Abstract
The individual “self” (ziwo) occupies a privileged place in p opular media and academic discussions about China’s post-Mao social and cultural transformation. 1 Alongside marketization and urbanization, a family oriented and collectivist ethics of personal responsibilities molded by Confucian as well as socialist principles of personhood, has been increasingly replaced by an emphasis on self-fulfillment and individual rights. What Yunxiang Yan (2009) calls the “individualization” of Chinese society, seems to be manifest in all areas of social and cultural life, from an education system that nurtures highly competitive individual ambition from the first years of school life, commercial advertising that equates self-worth with entrepreneurial success, consumer capacity, and good looks, to young people’s challenges to their parents’ authority. Its manifestation in everyday life unevenly draws on embedded cultural practices as well as new global influences. It also unevenly corresponds with the party–state’s interests in regulating the parameters of social and political activity and expression to sustain the authority of the political system, and to encourage entrepreneurial interests in the service of national prosperity. Zhang and Ong see China’s new individual as the product of the pull between the deregulated neoliberal market and the controlling impulse of the socialist state (Zhang and Ong 2008). Yan’s longer-term focus on the processes since the 1950s that have “untied” the individual person from the collective and state attributes to the state an important role in “manag[ing] the process of individualization by drawing boundaries and regulating directions” (Yan 2009: xxvii).
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© 2012 Andrew B. Kipnis
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Evans, H. (2012). The Intimate Individual: Perspectives from the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Urban China. In: Kipnis, A.B. (eds) Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268969_6
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