Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy

Li ZHANG is a professor in the Dept. of Anthropology at the University of California—Davis, and the author of the new book Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (2020, University of California Press). Her two previous single-author books are Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population (2001), and In Search of Paradise: Middle Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (2010). She is also the co-editor of the recently published edited volume, Can Science and Technology Save China? (2020).This podcast discusses the rise of psychotherapy in Kunming, and how part of the appeal of psychotherapy in China is that it comes from the West and claims to be scientific, but the therapeutic techniques don’t always fit Chinese notions of personhood, sociability and efficacy in healing, so have to be adapted and localized. We also discuss the scientism and blind faith in science that makes psychotherapy such a popular fad in China today, though psychotherapy nevertheless appears to be helpful to clients.