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Book Reviews, China and Inner Asia

Volume 90 – No. 1

UNKNOTTING THE HEART: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China | By Jie Yang

Ithaca: ILR Press [an imprint of Cornell University Press], 2015. xxv, 255 pp. (Illustrations.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8014-5660-2.


Jie Yang’s first book explores the long-term consequences of the massive layoffs in the late 1990s and early 2000s that affected tens of millions of workers in Chinese state-owned enterprises. The book is based on a decade-long ethnographic research in a community in Changping, a suburb of Beijing. Many of its residents are former employees of the now-privatized watch factory Beibiao. Through this case study, Yang reveals the suffering that laid-off workers and the unemployed experience today and examines the solutions that the state has employed to alleviate it.

Yang’s ethnography focuses on state interventions that are intended to tackle the “heart” through Western-style psychotherapy. In both the introduction and the conclusion, Yang presents an overarching argument that places these developments in the broader trend of “psychologization”—the rendering of socio-economic problems into psychological ones. Unemployment thus becomes part of the mental health crisis that is plaguing the rapidly developing society. Yang contends that the state’s promotion of psychotherapy signals a shift from coercive control to a more benevolent mode of governing. To characterize this shift, Yang coins the terms of “therapeutic governance” and “kindly power.” Yang further argues that, in doing this, the state aims to harness the positive potential (qianli) of the targeted populations and to contain the hidden threats or “negative potential” (yinhuan) they entail.

This ambitious thesis is supported by six ethnographic chapters. The first two bring readers to the centre of the said interventions: the residents’ committee that embodies the state/party’s presence at the grassroots level. Reemployment training, which frequently involves counselling, is offered by its staff who have recently received some training in psychotherapy. In chapter 1 Yang describes how these psychosocial workers endorse “self-reflexivity,” or more precisely reconsidering one’s situations and coming up with a positive mindset, as a crucial means to achieve “happiness.” This has become an index of “economic growth and governing efficiency” (36) in the official discourse. Chapter 2 turns to more closely examine the practitioners who, defining their mission as helping others to help themselves, must prompt their clients to relinquish their dependency on the state. Here Yang compares the Maoist ideology of self-reliance, which stresses the independence of the country, and the new emphasis on the individual self. In the end Yang also shows that the counselling is poorly received; local people often perceive it as “hoodwinking” (huyou).

Chapter 3 looks into the poverty-relief program known as “sending warmth” (song wennuan). At first glance this might seem like a digression as the program primarily involves giving material support to the poor and the unemployed. However, Yang discovers that local party staff who carry out these operations see the expression of compassion or “shared human feelings” (renqing) as an essential element. A broadly conceived notion of therapy, therefore, underpins these relief efforts. In chapter 4 Yang discusses the hybrid condition of the psychotherapeutic practices in the local community. The practitioners borrow bits and pieces from various schools or traditions, including rational emotive therapy, Carl Rogers’s client-centred approach, and narrative therapy. Since most of them are former or current party staff, they also tend to draw on thought work, the method of ideological education that was widely used during the socialist period.

In the second part of the book, chapters 5 and 6 investigate the role of gender in the experiences of the laid-off workers. While previous chapters discuss psychotherapy as a remedy, here psychotherapy training would become a strategy of reemployment. Chapter 5 introduces the new occupation of “housemaid counselors” (peiliao) —domestic workers who are equipped with basic counselling skills and could serve as companions to chat with. These jobs are mostly taken by women because of the link between the female gender and caregiving. Chapter 6 turns to taxi drivers, the most popular job for unemployed men. In a similar vein, it is not uncommon that taxi drivers receive basic psychotherapy training so that they become “counselors on wheels” (181). They counsel their customers during the trips and are capable of identifying those with suicidal intentions. Yang further describes the emotional distress prevalent among taxi drivers and attributes it to suppressed anger toward the state, whose abandoning of workers results in their current plight.

Despite the richness and depth of this study, a few questions remain. To begin with, what is the position of these psychotherapeutic interventions in the overall policy regarding the unemployed? Yang seems to ascribe a rather central role to them, but little is said about other social services and the relationships between them. Moreover, Yang repeatedly suggests that the training these local party staff receive is very limited, and that their counselling rarely achieves satisfactory outcomes: the attempt to instill a positive outlook in the unemployed is not only futile but often suspected of being a trick by recipients. These facts seem to undermine the claim that the state is taking a therapeutic shift; if that were true, why wouldn’t it invest more resources into training counsellors and monitoring the efficacy of these programs more cautiously? In fact, Changping should be an ideal place for such an experiment given its proximity to central Beijing, which is home to numerous leading psychology institutions and a flourishing “psycho-boom” among the middle class.

Unknotting the Heart offers invaluable information and insights into the lived experiences of laid-off workers and the state’s responses in China. Being the first book-length ethnography on the recent rise of Western psychotherapy in China, it will be of great interest to scholars in China studies, medical anthropology, and psychology.


Hsuan-Ying Huang
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China

pp. 120-122


Last Revised: May 31, 2018
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