Cultivating Capacity for Happiness as a Confucian Project in Contemporary China

Searching for happiness (xingfu) in contemporary China is noticeably mediated, in discourse and practice, by a revival of Confucian learning, especially Confucian self-cultivation. Drawing on personal observations, textual publications, and media documentation, this chapter illustrates how the Confucian notion of happiness has been formulated to articulate the diverse experience and desires among different social strata in post-reform China. The author argues that happiness engagement in contemporary China has acquired a distinctive Confucian moral-affect of self-cultivation, and in the meantime, Confucianism as an actively practiced tradition has been regenerated, transformed, and made closely relevant to the contemporary living for Chinese people.

“Happy Housewives”

This chapter analyzes representations of “happy housewives” in popular psychological self-help media in order to examine the relationship between gender, psychology and privatization in China. Through analysis of media and ethnographic data, I demonstrate 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. 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 downplays the intensified gendered exploitation and class stratification since the mid-1990s when privatization began. In this context, I argue that unhappiness or anger can constitute a repoliticizing process that reinvigorates discussions of class as both an analytical and political category in China.

Happiness “with a Chinese Taste”

This chapter explores how happiness is constructed in a new category of public service announcements (PSAs), which are broadcast during the CCTV's Spring Festival Gala. It lays down the theoretical foundations of the relationship between advertising and happiness, drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Promise of Happiness (2010), before moving on to introducing the context of the production and broadcast of Gala PSAs. The following section comprises a critical interpretive analysis of a purposively selected case study: the TV PSA "Chopsticks" (Kuaizi pian筷子篇‎, 2014). The analysis reveals that families – including the “big family” of the Chinese nation – lie at the heart of each sequence, and constitute happiness associations. It is clear that chopsticks were chosen as the central multimodal metaphor of this PSA because of the link between them and an idea of Chineseness. Chopsticks not only transmit food, but also emotions, and, more importantly, they direct the viewers’ attention to the State-sanctioned values and behaviours that promise happiness. Ultimately, this chapter argues that this PSA promotes a culturally and ethnically specific "happiness with a Chinese taste" (xingfu Zhongguo wei幸福中国味‎).

Tibet and Happiness in Chinese Media Discourses

This chapter analyses happiness discourses in Tibet. It juxtaposes the official discourse of Tibet as a happy place resulting from economic development and favourable social policy with the “hidden transcript” based on the importance of Tibetan culture, which also manifests itself in the “infrapolitics” of the subordinated and desperate Tibetan population. The chapter draws on close analysis of media reports on happiness in Tibet and concludes that linking economic prosperity to happiness is a legitimizing tool by the Chinese government and a discourse mostly directed at China’s Han population, who, from a distance, do indeed perceive Tibet as a “happy” place. For Tibetans happiness constitutes more than prosperity and includes a revival of Tibetan spiritual culture, into which much of the newly accumulated prosperity is invested.

Talking of Happiness

Anthropologists have long argued that emotions are cultural and have turned to the language of emotions to analyze them. This chapter starts from a similar approach but uses an online discussion about happiness among contemporary queer mainland Chinese men to argue that “emotion talk” opens up rather than delimits notions of how to live a joyful life. These men’s discussions focus less on particular definitions of happiness and more on the bonds created in the act of talking about it. Such a phatic approach allows them to maintain hopefulness in the face of persistent challenges to their wellbeing. The chapter concludes that the hopeful and potentiating aspects of emotion talk should encourage a shift in attention, especially in research with marginalized people, from simple questions of compliance or resistance toward a more nuanced analysis of affective context.

The Happiness of Unrealizable Dreams

This chapter explores the pleasures found within a category of Chinese literature known as YY (yiyin), a term that originated in Dream of the Red Chamber and which has been translated as “lust of the mind” or “lust of intent,” but which can be understood in a more contemporary sense as “mental porn” and the verb “to fantasise.” By examining a typical work of online YY fiction, I suggest that yiyin denotes a key hedonistic impulse in contemporary Chinese popular narratives in which authors and readers gain pleasure from the vicarious satisfaction of the protagonist’s every desire. Fulfilment of these desires, however, is constantly delayed as the “objects of happiness” are held at arm’s length and the protagonist—and reader—keeps wanting more. The pursuit of happiness in Chinese popular fiction thus mirrors the deferral of gratification within capitalist consumerism, highlighting readers’ sense of lack (manque) and helping to determine their subjectivities as questioning, desiring individuals. I conclude by suggesting that, in contrast with official discourse surrounding the “China Dream,” popular fiction offers a means of “feeling good” (shuang) that is quite at peace with the fact it has no pretensions of ever coming true.

Smile Yourself Happy

A vibrant discourse linking happiness and well-being to zheng nengliang正能量‎ (“positive energy”) has emerged in China since 2012. Drawing from a variety of disciplines and cultural resources, including positive psychology and ancient cosmological notions, zheng nengliang as a discursive practice is inseparable from wider processes that connect emotional intelligence and happiness with subject- and class-making in the reform era. This chapter outlines the holistic and embodied dimensions of zheng nengliang in popular discourse, and examines how zheng nengliang is used to express emotional well-being and socioeconomic stratification in four public service adverts. Contributing fresh insights into how happiness is promulgated and how happy subjects are constructed in China, it extends the scholarly literature at the intersections of Chinese studies, happiness studies, and media studies.

“As Long as My Daughter Is Happy”

This chapter discusses motivational advocacy work on the part of mainland Chinese parents who are or have been, struggling to come to terms with their now-adult child being lesbian or gay. Taking the recent emergence of the organization PFLAG (Parents, Friends and Family of Lesbians and Gays) organization in China in 2008, and the growing popularity for their outreach work in Chinese media as a starting point, I trace the striking appearance of stories of parental support, love and understanding – or ‘love advocacy’ work. Through a selective reading of two of Popo Fan’s recent documentary films on PFLAG-China’s parental advocacy work, I show the complex emotional framings of love, grief, gender and family norms through variegated articulations of ‘happiness’, as they relate to broader socio-political narratives of national modernity and progress. The discussion, whilst most directly concerned with the modern project of happiness, also points to a broader and more complex nexus of individually felt sensibilities and normative values, whereby gendered identities, sexual orientations and roles within and beyond family relations, are being challenged.

Chinese Happiness

Following decades of disorientating economic, social and societal changes, the Chinese self-help market flourishes. These self-help sources contain many popular sayings that represent wisdoms of life strongly rooted in Daoist and Confucian cosmology and ethics, such as constant change and cyclic thinking, and moral self-cultivation. Such sayings often contain a dialectical phrasing using opposites, and reflect the typically Chinese perceptions of happiness (fu), contentment (zu), and joy (le). They also offer concrete advice on how to navigate happily and smoothly through life. On the one hand, they embody individual strategies for coping with conflicts, failure, grief, powerlessness, and the quirks of fate. On the other hand, these sayings emphasize the importance of harmonizing interpersonal relations (zuo ren). This chapter argues that such popular philosophies are an essential part of today’s folk psychology and popular health discourse, and will lay bare not only their ancient philosophical, but also their psycho-social dimensions.

Happiness in Chinese Socialist Discourse

This 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. It examines the link between the spiritual and the political and argues that the current emphasis on happiness needs to be understood as a continued effort on the part of the CCP to instil the “correct spirit” in China’s population. The author argues that in this process Lu Xun’s Ah Q has turned from a symbol of feudal decay into a role model for China’s citizens. 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 Zhongguo Qingnian中國青年‎ in the 1950s and 1960s are juxtaposed with contemporary sources to illustrate the continuity and differences in the Chinese socialist debates on happiness over the decades.