Against Three Í Culturalí Characters Speaks Self-Improvement - Social Critique and Desires For Í Modernityí in Pedagogies of Soft Skills in Contemporary China

Against Three “Cultural” Characters Speaks
Self-Improvement: Social Critique and Desires

for “Modernity” in Pedagogies of Soft Skills in
Contemporary China
Gil Hizi
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney
Despite recent socioeconomic transformations, young adults in China construe local social norms
as inhibiting their individualized selfhood. Based on a study of pedagogies of interpersonal “soft”
skills, this article describes an apparatus of self-improvement where self- and social critique play a
pivotal role. Through comparison with Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” I illustrate that self-
improvement in China is largely oriented toward performative expressions that counteract the
“local” rather than the habituation of virtues or skills. [Chinese education, self-improvement,
soft skills, urban China, technologies of the self]
[Correction added on January 22, 2021, after first online publication: The article title has been
updated.]
Introduction
Practices of “self-improvement” often endeavor to habituate behaviors and values con-
sistent with wider cultural systems. In China, anthropologists in the last two decades
have discerned new market-driven forms of self-cultivation as evidence for the penetra-
tion of self-reliant and individualistic subject positions (e.g., Hoffman 2010; Otis 2011; Yan
2008; Yan 2013; Yang 2015; Zhang 2017), much like the situation in other economically
changing societies (see Cahn 2008; Dunn 2014; Gooptu 2016; Kim 2016; Rudnyckyj 2011).
This phenomenon is notable in Chinese public education where policymakers and educa-
tors increasingly regard person-centered qualities as beneficial for the healthy growth of
children as well as conducive to market productivity (Central Committee of the Chinese
Communist Party and the State Council 1999; Kuan 2015; Naftali 2014; Woronov 2003).
Although these reforms have not been applied consistently (Kipnis 2011; Woronov 2003,
2008), new educational values have gained currency among households and schools.
Influenced by these principles along with additional market-driven and psychotherapeu-
tic expertise, extracurricular person-centered practices have mushroomed and become
relatively accessible for Chinese urbanites. Interestingly, however, these discursive prac-
tices cast local “cultural” norms as antagonistic to the realization of the individual “self.”
Moreover, as my findings in workshops for interpersonal “soft” skills demonstrate, this
social critique becomes indispensable from the pedagogic practice itself.
This next scenario, taken from a program called Heart’s Secret, demonstrates this phe-
nomenon. During a one-day “salon” titled “the power of feelings” (qingxu de liliang), in-
structor Ping requested that the participants, many of whom were strangers to each other
before that day, divide into groups of four. Then he asked them to introduce themselves to
their group by stating how they felt at that moment. In my group, two participants made
short optimistic statements (“glad and relaxed,” “curious, grateful”) whereas the final
Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Vol. 52, Issue 3, pp. 237–253, ISSN 0161-7761, online ISSN 1548-1492.
© 2021 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/aeq.12366
237
238 Anthropology & Education Quarterly Volume 52, 2021
peer shared a troubling feeling concerning her personal life. Next, Ping asked that three
participants at a time compliment the personality of the other peer with one adjective.
“You seem an attentive (xixin) person,” “honest” (laoshi), “passionate” (you jiqing) were
among the endorsements expressed in my group. Later, Ping invited us to reflect on this
exercise in a class discussion but not before he stressed that in Chinese culture people
are not accustomed to expressing sincere praise or attending to each other’s momentary
moods. Moreover, he said, Chinese are not able to accept compliments that would allow
them to nourish their self-esteem. During the subsequent reflections by participants, a
36-year-old man, a newcomer to this program, said that he enjoyed making “guanxi,”
a Chinese term for interpersonal ties that is associated with interdependence and gift
exchange. Ping laughed with a hint of bitterness and requested the other participants,
more versed in the program, to correct this “error.” One female participant explained that
“guanxi” entails flattery (paimapi) and denying real feelings, attributes that are opposi-
tional to their exercise. The man nodded. Later in the lunch break I saw another partici-
pant further clarifying to this man why this pedagogy goes against the grain of “Chinese”
forms of relationship (October 2015, field note).
Drawing on findings in pedagogies of soft skills in the city of Jinan and interviews with
practitioners, this article analyzes the ethics of self-improvement in China, focusing on a
key feature of self- and social critique. I delineate the relationship between self-improve-
ment and the wider social reality and how it is configured by practitioners. My aim is
not to decipher to which degree Chinese society has become “individualistic” but rather
to describe the incongruencies that people identify between their ideals of personhood
and their lifeworlds, and how these are reified and amplified through person-centered
pedagogies.
Ideologies of person making in China cannot be fully understood without addressing
people’s imagined relationship between self-improvement and the command of “tradi-
tion.” Clearly, cultural values pertaining to social interdependence and kinship responsi-
bilities have not entirely transformed through recent changes (e.g., Harmon 2014; Osburg,
2013). Social actors also experience a chasm between market-driven values, including
the imperative of self-reliance, and the morality of state institutions, which still displays
collectivist agendas and coercive governance.1. Moral inconsistencies fuel widespread
perceptions on the limits of individualization and the shackles of “culture,” thereby
extending an ongoing discourse about “modernity” in China. Since the “New Cultural
Movement,” which emerged in the mid-1910s in resistance to both foreign imperialism
and feudal-Confucian social institutions, globalized expertise, and in particular concep-
tions of the individualized subject, signified the release of citizens from the shackles of tra-
ditions and in turn the constitution of an egalitarian society (Lee 2006; Liu 1996, 177–180).
During this period a local ethos of “developmentalism” emerged, which, as Andrew Jones
(2011, 6) argues, is a “form of pedagogy through which the enlightened are entrusted with
the elevation of the as-yet undeveloped.” 2.This perspective has extended since that time,
culminating in the period of “cultural craze” (wenhua re) in the 1980s, when Chinese poli-
ticians, intellectuals, and journalists debated in different forums on how to achieve a state
of “wenming” (i.e., “a state of civility that is closely identified with the advanced industrial
cultures of Asia and the West”) (Anagnost 1997b, 79). In this process, so-called Chinese
cultural attributes, such as submission to power (also known in China as the “slave men-
tality,” nulixing) and a tendency to affirm one’s “face” over direct communication, were
highly condemned. 3. These discourses frame the moral actor as a person who reflects
upon the effects of “culture,” overcomes them, and promotes social change.
Gil Hizi Against Three Characters Speaks Self-Improvement 239
In workshops for interpersonal skills, instructors and participants constantly identify

behaviors and values that seemingly reflect a “Chinese” tendency to suppress self-realiza-
tion. As I will elaborate, their critique also profiles stereotypical characters that supposedly
downplay self-improvement and the imperative of social change. This critique accompa-
nies interactive exercises, such as the mutual praising in the example above, that accentuate
particular forms of expression. More often than not, practitioners cannot transpose these
expressive styles outside workshops, but they continue to herald an ideal of personhood as
a prescription for the de- and resocialization of Chinese individuals into “new” norms. I il-
luminate this phenomenon by comparing it with Michel Foucault’s concept of technologies of
the self (Foucault 1988). Following Foucault, self-improvement in China involves self-reflec-
tion and the “problematization” of one’s subject position. Nevertheless, in the pedagogies
I describe, this process is not a corollary to the ongoing cultivation of new dispositions and
subject position. By emphasizing the inevitable effects of their socialization into Chinese
culture, practitioners rather buttress their implication in seemingly problematic norms.
Through their performed critique, they ultimately signal their morality through their ability
to identify and prescribe a developmental agenda, impractical as it may be.
The ethical apparatus that I describe next indicates that socioeconomic changes in
China, unlike the crux of many ethnographic works, have not brought about a domi-
nant new subject position defined by market-driven imperatives, nor do they reveal the
moral supremacy of socialistic institutions or more longstanding cultural values. Instead,
person-centered pedagogies pronounce a developmentalist agenda that is informed by
globalized expertise but also reflects and reproduces the tension between the ideal and
the local. Through practices of self-improvement, individuals can perform their moral-
ity while at the same time reifying the imagined “immorality” of their everyday social
engagements.
Setting and Methods

My research took place in workshops at the center of Jinan, the capital city of Shandong
Province in northeastern China, which lies approximately 130 miles west of the Yellow
Sea. Jinan is a second-tier city that embodies some of the tensions between the prospects
of economic development and the actual living reality. The city is an employment and
occupational hub undergoing mass economic development. Yet, in terms of gross domes-
tic product per capita, Jinan is only ranked third in Shandong and lags behind most me-
tropolises on the east coast of China (Askci Consulting 2017). Young adults I met in Jinan
acknowledged the centrality of the city in the region but also lamented the relative lack
of job opportunities in comparison to major urban hubs in China, including Qingdao in
eastern Shandong. Another notable tension in residents’ experience of social change is the
relationship between globalized values and so-called local “traditions.” Jinan embodies
a strong Confucian heritage due to its proximity to Qufu and Zoucheng, hometowns of
the renowned sages Confucius and Mencius. The city runs tourist sites and educational
programs dedicated to their longstanding philosophies, and sayings from Confucian
texts are incorporated into school and public spaces by the local government. Many Jinan
residents, although appreciative of the historic value of this heritage, also link it with a
“conservative” (baoshou) mindset that prioritizes filial piety, gender roles, and sustaining
“face” (mianzi), at the expense of person-centered self-realization.
When I first explored extracurricular pedagogies, I searched for programs that sought
to cultivate personality traits rather than narrower professional skills or hobbies. I was
directed by young adults I knew to programs for interpersonal “soft” skills. According to
practitioners, soft skills are accessible and relevant to any person seeking to foster their
individuality and in turn their well-being. The rise of pedagogies of soft skills that target
communication, emotional expression, and self-presentation is somewhat correlative to
the increasing importance of immaterial labor as a valuable attribute in post-industrial
economies (Hardt and Negri 2005, Lazzarato 1996). In China, discursive practices of soft
skills are mediated by expertise from the fields of management and positive psychology,
as well as reforms in public education, known as “education for quality” (suzhi jiayu).
These have sought to produce learning spaces that foster individual expression and
creativity at the expense of discipline and rote memorization (Kuan 2015; Naftali 2014;
Woronov 2003). The proponents of person-centered methods also aim to bridge the rigid
education system and the demands for flexibility and innovation that potentially char-
acterize the market economy, as well as possibly fueling market productivity (Anagnost
2004). These ideas in China prevail across sectors and age groups, combining imperatives
for emotional well-being and market success, as well as defining positive social change
through the “modern” socialization of new generations.
I next introduce the three programs I studied, each catering to a different age group
but all sharing a similar conviction in the “virtue” of individual autonomy. These three
pedagogic programs, established between 2012 and 2015, indicate the expansion of
self-improvement practices from big metropolises to wider urban China as well as their
extension to the lower middle-class and upper working-class, which is evident in the
composition of participants in each and every activity I attended. Participation in long
workshops and camps or annual attendance in weekly activities would cost US$150–350,
which was not a trivial expense (25–60% of their monthly income) but also not beyond the
financial capacities of devoted participants.
Champion Training was a private school run by a team of twelve to fourteen students
that catered to undergraduate students in central Jinan. The program offered one-week
camps, attended by seventeen to twenty students, that focused on cultivating an arsenal
of soft skills, including public speaking, emotional expression, communication, leader-
ship, and team building. Instructors, assuming that Chinese youth lack soft skills by de-
fault, proclaimed an urgency to undo this so-called deficit. Participants in the camp had
to adopt this narrative and proclaim their commitment to “change myself” (gaibian ziji),
namely becoming more extroverted, emotional, and risk taking. Comfort zones and past
habits were suspected of being tainted by tendencies for self-inhibition. In the numer-
ous segments of speeches and monologues during their training, participants conflated
optimistic views of self-improvement with a lament on social tendencies that deny the
realization of their individual selves. The teaching, delivered by instructors who were
more robustly business oriented than participants, further reinforced the link between
soft skills, well-being, and competence in the market economy. Dealing with their own
anxieties about their future careers and socioeconomic positions, these instructors imag-
ined business-oriented projects as the ultimate path for success without compromising
their individuality.
My second field site was Heart’s Secret, a program run by certified psychological
counselors for participants in their thirties to forties on topics related to interpersonal
communication and emotional expression. Heart’s Secret illustrates the expansion of psy-
chotherapy in China in the last fifteen years through a rapid training procedure and a
lenient licensing system (Huang 2013; Zhang 2017).4. Although this promotion of the field
has expanded counseling services, it has even more starkly led to the popularization of
therapeutic sensibilities as forms of self-help and self-improvement (Hizi 2017; Huang
2013; Tang and Fang 2009; Zhang 2017, 2018). In Heart’s Secret, most of the teaching drew
heavily on positive and humanistic psychology, yet with a focus on interactive practice
rather than the learning of therapeutic methods. Throughout 2015, the club had fifty to
sixty members. Members dominated the more professional activities, while in salons,
workshops, and courses, 35-55% of participants were guests. Unlike the two other pro-
grams I attended, the activities of Heart’s Secret had a majority of female participants
(60–75%). For these women, psychology offered a prescription for navigating social rela-
tionships at home and in the workplace, and also occasionally as training with possible
career implications. Through engaging in interactive exercises, they imagined the appli-
cation of interpersonal skills beyond workshops, potentially making their communication
more effective, constructive, and moral. At the same time, they continuously construed
these capacities as running counter to the seemingly self-inhibiting registers of practical
everyday interactions.
This last program I introduce is Super Speakers, a members’ club for public speaking
that ran weekly activities at a café in Jinan’s old town. Although defined as a social “club”
(julebu), the curricula and manual that members followed led them to unanimously define
their practice as a “workshop” (gongzuofang). Members (forty to forty five overall, twelve
to twenty in each activity) facilitated sessions of rehearsed and improvised speeches in-
tended to “inspire” (gei qifa) through stories about personal experiences outside their ordi-
nary social roles (traveling, volunteering, and romance) and desires for greater individual
autonomy. In tandem with guides and shows for public speaking in the entertainment
media, the style of expression precedes grammatical structures as a measure of the quality
of one’s presentation.5. After these speeches, senior members provided feedback in front
of the participating audience. For members, these evaluation segments accentuated their
experience of a learning environment that prompts their “improvement.” They empha-
sized the sincere and constructive nature of this feedback, which was vastly different from
social dynamics in the outside world that require deference and dishonest flattery.
During an average week of fieldwork, I took part in Super Speakers’ weekly activi-
ties and a workshop at Heart’s Secret, while nearly every month, I attended four to six
consecutive days in the Champion Training’s camp. I was an active participant in these
activities, even if the fact that I was not local (much more than my “researcher” identity)
meant for participants that my objectives of self-improvement were starkly different from
theirs. Champion Training instructors, for example, clarified that some of their teachings
were relevant to young Chinese adults who were preparing for the job market and hence
they expected me to have a limited understanding of participants’ main challenges. At the
same time, instructors told participants that having a foreign “friend” attend the camp
demonstrated their own achievement of stepping out of their ordinary social circles and
communicating with new “interesting” people. In other words, I was living evidence of
their self-improvement. In Super Speakers, members appreciated my input when it came
to evaluating their speeches, ascribing me with “academic” analytic abilities. They had
much lower expectations of me; however, when it came to delivering speeches in Chinese,
I undertook the task with various degrees of success. In Heart’s Secret, I experienced
fewer obstacles in becoming a full participant. New participants would normally express
curiosity about my attendance, but this interest would decline following several hours of
activity at most. Coordinators at Heart’s Secret, to my practical advantage, eagerly invited
me to their activities and urged me to bring along other foreign friends, which for them
would make their center seem more “international.”
In addition to participant observations in workshops, I also conducted between two

and four semi-structured interviews with sixty instructors and participants throughout
my stay: thirteen participants and four instructors in Champion Training, seventeen
participants and three instructors in Heart’s Secret, and twenty-three members of Super
Speakers. Interviewees encompassed different age groups, socioeconomic backgrounds,
genders, and occupations. They were mostly participants who frequented their respective
programs, although I also met with several individuals who withdrew after few atten-
dances. With a quarter of interviewees, I also spent time in extensive recreational activ-
ities. My positionality as a foreign researcher with a critical view on self-improvement
meant that I had to attentively unravel what made these pedagogies seem moral unique
in the eyes of participants. Through interactions outside the workshops I became aware of
the tangible commitments and norms of interactions that differed from their self-improve-
ment settings while also learning how practitioners configure and reify these distinctions.
My data ultimately are composed of interview recordings, notes from conversations,
and detailed descriptions of workshop activities and conversations. All interviews were
transcribed, and all my written records of practitioners’ verbal expressions were subse-
quently discursively analyzed. My inquiry mapped descriptors that practitioners uttered
for models of personhood and objectives of self-improvement, as well as their counter-
images, based on their frequency and consistency across different settings in and outside
workshops. I particularly attended to statements that narrated and criticized existing be-
havioral habits and aspired transformation. I also examined practitioners’ attempts, albeit
sporadic, to extend their practice outside workshops and how they discerned the out-
comes. This analysis allowed me to investigate the moral principles upon which self-im-
provement is pursued and perceived, as well as the relationship between these principles
and the norms that govern practitioners’ lifeworlds.
Cultivation of a New “Subject”?

In order to spotlight the importance of self-reflection in self-improvement in China, I
compare them to a framework for self-cultivation offered in Foucault’s theory of technol-
ogies of the self (1988). In China, self-reflection extends from an individual to a social per-
spective, as well as becoming a channel for virtue signaling through designated settings.
In a recent article, Sonya Pritzker and Whitney Duncan (2019) argue that person-centered
pedagogies, particularly when enacted in group settings, can serve as “technologies of
the social,” that is, practices where practitioners simulate group interactions with the am-
bition of forming new social realities. I adhere to this view while showing the specific
apparatus at play in China: a performed developmentalist critique combined with the
bounded and short-lived nature of self-improvement that hinders the habituation of new
“skills.”
The concept technologies of the self encompasses both self-governance and the pursuit
of moral personhood. Foucault associates this concept with a form of self-cultivation
that characterized Hellenistic and Roman periods, particularly evident in the writings of
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (Foucault et al. 1988). Under these social systems, caring for
and indulging in the faculties of the embodied self were congruent with the attainment
of virtue. Through a heightened awareness of one’s individual capacities and objectives,
self-cultivation activated both practice and self-reflection. With the rise of Christianity,
virtue ethics became more centered around self-knowledge rather than self-care, as the
latter stood in contrast to the ideology of self-renunciation (Foucault et al. 1988, 35; Kelly
2013, 518). Subsequently, the influence of Cartesian thinking led to a continuous focus
on knowledge of an inner human essence rather than appreciating the indeterminacy

of self-making. “Truth” became decreasingly associated with the practical conduct of
the person (Foucault 2005, 190-192), even if subjectivity itself remains, according to the
Foucauldian perspective, malleably constituted.
This historical backdrop notwithstanding, technologies of the self offers a broad under-
standing of self-cultivation as an ethical apparatus, as they:
Permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of
operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being, so as to trans-
form themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality. (Foucault et al. 1988, 18)
“Technologies” for Foucault, echoing an Aristotelian perspective, involve both practical

activity and reason, allowing individuals to gradually realize various capacities, habits,
and virtues (see Burkitt 2002, 223-224). A key feature in this process is an attitude of “prob-
lematization,” that is, heightened attention, inquiry, and even anguish toward behaviors,
practices, and ideas that were previously accepted with minimal scrutiny (Foucault 2001,
74). It is through this questioning of elements in the salient state of affairs that individuals
exercise agency and perceive new possible modes of conducting themselves. This type
of reflection, highly evident in workshops for interpersonal skills in China, differs from
Bourdieu’s notion of “practice,” which identifies agency primarily in individuals’ proac-
tive reproduction of existing fields of action rather than in deliberate or reflective endeav-
ors (see Köegler 1997 for similar commentary). This reflexive stance is also in disaccord
with anthropological theories of ethics that highlight the non-reflexive “embodied moral-
ity” as the pivotal modus operandi in social life (as in Zigon 2011).6.
Anthropologists have applied technologies of the self to show how social actors fashion
themselves in accordance with various ideologies and social structures while rejecting
others. Rebecca Lester (2005), for example, in a study of Roman Catholic postulants in
a Mexican convent, extends Foucault’s theory to describe a routine of bodily practices
that produce religious conviction combined with a perception of self-transformation. She
focuses on a constructed dichotomy between “embodied” and “transcendental” selves
that guides postulants’ perception of their bodily regimes and intersubjective experiences
(Lester 2005, 161). Saba Mahmood (2001), in another study of the cultivation of piety,
draws on the technologies of the self while highlighting an Aristotelian notion of self-for-
mation when conceptualizing an intentional and ritualistic pursuit of virtue (Mahmood
2001, 838). In the Egyptian Mosque Movement that Mahmood studies, similar to the
Mexican convent, the habituation of bodily tendencies is pivotal for the attainment of vir-
tue. Unlike the Christian ontology, in Islamic rituals, “form” (embodiment) and “essence”
(personal qualities) are co-constituted—particular bodily habits enhance believers’ pious
intentions, which in turn induce their commitment to religious rites. Technologies of the self
are also applied by scholars of capitalism who link self-cultivation with market-oriented
imperatives of self-governance. One example is Cynthia Dunn’s (2014) study of courses
for public speaking in Tokyo. Dunn introduces trainees who aim to become more proac-
tive, influential, and optimistic in accordance with the demand of their corporate world.
Dunn does not describe bodily experiences or ongoing outcomes of habitual action but
rather focuses on “self-transformation” as a linguistic narrative employed by speakers
as a “technology” of self-fashioning. Self-improvement ratifies imagined potentialities of
self-reliance and self-making under economic conditions that promote an entrepreneurial
spirit.
To this ethnographic literature on the ethics of person making, and its Aristotelian–
Foucauldian emphasis on self-reflection, my account adds a developmental-social ori-
entation that entails rejecting practical consideration. Young adults in Jinan who adopt
globalized discourse on self making promote a perspective different from individuals
who try to conform to the ethical life of an existing social group, whether it be at the
level of the marketized urban society (Dunn) or a religious community (Mahmood and
Lester). They also do not form an ongoing “community of practice” (a la Wenger 1999) or
class-driven cultural capital. Instead, practitioners of self-improvement in Jinan aspire to
exceed any dominant social reality while drawing on this perceived reality as an ongoing
point of reference.7.
Self-improvement via pedagogies of soft skills strongly illustrates the “problemati-
zation” that underlies technologies of the self. Through workshops, practitioners identify
everyday interactive expressions as meaningful sites of scrutiny and training. These ex-
pressions become evidence of “skills,” objects of improvement that are laden with vari-
ous degrees of morality. Yet the scope of the problematization I witnessed extends from
individual behaviors to a social, historically situated setting, making self-improvement an
ambitious endeavor with limited application. Practitioners at times experiment with their
training outside workshops, but they do not assess the morality of their learning based
on their ability to apply it effectively in their social worlds. A trajectory of dispersion of
discursive practices across different spheres of life through individual conduct remains
elusive and sporadic in this form of self-improvement, as I describe next. These findings
disrupt the often-presumed correspondence among ideology, critique, and self-making in
process of subject formation, and moreover in educational ethics.
Three “Immoral” Characters

In pedagogies of soft skills, vibrant exercises combined with participants’ statements
on the morality of their practice. This morality was often explicitly framed in relation to
lived examples that portrayed specific social contexts and figures. Drawing on my notes
from discursive comments in workshops and interviews, I assembled profiles for three
“Chinese” characters that workshop participants frequently described as antithetical to
the values of self-improvement and social development. Interestingly, these characters
were consistent across my three field sites. Although individuals were often more preoccu-
pied with issues relevant exclusively to their age groups, they were also concerned about
their own future and the prospects of their society, hence considering issues pertaining to
parenthood, education, and career. Notably, as they admitted they were implicated in the
practices they criticized, their discourse did not seek to stigmatize specific social actors
harshly but rather to delineate prescriptions for social development. Nonetheless, their
commentary did express their profound dissatisfaction with lived models for personhood
that govern their cultural realm.
The Credentialed Student

Li Ting, a Champion Training instructor and third-year undergraduate student in proj-
ect management, was an ambitious young woman. In addition to her work in Champion
Training, she undertook various internships in large enterprises whenever she had a
school break. She aspired to embark on a career in the private economy during her stu-
dent years. She disrespected students who did not share her ambitions and was particu-
larly discontented with the lifestyles, attitudes, and objectives of postgraduate students.
She once explained:
Many postgraduates have no awareness. These are students who spent their undergraduate
years watching TV in the dorms and reading books. No careful planning (guihua bu xinxi), wast-
ing their time (langfei shijian) … By the time they were in Year Four (the final year of undergrad-
uate studies), they had no other option but to take the exam for postgraduate studies (kaoyan).
Many postgraduates I have met here seem to me like freshmen students in terms of their level
of maturity. Many of them were also encouraged to continue studying by their parents, lacking
independent thinking (mei duli sixiang). (September 2015, interview)
Li Ting was not blind to motivations for postgraduate studies, but her ambitions led her
to choose a different path and discern postgraduate studies as a marker of incompetence
and avoidance from the “real” world. Her criticism was an attempt to negotiate between
two conflicting priorities: a mainstream path for educational success and the contingen-
cies of the job market. She echoed discourses of “education for quality” that consider
classroom learning insufficient in producing competent citizens for the job market. This
tension has intensified following the expansion of university enrollment in China in 1999
as graduates face a greater prospect of unemployment (Bai 2006, 142). Higher education
in China is being pursued more than ever, but diplomas do not alleviate anxieties about
the job market, hence students and educator increasingly define undergraduate studies
as a period of multitasking self-development (Hizi 2019; Sum 2018). Although Li Ting
committed to her educational path, she also opted to develop herself beyond the bounded
university.
Li Ting’s views extended throughout my field sites. Practitioners of self-improvement
frequently commented that “Chinese are good at exams” or “Chinese love diplomas,”
while hoping that more and more individuals would opt instead for the cultivation of
more well-rounded personhood. Study discipline and university degrees for members
of Champion Training were constantly suspected as a sign of conformity to parental
choice rather than liberating Chinese youth to become autonomous and choice-making
individuals (see Bregnbæk 2016, for the dilemma of self-sacrifice versus self-realization
expressed by students in Beijing). Soft skills signify a morality that overcomes the local
culture and is charged with potentials for transforming the meaning of personal and so-
cial development.
The Stagnant Civil Servant

On a bus ride with three male members of Super Speakers, aged 27–30, following a
weekly session, they expressed their preference to work in the private economy. One of
them shared an allegory about a crane. The crane, representing civil servants, stands sed-
entarily in a pond. It lacks neither alimentation nor comfort but such convenience also
brings on numbness and alarming fixity. Without anyone noticing, the crane becomes
covered in mud, unable to move, awaiting its eventual death. According to this allegory,
spiritual and professional stagnancy is a hazard, even, and particularly when, one is en-
joying stability. Like the postgraduate student trapped inside the campus walls, the civil
servant is embedded in a local Chinese system that is blind to wider social and global de-
velopments and that downplays the wholesome merits of the person. For the three young
men, pedagogic programs such as Super Speakers offer the remedy.
Most practitioners of self-improvement echoed a widespread assumption in China that
the state sector does not enable self-development (Hsu 2005, 2007). Although the Chinese
state can be traced back to no earlier than the establishment of the People’s Republic
of China in 1949, for practitioners, the state sector represented longstanding sociocul-
tural tendencies. Shili, a 22-year-old trainee in Champion Training, a third-year university
student, and an aspiring entrepreneur, identified civil servants with a Chinese “culture
of reliance” (kao wenhua) in which occupational success does not depend on merits but is
instead grounded in nepotism. He also criticized the hierarchical nature of the state sector.
“People will always flatter and follow their superiors” and “offer them gifts” (songli). He
lamented that it is tiring to communicate with civil servants, because there is always a
hidden message behind the uttered words (hua li you hua) rather than direct self-expres-
sion. Shili treated his university years as an opportunity to pursue various extracurricular
activities that he construed as an expression of his individuality: traveling to different
Chinese cities, attending training in soft skills and entrepreneurship, and becoming an
active member in Champion Training. His middle-class background allowed him to ex-
periment with self-improvement beyond the local scene, much unlike most of the prac-
titioners of self-improvement I met. Yet, he was concerned about the fact that his parents
began pressuring him to focus on a more secure career path, leading him to further defend
his lifestyle and criticize the state sector—an emblem of “narrow mindedness” (June 2015,
interview).
Another disputant of the state sector was Yan Xia, a 24-year-old member of Super
Speakers. As a woman who was committed to self-improvement, she considered the state
sector as limiting personal growth. “I wouldn’t want to be put in a box,” she said. “I prefer
to work harder [in the private economy] but have room to develop myself (fazhan ziji),
which would be more meaningful (you yiyi).” Yan Xia’s boyfriend at the time (and cur-
rently her husband) was actually a newly appointed state official. Yan Xia was supportive
of his choice and did not denounce the occupational stability he achieved, but she none-
theless rejected such a prospect for herself. As a host of weekly sessions in Super Speakers,
she emphasized on two occasions that self-improvement is a never-ending pursuit and
that each person should cherish aspirations and social environments that induce contin-
uous “growth” (chengzhang), like the one she found in the club. Yan Xia’s appreciation for
self-improvement also channeled her concerns about the glass ceilings she would face as
a woman inside or outside the state sector. On several occasions, she told me that China
is still a male-dominated society; therefore, she would benefit greatly from never-ending
personal growth, which in turn would also sustain the equitability of her conjugal rela-
tionship. (May 2015, interview; see more Hizi 2018a).
In practice, practitioners from a working-class background and individuals in the
wider urban society did not unequivocally rule out the possibility of working in the state
sector. Several participants in the workshops of Heart’s Secret were state employees,
whereas student participants in Champion Training could not ignore the pride and finan-
cial reward that they would bring to their households had they become state officials. The
disregard of civil service was, therefore, for many individuals a moral stance that clashed
with more practical and family-oriented priorities.
The Scolding Mother

The final character epitomizes the problems of certain forms of interpersonal expres-
sion that supposedly govern Chinese social relations, particularly within the household.
The “scolding mother” is a person who is cast as extremely stressed about her child’s
appropriate behavior and educational success, to the degree that she ignores the child’s
healthy growth and happiness.
Practitioners of self-improvement construed the scolding mother as an immoral as
well as an ineffective model for parenting, albeit a somewhat unavoidable outcome of an
exam-oriented educational system. A senior member of Super Speakers named Muling
evoked this image when introducing the club’s values to guest participants, emphasizing
the value of constructive, sincere, and emphatic evaluation that senior members artic-
ulated when giving feedback to speeches. “In China, we are accustomed to ineffective
criticism. Like when mothers shout at their child, ‘why did you do this and this and this
[imitating a mother who scolds the child in staccato shouts while pointing a finger].’ This
is not very helpful” (December 2015, field note). Jiang Cheng, a psychologist and instruc-
tor at Heart’s Secret, gave a similar derogatory imitation of demanding mothers in one of
his workshops. The trajectory he narrated is one in which a child who is too preoccupied
with pleasing one’s parents neglects one’s own personality and individual aspirations,
and may ultimately struggle to find out who he or she “really is” and how one should
live one’s life. In extreme cases, this burden can become pathological, as elaborated by
Jiang, alluding to a horror story about a high school student from Zhejiang Province who
murdered his mother as a result of the pressure she exerted on him (September 2015, field
note; see more on debates following this incident in Kuan 2015, 64–67).
From the supportive responses of the mothers in the workshops, it was clear that they
were interested in adopting new communication styles in order to promote their chil-
dren’s well-being. As Teresa Kuan (2011, 2015) has demonstrated in her work in Kunming
(Yunnan Province), in parallel with educational reforms in China, middle-class mothers
learn through various forms of expert knowledge to regulate their emotions in consid-
eration of the healthy growth of their children. Communication skills serve this process,
even if mothers in Heart’s Secret admitted the difficulty of implementing egalitarian in-
teraction because discipline was still crucial to success in the Chinese educational system.
At the same time, some considered that scolding may be counterproductive; therefore,
new communication styles might improve, in the long run, the child’s ability to excel in
one’s studies, in the workplace, and in life more broadly.
The challenge for practitioners of self-improvement, particularly those who were al-
ready parents, was how to overcome the gap between person-centered ideologies and
dominant educational regimes. The values of “education for quality” were already well
appreciated by the urban society; yet, they remained at odds with the logic of educational
success. Hence, practitioners were wary of the conditions that reproduce problematic par-
ent–child dynamics and the fact that they were implicated in this process.
The discourse on these three cultural characters indicates the tension between self and
the lived social reality. Practitioners construe the effects of their practice as inherently
limited by dominant cultural values. Although parents emphasized the imperative of
educational success, other practitioners disclosed that they were embedded in hierarchi-
cal social networks that demand that they submit to superiors, send gifts, and avoid ex-
pressing criticism in their workplace or universities. Young practitioners also admitted
that they must consider their parents’ demands regarding choice of spouses, marriage ar-
rangements, and career choices. Even Shili, the aspiring entrepreneur I met in Champion
Training, ended a conversation in which he harshly criticized various “Chinese” social
behaviors with a disclaimer: “Although I am quite different than most people, sometimes
unconsciously (bu zhi bu jue), I may also behave this way [referring to tendencies to rely
on family and friends and to search for the approval of teachers and parents].” These
habits have become “hidden regulations” (qian guize) (February 2016, interview). Like
other practitioners of self-improvement, he identified himself as tainted by the immoral
qualities he was mitigating.
Self-improvement, as practitioners have made clear, does not in itself release individ-
uals from their social obligations but rather offers opportune spaces for social critique
and ethical reckoning. Pedagogies of soft skills highlighted the contingency of inter-
personal expressions and the social milieus they produce, but they also underline the
subordination of individuals to salient norms. More than “technologies” that produce en-
during outcomes, workshop exercises enacted ideals while highlighting their improbable
realization in current conditions, even if practitioners sustained a hope that these ideals
could triumph at a future time.
Realizing Self-Improvement through Children

The dynamic of self-improvement that I have described reveals a pedagogy that is
oriented toward bounded performances that do not coherently sustain a teleology of indi-
vidual or social change. As a result, this practice prioritizes the momentary present, where
practitioners demonstrate their potential value through acts of performative critique. This
notwithstanding, practitioners still hoped that a day would come when their values mate-
rialize into social norms. Some of the ambitious practitioners tried to design educational
projects that could bridge the present moment and a future utopia: training children in
soft skills. Children, as their endeavors demonstrate, embody the bridge between the ac-
tual reality and the future. Soft skills are thus imagined as conducive to the socialization
of the new generation. However, as practitioners promoted these projects within a reality
where people must adopt to norms and institutions rather than prime idealistic enter-
prises, these projects were mostly impeded.
Hu Ling, a 29-year-old unmarried man, was one of the devoted members of Super
Speakers during my stay in Jinan. Public speaking for him was one of several pedagogic
practices that fostered individuality, innovation, and creativity. He volunteered in a local
branch of Design for Change—an international organization that runs activities aimed
at fostering children’s imagination. Hu Ling moved to Jinan in his early twenties from a
small village in Liaocheng County, west of Shandong. He made a monthly income of 4000
CNY (app. US$600) in technical assistance, almost quadruple the earnings of his sister
who worked as a school teacher in the village, although he was still much less affluent
than most of his city friends.
Although Hu Ling was concerned with the development of Chinese society as a whole,
he was also preoccupied with gaps between the city and the countryside. In summer
2015, he shared with me his plan to build a training school for children in his village that
will incorporate the curricula of public speaking and Design for Change. His family had
a vacant piece of land where he wished to construct the facility. He was highly bothered
by what he construed as the dominant conservative mindset in the village that neglected
issues of self-improvement and emotional well-being. As a pioneer educator and devel-
oper, he would introduce methods that “local teachers surely have never heard about.”
Although he thought that these pedagogies were far from being socially accepted in Jinan,
where “conservativism” was still paramount, he nonetheless believed that they possessed
a universal quality that made them valuable anywhere. He hoped that training in imma-
terial skills and new ways of thinking could prove effective in a place where economic
reforms have not led to substantial “development” (October 2015, interview).
One Sunday, I went with Hu Ling to visit his village, which was as impoverished and
gray as he had described. During that afternoon, Hu Ling participated in several family
rituals, including a matchmaking meal for his sister and a young man from a nearby
village. Later, we walked in the village. Hu Ling wanted to meet neighbors in order ex-
amine the construction of new buildings and advertise his educational plans. In these
conversations, as well as in future follow-up surveys, he became increasingly aware that
the main priority of local parents was for their children to survive academically in their
current schools. They would not invest in extracurricular programs that had no tangible
implications in school exams. Considering this and other financial issues he encountered,
Hu Ling suspended his project (March 2016, fieldnote).
Hu Ling’s plan sought to imprint the mindset of children while bypassing the struc-
tural and cultural imperatives (i.e., overcoming obstacles that he identified as limiting
the personal development of adults like himself). Like him, several other practitioners
of soft skills I met were planning to start programs for children that would bring forth
a similar ideology. Because these plans took form within a commercial setting, they not
only involved self-marketing and consideration of profit but also expressed profound
commitment to social change. For example, Tao Wenya, a 24-year-old member of Super
Speakers, tried to run a summer camp in public speaking in a city in eastern Shandong.
She saw children as a clean canvas unlike more cynical tendencies toward self-improve-
ment that she identified in adults. Yet, despite arduous efforts, she could not convince
parents that these skills would benefit their children. By conceptualizing pedagogies of
soft skills through a regime of values alternative to the current educational system and
social norms, she, just like Hu Ling, also limited the reach of her initiatives (September
2015, interview).
Children have long been associated with ideas of future social progress in China.
Focusing on the educational reforms in China, Terry Woronov (2003, 15) identifies chil-
dren’s suzhi (quality) as “directly linked to the imagination of China’s future under con-
ditions of economic reform, and the new kinds of subjects that need to be produced for
this future.” Children are both supposed to malleably adopt new personalities and be
the generation that will set the tone for the future values of the citizenry. This image
of children harks back to the early twentieth century when children in China signified
“transcendence” above seemingly problematic national-cultural traits (Anagnost 1997a).
Anagnost elaborates that the child has symbolized a carefree state of mind, and it is the
nature of childhood that makes regimentation necessary, paradoxically undermining “the
very notion of childhood” (1997a, 196). The child thus reflects a tension between open-
ended possibilities and social engineering directed for remedying specific social prob-
lems. It is a vision that requires the child’s impossible disembeddedment from the society
into which it is socialized.
Training children for the sake of social development ultimately appears in the stories of
Hu Ling and Tao Wenya, as well as other aspirational projects I encountered, as a fantasy
that stresses practitioners’ dissatisfaction with the current social reality, including their
own prospects of self-improvement. Although practitioners saw themselves as limited
by the present norms and already tainted by “immoral” practices, they believed that chil-
dren, in contrast, could more wholesomely absorb person-centered attributes and in turn
establish a new social morality. Yet, implementing these plans required practitioners to
confront the particular social reality that they wished to transcend.
Education, as evident here through the vision of soft skills, is the main channel for
self-making and social transformation in the imaginary of young adults in China. Practices
of self-improvement continuously proclaim an agenda of promoting virtues across soci-
ety, even if their pedagogic apparatus, combined with the limited possibilities afforded by
the social world, ultimately buttresses other priorities.
Conclusion
This article brought together person making, cultural self-reflection, and social devel-
opment, as I spotlighted key ethical features in pedagogies of self-improvement in urban
China. By recognizing a historically informed developmentalist perspective, I described
a moral agenda where self-improvement is defined as a precursor of social change, and

vice versa. In light of practitioners’ ambitious aim to undo social norms in a political
and economic climate that hinders collective action, their endeavors materialize mostly
in acts of performative critique via designated settings. Instead of recognizing pathways
for ongoing self-change, practitioners signal their virtue as individuals who aspire toward
self-improvement.
Practitioners’ ability to willfully step away from their ordinary responsibilities and
construe images of social morality indicates a highly agentive endeavor amid existential
challenges. Their critical-reflexive attitude may suggest that they exercise “freedom” in
exceeding collective structures (Laidlaw 2002) or an impetus of achieving (or reflecting
upon) a coherent sense of self in a modern reality characterized by rootlessness (Giddens
1991). What is distinct in contemporary China is a fragmented experience of reality where
individuals remain strongly embedded in some ongoing social institutions while at the
same time reproducing narratives of modernity that diagnose their moral deficiency.
Pedagogies of self-improvement hence ultimately do not produce a coherent subject who
becomes an emblem of modernity or the market at the local level, nor do they implement
measures for transforming social norms. They are rather sites where individuals can culti-
vate their attachments to seemingly virtuous figures of social change without actualizing
their ideals through the boundaries of their present social impositions. Future compara-
tive research could reveal to which extent the ethical features I have described are present
in other pedagogical settings worldwide, particularly among social groups that are com-
mitted to developmental agendas that sustain their perceived inferiority.
Gil Hizi composed this article as a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Anthropology,
University of Sydney (gil.hizi@sydney.edu.au). He is currently a Humboldt Postdoctoral
Fellow at the Global South Study Center, the University of Cologne.
Notes
Acknowledgements. This article is based on research conducted through the aid of the Carlyle
Greenwell Bequest Postgraduate Research Fund during my doctoral degree at the University of
Sydney. I am thankful to Terry Woronov for her careful guidance, as well as to my insightful auxil-
iary advisors Jadram Mimica and Yasmine Musharbash. I have presented segments of this paper in
various settings during 2017–2018 and received helpful feedback from many colleagues. I am partic-
ularly thankful to Bonnie Urciuoli for her elaborated remarks as a discussant in a panel I convened
at the 2017 AAA Annual Meeting. I am also in debt to the internal and external reviews coordinated
by AEQ editors, which were always highly constructive.
1. David Palmer and Fabian Winiger (2019) define a salient “neo-socialist governmentality” in
China, where, moreover, political goals are made apparent through state propaganda rather than
disguised behind economic ideologies, while at the same time, unlike in the Mao era, there is a nor-
malized chasm between propaganda and reality. From the perspective of individuals’ striving for
self-realization, Mette Hansen (2015) identifies “authoritarian individualism” in China, according to
which citizens (particularly youth and young adults) can pursue individualization in some spheres
yet restrain themselves in the political arena.
2. Lu Xun (real name Zhou Shuren), a celebrated author who inspired readers with his criticism
of prevalent cultural customs at the time, proposed that “when the individual is exalted to develop
his full capacity, the country will be strengthened and will arise” (Spence 1982, 68).
3. The popular book The Ugly Chinaman (choulou de zhongguoren), by the Taiwanese author (born
in mainland China) who carried the pseudonym Bo Yang, was widely read in 1980s China. Bo Yang
mocks Chinese characteristics that include, in his view, reluctance to introspect and admit one’s mis-
takes, inability to cooperate socially, and lack of transparency in social interaction (Yang et al. 1992).
Among intellectuals and writers in mainland China, Geremie Barmé (2000, 266) identifies a genre of
“self-loathing” in the 1980s and 1990s that extends not only the New Cultural Movement but also
styles of literati self-reflection from the Ming and Qing dynasties.
4. In November 2017, new reforms were set to make the national exam more exclusive and ori-
ented toward clinical therapy, albeit according to the predictions of local psychologists, they would
remain open to individuals without an academic degree in psychology.
5. This logic also extends to pedagogies with a stronger focus on participants’ sociability, such
as the network of Toastmasters Clubs for public speaking, which are currently gaining popularity
in Chinese cities (Hampel 2017). Since 2012, public speaking has also been at the center of reality
television shows in China. Successful contestants in these shows can display their knowledge and
rich vocabulary but more often public speaking is evaluated through its affective registers, signified
by both bodily expression and keywords that stimulate a hopeful imaginary of self-realization (see
more Hizi 2018b).
6. The capacities that are brought into play through technologies of the self do not indicate indi-
viduals’ liberation from external restrictions. In the development of Western capitalist societies, for
example, technologies of self-fashioning have been congruent with the shift from disciplinary state
apparatuses to new imperatives of self-governance and self-constitution (Lemke 2010, 174).
7. This impetus is paramount in an economically changing Chinese society that compares itself
with a more modern “other” (Liu 2002, 2012; Rofel 1999, 8) and also echoes other post-colonial con-
texts where the value of the person is measured in their expressive and symbolic affiliations with a
cosmopolitan “style” (Ferguson 1999, 221).
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Against Three Í Culturalí Characters Speaks Self-Improvement - Social Critique and Desires For Í Modernityí in Pedagogies of Soft Skills in Contemporary China

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Against Three Í Culturalí Characters Speaks Self-Improvement - Social Critique and Desires For Í Modernityí in Pedagogies of Soft Skills in Contemporary China

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Against Three “Cultural” Characters Speaks

Self-Improvement: Social Critique and Desires

In workshops for interpersonal skills, instructors and participants constantly identify

Setting and Methods

In addition to participant observations in workshops, I also conducted between two

Cultivation of a New “Subject”?

on knowledge of an inner human essence rather than appreciating the indeterminacy

“Technologies” for Foucault, echoing an Aristotelian perspective, involve both practical

Three “Immoral” Characters

The Credentialed Student

The Stagnant Civil Servant

The Scolding Mother

Realizing Self-Improvement through Children

a moral agenda where self-improvement is defined as a precursor of social change, and

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