In the United States, the popular urge for self-improvement has given rise to a massive commercial industry encompassing self-help manuals, therapeutic services, and motivational speaking events. In China, anthropologist Gil Hizi observed, a comparable movement is underway, as his case study in Jinan shows how people seek to improve their interpersonal skills through soft skill boot camps. Though their effects are short-lived, these workshops are important channels through which people seek to address the ills of exam-oriented state education, rigid workplace structures, and the pressure to conform to conventional social expectations. More importantly, these workshops embody long-standing reflections on the myriad undesirable facets of Chinese culture and society. As Hizi points out, instructors and participants constantly identify behaviors and values that seemingly reflect a “Chinese” tendency to suppress self-realization.
Gil Hizi is Research Associate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, the University of Cologne. Having studied discursive practices of psychology and personal development, he addresses moral change in urban China in his research. His ethnographic projects focus on how people navigate everyday uncertainties, the moral dynamics of capitalist worlds, and therapeutic cultures. Before publishing Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China (NUS Press), he edited the volume Self-Development Ethics and Politics in China Today: A Keyword Approach (Amsterdam University Press, 2024), among other publications.
Alice Liu: Dr. Hizi, you published Transient Becoming. Will you tell our readers briefly what the book is about?
Gil Hizi: Yes, the book is about self-improvement programs in urban China, focusing on the city of Jinan in Shandong Province. It traces expertise in psychology, public speaking, and various so-called soft skills, or interpersonal skills. My book explores how these programs have expanded in China and attracted clients and participants. It is also a story about how people in Jinan reckon with moral change, particularly changes brought about by economic reforms in recent years.
The activities and interactions in the workshops criticize social issues that are at the heart of young people’s distress: disciplinary education at the expense of fun and joy; normative-competitive expectations regarding diplomas, marriage, and possessions; and essentialist views on the seemingly relational and obedient properties of Chinese personhood. These views resonated equally with urban middle-class residents and students who had migrated from the countryside and who attended some of the self-improvement workshops.
Through self-improvement programs, we see people trying to express certain moral ideas and dissatisfactions with aspects of economic transformation. They carve out spaces for alternative behaviors, interactions, and forms of social life.
AL: Why did you choose Jinan as the place to study the self-improvement movement?
GH: I want to focus on a second-tier city in China because I think these cities are more representative of the tensions that emerge during economic transformation. Residents of second-tier cities experience rapid processes of transformation while also positioning themselves in relation to more advanced cities. 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. These people have aspirations and hope for something beyond the current state of economic reforms.
Another interesting aspect is the Confucian heritage. Jinan is close to Qufu, the hometown of Confucius, and Zoucheng, the hometown of Mencius. These renowned sages’ heritage is very present in social life, educational programs, city campaigns, and social norms, including social hierarchies, educational practices, and parenting practices. 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.
The Confucian legacy creates an urge for people to work on and improve themselves in a different register. Many of the people I met critiqued the Confucian heritage and how it limits certain aspects of self-improvement from a more individualistic perspective. This creates a very interesting form of reflection and social critique.
AL: You did field studies of three self-improvement organizations in Jinan: Champion Training, Heart’s Secret, and Super Speakers. Tell us what they are, how they are structured as private enterprises, and how the programs and workshops are structured. What would a typical session look like?
GH: These are different programs taking place in the same central district in Jinan. Champion Training primarily targets university students and is run by young trainers experienced in various fields such as management and positive psychology. Many are interested in entrepreneurship and engage with corporate culture, self-help knowledge, and related issues. What concerns them most are aspects of educational life, particularly the focus on the college entrance exam and what they see as the narrow-mindedness of Chinese education. Many activities purport to address these ramifications by fostering emotional interactions and emphasizing entrepreneurship and risk-taking. The activities included self-praise and the removal of so-called negative labels that people attach to themselves, with the goal of enabling participants to become more liberated individuals rather than simply follow their parents’ expectations.
This trend is also evident in the other programs I attended. Super Speakers mostly appeals to people in their mid-20s and 30s and focuses on public speaking. It is a weekly event where people meet at a local café. With a casual atmosphere, the speeches are intended to inspire people to realize their potential and achieve something beyond the routines of everyday life. Many speeches focus on traveling, pursuing professional ambitions, and romance. In a sense, it functions as a social club where people gather weekly and feel that they are a like-minded and open-minded lot.
Heart’s Secret emanates more from the tradition of modern psychology in China and is coordinated by practitioners of psychology. The participants are either licensed counselors or people who are interested in or study psychology. The activities emphasize principles for finding happiness, raising happy children, and finding self-realization. Most participants are middle-aged women concerned with navigating relationships within the household, including relationships with partners, parents, and children. These domestic issues receive considerable emphasis, and participants engage in extensive sharing of their personal problems.
AL: The book’s title is Transient Becoming. Why do you describe the process of becoming as “transient”?
GH: We tend to think of self-improvement as a continuous process in which people try to achieve progress from point A to point B. But what I observed in Jinan was a more sporadic and bounded form of self-improvement. People may feel that they need to behave by certain archetypes, whether with their employers, at school, or with their parents, but these workshops provide a space to experiment with new expressions of themselves.
Attendees do try to apply some of what they practice, such as public speaking skills and emotional intelligence, to their everyday lives. However, they also accept that these spaces offer something distinct that cannot easily be translated into other settings of social life. In that sense, the process is bounded and transient.
AL: You said that instructors and participants in these workshops constantly identify behaviors and values that seemingly reflect a “‘Chinese’ tendency to suppress self-realization.” In other words, they problematize certain aspects of Chinese culture. How do you see these critiques as echoing the “cultural craze” (wenhua re) of the 1980s?
GH: In post-Mao Chinese society, there is a certain continuity in the impetus to analyze China’s cultural and national character. This tradition is evident in discussions about how to create a better society by transforming individuals, reflecting on social morality, and focusing on children as agents of social change.
During the period of the “cultural craze” (wenhua re) in the 1980s, Chinese politicians, intellectuals, and journalists debated in different forums how to achieve a state of “wenming”, that is, a state of civility that is closely identified with the advanced industrial cultures of Asia and the West. In this process, so-called Chinese cultural attributes, such as submission to power (also known in China as the “slave mentality,” nulixing) and a tendency to affirm one’s “face” over direct communication, were highly condemned.
Many important figures and texts that shaped these debates, including Bo Yang’s famous book, The Ugly Chinaman(choulou de zhongguoren). Bo mocks alleged Chinese characteristics such as reluctance to introspect and lack of transparency in social interaction. There was also a genre in the 80s and 90s that Geremie Barmé identifies as “self-loathing” among Chinese authors and intellectuals. It draws on the New Cultural Movement of the early 20th century along with literati styles from the Ming and Qing dynasties.
These discourses frame the moral actor as a person who reflects upon the effects of “culture,” overcomes them, and promotes social change. All of this took place during the May Fourth Movement and the cultural craze of the 1980s, and it continues to some degree today.
But unlike before, we cannot necessarily view these activities as revolutionary or radical. Most people are very critical of the state of society, but they also accept and adapt to their environments in ways that perhaps differ from the revolutionary impetus we saw in other periods. Additionally, current concerns lean heavily on economic reforms, including workplace and educational competition, youth alienation, and the stress that accompanies urban life.
The fact that people often associate social problems with “culture” tells us something about moral processes under economic transformation. For example, educational stress is associated with the Confucian emphasis on education, while workplace competition is linked to traditional social hierarchies. Readers might identify in this book economic problems that are by no means unique to China or issues that derive from China’s political system, yet many people in China tend to identify them as a matter of “Chinese culture.”
AL: What is positive energy, or “zheng nengliang,” and how are workshops structured around this notion?
GH: Positive energy is a term closely associated with state campaigns. Xi Jinping promoted it in various speeches throughout the 2010s and later. In the literature on China, it is associated with a conformist approach to citizenship, advocating for acceptance of state campaigns and the authority of the Communist Party. The term is usually analyzed discursively, but it also inspires pedagogical activities and the interactions they produce. Practitioners in the workshops I studied associate positive energy with moments when people amplify their emotional expression or when the entire group shares intense feelings in a contagious way. In this sense, positive energy serves as a pedagogical tool for temporarily opening up new possibilities for personal expression and experimenting with different personas.
AL: In one of the stories, you described a workshop instructor who fashioned himself as a master teacher/therapist. Tell us more about the development of psychotherapy in China and how it differs from European/American counterparts.
GH: Around 2002, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security launched an examination for psychological counselors to obtain professional licenses. One could complete a months-long course and then qualify to take the exam and become licensed as a psychological counselor. This led to the so-called psychoboom, a period during which numerous new psychological counselors were licensed, alongside the establishment of new clinics, centers, services, and programs in hospitals and schools. The state also popularized self-help and self-regulation tools and sponsored psychological training for civil servants, nurses, police officers, and others.
This rapid surge in psychology led to widespread fascination with the field and considerable psychological content in the media, including entertainment television and the press. Psychology became closely associated with self-help and less with the image of the clinic or one-on-one therapy. Psychology workshops are quite central to what psychology means to many people in China.
A second interesting aspect is that, because psychology expanded so rapidly, it incorporated various psychological traditions. Centers and clinics might combine elements of Freudian psychoanalysis, Carl Rogers’s humanistic psychology, and Martin Seligman’s positive psychology in one workshop session. There are also particular methods that became extremely popular in China, such as Virginia Satir’s focus on family relationships.
AL: How do workshop participants reflect on traditional Chinese parenting models, family structures, and cultural norms?
GH: This is a strong theme in Heart’s Secret, a psychology-based program. Attendees constantly negotiate the imperative to raise perfect, successful children with their wish that kids be allowed to have more freedom, experience more joy, and pursue what they enjoy doing. Many workshop discussions revolve around this dilemma: When should mothers let go, and when should they try to control their children’s behavior? Part of what the workshops try to do is enable parents to raise their children differently from what social norms prescribe or how their own parents raised them. This is obviously a very emotionally charged topic.
The book presents the image of the “scolding mother” as it was described in workshops: a person who is 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. One psychologist and workshop coordinator in Heart’s Secret who is introduced in the book often addressed the issue of children being too preoccupied with pleasing their parents, who struggle to find out who they “really are” and how they should live their lives.
The workshops extended this image beyond parenting to a larger problem of communication and feedback. In the public speaking club “Super Speakers,” for example, the members were proud of the club’s emphasis on constructive, sincere, and emphatic evaluation of each other’s speeches.
AL: I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that many educational/parenting norms in China amount to outright abuse. I also liked the part where you discussed Super Speakers members’ antipathy toward civil servants. Would you share that bit with our readers?
GH: Most people I met in workshop express their preference to work in the private economy and complained of that spiritual and professional stagnation that comes with a civil servant role. Like the postgraduate student trapped inside the campus walls, the civil servant is supposedly embedded in a local Chinese system that downplays the wholesome value of the person. Most practitioners of self-improvement echoed a widespread assumption in China that the state sector does not enable self-development. Others cited the glass ceilings women would face inside the state sector.
What’s interesting about all this criticism is that people are aware that they are entangled in the very systems they criticize. Mothers in Heart’s Secret criticize certain parenting norms but also recognize that they are not immune to these practices. The same applies to criticism of civil servants. One interlocutor frequently identified civil servants with a Chinese “culture of reliance” (kao wenhua) in which occupational success does not depend on merit but is instead grounded in nepotism. He lamented that it is tiring to communicate with civil servants because there is always a hidden message behind the words spoken (hua li you hua), rather than direct self-expression.
Many youngsters, especially those interested in self-improvement and entrepreneurship in the private sector, criticize the state sector for its limited opportunities for personal growth. They despise the hierarchical nature, which required many workplace rituals through which employees catered to their superiors through flattery, insincere compliments, or gift-giving. These practices led to the perception that the state sector is pretentious and less meritocratic than it should be.
However, people recognize that they are also entangled in this system. They sometimes take civil service examinations themselves because they understand that these jobs provide a level of security that cannot easily be dismissed. There is an interesting article by the sociologist Carolyn S. Hsu from the early 2000s about workers at an international pizza chain in Harbin. She presents very nicely how the state sector is associated with supposedly backward elements of Chinese society, including rural life and traditional rituals, whilst the private sector represents cosmopolitanism, personal growth, and entrepreneurship.
But then again, we are now in a different period, in which more young people are seeking security and becoming disillusioned with the promises of the private economy. Consequently, becoming a civil servant has again become a pretty attractive trajectory.
AL: You identified a paradox in that whilst these self-improvement programs promised long-term growth for participants, they proved not always directly applicable to participants’ everyday lives. Why do you think people continued to attend these programs? What are they hoping to gain? Friendship? Emotional fulfillment? Or something else?
GH: All of these elements exist, but the fact that these experiences are limited to the workshops is not always perceived as a disadvantage. People appreciate these spaces as opportunities to experiment with new forms of behavior and new personas. They value having these experiences as part of their lives. Another issue is that these workshops offer some hope about moral transformations. By and large, participants are convinced that they are not simply engaging in activities that offer pleasure or temporary empowerment but also are morally valuable. Some participants also look for opportunities to extend these practices beyond the workshops. Some try to gain greater appreciation from family members or employers, while others establish new services.
The book also describes a Super Speakers member who tried to establish a creativity center for children in his home village with the goal of transforming the villagers’ mindsets. These agendas sometimes fail, particularly when they are overly ambitious, but they nevertheless demonstrate practitioners’ conviction in the value of what they are doing and their wish to extend its influence in different ways.
AL: All these programs emphasize soft skills. Tell us about the importance of soft skills in the Chinese context and where participants hope to apply these skills in their lives beyond their professional lives.
GH: There is no single, distinct term for soft skills in Chinese, as there is in English. Some people use the term ruan jineng, while others refer to specific skills, such as communication, public speaking, emotional expression, and leadership.
In China, people draw on transnational psychological and managerial expertise that promotes soft skills. However, as we discussed, they extend these ideas to questions of individual and social character and behaviors beyond the workplace. For example, they associate these skills with sincerity, self-realization, and enabling people to raise happy children and live fulfilling lives.
Of course, Chinese people do live in a market economy, so they sometimes try to instrumentalize what they learn to promote their businesses. They are not immune to these broader social pressures or the desire for self-promotion. Nevertheless, I think there is a strong association between soft skills and moral virtues rather than simply treating them as marketable assets, reframed through local concerns and Chinese worldviews.
AL: You described these workshops as cultivating “capitalist virtuousness.” What do you mean by that?
GH: I’m trying to show how people use market-driven expertise and tools to address moral concerns. The term shows that concerns with virtue do not dissipate along with capitalism, and the instrumental logic is fostered but rather emerges as responses to economic transformations. This is something that is happening worldwide. The people I met in these programs identify certain possibilities arising from economic changes to cultivate virtues such as sincerity and individual autonomy, alongside greater attention to emotional well-being.
At the same time, the fact that these concerns become mobilized through the means of the market—the self-help industry, entrepreneurial imaginaries, etc.—produces new contradictions and limitations, such as the temporary quality of self-improvement that this book describes, or the fact that structural issues are not fully addressed or converted to a more culturalist critique. Still, these practices enable certain possibilities within everyday life for people to imagine and enact things differently.
Work Cited
Hizi, Gil. 2026. TRANSIENT BECOMING Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China. [S.l.]: NUS PRESS. bo267741490.html