A collaboration by six anthropologists, one psychiatrist, and one anthropologist-psychiatrist, this volume delves into the moral and emotional lives of the Chinese. Departing from the predominant economic and political paradigms that have been used to analyze today's China, the authors deploy the moral and psychological framework to illustrate the complexities of remaking subjectivity in the new moral context created by rapid social and economic transformation.
The new moral individual, according to the volume, both produces and is produced by the new moral context since the 1980s, the process that epitomizes China's rapid transition to an increasingly individualized society (p. 14). As the volume contends, the new moral context emerged in consonance with the market reform. Decollectivization, privatization, and marketization of institutions—including education, medical care, and housing—created a new “enterprising and desiring” personhood by imposing new responsibilities on an individual to compete in the market economy and pursue wealth, happiness, and...
