Abstract
The conventional line of social scientific research on “happiness” takes a psychological approach: happiness is measured by individuals’ self-reported well-being and explained by some social factors, including age, gender, socioeconomic status, and so on. This approach inevitably leads to quantitative indexes of happiness used as a benchmark to compare different groups and even nations. For instance, in social scientific products like the World Happiness Report, nations compete in a happiness Olympics; the winner, well, is always Finland.
The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness: Anxieties, Hopes, and Moral Tensions in Everyday Life, edited by Becky Hsu and Richard Madsen, goes beyond this common approach. The book aims to explore how contemporary Chinese understand the cultural and ethical meanings of “happiness” and how such understanding is embedded in their social relations with families, communities, professions, and the state. To appreciate the importance of this edited volume, one must take both intellectual and historical backgrounds into consideration. The intellectual background for this book is deeply rooted in sociologists’ persistent interest in individual and group perceptions of the personal good life vis-à-vis the public good in their societies. This tradition dates back to classical sociology, especially Émile Durkheim, and the neoclassic study Habits of the Heart, of which Richard Madsen was a coauthor.
The historical background for this book is Chinese society, with its greater degree of diversity and pluralism since the early 2000s. The whirlwind changes in every aspect of society have provoked worries about moral degradation or even “moral void.” Certainly, one can apply this moral degradation critique to any society, but what makes China a complex case is the coexistence of a robust authoritarian state, a fast-growing market economy, and a vibrant society. In this sense, the book’s subtitle aptly captures contemporary Chinese’s general feelings: “anxieties, hopes, and moral tensions in everyday life.”
The book starts with an effort to look for an umbrella translation of the Chinese word “xingfu.” The English translation the editors choose is “blessed happiness” because it rightly indicates that, in contrast to the individual-based, utilitarian notion of happiness, xingfu is a feeling of well-being rooted in and “blessed” by one’s family and community. Needless to say, “being blessed” to be happy is the ideal rather than reality. As the chapters of the book show, people’s pursuit of such happiness is always intertwined with unhappiness. They have to come to terms with the demands, conventions, and politics of the social relations they are embedded in.
In Chapter Two, Hsu uses in-depth interviews to show a somewhat surprising fact: young Chinese still assess their happiness according to their various understandings of filial piety. Similarly, in Chapter Three, Deborah Davis’s study of elaborate and lavish weddings in Shanghai suggests that the young couples are anxious about whether their weddings can demonstrate their appreciation for their parents or bring “face” to their parents. They might be exhausted by the procedures, logistics, and even difficult interactions with their parents, and perhaps they could not wait to get the wedding done. Nevertheless, when it was all over and they watched the videos, they were happy. Their happiness is indeed embedded in their xingfu families, or more precisely, their families that pursue their xingfu through elaborate rituals.
The other chapters move beyond families. In Chapter Four, James Farrer presents fine-grained ethnographic details about social eating to show how people represent, enact, and embody the “good life” in their social relations. Eating alone is a meaningless practice of filling the stomach. But being forced to have meals with business purposes is a punishment. The happy meals, for the younger generations, are the ones with friends outside families, sometimes in western restaurants. Those happy meals function as an escape from routine, traditional meals with families, which at best are described as “warm” but not happy. To meet these demands for cultural meanings, restaurants attempt to create an atmosphere of intimacy and informality by rebranding them as “private kitchens,” which ironically provide perfect venues for developing commercially charged guanxi (social connections). The unhappy side, besides the forced formality of business meals, also includes the prevalent worry about food safety, which restaurants exploit to market their organic and safe food.
Madsen’s chapter uses interviews with Chinese social workers as a window on the moral order of Chinese society and people’s seeking meaning when facing pressure from the market, the state, and their families. Social workers are on the front line of social problems and witness much unhappiness among their clients. Their incomes, however, are universally lower than average. Adding to the Chinese social workers’ challenges is their clash of values with the state: the state emphasizes its authoritarian control over society, whereas the social workers adhere to individuals’ dignity and mutual help. Any social work agency or group that seeks the state’s permission to exist must avoid those activities that might be interpreted by the state as advocacy. Consequently, sometimes social workers wonder if their job is to make people happy or to make the government happy. For the younger workers, their parents’ complaints and dissatisfactions about their low pay and low status compromise their idealistic view of their commitments. Madsen, however, does not view these dilemmas as something idiosyncratic to social workers. Rather, social workers’ frustrations about moral fragmentation are common among other people in China, who are eager to send their children to study and live in what they view as morally better societies like Europe, Australia, and the United States.
Chih-jou Jay Chen’s chapter offers an even bleaker picture. The main characters of his chapter are those political activists who risk their careers, families, and even lives to do the good thing—not just for themselves but also for the greater good. Here, meanings of happiness come from seeking justice for others. But this meaningful practice comes at an exorbitant price in a society like China. Chen’s interviewees include famous activists like Xiao Shu and Teng Biao, who have to reconcile their personal unhappiness with the greater happiness they pursue for society.
This volume has left some things that can be addressed by future research. One particular limitation has been honestly admitted by the editors in the introduction: most research subjects are urban middle-class people. Therefore, this opens a possibility for future studies of other classes, such as peasants, migrant workers, and the wealthy. Lang Chen’s chapter provides a detailed genealogy of the Chinese term “xingfu” but stops at the early twentieth century and then jumps to the present day. The Communist political vocabulary on xingfu in the Mao years and its impacts on today’s discourses are absent. More importantly, the authors make much less effort to examine the pursuit of happiness in a comparative way. In other words, to what extent are the Chinese pursuits of happiness comparable to those in other contexts? Social workers and full-time activists everywhere face dilemmas caused by the conflicts among their careers, families, and political restrictions. Young Americans are also eager to have their parents’ endorsement of their marriage choices and wedding plans. I am certainly not saying they are no different from the Chinese; rather, a more comparative perspective might help this fine collection of essays speak to a broader audience. I am also particularly interested in how the authors think about the linkage between their work and Habits of the Heart.
In sum, The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness is a collective accomplishment from some leading China studies scholars and paves the way for a “cultural turn” in the sociology of China. While the mainstream sociology of China focuses on stratification, organization, and politics, this cultural sociology will provide a window onto the moral and cultural meanings that contemporary Chinese draw on to understand a constantly changing society as well as their own actions. This book is one of those rare edited volumes where all chapters are of high quality: beautifully written, theoretically thoughtful, and empirically grounded. The book is strongly recommended for anyone interested in the sociology of morality, cultural sociology, and contemporary China.