Doing Personhood in Chinese Culture

The Desiring Individual, Moralist Self and

Relational Person

Yunxiang Yan, University of California, Los Angeles

Abstract
This article starts with a brief ethnography of the social actions in which Chinese
personhood is constructed and then proposes a tripartite approach to help make sense
of personhood as both a state of being and the action of doing. In the process of doing
personhood, the reflective and ethical self is consistently mobilized and employed to fight
against embodied, individuated desires for the purpose of making a proper relational
person who is both social and agentive. This interactive cycle among the individual,
self and person in the construction of Chinese personhood manifests itself repeatedly
in a lifelong process of becoming, marked by earned recognitions, instead of a clearly
defined structure of being that is endorsed by a set of natural rights. Chinese personhood,
therefore, is inherently dynamic.
Keywords: China, desires, divided self, doing personhood, ethical work, relational
person

The construction of personhood and its cross-cultural variation has long been
important in anthropology. Marilyn Strathern’s seminal work (1988) on the partible
person and Melanesian sociality provided such an inspirational addition to an already
sizable literature that the debate on the validity of the contrast between the indivisible
individual in the West and the relational person in the Rest remains a hot topic
(Morgain and Taylor 2015; Mosko 2010). While more recent studies have explored the
individuality and reflective self in non-Western cultures (Lepani 2015; Mookherjee
2013) and the dividual personhood or importance of interpersonal relations in the
modern West (Mosko 2010) or Christian cultures outside the West (Daswani 2011;
Robbins 2004), there has not been an agreed way to define and unpack the construction
of personhood cross-culturally, partially due to the lack of generally agreed terms. Thus
far, the individual, self and person stand out as the most commonly used categories, but
identity, subject and agent have frequently been used too. The conflating, shifting and
sometimes confusing usage of these terms can be frustrating. As Maurice Bloch (2011)

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Yunxiang Yan

notes, ‘it is not that anthropologists are talking about nothing in their discussions of
self, person, agent, personality, identity, etc., but that what they are talking about, and
how far they want to go, cannot be pinned down’.
How to pin down the various issues under discussion was precisely the goal of
Grace Gredys Harris’s 1989 seminal article. She distinguishes three basic conceptions
of human beings as ‘(1) living entities among many such entities in the universe, (2)
human beings who are centers of being or experience, or (3) human beings who are
members of society’, and defines them as biologistic, psychologistic and sociologistic,
represented by the terms individual, self and person, respectively (Harris 1989: 599).
These can be hierarchically arranged, such as the self being shaped by the concept
of person in a South Asian society or the reverse case in an American town (Harris
1989: 607). As a result, to adopt any one of the three conceptions as a central mode of
description and analysis would privilege a particular kind of personhood. In doing so,
Harris falls back to the dualistic model of the indivisible individual of the West versus
the relational person of the Rest.
To meet this challenge, Bloch offers a very different approach to that of Harris.
Rather than taking pains to distinguish the three terms (and a number of others),
he simply lumps them together under the catch-all label ‘the blob’, referring to all
anthropological attempts to ‘describe what it is to be oneself or somebody else, in this or
that place’ (Bloch 2011). By giving up existing terms, such as the individual, self, person,
subject, identity and so on, Bloch wants to build a new ground of comparative studies of
personhood that takes into consideration both the commonly shared cognitive (and, to
a certain extent, the biological) base of all human beings, as well as psychological and
cultural variables. Bloch eventually returns to the term of self when he unpacks the blob
as an entity consisting of three levels of biological-psychological-cultural work with the
narrative self at the top level – that is, personhood as mega-representation of the self.
All the cultural variations of personhood come down to two basic types, argues Bloch,
the kind of people who like to talk about themselves and those who do not. Here, again,
we seem to see the dualistic model of the indivisible individual versus the relational
person slipping in via the back door under the disguise of two kinds of blobs in Bloch’s
approach, which was, ironically, meant to get rid of the dualistic model in the first place.
I agree with Harris on the importance of distinguishing the terms of individual,
self and person, and basically follow her definition when I use them; however, I do
not think the terms should be used alternatively to emphasize the particular features
of personhood in a given culture, such as the self in the United States or the person in
South Asia. In this connection, I adopt Bloch’s suggestion to integrate the individual,
self, person, subject, identity and agent into an operating whole, while also grounding it
in a common biological-cognitive base shared by all human beings. But I disagree with
Bloch’s effort to reduce the cultural variations of personhood to merely the difference
of two types of mega-representations, and I do not think we should replace the existing
terms of individual, self and person with the analytically unproductive label of the blob.
Instead, I would like to retain the commonly used term of personhood, which is defined
by most dictionaries simply as ‘the state of being a person’ (i.e., the blob in Bloch’s
sense), and I propose a tripartite approach to unpack personhood in Chinese culture.
I emphasize that personhood is as much a state of being a person as a process of actual

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social actions in making oneself a person. It is this aspect of doing personhood, along
with the cultural evaluation of it, that may explain the key differences of personhood
cross-culturally, especially across the infamous divide between the West and the Rest.
Doing personhood can hardly be closely examined through cultural representations
of dominant values in a given culture because it is embedded mostly in social actions
of flesh-and-bone. Thus, in the following pages, I start with a brief ethnography of
Chinese personhood in real life and move on to propose the tripartite approach
consisting of the individual, self and person and use it to examine personhood as both
the state of being and the action of doing. I argue that, among the three components of
Chinese personhood, the ethical self is consistently mobilized and employed to fight
against the biological individual for the purpose of making oneself a proper relational
person. This interactive cycle among the individual, self and person in doing Chinese
personhood manifests itself repeatedly in a lifelong process of becoming marked by
earned public recognitions, instead of a clearly defined structure of being endorsed
by a set of natural rights. In the conclusion, I propose that the tripartite approach is
perhaps a more effective way to capture the complexity, dynamics and nuances of the
Chinese personhood, and at the same time render it comparable to cultural variations
of personhood in other parts of the world.

Zuoren: doing personhood in everyday practices

My understanding of Chinese personhood originated from the local notion of zuoren.
In this two-character phrase, the first is a verb meaning to make or to do, and the
second is a noun that stands for human being or person. Literately zuoren means to
make oneself a human being or, simply, doing personhood. In everyday conversations,
zuoren is one of the most common subjects among both the elite and ordinary folks,
regardless of their age, gender or social status; all of them measure the behaviour of
themselves and others in terms of the success or failure in doing personhood. In this
connection, Mr Hu of Xiajia village, where I have conducted fieldwork thirteen times
since 1989, stands out as a particularly noteworthy example.1
Born in 1943 and highly respected as a major village leader for many years before
his retirement in 1988, Mr Hu impressed everyone as a very capable man and probably
the most powerful father figure in the community, maintaining a rich, close-knit family
of ten people spanning four generations. He became my best friend in the village by
the late 1970s and has been one of my key informants since the late 1980s, proactively
participating in all of my thirteen fieldwork visits between 1989 and 2015. As he and I
aged together over the past decade or so, we spent increasingly more time discussing
the subject of doing personhood, or zuoren in Mr Hu’s expression. During each of these
lengthy conversations, Mr Hu reflected how he stood in the process of zuoren and also
commented on and evaluated his family members, relatives, close friends and fellow
villagers in their moral career of doing personhood.
His principle criterion of making these moral judgements about himself and other
people is whether those in question can control their desires and self-interest, and then
act to realize a morally higher goal. From Mr Hu I learned about a couple living next
door, who were extremely frugal and hard-working, refusing to buy good food or new

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clothing for themselves for decades, yet building the best houses and spending the
largest amounts on bride wealth to get their two sons married in style. Another couple
was known to be generous on gift-giving occasions, despite the fact that they had little
chance of receiving a return gift because they are childless and could hardly host any
gift-receiving ceremonies. Mr Hu also frequently brought up a friend who risked his
life to save the village accounting books from a fire in 1970.
According to Mr Hu, a warm and affectionate family lasting through generations,
harmonious and ever-expanding circles of relatives and friends, and public recognition
of one’s contributions – not only to family but also to the community at large – constitute
the entirety of the notion of zuoren. He used the Chinese terms jiating [family], renqing
[emotional ties] and mingsheng [renown or public reputation] to represent these three
dimensions of making oneself a human being and provided countless examples through
the moral judgements he made (for similar observations in other parts of China, see
Wang 2014). He judged himself as doing well in zuoren because he quit school at the
age of fifteen to work for his family, he ignored two suggestions of extra-marital affairs
from female colleagues and he persevered in winning back the friendship of his uncle,
whom he had offended by refusing to use public resources to benefit him. Yet Mr Hu
continued to reflect on his missteps and weaknesses, such as his failure to communicate
with his wife, which was discussed in a rather dramatic family gathering that I featured
in my previous work (Yan 2003: 2–3).
Regrets for not doing better occupy a central place in Mr Hu’s reflections on doing
personhood. In some cases, he obviously judged himself too harshly. For example, he
had an opportunity to join the army when he was eighteen. Had he gone, his entire life
might have been different; after military service, he would have been assigned a job in a
government agency or a factory in an urban area. He did not take the opportunity because
of his mother’s objection. As a filial son, he obeyed his mother, but was upset for years.
This decision must be very important and meaningful to Mr Hu, as he brought it
up at least once during each of my field visits to the village. His reflection gradually
changed, however, from lamenting the lost opportunity to feeling apologetic towards
his mother, as he began to take into consideration her feelings and perspective:

As I grew older myself, I became more capable of putting myself into my mother’s shoes
and could see the whole thing differently. I would probably do the same if I were in my
mother’s situation – a peasant woman who had not even travelled twenty-five kilometres
to visit the county seat. She viewed the outside world as full of dangers, she worried about
me and she did all she could to protect me. I should not have been upset with her at that
time and was wrong to blame her for that lost opportunity for so many years. I truly felt I
let my mother down [duibuqi; more on this Chinese term later in this article]. (Interview
with Hu on 21 September 2013)

My long-lasting friendship and conversations with Mr Hu on doing personhood

also grew deeper because of our close association: I lived in his house and shared three
meals a day with his family during all my fieldwork visits. But my interviews with the
other villagers over twenty-eight years spurred similar reflective discussions, which
together offered me a much wider catalogue of personal experiences, reflections and
positionalities, as shown in the tragic case of Aunty Liu.2

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Widowed in her early thirties with a single son, Aunty Liu lived in a neighbouring
village, but had kinship ties with several families in Xiajia village. According to several
of her relatives, she was a petite woman of modest but strong character. She rejected
several suitors after her husband died and was determined to raise her son on her own.
She single-handedly farmed the household land and ran a sideline business at the same
time, earning enough to send her son to the best schools. She astonished fellow villagers
when her son triumphed in the highly competitive national exam and entered a top
university. After he graduated, her son found a well-paid professional job in Beijing
and regularly sent money home.
Aunty Liu became one of the most respected persons in her village, exemplifying
the moral career of doing personhood (zuoren), except for one imperfection – her
son wanted to concentrate on his career development and seemed unaffected by his
mother’s wish to see him married. Aunty Liu worried that the community would
continue to gossip about it, and her concern pushed her into depression. She shared
her strong feeling of shame and apology with only two of her best female friends, saying
that she had let her husband down (again, duibuqi in Chinese) and did not do well in
zuoren. After seeing no wish from her son to get married during his 2014 home visit,
Aunty Liu committed suicide.
Mr Hu regarded Aunty Liu as an exemplary person of virtue, who had established
her reputation through devotion to raising her son after being widowed, but he could
not fully understand why she had taken her own life and simply attributed it to the
narrowness of a woman’s mind. Yet when I discussed this case with several female
informants, they disagreed with Hu and argued just the opposite: Aunty Liu had a
much bigger heart than men could appreciate. ‘What is the most important in terms
of zuoren? It is the care for others’, these women explained to me. Aunty Liu put her
own self-interest aside and worked very hard to raise her son, but men could do this
as well. What men rarely do, they said, is to care about others’ feelings. As a parent, a
man or woman would feel the same shame for failing to get a son married as it is one of
the important and obligatory tasks that one must complete in order to be a full person.
And the same is true for having grandchildren. This is why Aunty Liu was so ashamed
of herself. But being a good person to women, as my female informants continued to
educate me, also meant being sensitive to others’ feelings and helping others to fulfil
their life tasks and achieve what they yearn to have. Once Aunty Liu learned that her
son wanted to concentrate on his work and enjoy life in the big city instead of getting
married at an early age, she stopped pushing him and kept all her concerns, shame and
sense of failure to herself. ‘Her son was just too selfish to consider his mother’s feelings.
He was unable to feel his mother’s heart because he is a man. He let his mother down’,
one female informant concluded, again using the local phrase duibuqi to judge the son.
I must add at this point that village men do value the capacity to care for others,
but they focus more on needs instead of feelings. Mr Hu’s reflection on his mother’s
need to have her only son stay at home is a good example in this connection. Women,
though, seem to be more sensitive to this quality of personhood and, as in the case of
Aunty Liu’s suicide, to the ability of empathetic understanding about other people’s
feelings as well as needs.

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Aunty Liu’s case shows that the virtue of proactively prioritizing another person’s
needs and feelings, however, can create an unnecessary moral burden on those who
strive to do good. Mr Chen, an undergraduate student at UCLA, is another example.
He is a tall, handsome and gentle young man, speaking excellent English and playing
basketball like a pro. He is also a self-driven, well-organized, thrifty worker, never being
self-indulgent or wasteful, even though his parents have provided their only son with
unconditional support. Everything appeared to be perfectly fine, except that Chen was
depressed and struggled to concentrate on his coursework, no matter how hard he
tried. Over a period of one and a half years, his academic performance continued to
decline, and so did his psychological condition.
During lengthy conversations with student Chen, I finally discovered that he was
passionate about the arts and had long desired to become an architect. Yet he was
majoring in mathematics at UCLA and planning to earn an MBA, before seeking a
successful career in finance. He confided to me that he was not interested in mathematics
and hated finance even more, but felt compelled to pursue these studies because his
parents would be very happy to see him thriving in the finance field. When I asked him
bluntly why he was bending over backwards to please his parents, he explained:

My parents loved me so much, gave me everything and took care of everything, even
before I knew what I needed. I feel I ought to do the same for them. Although they never
said they wanted me to be a successful financier, I can tell that it would make them proud
of me and very happy. That is why I am working for a career in finance. I feel good that
I can do this, but, on the other hand, I feel so bad that I do not have the talent or the
interest in it. (Personal conversation with Chen on 4 May 2015)

Like Mr Hu and Aunty Liu, student Chen went the extra mile to detect his parents’
feelings and needs, and then pushed himself hard to fulfil what he perceived their
wishes to be. The sensitivity to detect and ability to care for the needs and feelings of
another are highly valued in the Chinese process of doing personhood, which requires
that a person always keep the other party in mind (cf. Strathern 1988) and reach out to
them. Whenever I tried to characterize the sensitivity and ability to care for others as a
virtue of generosity, my interviewees would correct me by emphasizing two important
yet less visible factors. The first is a caution not to understand the sensitivity towards the
other party as offering material help only; equally important is to help the other party
progress in the lifelong moral career of doing personhood. The second is the proactive
nature of such a virtuous ability, that is, one should do all the right things for the other
party without the latter’s request. As Mr Yang, a village teacher, explained succinctly,
‘Zuoren means making yourself a human being by helping others achieve the same you
desire to have’. (Interview with Yang on 2 August 2006)
In a similar vein, Liang Shuming (1941), arguably one of the most influential ethicists
in China, claims that the primary guiding principle of Chinese ethics is to mutually
recognize and prioritize the other party’s needs and feelings in social interactions. This
is also why Mr Hu regards emotional ties and affective interactions with other people
as one of the three primary dimensions of doing personhood and why several women
informants in my study pointed out that the deeper ethical reason behind Aunty Liu’s

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suicide is her sensitivity in feeling her son’s new life aspirations and her effort to help
him achieve them.
It should be noted that the virtue of prioritizing the other party is defined, and
also confined, by the social structure of a close-knit society of kin and acquaintances
with low social mobility. In such a setting, social actors are embedded in lifelong
dyadic relations with little chance of breaking out, and are certain about the mutuality
and continuity of the give-and-take practices over a long period of time. This is why
memory plays such an important role in the operation of renqing ethics in traditional
Chinese culture (see Oxfeld 2010), and more importantly, why both parties in a given
relationship are expected to sacrifice self-interest and mutually put the other party’s
interest above their own.
All of these would encounter serious challenges once the social actors venture into
the unfamiliar sphere of interacting with strangers. As I noted in an earlier study on
immorality (Yan 2014), some people might extort money from a person who has helped
them in a time of distress, and producers and traders of altered and often poisonous
foods feel no inner guilt when they purposely add poisonous chemicals to the foods
they sell to strangers. In these cases, the moralist self is still at work, but working in
the opposite direction, that is, working to justify and prioritize individual desires and
self-interest because there is no longer any constraint on the relational person in the
context of strangers.

A tripartite approach to unpacking Chinese personhood in action

Several implications arise here. First and foremost, the process of zuoren, or doing
personhood, clearly constitutes the moral career of my informants who feel compelled
to achieve the status of a good person by fulfilling obligations and doing good deeds. To
do so, they measure themselves and others in terms of the ability and actual action to
control desires and self-interest for the benefit of the other party in social interactions.
Being selfish or self-centred, therefore, is always looked down upon as a vice; conversely,
self-sacrifice is always praised as one of the highest virtues. It appears almost impossible
to get a neutral description of a person or personhood from my informants: moral
judgements come side by side with their comments and stories about the flesh-and-
bone individuals. By contemporary American standards, these informants are all
moralists as they invariably insist that their own understanding of ethic norms is the
only correct version and, in most cases, they also impose their moral values on other
people. Doing personhood, therefore, is a morally charged process.
Second, they all reveal a strong sense of the reflective ethical self, which is manifested
in the frequently used local phrases ‘duibuqi/duideqi’. When someone reflects on the
wrongs they have done to someone else and uses this phrase – like Mr Hu’s introspection
about being upset with his mother or Aunty Liu’s anguish about failing her late husband
– duibuqi is best translated as ‘letting someone down’. But, more often, one reflects on
the good things one has done to another person and changes the phrase into a positive
or affirmative expression of duideqi. Then, the translation becomes ‘being worthy of
someone’s kindness (or trust, support, love, etc.)’. Moreover, duideqi is also employed
to reflect whether one’s behaviour or action is honest or worthy of one’s own inner

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self, and the translation might be something like ‘looking one’s conscience straight
in the eye’. My informants use both duibuqi and duideqi in all these contexts all the
time, constantly asking questions: ‘Did you let so-and-so down?’ ‘Are you worthy of
so-and-so’s care?’ This local use of duibuqi/duideqi can also be understood as a notion
of moral accountability when it is examined as a particular ethical-psychological
phenomenon. Linking this to their trait of being moralists, mentioned earlier, I am
tempted to characterize the reflective self of my informants as the moralist self, a term
I use hereafter in this article.
Third, the ethical work of the moralist self is oriented towards making oneself a
proper relational person.3 In the cases discussed above, the other party – the object of
ethical reflection – is always in a dyadic and often close relationship with the thinking
moralist self, such as Mr Hu and his mother, Aunty Liu and her son (and late husband),
or student Chen and his parents. They perform all the reflections, self-disciplinary
actions and moral judgements on both themselves and other people for the purpose of
cultivating themselves into the ideal personhood defined in these dyadic interpersonal
relations; hence, they emphasize self-sacrifice, modesty and proactive caring for the
other person’s needs and feelings. This logic goes into the sphere of public life in the
same way. When Mr Hu was reflecting on whether he could face his own conscience in
his career as village head, he used the interpersonal relationship with fellow villagers as
the reference point of his moral reasoning and judging whether he had let these fellow
villagers down (duideqi/duibuqi) in his administrative work.
In a different case that I examined elsewhere (Yan 2009: 183–206), the money-
lender Mr Wang took extra effort to offer gifts and free labour to fellow villagers. He
also willingly (as well as strategically) lost money in some business deals because he
wanted to ensure his reputation as a good person in the community, while making
steep profits from his money-lending business. This is because, after all, the reputation
of filial son, devoted wife, caring mother or considerate businessman are all relationally
defined and embedded, and one’s moral worth in social life can only be achieved
through cultivating proper relations with other people. Wise Mr Wang always loved to
share this ultimate reflection with me during our conversations: ‘You are nobody and
worthless if you do not have a good reputation and good relations with people. That is
renqing, the very thing that makes us human’. (For more details, see Yan 2009; for my
extended discussion of the renqing ethics, see Yan 1996.)
What the ethnographic evidence in my study reveals is an ever-dynamic process in
which the moralist self is often mobilized to control one’s desires and self-interests in
order to achieve the higher goal of making oneself a proper relational person. This is, I
dare assert, the overarching theme in doing personhood (zuoren) not only among my
interviewees but also in Chinese culture in general. Intriguingly, this is also precisely
what Confucius famously said when he was asked to explain his notion of benevolence/
humanity [ren], the ultimate virtue and highest level of moral personhood. ‘Keji fuli wei
ren’, which he defined in only four words, means (in English): ‘to overcome one’s selfish
desires and restore the lost cultural proprieties is benevolence/humanity’ (The Analects,
Yanyuan: 1). Here I have neither the intention nor the space to explore the link between
the moral career of doing personhood among ordinary folks and the elite discourse of
Confucian ethics. Suffice it to say that how individuals control their intuitive desires

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and transform them into virtuous motivations of doing good is the central concern
of Confucianism, especially the neo-Confucian discourse on the individual, self and
person since the eleventh century (see Tu 1985; Aims 2011). It is intriguing, however,
to see how ordinary people managed to operationalize the same principle in the process
of doing personhood and, in a way, practise Confucian ethics yet without referring to
any of the elite discourses.
Based on the above findings and in light of Harris’s and Bloch’s works, I propose a
tripartite approach to the Chinese personhood, in which the individual, self and person
are three functioning components of the wholeness of personhood. The individual
refers mostly to the desires and self-interests in personhood and, thus, appears to be
biologistic, intuitive and embodied. The self stands for the evaluation of desires and
self-interests, and the judgement of outcomes from satisfying them, either in real or
imagined terms; therefore, it is always reflective, psychologistic and ethical. The person
represents the socially approved role that can be realized only in social action and is
thus sociologistic, agentive and relational.
In real-life situations, personhood is acted out through the combined work of all
three components, but the weight of each of them (or the specific role they play) in
a given social action may vary greatly, depending on how a flesh-and-bone social
actor interacts with the specific social environment and the other party in a social
relationship. The thinking self, however, also works post-factually and, thus, helps to
redirect the social actor’s action next time. As a result, personhood consists of a series
of social actions, instead of merely a number of stated cultural traits.
Chinese personhood, understood as such a dynamic process, can be represented
by the interactions among the desiring individual, moralist self, and relational person,
as shown in Diagram 1.

Diagram 1.  Chinese personhood as a dynamic process.

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Yunxiang Yan

In light of this tripartite approach, we can see clearly that the Chinese personhood
exists in real life as a process of becoming, which is constantly measured and evaluated
by the moralist self. Such a sense of becoming is embedded inherently in the notion
of zuoren, or doing personhood, and, by definition, the process of doing is more
important than the state of being. As my informants reminded me repeatedly, they
strove to do better and better, in terms of fulfilling their obligations to family and
relations, expanding their personal networks in local society and also cultivating a
good reputation in public life. These three domains, as indicated in the first section,
are generalized by Mr Hu as jiating [family], renqing [emotional ties] and mingsheng
[reputation]. In all three dimensions of doing personhood, the proactive intention of
controlling one’s own desires while prioritizing the other person’s needs represents the
higher level of becoming human, and thus is used as another yardstick by which to
measure oneself and judge others as well.
This tripartite approach also enables us to better understand the inner struggles
among those who are torn between the old and new ethical demands, as evidenced in
the case of Mr Wei. With a successful career in the finance sector in Shanghai, Mr Wei is
a 37-year-old gay man who married a straight woman, a loving father to their daughter,
a filial son to his aging parents and also a romantic lover to his partner. On the surface,
he seems to manage all these complicated relations well and has always been praised as
a good person by the people he interacts with. Yet, after having two initial interviews
with me, he gradually shared with me his moral quandary and inner pain, raising a
sharp question to himself:

The most important part of making oneself a human being [zuoren] is not to let down
those people [duideqi] who care about you and whom you respect. In our old saying, this
is to hold yourself accountable to the heaven, earth, parents and your own conscience
[duideqi tiandi fumu liangxin]. I have been trying my very best to be good and not let
anyone down, including my boss at the company. But what about myself? Do I really
duideqi myself? (Interview with Wei on 9 June 2013, Shanghai)

As noted above, the Chinese phrase duideqi can be understood as the notion of
moral accountability. When Mr Wei raised the question of whether he had let himself
down or was being accountable to his inner self, I immediately sensed a new way of
moral reasoning. I probed Mr Wei to explain: ‘You treated all these people so well and
earned an excellent reputation for being a good person, while having a good career,
good family and comfortable life. You certainly duideqi yourself, did you not?’ He
looked at me, paused for a minute or so with a hint of sadness in his eyes, and then
decided to vent:

What you and other people saw is not the real me. I lived a double life. It is true that I did
everything I was expected to do and I am an achiever all around. But I did not want to
marry a woman, did not want to raise a child with her and did not want to stay in this city
for the rest of my life. Deep in my heart, I wanted to marry Little Zhang [his boyfriend
since college], move to Los Angeles or San Francisco, and live a free life with Little Zhang
as a gay couple. The reality is brutal. I had to marry a woman and have a child because I
am morally bound to my parents, who cannot live without these [cf. the case of Aunty Liu
in the first section]. I am still in love with Little Zhang but we can only meet secretly, and

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I cannot tell my wife my true love because it would hurt her. I cheated everyone and this
is why I was praised by everyone. I cannot live my true life and be my true self out in the
sunlight. I kept telling myself that hiding is the only way to be a good person. I actually
have been cheating myself too. This is why I said I had let myself down because I could
not hold myself accountable to my own conscience! I am actually a big loser in zuoren.

Like Aunty Liu and student Chen, Mr Wei obviously could, and indeed did, mobilize
the reflective self in his personhood to oppress his more intuitive desires, and bent over
backwards to meet the social expectations of others in order to make himself a proper
relational person. Yet, unlike Aunty Liu (but to a certain extent like student Chen),
Mr Wei also values his desires and feelings, which led him to acknowledge that he has
been cheating everyone, including himself. More importantly, he also believes that the
authentic self is the most valuable part of personhood and, thus, views his otherwise
good deeds in life as evidence of failing to be accountable to himself. The inner hierarchy
between the moralist self and desiring individual in a given personhood, arguably the
unique and central feature of Chinese personhood, has been subverted in Mr Wei’s case
and even turned upside down in his mind, as he aspired to become an authentic good
person who is honest to his embodied desires, instead of the public recognition of him
as a good relational person. But he could only do so in his ethical reflections, instead
of real-life practice.
Mr Wei’s case is by no means unique in contemporary Chinese society. According
to recent surveys and media reports, there are fifteen to seventeen million gay men
married to straight women due to social pressure from parents, relatives and other social
ties. We do not know how many of them would be able to reflect their moral dilemma
as thoughtfully as Mr Wei. It is clear, however, that an increasingly large number of
Chinese people have begun to challenge the conventional way of doing personhood,
either in ethical reflections like Mr Wei or in social action in other cases. For example,
the 2010 survey on marriage conditions by the All China Women’s Federation showed
that an estimated thirty-five to forty million women, aged twenty-seven years or older,
remain single. These women were negatively labelled as ‘leftover women’ because
women are expected to marry before reaching twenty-seven and will encounter social
difficulties past that age. Despite the social bias in general, and parental interference in
particular, many single women refuse to lower their standards when choosing a spouse
and strive to be a person on their own terms, leading to heated public discourse on the
‘leftover women’ phenomenon (see Leta 2014). In a similar vein, Aunty Liu’s son also
took a bold action against the stereotypical relational person by refusing to marry as
his mother expected, although I have no information about his ethical reflections as his
voice was completely missing from the moral discourse among my informants.
An important factor here is the changing place of the desiring individual in
Chinese personhood. Embodied desires have long been denied and oppressed in
both the traditional Confucian ethics and the communist ethics under Maoism.4 The
breakthrough came in the 1990s after market-oriented reforms and the globalization
process radically altered the social landscape in mainland China. The legitimization
of desires in social practice (see Rofel 2007) and the new inspiration to live a life of
one’s own (Yan 2009, 2016) have posed serious challenges to the Chinese personhood,
resulting in the entanglement of the old and new ethical values and paradoxical moral

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Yunxiang Yan

behaviour. Chief among all important social changes are what I have referred to as
the individualization of the Chinese society in terms of social structure (Yan 2009,
2010) and diversification of the moral landscape in terms of ethical values and moral
behaviour (Yan 2016). This is why, for example, a teacher, Mr Fan, could openly justify
his act of running away from his students during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan. He
was condemned by many as a selfish coward, but he also received almost equal support
for his honesty in admitting his intuitive desire to run to safety. When Dr Li, a well-
known sociologist, declared that her partner was not a woman but a transgendered
man, she too received harsh criticism and attacks along with understanding and support
from the public (Yan 2016). In both cases, the intuitive desires of the given person are
no longer judged with a fixed, one-size-fits-all ethical norm in the public discourse, due
to the legitimization of these desires and the modification of the moralist self among
many people. Consequently, we see the diversification of the Chinese personhood as
well.

Concluding remarks
In Chinese culture, personhood is as much an action as a statement or narration;
alternatively, it is as much a process of becoming as a structure of being. Doing
personhood is a lifelong moral career and can only be achieved by way of consistent
and constant fulfilment of one’s moral obligations towards others, instead of a moment
of revelation or inspired acts of self-discovery. My emphasis on doing personhood
instead of stating/narrating personhood, therefore, may shed new light on the existing
studies of personhood in China and beyond.
In order to detect and capture the mechanism of, and nuances in, this process of
becoming a human being (zuoren in Chinese), I propose a tripartite approach to the
Chinese personhood, by which I first identify the three components of personhood
as a whole: the desiring individual, the moralist self and the relational person. I then
examine the changing relationships and tensions among the three, in order to discover
the driving forces or the mechanisms that make the cultural construction of personhood
such a dynamic and fluid process in Chinese society. The key is to detect, unpack and
interpret the changing weight of any particular one on the other two among the trio.
Among the three components, the moralist self seems to have played the dominant
role in doing personhood in Chinese culture. Underneath all the social actions I
examined above is the hard and sometimes harsh ethical work of the moralist self
that aims to control the intuitive desires of the individual in order to make oneself a
relational person (i.e. a decent human being). In this connection, I agree with Mark
Elvin (1985) that it is simply wrong to assume, as most existing studies do, the absence
of a reflective self in Chinese culture; yet I disagree with Elvin that the Chinese reflective
self is the same as its counterpart in the modern West. As illustrated by Mr Hu, Aunty
Liu and student Chen, they invariably orient their reflections towards the goal of
maintaining and improving the intimate circle of interpersonal relations, which defines
their own identity and existence. Such a relational, instead of individual, orientation
of ethical work remains powerful, and this is why Mr Wei has to contort himself in
real-life situations to fit the model role of relational person. This may also explain why

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 Doing Personhood in Chinese Culture

so many Chinese seek therapeutic treatments for the purpose of better handling their
relationship with others, instead of searching the inner self (Zhang 2017).
This tripartite approach renders the Chinese personhood meaningful in comparable
studies because, in my view, the coexistence of the three components is commonly
shared cross-culturally. The intuitive desires and personal interests exist inside the flesh-
and-bone individuals of all cultures and social groups, regardless of their differences
in history, polity, ethnicity, religion, gender or age. Yet the relationship between the
desiring individual and the reflective moral self would vary greatly across time and
space, which in turn results in cross-cultural variations of personhood.
Viewed through this lens, I do not see the Chinese personhood and its counterpart
in the modern West as two radically different or even opposite types. The ‘indivisible
individual’ in the West and the ‘relational person’ in China share the same personhood
structure with three components, among which the embodied, intuitive desires and
personal interest are identical as well. The important factor, which sets the two grand
categories of personhood apart, is that, in the modern West, the reflective self has been
doing the ethical work of justifying and legitimizing various kinds of individual desires,
ranging from political freedom to consumer wants to sexual orientation, all in the name
of individual rights. In the Chinese case, until very recently, the opposite is at work –
the reflective self has been mobilized to control the various kinds of desires in order to
fulfil obligations to collectivities, ranging from the family to the nation-state. Here it
is worth mentioning that, ever since Mauss’s breakthrough work on the notion of the
person ([1938] 1985: 1–25), only the Western type of ethical reflections are counted as
the expression of the inner and autonomous self, while the Chinese type, or any other
type of ethical reflections, would be discounted, resulting in a blind spot in the studies
of personhood in non-Western cultures, as well as the infamous dualism between the
Western indivisible individual and the non-Western relational person.
In a similar vein, the tripartite approach may also make the Chinese case comparable
to its counterpart in the Melanesian cultures. The departure point remains the same;
that is, the various kinds of individual desires and personal interests of the sexual,
political, spiritual and materialistic can be found in the Melanesian personhood as
well, as can the ethical reflections on how to make oneself a decent human being. What
sets the Melanesian case apart is the prevalent ethical reflections on one’s attachments
to others through the exchange of bodily substances and material gifts, which defines
the local personhood as a composite formed of relations with a plurality of other
personhoods – the ‘partible person’, to use Strathern’s term. It would be misleading,
however, to deny the role of the self in the partible person because, after all, starting
from K. E. Read (1955), nearly all ethnographic accounts of the Melanesian personhood
rely on local people’s accounts of what constitutes a proper person, which are, in my
view, the undisputable evidence of the ethical work of the self. The working of the self
in Melanesian personhood, however, does not take the moralist form of the Chinese
case: replacing the role of ethics in Confucianism (Aims 2011) is the animist beliefs
of Melanesian religions that do not separate persons from things (Mauss [1938] 1985:
1–25; Strathern 1988). In other words, the work of the reflective self, in both Melanesian
societies and Chinese society, is similar in terms of its role in constructing the relational

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Yunxiang Yan

person. Yet separation between persons and things has long been established in
traditional Chinese culture; thus, the Chinese personhood is relational yet not partible.
If the above inference makes sense, I even dare to propose that the tripartite approach
can bring cross-cultural variations of personhood into a comparative framework.
While the component of intuitive desires and interest remains universally the same,
the other two components and the interplay among the three components vary from
one culture to another. For example, we might think of the desiring individual, rational
self and autonomous person in the modern West and the desiring individual, animist
self and partible person in Pacific Island societies, and then compare the two types
of personhood with the Chinese personhood of the desiring individual, moralist self
and relational person. The key difference, let me reiterate, is caused by social actions
of flesh-and-bone individuals in real life, instead of narrations about the self. Even
though the ideology of individualism in the modern West presumes the inner self as
a priori existence, we cannot have it until we discover it through our social actions. In
this sense, doing personhood is also cross-culturally common, but may be carried out
differently in specific ways. It is these specific ways of doing personhood that lead to
the unnecessary dichotomy between the indivisible individual in the modern West and
the relational person in the Rest.

Acknowledgements
This article was first presented as the 2016 Annual Marilyn Strathern lecture at King’s
College, Cambridge on 26 May 2016. I am grateful to James Laidlaw for the invitation
and Stephan Feuchtwang, Charles Stafford, Liu Qing and Xu Jilin and the audience at
the lecture for their insightful comments on the early drafts or the presentation. I also
owe thanks to reviewers and editors for support and help during the process of turning
the public lecture into the current article.

Yunxiang Yan is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles,

and Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Policy and Social Development, Fudan
University, China. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks
in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press, 1996), Private Life under Socialism:
Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999 (Stanford University
Press, 2003) and The Individualization of Chinese Society (Berg, 2009). His research
interests include family and kinship, social change, the individual and individualization,
and moral changes in post-Mao China.

Notes
  1. Located in Heilongjiang province, in north-east China, Xiajia was a rural community of 1,273 people
in 2015. I lived and worked as an ordinary farmer in this village from 1971 to 1978 and then left for
college. I returned to conduct long-term fieldwork in 1989 and 1991. Since then, I have revisited the
community, for one to four weeks at a time, in 1993, 1994, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011,
2013 and 2015. (For more details about the community, see Yan 1996: 22–42; and 2003: 27–41.)

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 Doing Personhood in Chinese Culture

  2. Although the theme of zuoren, or doing personhood, has yet to be a central issue in the anthropology
of China, most ethnographic accounts of Chinese social life touch upon it in one way or another. For
those who explore the normal and ethical aspects of interpersonal relations (i.e. guanxi) and morality,
the proper or improper ways of doing personhood are inevitably explored to a great extent. See, for
example, Fei [1948] 1992; Hwang 1987; King 1985; Kipnis 1997; Liu 2000; Oxfeld 2010; Stafford 2013;
Yan 1996 and 2003.
  3. A lengthy note is warranted here. The central importance of interpersonal relations in the cultural
construction of Chinese personhood has long been extensively explored and discussed by China
scholars, and the notion of relational person has also been widely used in this ever-expanding literature.
Arguably one of the earliest studies, and certainly the most influential, is by Fei Xiaotong in the 1940s.
He argues that the Chinese social structure is made possible through a differential mode of association,
by which individuals socially exist only through networks of dyadic and personal relations. The Chinese
personhood, or self, consequently, is relationally defined as well (Fei [1948] 1992). Another thread in
the existing literature on the relational Chinese person switches entirely to the network of personal
ties, known as guanxi in Chinese (see Gold et al. 2002; Hwang 1987; King 1985; Kipnis 1997; Yan
1996; Yang 1994), and, in a similar vein, defines the Chinese personhood implicitly or explicitly as a
type of relational person, putting it into contrast with the indivisible individual in the modern West.
Yet, missing from this widely shared view on the relational person in Chinese culture is the actual
zuoren process that is full of social actions in real life. A noteworthy and groundbreaking effort was
recently made by a young Chinese scholar whose dissertation-turned-book unpacks the process of
self-realization through the dual-track expansion of the self and the personal network, or guanxi
(Wang 2014). Yet this courageous effort fell short of overemphasizing the unique psychological traits
of the Chinese personhood, including the lack of the reflective moral self, and consequently renders it
incomparable with other cases in the world.
  4. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the Chinese elite and later the leaders of the Chinese state made
numerous efforts to reform the Chinese personhood, known as building the new citizen or person. The
inner logic of these projects of social engineering on personhood, ironically, remains the same as my
tripartite approach demonstrates in this article, that is, to mobilize the moralist self against the desiring
individual in order to build the proper relational person (see Cheng 2009 for a historical account; see
also Yan 2010). Due to space limitation, I have to omit this important history of reforming the Chinese
personhood by the nation-state and plan to examine it in a separate article.

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