Against Three “Cultural” Characters Speaks Self‐Improvement: Social Critique and Desires for “Modernity” in Pedagogies of Soft Skills in Contemporary China

Abstract

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 selfimprovement 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]

Tragic Stability and Elusive Selfhood: On the Drive for Self-Development in Contemporary China

“…Participants in these workshops, who are mostly in their twenties, aim to foster skills for diverse usage while also enjoying enacting themselves in new ways through workshop exercises in correspondence to images of marketdriven morality. Elsewhere, I have elaborated on the image of the ideal person heralded in these workshops, who displays imagined virtues of individual autonomy, emotionality, and sincerity (Hizi, 2021a(Hizi, , 2021b. I have demonstrated how instructors and participants index these qualities in workshops as socially advanced virtues, antagonistic to widespread norms that involve rigid hierarchies, saving face, interdependence, and social connections.…”

“…Thus, I do not treat this Sartrean viewpoint as the predominant perspective in China, but rather as one that comes alive through the interaction of self-development with person-centred discourses. Outside activities associated with self-development, individuals are preoccupied with, and often ascribe virtue to familial obligations and social networks, while in workshops they tend to identify the seemingly self-inhibiting aspects of these responsibilities (see more in Hizi, 2021a). The Sartrean dualism, which I apply as an etic interpretation of my interlocutors' concerns, captures a mindset that treats the present-local sociocultural influences as morally insufficient that seeks to reify the "self" as an entity that can determine its way of living, and that must remain resilient in the face of future contingencies.…”