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“Fake Happiness”: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho-Politics

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DOI: 10.1111/etho.12023

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292 ETHOS

“Fake Happiness”: Counseling, Potentiality,

and Psycho-Politics in China
Jie Yang

Abstract In China, an emerging psycho-politics seeks to extract value from and to govern the potential of
individual citizens. The party state attempts to preempt social unrest by encouraging the poor and the unemployed
to engage in psychological self-help to unlock their positive potential. Television counseling programs promoting
the cultivation of happiness are part of these attempts. These programs showcase marginalized people who
appear happy despite their limited life circumstances. Expert counselors glorify individuals who have actualized
their potential through happiness to become entrepreneurs and role models. However, critics argue that these
programs promote “fake happiness” and divert people’s attention from structural forces that negatively affect their
lives. This article advances these critiques by illustrating how happiness promotion in China taps into the resources
of the victims of socioeconomic dislocation to effect economic advancement and political equilibrium. This article
contributes to the growing anthropological literature on happiness by engaging happiness as a governing
technology based on psychologization and as a force for both the government and underprivileged people
to rally resources for their respective causes. [China, happiness, counseling, potentiality, psychologization,
marginalized classes]

A skit during the Chinese New Year Gala of 2000, which is China Central Television’s
(CCTV) most watched live broadcast of the year, featured the famous actress Song Dan-
dan playing a paid-by-the-hour housemaid turned psychological counselor. Glowing with
happiness and armed with practical jokes and precepts loosely identified with positive psy-
chology, she offers advice to a depressed and lonely man.1 After the hilarious and seemingly
well-received counseling session, the man appears happier and upbeat; intrigued by the
efficacy of her counseling, he decides to follow in the housemaid’s footsteps and counsel
others. Apart from its explicit function as brief entertainment, the skit had an implicit but
more important function: to transmit messages dovetailing with recent initiatives of the
Chinese government. Those messages included the high value the government places on
psychotherapy and the vanguard role played by underprivileged people in performing happi-
ness and promoting psychotherapy. This latter role has been solidified since the mid-1990s
by a proliferation of representations of members of marginalized classes as ideal, happy
subjects—in movies, in TV programs, and, most systematically, in popular representations
of psychological counseling.2

In one example, the popular 2010 Chinese TV series Laoda de Xingfu (The Oldest Brother’s
Happiness, hereafter LDXF) shown on CCTV during prime time told the story of a middle-
aged man, nicknamed Laoda, who lived in a small town in northeast China. Despite being

ETHOS, Vol. 41, Issue 3, pp. 292–312, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. 
C 2013 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12023

 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 293

divorced, infertile, and, for a time, unemployed, the show portrayed Laoda as happy. After
a state enterprise lays him off, Laoda becomes a foot masseur. He also develops a fatherly
relationship with an autistic child whom he picks up on the street. His happiness appears to
derive both from his belief that he has realized his potential through self-employment and
“fatherhood” and from constant self-adjustment to his changing circumstances.3 The story
culminates in a happy and altruistic moral episode in which Laoda offers to care for the child
of the woman he loves while she marries another man.

Such stories, while receiving high viewership among CCTV productions in 2010, have
stirred controversy in China. Among many critiques from the audience on a popular web-
site, one online commentator remarked that “[These stories show that] poverty is happiness;
losing one’s love is happiness; layoff is happiness. Is this true happiness or false happiness?”
A well-known Chinese commentator, Han Haoyue (2010), stepped into the debate con-
tending that Laoda’s happiness is actually wei xingfu (false or fake happiness).4 For Han,
wei xingfu differs significantly from the generally accepted ideal of happiness: it represents
a lower standard of positive feeling and contentment in the name of happiness, a level he
argues below even that afforded by the average Chinese standard of living.5 Happiness that
occurs in such a passive relation to whatever one is given and whatever forces control one’s
fate is self-deceiving, argues Han. It is a self-comforting complacency. The ideology that
promotes this sensibility romanticizes pain and suffering as hope and potential (see also Shi
2010). While Han suggests that the happiness experienced by subjects is not real, I take an ad-
ditional step to acknowledge the authentic emotional experience that may emerge from such
fake happiness—the real possibility for self-help of emotional improvement through initial
fakery—while also recognizing the political manipulation that Han leaves unaddressed.

In this article, I take up the connection Han establishes between state-sponsored media
representations of happiness (xingfu) and wei xingfu. Building on his critical sense that these
representations and, more generally, Chinese government-sponsored happiness promotions
serve as a means of romanticizing suffering, I go on to examine them as part of a govern-
ing technology that, by psychologizing marginalized citizens and actualizing their positive
potentials, attempts to effect larger-scale economic growth and political stabilization. To
do so, I examine the promotion of (wei) xingfu through one particular program called The
Secrets of My Happiness (wo de xingfu jinnang, hereafter SMH), which aired as part of CCTV
12’s ongoing series called Xinli Fangtan “Psychological Counseling.”6

Launched on National Day, October 1, 2008, SMH celebrates individuals from all walks
of life—but especially disadvantaged citizens—by demonstrating how their optimism and
happiness helped them realize their potential and achieve success.7 I will analyze three
subjects represented by SMH as happy and entrepreneurial: a laid-off woman turned teacher
of English, a laid-off man turned taxi driver and counselor, and a female pensioner turned
published author.8 Through this analysis, I demonstrate that, by glorifying these individuals,
SMH promoted happiness as a catalyst for the production of new potentials for being and
doing. However, this happiness I argue is fake in the sense that in promoting this emotional
strategy, SMH furthered the explicit aims of the Chinese government to focus on the
294 ETHOS

well-being of its citizens while also forwarding a less explicit, new form of governance
that occurs through the process of “psychologization,” managing socioeconomic issues in
psychological terms. That is, the programming is deceptive in that it aims at political control
in the guise of emotional support.

Steps to Happiness Governance in China

China is not the only country to consider happiness as a tool of governance (see Helliwell
et al. 2012). Since the 1970s, Bhutan, for example, has utilized a happiness measure as a
means of assessing the value of certain forms of development.9 Happiness is also a well-
known, worldwide marketing tool (e.g., Coca-Cola’s Open Happiness Campaign) as well
as a commodity, particularly considering the global omnipresence (and recent increase in
popularity in China called the “psycho-boom”) of self-help books, psychotherapy and the
expanding wellness industry.

However, the happiness campaigns in China are unique for three reasons. First, they take
place in relation to current mental health and unemployment crises and in the context of
the “psycho-boom” in China (see also Blackman 2007–2008 on the relationship between
happiness and psychology).10 Second, the type of psychotherapy being promoted to ensure
happiness is not based on a psyche, as in the Western model, but on a more embodied and
holistic approach fused with positive psychology and with a practice of self-reflection rooted
in the Communist Chinese practice of “thought work,” which puts the onus on the individual
to uncover and resolve internal struggles.11 Finally, since 2006, China has gradually adopted
an index of happiness as a measure of economic development and government efficiency. This
index appears to resemble Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index but is less consistently
developed and implemented, often serving as a rhetorical tool for local governments to brag
about their efficient and benevolent governing.

Further, China observers have suggested that, following Deng Xiaoping’s 1980s motto, “To
get rich is glorious,” happiness has become the new mantra that fuels China’s economy,
especially since the turn of the millennium (cf. Richburg 2011). Indeed, the happiness
discourse in China resonates with neoliberal pillars such as freedom, individualism, and
prosperity; it also constructs productive, entrepreneurial subjectivities for advancing market
development (see below).12 However, I would argue that more than an economic mantra
integral to capitalist production (Hardt and Negri 2000; Richburg 2011) or a political
technology that delivers social norms (Ng and Ho 2006; Ahmed 2010), wei xingfu represents
a form of psychologization that glorifies the psychological well-being of the marginalized and
mobilizes their emotions and potentials for political reordering and economic advancement.

This Chinese approach to happiness began in the mid-1990s. By 2011, Premier Wen Jiabao,
in his report to the People’s Congress on the 12th Five Year Plan (2011–15), announced a
lower goal for GDP growth alongside a greater focus on improving people’s lives and well-
being. This political vision initiated a torrent of happiness campaigns, happiness surveys,
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 295

and well-being promotion measures across China. Such a public decision to make happiness
a policy objective reflected several features of contemporary China. First, there are low
levels of self-reported happiness (Brockmann et al. 2008) and the widespread “mental health
crisis” facing over 100 million Chinese (Han and Kan 2007).13 Second, there is the fact
that economic inequality has become a major source of unhappiness and dissatisfaction in
China, especially in the context of the growing commodification of social life and greater
neoliberal policymaking (Brockmann et al. 2008; Smyth and Qian 2008). In recent years,
the government’s capacity to deliver goods and services has paled in the face of people’s
increased expectations, resulting in widespread complaints and social unrest.14

Dealing with these features has been challenging for various arms of the Chinese state,
especially as it remains committed to a neoliberal economic agenda, which prioritizes market
advancement over social welfare provision. Regarding the mental health crisis, for example,
public support for addressing mental health issues has remained low. This has resulted in
reluctance to ensure (equitable) provision of much-needed medical mental health services
by the Ministry of Health (in charge of licensing clinical counselors) and the Ministry of
Labor and Ministry of Civil Affairs (in charge of licensing social workers and other counseling
personnel). Low support also relates to recent Chinese history, in which mental health issues
were considered private, family responsibilities, addressing them stigmatized as weakness,
and the effects of mental illness unworthy of attention. China has only 2.4 counselors per
one million people—a stark contrast with the United States, which has 3,000 counselors
per one million people (Han and Kan 2007). Meanwhile, efforts have been made by state
planners to create jobs (through major campaigns between 1998 and 2003), but these have
been insufficient to make up for 35 million layoffs that resulted from privatization of state
enterprises since the mid-1990s (Yang 2010).

Thus, alongside concrete steps addressing mental health and joblessness, the Chinese gov-
ernment has also emphasized the less medical and less economic notion of “well-being.”
Various ministries in the government like the Ministry of Health, Ministry of Labor, and
Ministry of Civil Affairs began implementing psychotherapeutic interventions, such as coun-
seling and social work, to make people feel happier. Formal counseling training in China
started earlier in 2002 (Higgins et al. 2008:102), but those with such training have mainly
served elites and well-to-do middle class. In addition, local governments and grassroots
organizations have instituted job-creation programs aimed at training and creating more
informal counselors in order to fill the niche market created by the lack of counselors in
China, like the housemaid counselor in the opening story of this article. The other, and
most significant avenue for spreading happiness and psychological knowledge has been the
mass media, which can reach all classes.

The Chinese government does not entirely control the national media nor does it control ac-
cess to international programming. Chinese citizens have access to international broadcasts,
films, and websites through the Internet, movie theatres, and satellite television. However,
most Chinese television is state-owned and run. CCTV encompasses 22 channels, including
CCTV 12, which aired the program under analysis in this report, SMH. The history of these
296 ETHOS

media outlets as venues for state propaganda has been obvious in their broadcast content.
Though, arguably in recent years, the means through which state-run media disseminate
official messages have become subtler and more diverse. I argue that the turn to happiness
campaigns is part of this effort at more subtle governance. The process has also intertwined
and coincided with a burst of promotions of happiness outside of state-run media (e.g., NGO
or government programs independent of the centralized media).

On the surface, the governmental turn to happiness is intended to enable citizens to con-
struct productive, entrepreneurial subjectivities, and for some it is successful. However, as I
demonstrate below, the Party-sponsored promotion of happiness in China is not primarily
an economic tool, but a governing technology based on psychologization to promote both
economic development and social and political stabilization.

Counseling-promoted Happiness and Potentiality

The CCTV program “Psychological Counseling” combines psychotherapy and media (see
Matza 2009 on psychotherapeutic radio programming in Russia). In its daily broadcast (aired
at 11:15 and repeated twice the next day at 14:45 and 23:25), the hostess, A. Guo, facilitates
a discussion between participants, offering pragmatic advice and informal interpretations of
psychological problems, while guest counselors provide expert diagnoses and prescriptions.
Together, the hostess, participants, and counselors offer a positive, synthetic program for
both achieving specific therapeutic results and improving individuals’ lives in general. The
methods used on air during the period of my research are identified with rational emotive
behavior therapy (REBT), which helps people overcome “unrealistic” and “irrational” feel-
ings or actions (Ellis 1973). Such counseling often portrays the individual as a vulnerable
subject in need of expert help.

However, SMH took a distinctive approach. Rather than problematizing and normalizing
people who are psychologically ill, it celebrated and glorified the psychological strength
and wellness of disadvantaged individuals who pursued happiness despite their suffering.
The three SMH participants whose stories I analyze here narrated a life they once could
not have dreamed possible—one in which they experienced and actualized their potentials.
Their narratives emphasize how they invented, witnessed, and acted on new potential for
life, revealing how what had once been impossible became possible through their pursuit of
happiness.

The July 19, 2009, episode entitled “From a Female Laid-off Worker to a Mother of
English Teaching” (cong xiagang nugong dao yingyu mama) told the story of Xu from
Shandong Province, a woman worker in her late forties who overcame her distress after a job
loss and dedicated herself to helping her daughter with her studies (English, in particular).15
To supervise and help her daughter with her English and to set a good example, Xu learned
English herself. Over several years, her daughter’s English greatly improved; she won first
prize in a national English contest in 2008. Meanwhile, Xu gained expertise in teaching
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 297

English and established her own private after-school English training program. The episode
celebrated unemployment as an opportunity for Xu to unlock a hidden potential. Xu de-
scribed how, after both she and her husband lost their jobs, their distress at home negatively
affected their daughter and her school performance.

I felt terrible, you know, after so many years working at the factory, all of a sudden, you
don’t have a job. And then things couldn’t be worse; my husband got laid off as well. Two
depressed parents at home inevitably affected my daughter. My daughter was only 12 years
old but very concerned about our economic difficulties. I could see that she was not happy
and lost interest in schoolwork. But I was determined to give my daughter a future. She
deserves a better future. I decided to change myself, to become more cheerful, and try my
best to reassure my daughter that things would be fine. To help with her English, I myself
picked up my English, very hard at first, after so many years out of school, especially at my
age. In my wildest dreams I’ve never imagined that I have such potential and could end up
teaching English myself.

As Xu’s narrative hints, her spectacular transformation has the capacity to play on people’s
imaginations. Bugliani (2011:83) suggests that instead of looking for power in terms of its
location (as in who wields it), scholars should look for power as expressed in the limits placed
on peoples’ faculty to imagine and in how these are imposed. In this case, one can view the
construction of Xu’s potential self through the discourse of happiness as a way to regulate
viewer’s imaginations. Instead of imagining collective action to ensure reemployment for
laid-off workers, the horizons of possibility are defined by happiness and self-actualization.
SMH presented those who appeared before its cameras as sleeping beauties awaiting the kiss
of psychological consciousness to wake them and enable them to realize their (unknown)
capacities and live their dreams.

Recall the internet commentator’s view of Laoda’s irrepressible happiness; was Xu’s hap-
piness real or fake? We know from her narrative that Xu initially faked happiness to cheer
her daughter up and help her with her studies. That happiness was later transformed into
something more lasting as the show revealed all of the benefits that came from faking it
(including a new career for Xu’s husband as a novelist). So “fake happiness” is not always
fake, at least in individuals’ experiences. It is a complex situation that allows for change
and individual agency. But it is also a cultural phenomenon. Happiness promotions (e.g.,
in SMH) have tapped into something real: preexisting cultural values, folk ideologies, and
expert knowledge. These have been repackaged for the purpose of promoting a particular
way of imagining happiness, one that puts the onus of adapting to economic marginalization
through self-help and individual coping.

For example, another SMH episode featured Song Shuru (see below), a senior pensioner
who habitually fakes happiness for the sake of her health and who even wrote a book offering
secrets of happiness—that is, how to remain at peace and happy amidst the ups and downs
of daily emotions in order to boost one’s health. This advice resonated with SMH’s broad
298 ETHOS

audience.16 One of my informants, a woman working at a community center in Changping,

Beijing, commented on Song’s advice.

There is nothing really new in her secrets. We have folk sayings like xiao yi xiao, shi nian shao,
“Smile will make you ten years younger.” It seems Song smiles whenever she speaks. She
does look much younger than her age. Song’s secrets also resonate with Chinese doctors’
advice: being happy, positive or in a good mood enhances one’s immunity system and health.

As the examples of Xu and Song show, the initial action on the part of the SMH participants
is fake happiness—an action the show encouraged and rewarded with lavish praise.

We can think of this promotion of wei xingfu by SMH as accomplishing several goals. First,
it seeks to optimize the positive potentials of marginalized individuals (particularly, laid-
off workers) toward entrepreneurship and achievement of the good life through individual
effort. But second, it preempts potential threats to social stability posed by these same
groups. It pursues this end by discouraging, for example, depression leading to the inability
to work, incomplete education, physical violence, alcohol abuse, social unrest, et cetera.
By celebrating the happiness of the underprivileged and their actualized potential, these
media take the government’s place in producing an ideal effect. In other words, these
media, directed behind the scenes by agencies within the government, are serving as a
proxy in the public view for the government by providing explicit rationales for happiness
promotion. The “fake happiness” through which the marginalized individuals depicted in
SMH cope with their problems and seem to become truly happy in these televised depictions
is connected to the fake happiness agencies within the Chinese government use to placate
the underprivileged. This second level of “fakery” is so because the government fails to
address the real economic and structural problems that Chinese people face.

Counselors behind the Wheel: Happiness and Suicide Prevention

On November 24, 2008, SMH televised an episode called “A Psychological Doctor in a
Taxi” (chuzu che shang de xinli yisheng). The host, Xiao Qin, and counselor Yang Fengchi
interviewed a 53-year-old taxi driver, Zhen Fengxiang. He had been driving a taxi for 14 years
after being laid off from his factory. He had also enjoyed the title of “taxi star” (dishi zhixing,
designated by taxi companies in Beijing) for eight years. Zhen had reportedly prevented over
100 suicides. The counselor asked Zhen to describe how he counseled his passengers. Zhen
narrated one of his sessions with a young woman:

After the low-spirited young woman got into the taxi, as usual I asked her, “Where do
we go?” She replied, “[To] Zao Junmiao.” Then I said, “Good.” Unexpectedly, she said,
“Why is it good—I’m going to die!” I said, “Oh, that’s serious. Why do you want to
die? If you can tell me why, perhaps I can help you sort out things.” She said, “I don’t
think so; no one can help.” I then realized that she had trouble and I encouraged her to
share her story. I said, “Well. I don’t want to be nosy. But I just want to tell you there
are two sides to any thing. Perhaps I can help you find the positive side.”
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 299

Then the passenger told me about her frustration at work and the complicated inter-
personal relationships at her company. She felt she was manipulated; she felt depressed
and hopeless. [ . . . ] So a twenty-minute taxi drive took me three hours. I counseled her
to make sure that she was no longer suicidal and started to feel optimistic about her
situation. Then I drove her home. I want to transmit happiness and make their taxi
riding pleasant. I didn’t know I was able to save people’s lives. [ . . . ] I often watch your
counseling and apply what I’ve learned to my conversations with passengers. But I didn’t
realize that I actually acted like a counselor until many passengers thanked me for saving
their lives or changing their outlooks.

Counselor Yang Fengchi then summarized Zhen’s approach from a professional perspective
in order to help him improve his counseling skills and to hold him up as a role model for
other taxi drivers. He said:

You are sensitive enough to realize that she looked depressed and you were sympathetic.
You have the basic quality of a professional counselor. By saying that there are two sides
of anything, you are helping this passenger reconstruct her cognition. Also, since you
and the passenger were strangers, without conflict of interest, it was easier for her to
open up. Also, professional counselors wait for people to seek psychological assistance
while, as a taxi-driver, you can observe passengers and initiate the counseling process
in a casual way. And taxi drivers can efficiently prevent suicides, as you are sometimes
the last persons those who attempt suicide would face. And you are such an enthusiastic
counselor and selfless person, so generous with your time; it’s easy to move people. You
set a role model for other taxi drivers.

Zhen did not realize that he had the potential to counsel people and prevent suicide until he
himself consciously pursued happiness and considered himself as a key point in the chain of
transmitting happiness. That is, his own pursuit of happiness helped him develop skills in
suicide prevention. Based on the information Zhen absorbed through television counseling
programs and other media sources, he became a self-taught “expert” and learned to help
others. In this session, counselors represented taxi driving as an opportunity for Zhen to
discover his potential as a “counselor.”

Taxi driving has been one of the most common ways for workers laid off from state enterprises
to make a living (see Chang 2001). However, given the rising gas price and the proliferation
of taxis with no decrease in the fees drivers must pay to taxi companies, competition between
drivers and the pressure on them to survive has intensified. Waves of protests among taxi
drivers have occurred in Beijing. For example, in May 2003, over 300 taxis in Changping
District lined up to block traffic in front of the district government for several days in an
attempt to pressure the government to regulate the taxi-driving market and create new jobs.
Many taxi drivers suffer job burnout because of frustration over the intensified competition
and meager income.

The Chinese term for those who suffer job burnout is xiangpi ren, “rubber people” (people
with numbness, hopelessness, loss of passion in life). The term is often associated with
white-collar workers but has recently been used to describe taxi drivers. Belying the common
300 ETHOS

assumption of burnout because of overwork or exhaustion, taxi drivers in Beijing claim that
they became rubber people because of their frustration with the taxi-driving system, which
continually recruits new drivers but does not regulate the job market to enable drivers to
make enough money to survive. Whereas psychologists call the emergence of rubber people
a symptom of depression or a psychological disorder, workers consider their burnout a social
problem. A taxi driver from Changping told me, “Every morning as soon as I open my eyes,
I already owe the company 250 yuan. No matter what happens that day, you have to work
hard to make 250 yuan and then hope to make several extra yuan to buy food for your family.
You complain, protest; it’s useless. There are no other jobs.”

In this context, the representation by SMH of Zhen as a happy, enthusiastic, and selfless
taxi driver who also prevents others from being depressed and committing suicide transmits
the following messages: rather than focusing on the real social and economic issues of
unemployment and insecure employment that affect millions of men like Zhen and would
require overhauling economic enterprises and governmental operations, the focus is on a
personal and psychological level. This parallels and extends the focus on happiness and
personal well-being by the Chinese government rather than forcing Party leaders to enact
policies to better deal with unemployment and economic dislocation.

But Zhen’s representation contains a second hidden message. In his case, SMH’s expert
counselors also functioned as psycho-educators, presenting Zhen as both a psychologized
and psychologizing subject who knew how to pursue happiness to release his potential.
Such potential then constituted a site for extracting value for moral, economic, and political
ends. The counselors wove the survival stories of this underprivileged man into a logic
of psychologization: they psychologized the (negative) consequences of state-led economic
restructuring through the provision of (emotional and expert) support and recognition of
the taxi driver’s accomplishments in suicide prevention and happiness promotion.

The term psychologization often refers to the process by which psychology moves beyond
institutional and professional practice and becomes naturalized as part of a cultural logic
(Gordo and De Vos 2010:3–4). For example, Smith (1997) sees psychologization as pop-
ularizing and encouraging the internalization of psychological knowledge. He writes, psy-
chologization is the “internalization of belief in psychological knowledge so that it acquired
a taken-for-granted quality, altered everyone’s subjective world and recreated experience
and expectations about what it is to be a person” (Smith 1997:575). A related process is
the political misuse of psychology when, for example, it becomes entangled with power
mechanisms and turns the political field into a psychological domain ripe for psychological
or psychotherapeutic intervention (cf. De Vos 2011; Gordo and De Vos 2010; McLaughlin
2010; Rose 1996). In the SMH examples presented above, I am engaging psychologization as
the later kind of process transforming social and political problems into personal dilemmas
or psychological issues.

It is helpful to consider psychologization as somewhat parallel to medicalization. Where

medicalization describes a process by which nonmedical problems become defined and
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 301

treated as medical problems, usually in terms of illness or biophysiological disorders

(Conrad 1992:209), psychologization turns nonpsychological issues into issues of the in-
dividual psyche or, in the Chinese case, of the heart. Both medicalization and psychologiza-
tion can disguise or naturalize social control. Psychologizing in China consists of mobilizing
the emotions and potentials of the marginalized for political reordering and economic ad-
vancement that privileges certain groups within society over others. This may result in
condemning or excusing specific individuals for ills such as impoverishment on the grounds
of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of or contrary to factual
evidence. But psychologization is not only a process of rendering socioeconomic issues in
psychological terms. It is also a process through which psychology as an array of practical
modes of understanding and acting penetrates people’s social imagination of who they are
or what they might be (Brinkman 2011:18).

While psychologization is often associated with Western liberal societies (cf. Gordo and
De Vos 2010; Rose 1996), Eghigian points out that psychological sciences also flourished
in former Communist societies such as East Germany and the former Soviet Union in the
1940s (2004:183). Studying the role of (forensic) psychology in preventing youth crimes in
East Germany, Eghigian argues that, while the agendas and methods of policy makers, re-
searchers, and psychologists cross-pollinated one another, prompting a psycho-pedagogical
turn in the East German approach toward delinquency, such a development was not a de-
parture from authoritarian political rule but “an extension of the socialist utopian project”
(2004:184). In China, one can argue that, at the most general level, psychologization legit-
imates and facilitates current socialist projects, salient among them, building a harmonious
society.17 Scholars see psychology as a tool for building virtual reality (Bricken 1991) because
it promises people they can achieve certain goals if they behave in certain ways. The Party
in China adopts this perspective as well, using psychology to construct idealistic or utopian
situations that parallel or can be associated with socialist ideals. This vision is implicitly
manifested in Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2011 report that claims to prioritize the promotion
of people’s happiness and well-being over economic development. Also, unlike Western
psychology based on a psyche, psychology in China is based on “the heart.” Translated
as xinlixue, “the study of the heart,” the heart in the Chinese context is the seat of both
cognition and virtue, the grounding space for all aspects of bodily and social well-being (Ots
1994).

The current psychologization trend appears to be constructive or preemptive by promoting

the happiness and potential of the marginalized. It is different from the political misuse of
psychiatry during the Cultural Revolution—the labeling and incarceration of political dissi-
dents as mentally ill (Munro 2002).18 Whereas in Mao’s time, mental problems were viewed
by the ruling party as a disease of the bourgeoisie and a product of the capitalist system
(Munro 2002:104),19 they are now sometimes seen particularly by state enterprise manage-
ment as a result of people’s inability to embrace privatization and the market economy. For
example, in the context of mass unemployment caused by privatization, the government’s
message is that workers’ problems come not from the state but from their own failure to adapt
to the market and that workers ought to accept market-based logic when examining their
302 ETHOS

own lives (Blecher 2002:298–299), a shift from blaming the system—capitalism—to blaming
the individual. Whereas in Mao’s time, mental problems were believed by the government to
be caused by people’s obsession with selfish ideas and personal concerns (Munro 2002:104),
psychological technologies now actively promote self-reflection and self-governance and
enable governing institutions to penetrate private spaces, a person’s emotions, intimate rela-
tionships, and capacities or potentials. To release, distribute, and preempt various potentials,
then, television counseling and government programs encourage marginalized citizens to
psychologize their own lives and to fake happiness.

Happiness and Potentiality as Freedom from Structured Inequalities

To return to the October 4, 2008, episode of SMH that featured Song Shuru, then in her
eighties, she had won the title of Happy Elder (kuaile laoren) in Beijing and then the title
of ageless beauty queen (wu nianlingjie meinu). She claimed that her happiness stemmed
from her ability to ignore or forgive wrongs and injustices. Song believed that forgiveness
generated an irreversible freedom to move forward in one’s life. She also believed that
happiness overcame afflictions; she consciously faked happiness to ensure a healthy, peaceful
life.

In her narrative, Song offered a diegetic notion of fake happiness. She began by describing
how faking happiness had helped her to overcome her fear upon being diagnosed with
breast cancer during the Cultural Revolution. She forced herself to fake happiness and to
try to smile, even though her life was miserable. She had a serious illness. Her husband
was far away at a labor camp. Red Guards subjected her to torture. However, her will to
live was strong; she sang and played the accordion at night and smiled (secretly, in her
heart), willing herself to stay happy and positive. Song discovered that when she felt happy,
her tumor became smaller. She then decided to try and improve her physical health by
faking happiness, regardless of the circumstances of her life. After several months, her tumor
miraculously disappeared. She learned a lot from this experience, she said. Like Xu, Song
resorted to fake happiness as a survival strategy.

For Song, it was also a form of resistance to the Maoist ideology that held happiness derived
from politics and from the elevation of the collective over the self (McGrath 2009). One
of the real political effects of current happiness campaigns in China is the inculcation of
new values such as self-care, self-realization, and self-enterprise. Song’s happiness has also
helped her overcome tremendous social injustice in more recent years. Her husband died
after an illness misdiagnosed by an unqualified doctor at a Beijing hospital. Instead of suing
the doctor and hospital in court, Song decided to forgive them and thus sustain her happiness
and health. As she explained on SMH:

I have experienced too many injustices. I don’t have the energy to fight again. No matter
how much they are punished, my husband cannot come back to life. And there are always
inequalities and unfairness in society. Life is not fair. You will be frustrated to death if
you take all the unfairness too seriously. I choose to open one eye and close the other.
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 303

Song summarized her philosophy of life in terms of nande hutu (“it is not easy to be muddle-
headed”). Nande hutu originated with Zheng Banqiao (1693–1765), a Qing Dynasty official
and artist from Jiangsu Province. His philosophy has regained popularity in China since the
1990s, and it has given rise to a popular practice based on the concept of hutu, so-called
hutuxue (“the art of being/pretending to be muddleheaded”). Nande hutu is a publicly pro-
moted and commonly accepted strategy for becoming successful by knowing when and when
not to (pretend to) be muddleheaded. It is also used for dealing with conflicts and feelings
of powerlessness in order to remain mentally healthy.20

The benefits Song derived from her strategic forgetting and enthusiastic pursuit of happiness
led her to publish a book, The Secrets of My Happiness, in which she detailed her strategies
of faking and seeking happiness. Song saw everyday living as a process of active, skillful
self-cultivation and emotional management. She explicitly chose to fake happiness—forcing
herself to smile, to think positively, to forgive, and to ignore pain and suffering caused by
forces beyond her control. Her faking happiness first functioned as a ritualistic practice. In
the end, it led to a deeper ideological conviction; she believed in the efficacy of happiness
and became a happy person, actualizing potentials that she did not realize she had. Highly
appreciative of Song’s personality and philosophy of happiness, SMH counselor Yang com-
mented that, “Because of your forgiving and laid-back attitude toward atrocities, you look
twenty years younger than your actual age. People should learn from you and learn how to
manage our psychology and attitudes to forgive and forget.” The counselor thus extolled
forgiving or overlooking inequalities and injustices as a path to happiness that benefits and
rejuvenates people.

Scholars have started to consider this diversion of attention from injustice and hardship as an
important aspect of governance. They view people’s potential to act, and their potential to
withhold action, as a parameter of (bio)politics (cf. Hardt 1999; Massumi 2007; Venn 2007).
Svendsen proposes an anthropological approach to this potential, or what we can call “po-
tentiality.” This approach “addresses the cultural context as well as the material conditions
of that seen as incomplete yet with a power—a potency—to develop into something else”
(2011:416). Svendsen emphasizes the potency of potentiality in actualizing and transform-
ing social networks and relations. However, this neglects a politics of potentiality, in which
the constitution, animation, actualization, and preemption of potentialities fall under the
purview of the sovereign power of both experts and government—such as in China, where
happiness promotion through counseling politicizes people’s potential.

Here it is important to understand both facets of potentiality (i.e., the potentiality to and
the potentiality not to). Opposing the claim that potentiality exists only in an act, Agamben
(1998:45) endorses Aristotle’s insistence on the idea that potential has an autonomous exis-
tence; it remains capable of the act in not realizing it. For example, a builder keeps his ability
to build even when he does not build.21 As Agamben (1998:47) points out, when sovereign
powers politicize potentiality, they can maintain some that never pass into actuality and
can force others into actuality. In happiness promotions for marginalized groups, poten-
tiality encompasses positive potentials for entrepreneurship, the adoption of new morals,
304 ETHOS

or the enjoyment of a better life. However, these same groups of people, including, for
example, large numbers of angry cab drivers, also embody potentialities not to embrace such
positive outcomes by engaging in alcohol abuse, physical violence, social unrest, etc. A
taxi-driver told me in 2010:

Recent propaganda promotes the happiness of the poor (qiongren de kuaile). You can see
how TV series, movies focus on the unemployed, migrants, and urban poor and their
ordinary but happy life. Why? Because these people are not happy. Not happy, they will
make a fuss (naoshi). The government is afraid of chaos (luan).

Indeed, the recent focus of the Chinese media on everyday life and disadvantaged groups
reflects new guidelines for propaganda work issued under Hu Jintao’s leadership since
2003. These guidelines emphasize the “three closenesses,” that is, close to reality, close
to life, and close to the masses and building a harmonious society. A default rhetoric in
recent propaganda is that “people’s interests are the highest” (renmin liyi zuigao, a slogan);
policies and practice should be oriented to making people happy and satisfied (see also
Zhao 2008).

Counseling on SMH celebrates positive potentials, which are released by fake happiness
to possibly preempt negative actions of unhappy, marginalized groups (see Massumi 1997
on preemption). In other words, promoting the happiness of the marginalized combines
both a positive task of caring for people’s happiness and well-being and a negative task of
fighting against what various arms of the government, including state-run media, view as
having the potential to carry out actions posing threats to the government. These negative
potentials are “hidden dangers or risks” (yinhuan)—a buzzword in Chinese propaganda on
sustaining stability. These dangers or risks include more explicit factors or groups that are
perceived by the party to be hostile and likely pose direct threats to stability, for example,
falungong practitioners, and less explicit factors or groups such as those who experienced
drastic downward mobility in social status because of ongoing economic restructuring, es-
pecially urban workers who, as the ideological representatives of Mao’s socialism, have
been marginalized and impoverished since the mid-1990s (see also Yang 2010; Zhao 2008).
Such potential dangers can become the objects of psychological “care.” In the Chinese
context, the threat and its nature are unspecifiable and indeterminately potential. The gov-
ernment partly transforms its own structure in the image of what it fights for or desires:
both the government and potential dangers become encompassed by the “happiness” of the
underprivileged.

Counseling as Huyou

While SMH was a short-run program that ended in 2009, the parent program, Psychologi-
cal Counseling, remains popular today. It and dozens of other shows, including Beijing TV
7’s Happiness Show (xingfu xiu), attract millions of viewers daily. Popular as it is, televi-
sion counseling nevertheless constitutes a site of contestation in China. In a working-class
community in Beijing where I have conducted research for the last decade, some workers
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 305

I interviewed as late as 2011 perceived the people being counseled on camera as “stupid”
or as “having psychological problems of over-self-exposure.” Others criticized television
counseling as entertainment based on public displays of the deviant and the marginalized.
Many workers contended that the pressure of being on display often compels the person
being counselled to conform to the guidance offered by psychologists. One of my informants
went on a CCTV 12 Psychological Counseling program with his wife in 2010 to seek mar-
riage counseling; he confirmed that the large audience, cameras, and photographers made it
easy for both of them to initially agree to what the counselors proposed. They encouraged
his wife to stay in the marriage, but she eventually filed for divorce. Indeed, counseling on
television programs like SMH constructs a subject who is approved by both expert counselors
and television viewers. After the show is over, it is not always clear how that subject can be
sustained.

Another related theme of contestation has been to label counseling or happiness campaigns as
a form of huyou, a kind of entrapment, with the counselor luring the subject into conforming
to his or her ideologies or concepts. In other words, counselors often tap into one’s desire for
happiness and a good life and tie this to sociopolitical objectives. Huyou is not a neologism but
has acquired new pragmatic significance since 2000, when short plays by the comedian Zhao
Benshan gained popularity for their funny and efficacious take on this kind of persuasion.22
Huyou makes the target feel appreciated and cared for so that he or she is unaware of falling
into the trap set for emotional or financial exploitation. Many workers I interviewed in Beijing
condemned the traditional communist ideological orientation, or thought work, which often
imposed official ideologies on the rank and file or twisted their psychology. Nevertheless,
they harbored some nostalgia for thought work, whereas they criticize counseling. A worker
at a state enterprise in Beijing compared the two:

In thought work, even being criticized, at least, you felt you were recognized; you
belonged somewhere. What counseling offers—happiness and positive thinking—are
irrelevant. When you struggle everyday to put food on the table, other lofty things
are unrealistic. My happiness is a job. When everything is so negative, it’s hard to feel
positive. The so-called people’s interest is the highest (renmin liyi zui gao), but we, as
members of the people, must feel it in tangible ways. Or if we are not of the people, who
are the people?

This worker implied that he needed to feel the care of the government in tangible ways—for
example, through job provision—rather than in the cultivation of “potentials.” By consid-
ering happiness and counseling irrelevant, he defied the official prescription of happiness
or positive psychology as a solution to people’s problems. Several workers in Changping
said that, despite watching television counseling, they realized that happiness promotion
produces relaxation or detachment, which ends up creating a form of satisfaction, passivity,
or inaction toward the world (see also Illouz 2008, 2012). Indeed, psychology plays an im-
portant role in the depoliticization of society, through privatization of problems and through
the promise as well as the injunction of self-improvement. Illouz (2012) suggests putting the
politics back into our thinking. In general, these (workers’) critiques demonstrate that the
discourse of happiness in China is not firmly hegemonic or totalizing.
306 ETHOS

Conclusion
The failure of Chinese communism to deliver its promise of a good life through a market
economy is being redressed, in part, through a new politics of potentiality—which is based on
happiness and its promises. Economic restructuring has destroyed the livelihood of millions,
marginalizing them both socially and economically. Television counseling programs further
capitalize on their distress and suffering, psychologizing their lives to actualize their positive
potentials to promote their own well-being while serving various state-defined purposes.
Constructing a better individual life through the positive potentiality released by happiness
is a corollary to the political project of constructing a harmonious society. Promoting the
happiness of marginalized citizens gentrifies the wrenching effects of economic restructuring
and highlights the benevolence of a paternal state. The governing rationality of optimizing
happiness incites within subjects pleasurable responses, thus minimizing opposition and
sustaining stability. For a single-party state facing challenges in stabilizing society while
integrating itself into the fast track of the global capitalist economy, the promotion of
happiness as a site for releasing positive and preempting negative potentials constitutes a
strategy for both enhancing social harmony and advancing market development through
such means as encouraging entrepreneurship and compliance among precariously employed
workers.

However, attempts by various government agencies, including state media, to apply a logic
of psychologization is not the effect of empowered state authority; it reflects instead the
government’s inability to provide its citizens with adequate resources. The recent politics of
potentiality, anchored in the emotions and everyday struggle for survival of the marginalized,
ostensibly demonstrates that the Chinese government has overcome the ideological and
political excesses of Mao’s era and now “cares” for the psychological well-being of its people.
Yet, this care is complex, both real and fake. Many citizens are aware of the fakeness and
contest the psychologization depicted in television programs like SMH. The discourse of
fake happiness celebrates the emotional, the psychological, and the potential; the political
somehow becomes inarticulable as a sustained collective commitment and is rechanneled
into a personal and psychological obsession (see also McGrath 2009). The most permeable
aspects of life—emotions and potentialities—carry out both the exercise of power and value
extraction.

The psychologization trend—managing socioeconomic differences by psychologizing

them—downplays intensified class stratification. The promotion of fake happiness through
counseling in China apparently satisfies contingent needs, interests, and aspirations of a
certain class (i.e., entrepreneurs, the managerial class, psychotherapists). However, it also
attracts contestation, especially from the economically marginal. Such contestation occurs
even as China continues to promote happiness as the measure of a good life. Happiness
(which, in this context, begins with a performance of fake happiness) has become a resource
for contending with social and political change from diverse perspectives (Johnston 2012) as
well as an analytical tool for social critique. This article contributes to the growing anthro-
pological literature on happiness (cf. Johnston 2012; Thin 2008; Mathews 2006) by engaging
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 307

happiness as a governing technology based on psychologization and as a force for both the
government and underprivileged people to rally resources for their respective causes.

JIE YANG is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Department of Sociology and Anthro-

pology, Simon Fraser University.

Notes
Acknowledgments. The research was funded by a Standard Research Grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. An earlier version of this article was delivered on a panel on Affects and
Markets in East Asia at a combined meeting of the American Ethnological Society and the Canadian Anthropology
Society in 2009 and at a conference “China Inside Out: Modernity and the Individual Psyche” organized by
Andrew Kipnis and Tamara Jacka at the Australian National University in 2010. I thank Andrew Kipnis and
Tamara Jacka for the invitation and their penetrating comments on the article. I am grateful to comments and
warm encouragement from Borge Bakken, Trent Bax, Linda Forman, Janet Dixon Keller, Delia Lin, Janice
Matsumura, Marguerite Pigeon, Sun Wanning, and Jonathan Unger for their excellent comments and editorial
suggestion. Thanks also to Edward Lowe for his extremely helpful comments and editorial insights. Constructive
comments from four anonymous reviewers shape the final version of this article. Any errors remain my own.

1. In this article, I draw from both ethnographic research and the literature concerning current intellectual
and popular discourses on happiness and psychological counseling in China. I collected the data I present here
during field research in Beijing between 2007 and 2011. This research focused on the privatization of state-owned
enterprises and state-led psychotherapeutic interventions.

2. Examples include the TV series pinzu Zhangdamin de xingfu shenghuo (The Happy Life of Talkative Zhang
Damin, 2002) and Yangguang de kuale shenghua (Yangguang’s Happy Life, 2004), as well as the film Gaoxing
(Happiness, 2010). CCTV has been one of the most important official propaganda tools in China. However, I am
not implying here that the government entirely controls the media; transnational capital is invested in the network
and influences the media (Yang 1999). The result is not monolithic control by the state. CCTV 12 (Society and
Law) has also heavily relied on its own ratings to prioritize programs (Zhao 2008). Happiness promotion generally
combines official ideologies of the party state and preferences that emerge in the ongoing commercialization of
media and the entertainment industry (Wang 2001; Zhao 2008).

3. Laoda famously pronounces, “Wo ziji tiaotiao” (I will adjust myself), showing that he constantly psychologizes
his life through self-reflexivity and conscious adaptation.

4. For additional Mandarin-language commentary from Han Haoyue and others, see cul.sohu.com/20100318’/
n270928949.shtml.

5. Mathews (2006) proposes an anthropological approach to happiness; he suggests examining native terminologies
for happiness and their ideological orientations. I do not have the space here to delve into the semantic differences
among the pertinent Chinese terms. Instead, I examine how and why xingfu is often associated in Chinese media
with underprivileged people.
Happiness expressions become floating signifiers without fixed referents. The power of the terms xingfu and wei
xingfu does not derive from either’s capacity to adequately or comprehensively describe an already existing political
or social reality but from their semantic volatility, which enables them to act as sites where investments may accrue.
These words wield the power to rally, mobilize, and produce the political contingency they may appear to represent
(see Butler 1993 for a fuller account of this dynamic).
308 ETHOS

6. Launched in 2004, “Psychological Counseling” at CCTV 12 is the first TV counseling programming in China
to broadcast individual counseling live. Its hostesses include A. Guo, Zhang Xiaoqin, and Zhou Ling, and found-
ing counselors include Li Zixun, Yang Fengchi, Zhou Zheng, and Lei Ming. The show’s motto is “to open
the door to one’s soul, listen to inner stories, and advocate for a happy life.” For a Chinese introduction, see
baike.baidu.com/view/575827.htm.

7. Through telephone hotlines and a website, people contact SMH to tell their stories; the criteria for selecting a
story for broadcast included the story’s sensationalism and its political and ideological significance (as I determined
by a telephone interview with an SMH producer).

8. Although SMH focused on women, men were featured as well, including laid-off workers and taxi drivers.
The latter group was depicted as happy and healthy and as having counseled depressed passengers to prevent
their suicides. This portrayal relates to a parallel discourse of “reemployment stars,” glamorized laid-off workers
(particularly women) who have reemployed themselves in service industries (see Dai 2004).

9. Unlike in China, where happiness promotions rely heavily on government initiatives and policies, elsewhere,
the approach to increasing happiness has included various sectors of society. For example, in Bhutan, such efforts
have been made by government authorities and also by civil servants, business leaders, monasteries, communities,
individuals, and households (Helliwell et al. 2012:143). In the 1970s, the Fourth King of Bhutan proposed a 33-
indicator measure of happiness called “Gross National Happiness” (GNH) to holistically evaluate development
in the country. GNH differs from Western measures of happiness in its multidimensional focus; rather than
highlighting subjective well-being, it takes into account the collective pursuit of happiness, (though this can be
experienced deeply personally), and explicitly refers to responsibility and other-regarding motivations (Helliwell
et al. 2012:112).
Like SMH in China, which targets underprivileged people for happiness campaigns, the GNH Index was devised
to provide policy guidance to increase happiness, particularly by focusing on the not-yet-happy people so that their
situation can be improved; people who are not-yet-happy are also an important policy priority in Bhutan (Helliwell
et al. 2012:109).

10. The emerging “psycho-boom” in China refers to an awakening interest in psychology books, psychometric
terms, and training in counseling (Kleinman 2010) with an increasing use of psychology in governing social
life.

11. Thought work is considered an ideological ritual through which party authorities transmit (and impose) policies
and official ideologies to the rank and file (Brady 2008; Rofel 1999). Psychology and psychotherapy in China during
Mao’s time were practiced in a Marxist and Leninist theoretical framework; during the Cultural Revolution, the
disciplines were not practiced at all (Han and Kan 2007).

12. Further, the kind of emotion management (i.e., happiness) promoted through psychologization is now part and
parcel of the culture of neoliberalism. In other words, neoliberalsim works well as an ideological system because
it fits the worldview promoted by popular psychology: if one works on one’s self sufficiently, it is possible to
accomplish anything. An objective reality does not exist in this perspective, only interpretive stances (Illouz 2012). I
argue that this neoliberal model of society becomes one in which individuals take responsibility for the deficiencies
and injustice of the larger community, institutions, and workplace. Such a model is not a just model of society
(Illouz 2012).

13. The so-called mental health crisis (manifested in depression, anxiety, stress, schizophrenia, and suicide) was
spawned by widespread socioeconomic dislocation and, in this article, is understood as both a real effect on the
mental health of millions and a discursive construct that the state and psychotherapists use to legitimate the
psychotherapeutic intervention in social problems.
 COUNSELING, POTENTIALITY, AND PSYCHO-POLITICS IN CHINA 309

14. To some critics, this has led to the weakening of the party’s eudaemonic legitimacy, that is, of the justification
of its rule through efficient provision of economic benefits to individuals (Chen 1997:423).

15. Watch the segment at news.cntv.cn/program/xinlifangtan/20100408/107302.shtml.

16. SMH resembles the working of self-help books in the United States. For example, it resonates with 19th-
and 20th-century notions of self-help. Take Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) as an example. It has its opening
sentence: “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937) described the
use of repeated positive thought to attract happiness and wealth by tapping into an infinite intelligence. The
basic structure of these American self-help books is, first, a suggestion that something is wrong with people,
with the culture that guides or programs people, and second, a suggestion of what might be done to correct this
problem. That is, self-help books offer both a critique of the culture and a solution (Dolby 2005:4–5). Those
self-help books maintain the stability of culture; they ensure that some elements of past and current culture will
be preserved into the next generation (Dolby 2005:11). These books carry such appeal and inspiration for an
American audience, who feels a need to reflect upon life and become prudent, self-educated, self-reliant, and even
wise (Dolby 2005:xii). Although 90 percent of self-help books in China are translated from Western books, another
important source of psychological self-help in China is its rich cultural tradition such as Confucianism, Daoism, and
Buddhism.

17. A harmonious society, as envisioned by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao in 2004, is putatively people-centered and
socially and economically sustainable. Its key features include democracy, the rule of law, equity, justice, sincerity,
amity, and vitality.

18. With mass layoffs from state enterprises since the mid-1990s, Chinese media have, by default, represented
suspects in serious crimes as laid-off workers recently released from mental hospitals. The portrayal of mental illness
as the cause of unemployment (rather than the other way around) not only rationalizes the association between
unemployment and mental illness but also downplays any possible political motivation for unemployed workers to
engage in criminal acts against structural inequality.

19. See Lee and Kleinman (2002) for a more tempered view of psychiatry in contemporary China.

20. The philosophy of nande hutu is embedded in Zheng’s famous passage: Congming nan, hutu nan, you congming
er zhuanru hutu geng nan. Fang yizhao, tui yibu, dang xia xin an, fei tu houlai fu bao ye. “Being bright is not easy. But
it’s also difficult being muddleheaded. If you start out being bright, it is even harder to be muddleheaded. Let go!
Step back! If you want to have present peace of mind, don’t anticipate future rewards” (Matthyssen 2009).

21. See Power (2010) for a critique of Agamben’s notion of potentiality, which emphasizes inactivity or the power
to suspend the passage of potentiality to actuality. Power argues that this notion of potentiality constructs reduced or
promissory subjects. However, in the Chinese context, both notions of positive and negative potentiality maximize
individual agency.

22. Zhao’s short plays maiguai (selling crutches) in 2001 and maiche (selling wheelchairs) in 2003, broadcast as
part of the CCTV Chinese New Year Gala, made huyou a popular term in China. In maiguai, for example, Zhao’s
character talks an entirely healthy stranger he meets on the street into buying a pair of crutches. The stranger is
grateful to Zhao for helping him identify his potential health problem.

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