Cultivating Guanxi in the Digital Era: Perceptions of Relationship- Building Practices among Young Urban Chinese & Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy

Part of the Anthropology Departmental Seminar Series 2022

15:15 – 16:00

Cultivating Guanxi in the Digital Era: Perceptions of Relationship- Building Practices among Young Urban Chinese

Maria Nolan, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS

Abstract

Practices of guanxi, the Chinese expression of interpersonal connections, have received much attention from anthropologists and sociologists in recent decades. There are few studies however that examine the significance or prevalence of guanxi practices among the generations born under market reforms, and who have come of age alongside the growth of social media platforms such as WeChat through which much guanxi activity is now cultivated and maintained. This talk is concerned with what guanxi means to young urban Chinese today. Drawing from twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing and Wuhan, I consider dominant perceptions of guanxi practices among university students and young professionals. I contextualise these perceptions within the pressurised education and work environments to which urban youths (born after 1990) are accustomed and within which they possess greater personal autonomy and access to “weak” ties than any previous generations of youth. I propose that feelings of cynicism and resignation which can emerge in response to pressure to engage in particular guanxi practices have the potential to disrupt and transform the ways in which guanxi connections are cultivated and maintained. I argue that taking time to consider the ways in which guanxi practices are experienced in affective terms, particularly by youth entering the workforce, can help to ensure a more nuanced understanding of guanxi and provide a necessary sensitivity to its shifting forms. 

Maria Nolan is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS. She completed a PhD at SOAS in 2020 which traced the emergence of the youth-related phenomenon, zhai, in urban China. Her most recent article is “Developing Indifference; Youth, Place-making and Belonging in a Transforming Urban China” (HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory). She is currently working on a monograph on the topic of zhai. 

16:15 – 17:00

Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy 

Li Zhang, Professor of Anthropology, University of California-Davis

Abstract

The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with relentless market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. This talk is an overview and open discussion of Zhang’s newly published book--an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality, and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Zhang shows that anxiety—broadly construed in both medical and social terms—has become a powerful indicator for the general pulse of contemporary Chinese society. It is in this particular context that Zhang traces how a new psychotherapeutic culture takes root, thrives, and transforms itself across a wide range of personal, social, and political domains. 

Li Zhang (Ph.D. Cornell 1998) is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Davis. She is the author of two award-winning books: Strangers in the City (Stanford 2001) and In Search of Paradise (Cornell 2010), and the co-editor of Privatizing China, Socialism from Afar(Cornell 2008) and Can Science and Technology Save China? (Cornell 2019). Her most recent book is Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (UC Press 2020). Broadly speaking, her research concerns social, political, and psychological repercussions of the market reform and socialist transformations in contemporary China. Her new book traces the rise of the “inner revolution” brought by a widespread psychological counseling movement and examines how an emerging therapeutic culture reshapes Chinese people's understandings of selfhood, well-being, sociality, and governing. She was a 2008 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and the President of the Society of East Asian Anthropology (2013-15). She served as Interim Dean of the Division of Social Sciences (2015-17) and Chair of Anthropology Department (2011-15) at UC Davis.

Convened by:      Dr Maria Nolan and Dr Nikita Simpson