Okay.

Well, thank you, Professor Mueller for the very generous introduction, and also for inviting me. I was very pleased when you wrote me and of course you know we met at Max Planck and I remember you so well because you were a star there we were so impressed by your research

and everything your presentation so it's a pleasure to come to speak with all of you here I really

look forward to the discussion and also thank you Hany for setting up everything that was very nice

so my talk today is intended to give an overview of my newly published book anxious china

inner revolution and the politics of psychotherapy by UC Press it's a pandemic baby it came out last

summer in the midst of the pandemic so let me also pause here to share the screen with you I do have

a ppt here okay here you go hope you guys can see it well okay I'm not doing a full screen because

otherwise some parts of the people would block the screen so hopefully you can see here yeah

so this is the book um I just want to briefly comment on the cover the cover image I love it's

done by a Chinese artist who is also my friend Hong Zhang it's called the breed field I first saw

this charcoal painting and I thought this image really captures the sense of anxiety and restless

I try to convey in my book so here you go that's the restless anxious china so this is an overview

at the same time towards the end of my talk I will also go in a little bit deeper for a specific

issue of the rise of therapeutic self to just give you a sense of how I as a anthropologist

approach the complexity of psychotherapy through ethnographic field work so I also heard some of

you have read my article on therapeutic self so which is wonderful so you would have a good sense

of what I'm going to talk about and that can generate more discussion later so yeah I'm going

to keep my talk a little bit shorter like 40 minutes or under I know zoom is so exhausting

people just get really tired of it all right so let's get started China's economic reform has

brought about the profound ruptures in not only social economic structures but also people's inner

landscape just give you some figures the national center for mental health in China estimated that

over 100 million Chinese people suffer from different kinds of mental illness faced with

relentless market-driven competition rapid social change and pressure to become successful many

Chinese people today are feeling restless and distressed so some of them are turning to

psychological counseling to grapple with their anguish and problems in hope for a quick fix

in this context a new therapeutic language of self-care and self-mastery along with a medicalized

language of managing anxiety depression stress is entering Chinese society so it's interesting you

have these simultaneous two languages emerging as a reporter once put it to quote that this is a

radical shift in a nation where focus on the individual was discouraged by both socialist

ideology and traditional culture unquote so my book is an ethnographic account of how a new

inner revolution is unfolding in urban China I largely cover cities only not in the countryside

as my research shows this bottom-up popular psychological movement is really reconfiguring

the self family dynamics social relations and the modes of governing so I call this phenomena the

inner revolution to highlight it's a transformative impact on so many aspects of life so even though

it's still in the early stage of development unlike some revolutions you have heard the cultural

revolution the consumer revolution and so on this inner revolution is relatively quiet but it engenders

profound changes from within and it's spreading rapidly and its impact goes far beyond the

individual realm and the clinical space so in this thriving therapeutic culture a host of work units

such as schools enterprises the police and even the military are increasingly keen to incorporate

psychological techniques into their personal management personnel management when these

organizations face multiple challenges today therefore psychological counseling I argue is

not limited to the reshaping of the individual and the family sphere but also extend into

governmental practices and the broader social domains so in this book I try to demonstrate

that the inner revolution is simultaneously personal and political intimate and social

subtle yet powerful and you will see in this book my ethnographic gaze travels from clinical space

to much broader social spaces such as family school and workplace so before I go into the book

detail let me say a few words about the context for my research since the early 1990s a side

fever that's called the has been sweeping Chinese cities now it includes a broad range of things

for example the teaching and the learning of psychology group and individual counseling