao estate with his combination of brains, looks, and twenty-first-century know-how. Lin’s fortunes are boosted, moreover, by his initial indifference to the feelings of those around him. Having been hurtled into the past against his will, he takes his stranger status in this alternate-yet-familiar world as justification to behave exactly as he pleases, free to pursue his desires with disregard for the reigning social and moral imperatives of the time. As the narrator 1. Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this chapter are the author’s own.

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declares after Lin wins his first female admirer with his gift for reciting yet-to-bewritten lines of classical Chinese poetry (which, naturally, he claims as his own): “He who has no shame has no rivals” (wuchizhe wudi 無恥者無敵). By the end of the novel, three and a quarter million characters later, Lin has used his talents and charms to work his way to the very top of China’s social hierarchy, yet ultimately relinquishes his chance to become emperor in favor of living out his days as a fortune teller in matrimonial bliss with the multiple brilliant and beautiful women who have become his wives, leaving the task of ruling the dynasty to one of his sons. The narratives of success and personal happiness that constitute much contemporary Chinese popular fiction form a stark contrast with China’s current propaganda slogan of individual ambition and national rejuvenation that has been dominating media channels in recent years, namely that of the “Chinese Dream” (Zhongguo meng 中國夢) and its concomitant drive to “make the country rich and strong, make the nation prosper, and make the people happy” (guojia fuqiang, minzu zhenxing, renmin xingfu 國家富強，民族振興，人民幸福) (Xinhuanet 2013).2 The Chinese Dream discourse promotes the message that the Chinese people should create a “Happy China” (xingfu 幸福 or kuaile Zhongguo 快樂中國) by pursuing realistic goals for the future such as buying an apartment, getting married, scaling the career ladder, and generally contributing to the building of a “moderately prosperous society” (xiaokang shehui 小康社會); as other contributions to this volume make clear, this is a narrative that owes much to the global happiness industry and its attempts to quantify individual and gross national well-being (W. Davies 2015). In response to the Chinese Communist Party’s appeals, media organizations across the country have mobilized China’s population into giving creative expression to their Chinese Dreams through speech competitions, fiction competitions, televised singing competitions, photography competitions, and much more besides. Such initiatives imply that it is only by publicizing one’s dreams through taking photographs of a beautiful university campus or announcing on national television a desire to become rich that the Chinese Dream and its concomitant vision of a strong, prosperous, and happy nation can acquire any tangible form.3 My purpose in juxtaposing Xi Jinping’s and the Chinese media’s repeated references to the Chinese Dream with the kinds of dream-like narratives contained within contemporary Chinese popular fiction is to consider how the latter might produce a sense of pleasure in its readers that defies the logic of pursuing happiness via realistic and practical goals. In addition to the fact that they exist in the realm 2. President Xi Jinping first used this phrase in his inaugural speech as president of the PRC in November 2012, but the text that is cited most often on this topic is his address at the first session of the Twelfth National People’s Congress on March 17, 2013 (Xinhuanet 2013). 3. To give just one example, the organizers of a 2015 national student photography competition described their goals as being, “from a student perspective, to express the collective wish of building socialism with Chinese characteristics; to reveal the search for, pursuit, and building of dreams . . . and to work hard to make contributions to realizing the Chinese Dream of a strong country, national prosperity, and a happy people.” “Wo de Zhongguomeng: zui mei Zhongguo” 我的中國夢：最美中國 [My Chinese Dream: Most beautiful China], http://dream.people.com.cn/.

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of fiction, the improbability of these dreams lies in the scale of the protagonists’ success, winning the hearts of countless lovers or gaining wealth and power on an intergalactic level. The achievements of Lin Wanrong include not just accidental time travel but almost superhuman feats of cunning and ingenuity, going from rags to riches and even turning down the opportunity to rule as emperor in favor of a more comfortable life. In the contents of these novels as well as the reactions they elicit from readers, emphasis is placed on the sensation of shuang 爽 or “feeling good.” Shuang indicates a pleasurable yet temporary state that can be achieved through either a physical occurrence or the virtual act of fantasizing—what I term “mental porn” (yiyin 意淫, or YY for short)—and usually involves a combination of psychological and sensory components. It is precisely the psychosensory experience of shuang that Lin Wanrong enjoys as he projects a carefree ball of saliva into Xuanwu lake. It does not matter who might be watching or what others think, what is important is that he makes the most of the time into which he has been sent—and besides, “dammit, it felt good to spit!” In his work on English-language popular fiction, Scott McCracken argues that contrary to the widespread (and since largely discredited) assumption that popular culture has a numbing or sedative effect on its audiences, popular fiction can help its readers imagine different possibilities for their lives, thereby engaging in “modernity’s need to colonize the future, to project new worlds for ourselves” (McCracken 1998, 14). Popular fiction thus possesses a utopian orientation that gestures to the possibility of a better world without ignoring the contradictions and sources of dissatisfaction that exist within contemporary society: it participates, in other words, “in a transaction with the incomplete sense of self ” (McCracken 1998, 104). While it may well be true that popular fiction “would have little point if it weren’t fun,” McCracken states that to relegate popular genres to the category of “texts of pleasure” (Barthes 1975) or intellectually undemanding mass culture would be to ignore their frequently transgressive implications, as well as the ways in which readers can garner both pleasure and bliss from the same text (McCracken 1998, 154–55). My own contention in this chapter is not so much that Chinese popular fiction deserves intellectual credit for challenging its readers to think more carefully about their own visions for individual happiness or the government’s demands for greater national strength and prosperity, although it doubtless does so from time to time. I am more interested in what the fantasy settings and imaginative act of yiyin can tell us about the origins and ethical implications of feeling good, a sensation that can be linked to the current global obsession with happiness and well-being. Assuming the material and carnal achievements in contemporary popular fiction to be the central “happy objects” (Ahmed 2010) towards which the protagonists are drawn, it is surely significant that these objects are conceived in such a way as to make them unachievable in the rule-bound world in which we, the readers, live. If happiness is the sum total of all the personal achievements that have been accumulated by the end of a multimillion-character novel such as Top Quality House Servant, then what

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does it mean that in order to be happy we would need to be capable of traveling back in time (thus colonizing the past, not the future), of pushing aside those who stand in the way of our success, and of largely relinquishing our sense of moral goodness in the process? To answer this question, I begin by exploring how YY narratives function as “objects of happiness” before delving into the contents of one example of contemporary popular fiction, considering a few of its literary predecessors and the kinds of reactions it elicits from readers. I will argue that the texts categorized as YY fiction (YY xiaoshuo YY小說) or “pleasurable writings” (shuangwen 爽文) show us that happy feelings can be produced through the virtual act of fantasizing and intentionally holding the objects of happiness at the arm’s length of fiction, a process more or less aligned with Alfred Knut’s rather under-theorized “fantasy happiness,” or “the happiness obtained when suspending one’s sense of reality long enough to enjoy fiction of some sort” (Nkut 2011, 102). Here, it is the not getting what you want as much as the vicarious pleasures of witnessing the protagonist eventually achieve everything that he or she desires that is the source of feeling good. One possible explanation for this is that consuming other people’s successes through the mediating fabric of fiction allows the reader to “preserve the happiness of ‘the what’ as fantasy” (Ahmed 2010, 31) and thus avoid the negative outcomes that may arise when it transpires, as it often does, that the dreamer was not prepared for dreams to become reality.

From Dreams to Lust The Chinese Dream slogan and its accompanying propaganda blitz have come in for a fair amount of satire on the internet by Chinese netizens who are renowned for their cynical attitude, if not overt resistance towards any attempts by the CCP to impose ideological order or “harmony” on their lives (Gong and Yang 2010; H. Li 2011). A number of blogs and microblogs playfully refer to the Chinese Dream as a “spring dream” (chunmeng 春夢, a sex dream) or “wet dream” (mengyi 夢遺), alluding to the momentarily satisfying yet ultimately futile nature of many dreams (Fenqing yifeichongtian 2013; Fang, 2013; Yinmi didai 2013). One blog post, written as part of a school assignment on the Chinese Dream, is entitled “The sleep talking of a female loser” and serves as something of a manifesto for the self-described losers (diaosi 屌絲, literally “penis hairs”) of the post-1990 generation of Chinese youth. The blogger claims membership of a group of young people who exist as the “cream in the middle of the high-pressure biscuit of life,” those “who are bossed around and never listened to, who can only spit out our dissatisfactions, anger, and helplessness on the internet”4 (Jing 2013). After bemoaning the hereditary nature of advantage and disadvantage in contemporary China, she ends: 4. Da jingjing de xiao shijie 大婧婧的小世界, “Yi ge nü diaosi de mengyi” 一個女屌絲的夢囈 [Sleep talking of

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Heather Inwood Reality may be cruel, but we will still greet each rising sun with a smile, as we are the true warriors, those who dare to face the bleakness of life head on, who dare to confront life’s unavoidable challenges. With our hearts full of dreams, we save up every ounce of our character to fantasize [yiyin] about the legendary counterattack! We tell everyone our dreams without any stigma, because it is dreams that give us the courage that props up our hardworking lives. We believe that tomorrow will be better! 儘管現實如此悲涼，可是我們還是會微笑著迎接每天升起的太陽，因為我們 是真正的勇士，敢於正視慘淡的人生，敢於直面避無可避的困境。 我們心中有夢想，我們攢下每一分人品，意淫著傳說中的逆襲！我們毫不避 諱的告訴大家我們的幻想，因為幻想是支撐著我們努力生活的勇氣。我們堅 信，明天會更好！

The key word here, I would suggest, is not “dreams” but yiyin, which can be understood as “to fantasize” or perhaps “mental porn” but is more commonly translated, for reasons that will become clearer below, as “lust of the mind” (Cao 1973, 146; Epstein 2001, 159; Lee 2006, 50; W.-Y. Li 2014, 203; Wong 1977, 212; Yu 2001, 202; Zunshine 2006, 180) or “lust of intent” (Huang 2001, 273; Santangelo 2006, 186; Vitiello 2011, 129). Rather than indicating a desire to overcome the challenges of everyday life, the blogger’s fantasies represent a longing for the “legendary counterattack” against people more fortunate than herself: legendary because, as she makes clear, the real opportunities in China belong overwhelmingly to the “pale, rich, and beautiful” (bai fu mei 白富美) women and the “tall, rich, and handsome” (gao fu shuai 高富帥) men with whom they fall in love, and are thus not available to those not blessed with such good fortune at birth. In addition to its use as a verb meaning “to fantasize,” yiyin, and its abbreviated form YY, is employed as a label for any Chinese fiction that features idealization in plot, setting, characterization, or all three and portrays the protagonist’s quest for what Shih-chen Chao calls the “Golden Triangle” of “wealth, high sociopolitical status, and sex” (Chao 2013, 29). Such idealization is typical of many of the novels that populate China’s online fiction portals and fall within genres such as urban romance (dushi yanqing 都市言情), immortal (xianxia 仙俠), gaming (youxi 遊戲), and fan (tongren 同人) fiction, to name just a few. YY fiction can be further categorized according to the gender of its central protagonist, resulting in male YY fiction that caters primarily to the fantasies of heterosexual male readers and female YY fiction that does the same for heterosexual female readers; queer audiences hoping for some form of representation would usually be better off looking elsewhere.5 Male YY fiction is defined by the “two alls and three withouts” (liang quan san wu a female loser], Da jingjing de xiao shijie de boke 大婧婧的小世界的博客 (blog), April 16, 2013 (10:43 p.m.), http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_6784cbc70101bulv.html. 5. This is not to say, of course, that queer readers cannot also enjoy fiction that features heterosexual characters and relationships, nor that female readers cannot enjoy fiction aimed at men or vice versa. For a detailed discussion of queer sensibilities in online romance fiction, see Feng (2013).

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兩全三無): the women that the male protagonist meets should all be virgins in body and mind (i.e., first timers in sex and love, quan chu 全處) and he should take them all into the “rear quarters” (i.e., bedroom) as his wives or lovers (quan shou 全收). The “three withouts” refer to stories without “thunder” or silly plot twists (wu lei 無 雷), without boredom (wu yumen 無鬱悶), and without entanglements (wu jiujie 無糾結) (Baidu Baike). YY fiction is considered formulaic enough that some writers have even produced how-to guides on the subject, embracing the hedonistic function of popular fiction and the transgressive pleasures it can create in its readers. One blogger going by the moniker “Uglyugly” (Chouchou 醜醜) has published 342 guides for authors with titles such as “How to Make Your Readers Feel Good”6 and “103 Feel Good Points for YY fiction.”7 “A good piece of internet writing,” the blogger states, “isn’t one with zero silly plot elements, but one that gives rise to the experience of happiness [kuaigan tiyan 快感體驗].” Rather than following a typical dramatic arc that begins with stasis and proceeds through the escalation and resolution of conflict, most YY fiction derives its momentum from the protagonist’s mastery of a series of personal challenges, much like rising through the levels of a computer game.8 The language used to describe these accomplishments is irreverent and frequently vulgar, finding humor in incongruous settings and taking delight in the protagonist’s every victory, regardless of who might suffer in the process. For its detractors, on the other hand, YY points straight to popular fiction’s shortcomings, namely, its failure to provide positive models by which its predominantly young readers can aspire to live their lives and its inability to promote aesthetically or intellectually sophisticated writing of the kind that might lift Chinese literature’s status on a global stage and fulfill its traditional responsibility to “convey the way” (wen yi zai dao 文以載道). As one critic puts it, “These creations never pursue depth of subject matter, neither do they charge themselves with uncovering life philosophies, historical consciousness, or grand narratives. The majority are based on fantasy . . . thereby meeting the needs of readers to ease and release themselves from the pressures of real life” (Cai 2011). Another critic more damningly suggests that the kind of satisfaction found in YY fiction represents a “spiritual victory that deceives the self and others” and a dangerous reemergence of the Ah Q spirit in the age of the internet (Chen 2012).9 6. Chouchou 醜醜, “Kuaigan de fangchengshi (yi): ruhe rang duzhe shuang” 寫作講壇293快感的方程 式（一）—如何讓讀者爽 [The formula for happy feelings (1): how to make your readers feel good], Chouchou de boke 醜醜的博客 (blog), September 6 2014 (4:29 a.m.), http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_869f978a0102v1ox. html 7. Ibid., “Xiezuo jiangtan 290: YY xiaoshuo shuangdian 103 shi” 寫作講壇290：YY小說爽點103式 [Writing workshop no. 290: 103 feel-good points of YY fiction]. Chouchou de boke 醜醜的博客 (blog), September 6 2014 (4:12 a.m.) http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_869f978a0102v1ou.html. 8. For more on the institutional structures of online Chinese popular fiction see Hockx (2015) and Chao (2013). 9. The Ah Q spirit is a reference to Lu Xun’s novella, “The Real Story of Ah Q” (A Q zhengzhuan 阿Q正傳) (Y. Li and Xun 2009, 79–123), whose eponymous antihero has become synonymous with the “spiritual victories” derived from bullying others less fortunate than oneself and convincing oneself of one’s superior qualities. For

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Much as they attract criticism for being superficial, self-deceptive, and badly written, there is evidently something about these narratives that keeps readers coming back for more. On the internet as well as offline, Chinese popular fiction is being produced and consumed on a massive scale: in 2015, there were around 297 million “users” of internet literature (CNNIC 2016), making it the tenth most prevalent online activity in China, with over 20 million internet writers (Zhuo 2015) and tens of thousands of novels being serialized and read online. The novels that attract the largest number of fans are published in print and sold as intellectual property to be adapted into television dramas, comics, films, and computer games, thus providing their audiences with more opportunities for immersion in the worlds they create and bringing in further revenue for their authors.10 Many readers return multiple times to the text of the same novel, leaving comments online admitting that they have just read a particular work for the third, fourth, or even fifth time. This could be seen as a reflection of the readers’ love of the story and its characters, or a wish that the fictional world might never end. From a happiness perspective, however, we might wonder what it means for the readerly pursuit of pleasure or “feeling good” if finishing a work of fiction does not signify its completion. Might this be an indication that the experience was unsatisfying, leaving the reader with a sense of lack (manque) that can only be ameliorated through repeated consumption of the text, as Baudrillard might contend (Baudrillard and Levin 1981, 207)? To answer this question, we first need to consider more closely the implications of YY as it applies to Chinese fiction past and present, as it is this word that offers the key to understanding the pursuit of pleasure in contemporary Chinese popular fiction.

Latent Desires and the Unreal Made Real The term yiyin has its origins in Dream of the Red Chamber (Houloumeng 紅樓夢, also known as Shitouji 石頭記 or Story of the Stone), Cao Xueqin’s classic vernacular novel about the rise and fall of a Qing dynasty noble family. Since its publication in 1792, Dream of the Red Chamber has been extended and adapted in hundreds of plays, films, cartoons, musicals, television dramas, and novels; its popularity is so great that it has even given rise to its own dedicated field of study, “Redology” (hongxue 紅學). The word yiyin first appears in Chapter Five, in which the novel’s young protagonist, Jia Baoyu, has a vivid dream about a fairy named Disenchantment (Jinghuan 警幻) who gives him a portentous lesson in love and lust in the Land of Illusion (taixu huanjing 太虛幻境). Upon concluding a song that foretells the fates of several of the women in Baoyu’s life, Disenchantment introduces him to her cousin Jianmei 兼美 (“Combining Beauties”) or Keqing 可卿, telling Baoyu that the more on Ah Q’s implications for the Chinese national character, see G. Davies (1991); Foster (2006). 10. For more on China’s “IP fever,” by which the intellectual property rights for popular online novels are sold to film, game, and TV producers, see Tang (2015); Wang (2015).

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reason she likes him so much is because he is “full of lust. You are the most lustful person I have ever known in the whole world!” (Cao 1973, 145). Although Baoyu protests that he is too young to understand what lust is, Disenchantment knows better, clarifying the differences between the “shallow, promiscuous kind of lust” (pifu lanyin 皮膚濫淫) that belongs to “mere brutes” and the less typical, more romantic kind afflicting Baoyu (Cao 1973, 146). Here is David Hawkes’s translation of the passage in question: But your kind of lust is different. That blind, defenseless love with which nature has filled your being is what we call here “lust of the mind” [yiyin]. “Lust of the mind” cannot be explained in words, nor, if it could, would you be able to grasp their meaning. Either you know what it means or you don’t. Because of this “lust of the mind” women will find you a kind and understanding friend; but in the eyes of the world I am afraid it is going to make you seem unpractical and eccentric. It is going to earn you the jeers of many and the angry looks of many more.

Following Disenchantment’s instructions, Baoyu dreams about losing his virginity to Keqing, an act that the narrator notes is “difficult to describe in full” (nanyi jinshu 難以盡述). Their carnal pleasures are swiftly followed by a nightmarish episode in which Baoyu and Keqing are confronted with a terrifyingly deep abyss dubbed the “Ford of Error.” As monsters and demons leer at them out of the depths, Baoyu panics and awakes in a cold sweat, still crying out for Keqing. After his maid, Aroma (Xiren 襲人), attends to his calls and discovers that his thighs are coated in something “cold and sticky” (Cao 1973, 149), Baoyu proceeds to recount his dream and demonstrate his newfound skills in the “art of love,” which leaves Aroma more devoted to him than ever before. As one might expect, this passage in Dream of the Red Chamber has been subject to countless analyses by scholars who have tried to decode the juxtaposition of Baoyu’s dream-based and subsequent real-life experiences of sex and Disenchantment’s diagnosis of Baoyu as suffering from “lust of the mind” or the kind of lust that, to use Gladys and Xianyi Yang’s more literal translation, “can be grasped by the mind but not expressed, apprehended intuitively but not described in words” (Cao 2001, 80). In recognition of the virtual or latent nature of this lust, Martin Huang has suggested that yiyin would be better rendered as “lust of intent” as it is more concerned “with the act of ‘intending’ itself rather than with the actualization of any specific intent or the object of that ‘intent’” (Huang 2001, 274). The driving force behind Lin Baoyu’s lust of intent is his narcissistic desire to “please and win admiration from every beautiful girl he encounters” (Huang 2001, 277), a trait shared by many male heroes of contemporary Chinese popular fiction. One theme that scholars agree is central to any understanding of the novel and its philosophical explorations of love and lust is that of dreams and, relatedly, the dialectical relationship between the real and the unreal, or truth and fiction. Famously, when Jia Baoyu first enters into the Land of Illusion in his dream-based

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encounter with the fairy Disenchantment in Chapter Five, he is greeted by an archway inscribed with the following couplet: “Truth becomes fiction when the fiction’s true / Real becomes not-real when the unreal’s real” (Cao 1973, 130). The fact that Baoyu’s dream is soon followed by a chance to put it into practice with his maid suggests that the boundaries between dreams and reality, or fiction and truth, are not as steadfast as might be assumed, a suspicion that is later confirmed when Disenchantment’s predictions about the women in Baoyu’s life all come true. If Baoyu’s dream-based adventure is what teaches him the true nature of his latent desires, then it is also the dream that paradoxically makes those desires more “real” and leads to their actualization or manifestation, both in the wet dream that accompanies his imaginary journey and in the sex that follows. In this way, dreams, brought on by desire, function as a form of wish fulfillment that produces yet more desire, and the “self-perpetuating circuit of dream and desire” is complete (Yu 2001, 144).

Frustrated Fantasies and “Feeling Good” Compared with scholarly discussions of Jia Baoyu’s “lust of the mind” or “lust of intent,” a relatively simplistic understanding of the term yiyin or YY has taken hold on the internet as being “language not based on reality, or imagination based on nothing, used to seek recognition from others” or, in the case of online fiction, as “beautiful yet unrealistic fantasies” (Baidu Baike). It is difficult to ascertain exactly when the concept made the jump from Cao Xueqin’s novel to contemporary Chinese slang, although one website suggests it may have arrived via Taiwanese internet forums.11 Some observers have pointed out that the fantastical depictions contained within YY fiction are by no means limited to online novels and are, in fact, a defining feature of Chinese popular literature throughout the ages. YY elements can be traced to the classic Ming dynasty novels Journey to the West (Xiyouji 西遊記), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguozhi yanyi 三國志演義) and The Water Margin (Shuihuzhuan 水滸傳), and even as far back as Tang dynasty chuanqi 傳奇 or “tales of the strange” (Deng 2013, 96). It is, however, Jin Yong’s final martial arts novel, The Deer and the Cauldron (Lu ding ji 鹿鼎記), that bears the strongest resemblance to the YY fiction examined in this chapter. Print editions of Top Quality House Servant, which was published in eight volumes by Guangxi People’s Publishing House in 2008 and 2009, announce this provenance on their cover: “Celebrated as the The Deer and the Cauldron of imaginary historical fiction, combining love, commerce, officialdom, and war in one!” Much like Lin Wanrong, Jin Yong’s protagonist Trinket (Wei Xiaobao 韋小寶) is “an incorrigible scamp” who is able to use his multiple identities to build “an absorbing and extraordinary card castle of a life” (Cha 1997, xiii). The traits most 11. http://www.aoyier.com/z/hongloumeng/21480728.html, accessed January 17, 2016.

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key to these characters’ motivations are their constant pursuit of self-interest and dreamer-like mentalities: both Lin and Trinket fantasize about getting rich, having their way with the many women in their lives, and acquiring greater social status as they move beyond their impoverished beginnings. In most cases, their fantasies do become reality as they use various ingenious methods of outwitting those around them and making a fortune via, in the case of Lin Wanrong, introducing premodern Chinese women to the delights of the qipao, high-quality floral perfumes, and bras. In other instances, the characters’ flights of fancy remain just that: fantasies that “can be grasped by the mind but not expressed”—except that, as readers, we have access to the minds of these protagonists and get to listen in on the otherwise inexpressible. Here, for example, is the opening of Chapter Eight of Top Quality House Servant, in which Lin Wanrong has just been shot with a poisoned arrow by the beautiful swordswoman Xiao Qingxuan 肖青璿, whom he nearly drowned during a fight in Xuanwu lake: Lin Wanrong was more than a little angry, but he didn’t regret his actions one bit. Although killing a beautiful girl would clearly not be a happy thing to do, if it was a case of “doing” her to death, then that he could consider. Lin Wanrong made the most of his Ah Q spirit, engaging in a bout of mental porn about Xiao Qingxuan to heal his wounded pride. 林晚榮心中雖然有些惱怒，但也並不後悔剛才所為，殺死一個美女，顯然不 是一件讓人愉快的事情，如果是“幹”死，倒還可以考慮一下。林晚榮充分發揮 了阿Q精神，心裏對這肖青軒好好的意淫了一番，安慰一下自己受傷的心靈。

Lin Wanrong’s “mental porn” is a dream of lustful revenge that helps release his anger from losing a duel with his female opponent by allowing him to fantasize, briefly but cathartically, about an act of murderous rape. At this point in the narrative, he seems to be free of any sense of ethical responsibility towards the people he encounters in this historical era: this is a world apart, a place in which the usual rules do not apply. It is significant, however, that Xiao Qingxuan’s demise remains solely within his imagination—and even at this early stage in the novel it is not hard to guess that, despite their initial hostilities, Xiao will eventually end up falling for Lin’s rakish ways. That Lin Wanrong’s desires do not necessarily result in actualization is indicated by the self-referential way in which the author Yu Yan describes these “lusts of the mind,” making explicit use of the word yiyin in the narrative and even naming three chapters of Top Quality House Servant after the online definition of YY fiction, “A Product of the Three Withouts” (sanwu chanpin 三無產品). In Chapter Twelve, Lin hears for the first time about the unmarried eldest daughter of the Xiao family, Xiao Yuruo 蕭玉若, who is said to be beautiful and wealthy—a truly “precious young lady” (qianjin xiaojie 千金小姐). This is how he reacts: In all the TV dramas Lin Wanrong had watched and all the novels he had read, the so-called “precious young ladies” were astonishingly beautiful with heavenly faces

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The irony here is, of course, that fantasizing about endless supplies of the “rare commodities” that are beautiful women (“objects” of happiness, indeed!) is exactly the business that Yu Yan is in: each and every one of the female characters Lin encounters are described as being extremely attractive, and Lin has no difficulty meeting them and getting them to fall in love with him. Lin’s tendency to engage in mental porn serves both to distract him from the fact that he is not managing to get any action in reality and to propel him to seek greater satisfaction of his desires. For all his brazen thoughts about the women in his life, Lin is often interrupted or stops himself from taking things further right when the temperature starts to rise. This happens at some point with each of the women who become his wives in the course of the novel, including with the teenaged younger sister of the eldest Xiao daughter, Xiao Yushuang 蕭玉霜. In Chapter 107, Lin encounters Yushuang after a period of separation he had initiated after realizing that she had fallen in love with him—inappropriately, he thought, given her young age. In this scene, Xiao Yushuang appears much diminished as a result of her unrequited love. Lin proceeds, however, to undergo a change of heart towards the younger Xiao sister, brought on by the depth of her feelings and her physical proximity to the lower half of his body. After Lin admits that he does find Yushuang attractive, she responds: “Why don’t you like me then?” Xiao Yushuang felt a lurch of happiness and, unable to hold back her feelings any longer, threw her arms around Lin Wanrong. In the midst of her tears she asked, “Is it really because you think I’m too young? I will grow up, you know—and Mother says that some girls my age are married already. Why don’t you like me, why?” Xiao Yushuang held tightly onto Lin Wanrong’s waist and buried her head into his chest, sobbing loudly. Lin Wanrong felt her soft body gently trembling against his chest, Yushuang’s well-developed breasts pressing against him. Her tender jade rabbits rose and fell with her sobs, slowly rubbing against his chest. Feeling the intense heat of this burning hot female body, Lin Wanrong warned himself repeatedly that the younger Xiao daughter was still a child: he should not be thinking any evil thoughts! But the fire in his lower body betrayed him with its honesty, poking lightly into the Xiao sister’s smooth belly. You’re a beast, a beast! Lin Wanrong reprimanded himself, but Xiao Yushuang only held on more tightly, rubbing against his body.

The Happiness of Unrealizable Dreams 219 「那你為何不喜歡我？」蕭玉霜心裡一喜，再也抑制不住自己的情感，猛 的抱住了他，帶著哭音顫道：「是不是真的嫌我小？可是我會長大的嘛，娘親 說，她像我這般年紀都已經嫁人了。你為什麼不喜歡我，為什麼？」蕭玉霜緊 緊抱住他的腰，將頭埋在他的懷裡，放聲痛哭起來。 林晚榮感覺一個柔軟的身體靠在自己懷裡輕輕的顫抖著，二小姐已經發育 完全的酥胸便緊緊地貼在他胸膛上，那嬌嫩的玉兔隨著她哭泣而緩緩顫動， 慢慢的摩擦著他的胸膛。感受著這具滾燙的動人女體帶來的無窮熱力，林晚 榮一再告誡自己，這二小姐還是個小孩子，萬不可起歹念，可是身下那火熱 卻很忠誠的背叛了他，輕輕的頂在了二小姐那光滑的小腹上。 禽獸啊，禽獸啊，林晚榮暗自罵著自己，二小姐卻把他抱得更緊了，還拿 動人的軀體在他身上輕輕摩擦起來。

After a few more minutes of this increasingly intense embrace, Lin Wanrong finally comes to his senses and puts on the brakes, thinking: “Oh fuck, what the hell am I doing, it can’t go down like this! If we’re going to do it then we should at least go back to my room—conducting ‘field operations’ on the first go would surely be a bit too avant-garde.” Having by now spent several months living in this alternative world getting to know the people who live within it, it seems Lin might be starting to grow a conscience, at least to the extent that he realizes the impropriety of taking the virginity of a younger girl in public. A similar incident occurs a few chapters later when Lin and Xiao Yushuang are prevented from kissing by the older Xiao sister, who spots what they are doing and rushes over to ask what is going on. This time, Lin’s reaction reveals that he has not left his “evil” thinking behind: That girl Xiao Yuruo was just too much, keeping a close eye on her younger sister and treating me like a thief, stopping me from making my moves. Hehe, if you’re going to watch over her like that then I’ll just have to work extra hard to get the girl. A game of cat and mouse may well turn me on! Lin fantasized to himself for a while. 就是蕭玉若那妮子太過分了，將二小姐看得緊緊的，像防賊一樣防著我， 讓老子得不了手。嘿嘿，你特意看住她，我便偏要偷偷一親芳澤，這樣一偷 一防，或許更刺激哦。 他心裡意淫了一會兒。

There are countless other instances in Top Quality House Servant in which Lin Wanrong’s mind and body seem to be battling each other, with his body saying yes and his mind saying no or his mind engaging in fantasy while his body remains (mostly) inert, plus other occasions when characters and events intervene to prevent his “mental porn” from becoming reality. Although Lin does eventually “take” all the central female characters as his wives, his regular lusts of the mind enhance the imaginative scope of the novel by creating a series of fictional possibilities in the form of romantic liaisons and other happy events that could happen any moment now, but which are usually delayed until later. It is in large part these deferrals that create the narrative momentum needed to carry readers through the novel’s 691

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chapters by constantly whetting their appetites for more: more sex, more success, and more amusing situations born from the mismatch of Lin’s twenty-first-century thinking and the premodern setting. The lesson seems to be that good things come to those who wait—and perhaps to those who fall off the top of a mountain and travel back in time to an imaginary and supposedly more innocent time in Chinese history.

Readerly Pleasures and Aching Balls Ascertaining what exactly it is that keeps readers hooked to a story and what does or does not make them “feel good” is a notoriously tricky business. Given the uniqueness of the individual mind and personal experiences, we can never know for sure what happens when text meets reader and produces, in some instances, an “experience of happiness.” As Karl Mannheim notes in his writing on wish fulfillment and utopia, we should not overlook the role of individual creative power in our rush to identity collective visions of better worlds—and besides, “from what should the new be expected to originate if not from the novel and uniquely personal mind of the individual who breaks beyond the bounds of the existing order?” (Mannheim 1955, 206). There are, fortunately, hundreds of individual responses to YY fiction available online from which we might start to understand the appeal of these narratives. On the fiction portal Qidian.com where Yu Yan first serialized Top Quality House Servant between 2007 and 2008, the novel has, as of the time of writing, received 33 million hits, 5.3 million recommendations, and 33,559 comments from readers. On the community review site Douban.com, the first print volume of Top Quality House Servant has received an average score of 7.7 out of 10 over 2380 ratings and has attracted 588 short comments and 53 longer reviews.12 Further reactions can be found on sites such as Dangdang.com that sell print editions of the book and on blogs, Weibo, and other social media. While it is beyond the limits of this chapter to survey all these responses, a few reactions are worth noting here. Many readers describe the novel as “top quality YY” and “the king of YY,” or weigh their enjoyment of the plot against their appreciation of Yu Yan’s writing style. Others describe their emotional and physical reactions to the book, such as “pretty happy” (ting kuaile de 挺快樂的) or “so long it made my balls ache” (tai chang le, kan de danteng 太長了，看得蛋疼). On Dangdang, a reader comments, “I’ve been looking for this book for ages. Whenever I feel unhappy I read it for a while and feel happier. There are, after all, so many unhappy things in life.” On Douban, another acknowledges the novel’s limitations but admits to enjoying it nonetheless: I never imagined I’d be able to read a three-million-character novel on my phone, let alone such a ridiculous time travel story . . . Although there are many holes in 12. http://book.douban.com/subject/3015088/, accessed January 16, 2016.

The Happiness of Unrealizable Dreams 221 the plot, its entertainment value is clear for all to see. As a work of fiction you read as you drift off to sleep and enter your dreams (I suffer from a lot of insomnia) it offers excellent value for money.13 沒想到我竟然能用手機看完這三十多萬字的網絡小說（而其是那麼狗血的 穿越）……雖然漏洞不少，但他情節上的娛樂性也同樣可圈可點。作為一部睡 前入夢小說（其實常常讓我失眠）達到這種程度。確實物超所值。

A perhaps surprising number of readers confess to reading Top Quality House Servant multiple times; on Qidian, one recalls finishing the book no fewer than five times, then wonders why he or she has been unable to find other novels in the years since that stand up to so many repeated visits. Another short review left on Douban reminisces about the pleasures the reader experienced when reading time travel fiction back in his younger days: Reading about those characters slowly climbing the ladder of power made you feel extremely good and gave you a strong sense of immersion. However, I think it’s enough to try to be a better version of yourself. The Liaozhaizhiyi 聊齋誌異 is also full of stories about scholars coming across foxes and spirits; most are just the mental porn of the impoverished scholars who wrote them. This novel is pretty much the same thing. It’s fine to read it, but you shouldn’t take it too seriously [bie tai dangzhen 別太當真].14

Finding Happiness in Unrealizable Dreams Comments like this allude to what Serge Tisseron calls the “paradox of fiction”: “the fact that we can let ourselves be ‘carried away’ by a story and at the same time regard these feelings as excessive, if not shameful” (Tisseron 2013, 121). This reviewer’s advice to not take Top Quality House Servant too seriously alludes to this sense of shame, the fear that immersing oneself in its imaginary world or identifying too strongly with a character like Lin Wanrong might prevent the reader from becoming “a better version of yourself.” As Tisseron argues, however, the whole point of fiction is that it operates as a space in which we can safely put our sense of reality on hold, something that humans are quite good at. This can involve playing with pleasurable emotions as well as defending ourselves against less pleasant thoughts and feelings, which might include Lin’s passing fantasies of murder and rape (Tisseron 2013, 121–22). The concept of yiyin or YY, which I have variously translated as “to fantasize,” “lust of the mind,” and “mental porn,” can help us understand how the processes of pleasurable play and self-defense play out in the writing and consumption of popular fiction. YY takes place on at least three levels: in the mind of the author, who imagines then describes the fantasy world in writing; in the fictional mind 13. http://book.douban.com/subject/3015088/, accessed January 16, 2016. 14. https://book.douban.com/subject/3015088/comments/, accessed January 16, 2016.

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of Lin Wanrong, who constantly fantasizes about having his wicked way with the various beautiful women in his life; and in the minds of the readers, who imagine and experience these fantasies vicariously through the mediating layer of fiction. If we were to adopt a Theory of Mind approach to these multiple layers of imagination or “nested levels of intentionality” (Zunshine 2006, 32), we might note that the process known as YY is in fact crucial to the pleasures involved in reading any kind of fiction, as it enables the reader to engage in mind reading, the cognitive detective game of figuring out what it is that the characters are thinking and why they behave the way they do. In YY fiction it is relatively easy to get it right, as the “mental porn” of the central protagonist—such as having outdoor sex with a teenage girl like Xiao Yushuang—forms a key part of the narrative itself. According to Scott McCracken, part of the pleasure of reading popular fiction lies in the experience of transgression, of being taken “out of the realm of conformity and into a more dangerous zone” (McCracken 1998, 154). While this does not mean that all popular fiction has to transgress in order to be pleasurable to read, it does in most cases create “an imaginative space for new social formations” that play with existing social and literary norms (McCracken 1998, 156–57). What is most significant about the concept of yiyin as it applies to YY fiction is not that these novels portray people and events in ways that push the boundaries of contemporary and historical morality, although this is one component of them. Rather, it is the latency of the desires or the “happy objects” that YY fiction depicts and the fact that they are restricted to the world of the imagination that is key to the production of readerly pleasure or “feeling good.” As Disenchantment tries to warn Jia Baoyu in Chapter Five of Dream of the Red Chamber, desires can be dangerous when they are enacted for real. In Top Quality House Servant, most of Lin Wanrong’s dreams do come true, but for much of the narrative he is nonetheless able to find pleasure in holding the objects of his desire at a distance in his mind. This, as I have suggested, is partly what keeps the momentum going and maintains the reader’s suspense over the course of its 691 chapters and 3.26 million characters. Sara Ahmed argues, by way of Lacan, that it is the obstacles to happiness that allow “happiness to be sustained as the promise of the good life.” Happiness, by this reasoning, is more a question of following than of finding, as the promise of happiness acquires its force “by not being given by the objects that are attributed as happiness-causes” (Ahmed 2010, 32). Another way of putting this is to explain happiness not as the end product or the place at which one arrives after all one’s dreams come true, but as a potential energy similar to the feeling you get when you peer over a steep cliff and imagine how shuang it might feel to leap off the edge and attempt to fly. This is why Martin Huang and others translate yiyin as “lust of intent,” in recognition that intending—or imagining—is sometimes more important than making something real. From one angle, the object of our intent may appeal, but not only is happiness conditional, happenstance, and thus not entirely under our control, but our desires can themselves be terrifying, whether due to the fact that

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we do not really want what we think we want, as Slavoj Žižek would contend, or because the objects are not quite “ready” for us (Ahmed 2010, 31). A connection can be made here with Baudrillard’s ideas about the function of sign values in the capitalist economy: fulfillment of consumer desire inevitably produces more desire in the form of lack or the sense that something is missing, which in turn preserves the subject’s questioning about the nature of his or her desires (Baudrillard and Levin 1981, 207). Anthony Yu’s argument about the function of Jia Baoyu’s “lust of the mind” points to a similar circularity. Desires bring on dreaming, which brings on dreambased wish fulfillment (expressed in Baoyu’s “nocturnal emission”), which brings on yet more desire. Dreams, and the works of fiction that describe them, thus participate in pleasurable circuits of imagination, potential energy, and possible worlds, not all of which need ever come true nor result in a more perfect reality, but which nonetheless can bring passing happiness to those who enter them. Such a “repetitive cycle of value” (Baudrillard and Levin 1981, 208) is further enacted in the process of consuming popular fiction. Readers are sucked into the narrative by their desire to know what happens next and to experience the vicarious pleasures that come with watching the protagonist get his or her way. When they finish reading the novel, a process that can be extended over many months or years, they often find themselves wanting more: either more of the same style or genre or sometimes more of the exact same work, returning to the beginning and starting again. Desire thus begets desire, and true fulfillment (whatever that might mean) remains tantalizingly out of reach. I began this chapter by juxtaposing the “feeling good” that results from reading about impossible dreams in YY fiction with the mainstream Chinese Dream discourse promoted by Xi Jinping, which emphasizes the achievability of individual dreams and their potential to create greater prosperity for the Chinese nation. There is a risk, however, of overstating this “impossible versus possible” divide. It is no coincidence that Chinese netizens have referred to the Chinese Dream as a “spring dream” or “wet dream” and described their own dream narratives as the “sleep talking” of losers. Such comments mockingly imply that the Chinese Dream propaganda drive in fact participates in the same circuitous flights of the imagination that form the contents of popular fiction and that have been the concern of this chapter. Most Chinese citizens, like people anywhere in the world, would presumably like to be happy and bring about happiness for others. But if that happiness is presented as being within reach and contingent upon the accumulation of individual wealth, it is understandable that for many people, particularly the self-identified “losers” of contemporary Chinese society, it will be seen less as a realistic goal for the future than as a self-deceptive dream. Popular fiction, therefore, not only offers respite from the pressures of everyday reality as its fans and critics alike suggest, but also a means of “feeling good” that is quite at peace with the fact it has no pretensions of ever coming true.

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Contributors

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen is an associate professor of gender studies at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She is the author of Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography, which was awarded the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Award honorable mention from the Association of Queer Anthropology, American Anthropological Association. Engebretsen coedited Anthropology’s Queer Sensibilities, a Sexualities special issue (2017), Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures, and Generations of Feminist Activisms in the PRC (forthcoming). Engebretsen holds a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics (2008). Derek Hird is a senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Lancaster. His research interests include Chinese migrant men’s experiences in London and Chinese white-collar masculinities. Recent publications include Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China (with Geng Song), “Making Class and Gender: White-Collar Men in Postsocialist China,” in Changing Chinese Masculinities: From Imperial Pillars of State to Global Real Men, edited by Kam Louie, and “Moral Masculinities: Ethical Self-Fashionings of Professional Chinese Men in London,” Nan Nü 18 (1) (2016): 115–47. Heather Inwood is a university lecturer in modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture at Cambridge University and a fellow in Chinese studies at Trinity Hall. Her research focuses on interactions between digital media and culture in twenty-first-century China. She is the author of Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes and is currently working on a book project on Chinese-language popular genre fiction and its transmedia adaptations. Mieke Matthyssen is a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Eastern Languages and Cultures, Ghent University. For her PhD thesis, she explored different dimensions of the popular Chinese saying nande hutu 難得糊塗 and “the art of being muddled.” Since then, her research interests focus on Chinese health strategies and indigenous psychology, from the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine and philosophy. She has published in journals such as Contemporary Chinese Thought and Journal of Asian History.

228 Contributors

Giovanna Puppin holds a PhD in Chinese studies from Ca’ Foscari University (Venice) and is a lecturer and director of the MA in media and advertising program at the University of Leicester. Her research interests focus on Chinese advertising and creative industries, media and popular culture, country branding, and soft power. Her recent English-language publications include “The Master Said, the Master Sold? Uses and Misuses of the Confucius Icon in Chinese Commercial Advertising,” in Religion and Media in China: Insights and Case Studies from the Mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong (edited by S. Travagnin); “Making Space for Emotions: Exploring China-Africa ‘Mediated Relationships’ through CCTV-9’s Documentary African Chronicles (Feizhou jishi 非洲紀事),” Journal of African Cultural Studies 29 (1) (2017). William F. Schroeder is an independent researcher. He received his PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Virginia in the USA in 2010 and was a lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Manchester, UK, until the end of 2016. His research has focused on leisure practices in the queer community in Beijing and draws on queer, play, affect, and kinship theories. His work has appeared in GLQ and edited volumes and blogs, and he has recently coedited a book titled Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures. He is a cofounder of the Queer China Working Group, an international collaboration of artists, activists, and scholars concerned with the queer PRC, and was a founding coeditor of Manchester University Press’s book series “Alternative Sinology.” Gerda Wielander is a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Westminster, London. Her research focuses on the link between the spiritual and the political in contemporary China. She is the author of Christian Values in Communist China as well as a number of journal articles (in the China Journal, the China Quarterly, and the Journal of Contemporary China) and book chapters on the subject of Chinese Christianity. She is currently researching the appearance of the term faith (xinyang) in Chinese political discourse as well as the development of a Chinese cultural psychology. She is coeditor of the Journal of the British Association for Chinese Studies. Jie Yang is an associate professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her research interests include gender, class, psychology, and mental health in China. Her recent publications include The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia (edited volume), Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China, and Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition, and Therapeutic Governance. Jigme Yeshe Lama is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science, University of Calcutta, India. His research interests include Sino-Tibetan relations, memories, and resistance in Tibet and Himalayan politics and culture. He recently

Contributors 229

edited a volume titled Changes on the Roof of the World: Reflections on Tibet. He has also presented his work in a number of seminars in India as well as in other countries. Yanhua Zhang is an associate professor of Chinese and anthropology at Clemson University, South Carolina. Her research centers on knowledge and practice of health and well-being and everyday life in contemporary China. She is the author of Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China.

Index

1950s China, 8, 17, 26, 27, 30–33, 35, 36, 39, 59 2008 Tibetan protests, 55, 56, 57–58 activist parenting narratives, 91 advertising, 13, 14, 38, 134; commercial, 67, 69, 82. See also public service advertising affect, 11, 15, 17, 27, 29, 35, 38, 79, 80, 81, 89, 95, 117, 131, 133, 134, 137, 141, 142–44, 147, 150, 151, 152, 155n13, 159, 160, 161, 165, 169–86, 150–66; and discourse, 176 affective practice, 152, 155, 162–64, 165 Ah Q, 10, 13, 25, 26–27, 29, 39–40, 193n6, 195, 213, 217 Ahmed, Sara, 3, 27, 29, 34, 39, 65, 67, 77, 81, 172, 175, 222 All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), 133, 138 Barthes, Roland, 114, 119 Berlant, Lauren, 177, 184 Bhutan, 5, 34 Bi Shumin, 143 Buddhism, 19, 79, 108n2, 113, 114, 118, 203; and mindfulness, 107; Tibetan, 13, 54, 57–59, 60 capitalism, 4, 38, 65, 66, 108, 109, 125, 153, 223 CCTV (China Central Television), 2, 44, 47–48, 108, 111, 113, 133, 138, 150, 154, 156, 162; Spring Festival Gala,

14, 66, 210; Spring Festival Gala PSAs, 67–83 censorship, 100 Chinese Dream, 1, 7, 8–9, 18–19, 20, 29, 33, 35, 38, 45, 68, 201, 209, 211, 223 China Queer Film Festival Tour, 88 China Youth Journal (Zhongguo qingnian), 8, 31 Chinese New Year, 14, 15, 69–70, 74, 76, 89, 100 Chopsticks (Kuaizi pian), 8, 14, 17, 66–67, 69, 70–83, 100 civility campaigns, 122 class, 9, 12, 16, 32, 36, 39, 45, 46, 47, 56, 80, 103, 123–24, 125, 131, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 142–43, 144, 146-47, 159. See also middle class; working class classics, learning of, 161–64 Coming Home (Hui jia), 15, 89, 100–101, 102 commercialization, 68 Confucianism, 9, 11, 16, 34, 150–66, 200; revival of, 81, 150, 152, 155n13, 158, 163, 165. See also filial piety cosmology, 18, 190, 192, 202 cultural resistance, 44, 55–56, 186 culture, definitions of, 176 dao, 18, 19, 109, 112, 117, 194, 195, 203, 204, 213 Daoism, 9, 18, 19, 113, 118, 192, 194, 198, 200, 203. See also dao; yangsheng; yin and yang Deer and the Cauldron, The (Lu ding ji), 216

Index 231 desire, 20, 28, 31, 39, 64, 66, 89, 90, 92, 94, 97–98, 102–3, 106, 124, 134, 139, 147, 153, 178, 180, 181, 185, 198, 202, 208, 211–23 Dirac, Paul, 110 domestic femininity, 131, 138, 139, 140, 147 domestic worker, 16, 130, 131, 137, 143 Douban, 220, 221 Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng), 214–15, 222 dreams, 18, 19, 26, 31, 65, 69–70, 100, 120, 189, 209, 210, 211, 214–16, 222, 223; “spring” or wet, 18, 211–12, 217–18, 223. See also Chinese Dream economic development, 13, 20, 37, 45, 47–48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 59, 122 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 3, 106 embodiment, 111n5, 152, 161 emotion, 120, 122–24; and habitus, 123 emotional intelligence, 123–24 entrepreneurship, 16, 131, 133, 134, 137, 139–42, 143–47 ethnic unity, 13, 52 everyday life, 93, 96, 125, 141, 143, 144, 146, 147, 151, 152, 154, 160, 164, 165, 212 fake happiness. See under happiness family, 7, 8, 14, 15, 19, 20, 27, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 86–103, 129–47, 152n10, 155, 161, 162, 163–64, 165, 173, 189n1, 191, 197, 199, 208, 214, 217 family happiness. See under happiness Fan Popo, 15, 88 feeling good. See under shuang feeling rules, 28, 38 filial piety, 17, 92, 94, 100, 107, 152n10, 163, 177, 178, 180–84 Fourteenth Dalai Lama, The, 57, 58 gender ideology, 147 Gongmeng Law Research Centre, 55 Gramsci, Antonio, 45 Great Leap Forward, 33, 37 Guo Mingyi, 29–30, 35, 37, 39

habitus, 123–24, 125. See also emotion Han Chinese, 13, 14, 20, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 71 happiness: campaigns, 9, 64, 129n1, 144, 190; commodified, 64, 82; and Confucianism, 9, 14, 16, 20, 150–66, 196n11; crisis of, 66; and development, 5–6, 33–35, 45, 47, 52, 53, 54–57; fake, 37, 108, 111, 116, 121, 124; family, 20, 30, 48, 53, 77, 82, 86–103, 129–47, 177, 178, 180, 182; and GDP, 5–7, 154; as kuaile, 99, 103, 112, 118, 120, 132, 169, 170, 171, 174, 175, 179, 185, 186, 190, 209, 220; as le, 1, 16, 91, 94, 96, 151, 152, 155, 190, 204; and maximization strategies, 9, 13, 20, 35; and neuroscience, 3, 28; promise of, 3, 8, 34, 38, 77, 82, 142, 186, 222; and self-governance, 3, 15, 16, 124,147; and social capital, 7, 19; and social safety net, 6, 7, 19; as talk, 169–86; turn, 64, 106, 137; and unemployment, 6, 7, 19, 49, 106, 129n1, 131; as xingfu, 1, 2, 8, 16, 26, 30, 31, 34, 37, 65, 69, 83, 96, 97–98, 99, 101, 108, 110, 111, 112, 114, 132, 143, 150, 152, 154, 156, 169, 170, 171, 173, 175, 182, 185, 186, 190, 191, 197, 198, 199, 204, 209. See also happy housewife; happy objects happy housewife, 16, 128–47 happy objects, 81, 143,152, 210, 222 health strategies, 190, 199 heart, the, 16, 132, 134, 135–39, 147 hegemony, 45, 46, 47 homosexuality, 15, 86–103, 169–86 Hochschild, Arlie, 28, 38 hyperfemininity, 140 Illouz, Eva, 109, 123, 125 infrapolitics, 46, 54, 55, 60 internet fiction. See under popular internet fiction it is difficult to be muddled (nande hutu), 191, 193 James, William, 106, 110, 124

232 Index Jin Yong, 216 jingshen. See under spirit knowing and rejoicing in fate (le tian zhi ming), 200 knowing contentment brings happiness (zhi zu chang le), 198 laid-off worker, 130, 144, 145 Layard, Richard, 2, 3, 11, 32, 65, 66 legitimacy, 13, 28, 38, 44, 45, 54, 59, 60, 153, 200, 203 Lei Feng, 26, 29, 30, 35, 37, 39 leisure, 7, 30, 47, 50, 146, 169, 170n2 LGBTQ, 7, 15, 86–103, 169–86 Lhasa, 44, 47–57 losers (diaosi), 18, 211, 223 luck (fu), 191, 192, 193, 204 lust of the mind/intent. See yiyin Mama Rainbow, 15, 86, 88, 89, 97, 98, 99, 100 Maslow, Abraham, 106 Massumi, Brian, 171, 172n3, 186 media, 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 46–56, 64–83, 86, 87, 90, 93, 94, 100, 109, 110–14, 116, 124, 125, 128–47, 151, 153, 154, 156, 201, 209, 220 mental illness, 89, 131, 137 mianzi (face), 89, 92, 137n5 middle class, 9, 16, 60, 90, 97, 107, 123–24, 125, 126, 131, 135, 136, 144, 153, 158, 159–60 modernization, 10, 12, 13, 25, 27, 33, 37, 38, 45, 46, 151, 153, 205 moral experience, 150, 151, 161–65 Muñoz, José Esteban, 177, 184 negative emotions (xiaoji ganqing), 107, 120 neoliberalism, 2–4, 25; and the self-governing subject 3, 107–8 Olympic Games, 55, 56, 112 parental love advocacy, 87, 88, 91 Peale, Norman Vincent, 3, 106

PFLAG (Parents, Friends, Family and Allies of Lesbians and Gays), 15, 86–91, 94, 96–97, 100–103, 178 philosophy, 2, 19, 112, 190, 204; of life, 194, 202 Pink Dads, 15, 88, 89, 91–94, 97, 98 pleasure, 18, 31, 81, 95, 137, 143, 144, 155, 157, 158, 172, 190, 198, 204, 208–23 popular internet fiction, 208–23 positive psychology, 3, 10, 11, 13, 15, 19, 36, 37, 39, 64, 106–12, 120, 124, 125, 132, 150, 154 postsocialist China, 10, 15, 38, 39, 109, 158 Power of Positive Thinking, The, 3, 106 propaganda, 1, 8, 13, 27, 28, 54, 59, 67, 68, 113, 142, 209, 211, 223 PSAs. See public service advertising/ announcements psychoboom, 137, 140 psychological self-help, 16, 129n1, 133, 142, 147 psychologization, 108, 109, 111, 126; and “fake happiness” (wei xingfu), 124 public service advertising/announcements (gongyi guanggao), 2, 9, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 66–83, 109, 110, 114–25. See also under CCTV qi, 19, 109, 112, 124, Qidian, 220, 221 queer, 12, 17, 88, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 169–86, 212; organizing, 170n2 revival of Confucianism. See under Confucianism rituals, 13, 16, 60, 152, 155, 161, 162, 163 Scott, James, 46, 47 self-cultivation (xiushen), 9, 18, 19, 118, 120, 124, 125, 152, 154, 158, 161, 165, 196, 198, 200, 204–5 self-governance, 3, 15, 16, 110, 107–8, 122, 124, 125, 147 self-immolation, 13, 44, 54–55, 60 Seligman, Martin, 3, 36n4, 106, 108, 109, 120, 124

Index 233 shuang (feeling good), 210, 211, 213nn6–7, 222 sixiang (way of thinking), 90, 102 slogan, 26, 64, 68, 69, 81, 82, 115, 118, 121, 122, 125, 162, 191, 209, 211 socialism, 8, 14, 27, 34, 35, 38, 45, 67, 141, 209n3 spirit (jingshen), 10, 12, 14, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 66, 67, 68, 160n18, 165, 217 spring dreams. See under dreams subjectivity, 97, 107, 124, 125, 131, 134, 139, 140, 142, 154, 172, 186. See also under neoliberalism suffering brings good fortune chi kui shi fu, 190 suzhi (quality), 4, 8–10, 20, 35–37, 39, 56 99, 124n15, 125 Theory of Mind, 222 therapeutic consumption, 131, 133 Three Guarantees Policy, 49 tianlun zhi le (“family happiness”), 91, 94 Tibet, 9, 13, 20, 44–60 time travel, 19, 210, 220, 221 tongzhi, 86–103, 113n8, 169–86 Top Quality House Servant (Jipin jiading), 18, 208, 210, 216–21, 222 unconscious, 10, 26–27, 203 unemployment, 6, 7, 19, 49, 106, 129n1, 130, 131, 141n7, 189n1. See also under happiness utopia, 25, 33, 184, 185, 210, 220

Wei Wei (propagandist), 32 Wei Wei (sociologist), 177 wet dreams. See under dreams wisdom of life, 189, 191, 193, 197 Wiseman, Richard, 109, 110–11 working class, 16, 129n1, 131, 135, 138, 141, 144–45 World Happiness Reports, 5 Xi Jinping, 8, 9, 14, 18, 33, 34, 45, 68, 113, 209, 223 Xia Mianzun, 138, 139, 144 xingfu. See under happiness Xinli fangtan (Psychology Talk Show), 133, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 146 Xinli yuekan (Psychologies), 133, 134, 136, 137, 140 Xu Zhiyong, 8, 55 yangsheng, 118, 164 yin and yang, 117 yiyin, 210, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 221, 222 YY. See yiyin zheng nengliang (positive energy), 15, 109–26 Zhongguo qingnian. See under China Youth Journal