Individuality,subjectivation,and their civic significance in contemporary China: The cultivation of an ethical self in a cultural community

The community and research methodology

The community under study had about 30 core members. It also set up an online group of about 350 people across the country, who communicated with one another from time to time via the Internet. The vast majority of its core members were born in the 1970s, and most were women, a reflection of the proportion of female teachers in primary and secondary schools. Yanfen got to know her community members during a period of field research in a few local schools. The group was open to anyone who was interested, and members were expected to communicate with each other on an equal footing. That is, every member would be encouraged to speak and would be provided with opportunities to speak whilst also being encouraged to listen carefully and to respect fellow members’ right to express their viewpoints. In addition, no rule regulated or bound members to participate in community activities.

I have been observing and participating in a range of online and offline community activities that extended well beyond the initial reading-focused activities concerning professional improvement. Whilst the reading materials were largely education focused, the activities over the past years concentrated more and more upon the issues of mental and ethical well-being and mind–body health. As time went on activities were no longer organized around books as a medium for discussion. New activities included workshops on teacher development, games that teachers, parents, and children can play (learn) together, applications for grants on studying learning communities, lectures given by a prominent Japanese educator, a weekend story-telling corner for children in a local bookstore, and a programme on Buddhist meditation. Several sub-groups were also set up by core members in recent years to serve specific goals, such as professional development, social service, school–parent communication, and so on, in diverse and flexible forms, including, but not limited to, reading, writing, physical labour, tours, and charity or volunteer work.

These grass-roots middle-class members were thus different from the ones observed by Yi Zheng in a significant way. ¹⁷ In the process of leisure reading, Zheng’s middle-class members were cultivating their lifestyle or taste to show social distinction, and were thus primarily part of a class-making project. In comparison, by initially reading profession- and education-related books, and later on, by emphasizing and organizing various practical activities, the participants of the community under study principally aimed at forging their internal power to achieve ethical well-being. Therefore, their professional reading was not about leisure, nor did their reading aim at the cultivation of taste or at class formation/identity. Rather, their reading and practical activities ultimately targeted the cultivation of an ethical self (in a Foucaultian sense) rather than the making of middle classes (in a Bourdieusian sense).

After getting acquainted with group members, and for the research purpose of this study, I selected and interviewed 15 of its core members, a retired researcher about 80 years of age, who was Yanfen’s colleague, and a government official in the local education sector who was highly interested in the community under study. I conducted these interviews in 2013, and re-interviewed a few core members in 2016. In addition, I continued informal interactions online and offline with them well into 2018, discussing a wide range of topics, from vegetarian food, fashion, books, pets, and spiritual pursuits on the one hand, to family problems, psychological issues and work pressure, on the other. A number of texts and writings produced by some of these informants – either as official documents of the community or personal diaries or blogs – were also used with their permission in this study.

‘I cannot find a goal’

Yanfen is around 40 years old, and she is recognized by all as an enthusiastic, passionate, and active person – characteristics that attracted and inspired other community members. This positive image, however, made a sharp contrast with what she revealed to me in both formal interviews and informal conversations. She described herself as a ‘lucky’ person, and that every transitional moment of her life was ‘smooth’, something she attributed to her long-held goal of higher education throughout her schooling career. But deep down, Yanfen still felt an intense dissatisfaction with her life:

When I entered MB University (to pursue postgraduate study), I, again, set a goal. Because I was no longer young, my goal was not to pursue a PhD study. Rather, the goal I set for myself was to find a boyfriend, and it was realized as I expected. I did not set a study-related goal, and my life after graduation was confused. Another important thing was that I could not find my purpose in life, I did not know what the value of reading [academic works] was, [which had] no connection with real life…. So I could not find fun [in studying] … I felt dispirited after graduation … and could not find happiness at my work unit [either]…. My dissatisfaction with the status quo lasted for a few years, and I still could not find a goal. Then I said [to myself], OK, let me achieve my life goal [as a woman] first. So I had a child. ¹⁸

Yanfen’s experiences to a significant degree reflect the experiences of many Chinese people who go through the Chinese educational system. ¹⁹ Whilst young people are expected by the Chinese educational system to master ‘useful’ knowledge and at the same time become good, disciplined citizens, education does not particularly encourage students to explore the things that intrinsically motivate them. As a result, both students and adults are more interested in continually moving to higher levels of the educational and social ladder. This rarely gives children happy experiences in school. The education system does not cultivate individual willingness, capacity or power to develop other interests in life. Yanfen was not the only one to experience a disconnect between school and life, because the same can be said of those currently attending school. A headmaster once shared his observation with me, and declared that even he himself was not fond of the examination-driven education at all: ‘Seven-year-old kids were all so smart when they first entered our school, [but] when they graduated no light of curiosity could be seen in their eyes.’ ²⁰

The current system of education in China has received wide criticism from many quarters of society for its narrow focus on examinations. The proposed alternative is termed ‘suzhi education’ (素质教育, ‘quality education’ or ‘education for quality’). ²¹ Nonetheless, as I document elsewhere, ²² in practice, suzhi education is not widely found, and its popularity rests more on rhetoric than anything else. Put differently, the education of younger generations in China has long been instrumentally and ideologically oriented to a set of societal standards that do not care much about spiritual needs, or the ‘soul’ to borrow from Foucault, ²³ of diverse individuals. In this light, both the young in schools and adults in the wider society are generally more interested in the standards – examination scores or socio-economic status, for instance – by which society or others view and judge them. This tendency has resulted in what I call a standardized mentality among individuals, a major reason why Yanfen herself was not capable of finding a goal or fun in her life and work. This orientation towards the external is also what Huiling, another teacher in her 40s, experienced in her younger adult life:

Early on I was someone who had difficulty being satisfied or feeling satisfied…. I did not have any [financial] burden and my work was easy and relaxing. But I felt unsatisfied with everything at that time…. When I was staying at the hospital expecting my kid, the expenses were paid by my elder brother-in-law…. I then wondered why we were not rich people…. Certainly this [way of thinking] made you [me] feel uneasy [because it was difficult to come to terms with reality]; you would not be able to enjoy many happy things in life, and subconsciously a feeling of resentment would arise…. [This sense of dissatisfaction lasted until] that happened to him, when my daughter’s dad was involved in a traffic accident [and was killed]…. That was a turning point that changed me completely…. What I can say [now] is that your happiness has nothing to do with money…. In fact, since that accident, I felt I had not cherished [what I had], that’s why it was gone. Since then the biggest change was that I started cherishing. I started cherishing what I have, cherishing my friends around me, appreciating very much people’s kindness to me. ²⁴

In her narrative, Huiling stressed repeatedly how much she had hoped to be a wealthy person and recognized by others, that is, to become a successful figure by societal standards. Later on, she reflected upon this idea of living a successful life through the eyes of others. These reflections gradually led her to a different idea about life – one that focused on internal spiritual power. The different paths that Yanfen and Huiling had taken in pursuit of a ‘good’ life had several features in common. Both women shared a similar tendency when they were younger and neglected to develop their power from within. This tendency was to a significant degree a result of their education that produced a standardized mentality, which largely failed to empower them to become intrinsically motivated individuals. This was why Yanfen’s community, as she explained, was a community of spiritual or internal growth that made up for what was missing from her earlier life. Meanwhile, in her search for spiritual well-being, Huiling started a meditation programme with her new husband, alongside other spiritual programmes. Both Yanfen and Huiling shifted their life goal from the external world to the internal world, to what Foucault calls the care of the self. ²⁵ The following sections describe the ways members of the community in question pursued a lifestyle of self-cultivation.

Ethical well-being: The artistic creation of the self

By technologies of the self, Foucault means that individuals exercise choice and act ‘so as to give to their life certain values’, aiming at ‘making one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge, for a tekhnē – for an art’. ²⁶ For Foucault, ‘the main area to which one must apply aesthetic values, is oneself, one’s life, one’s existence’; ²⁷ this art involves ‘not only a principle but also a constant practice’. ²⁸ Foucault suggests that, through a set of practices, one can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth or the logoi into a permanent principle of action, and finally turn it into ethos. ²⁹ Ethos is a way of being and of behaving, and someone who possesses ethos has practised freedom. ³⁰

This freedom is fundamentally associated with an ethics of control that enables one to turn to one’s self – epistrophē eis heauton. ³¹ That is, we escape all the attachments or enslavements that are out of our control to ultimately reunite with our own self – our very self and the best part of us. ³² Meanwhile, Foucault also suggests that one needs one’s social relations to serve as the supporters of soul practice. ³³ ‘In this way’, contends Foucault, ‘there is constituted what one might call a “soul service”.’ ³⁴ Nonetheless, technologies of the self is one side of the coin of governmentality; technologies of domination or power form its other side. In other words, governing both the self and others constitutes governmentality, which aims, as Colin Gordon paraphrases Foucault, ‘at once to “totalize” and to “individualize” its effects’. ³⁵

Self-cultivation practices comprise four aspects. Ethical substance ‘answers the question: Which is the aspect or the part of myself or my behaviour which is concerned with moral conduct?’ Mode of subjectivation is ‘the way in which people are invited or incited to recognise their moral obligations’. Self-forming activity asks: ‘What are the means by which we can change ourselves in order to become ethical subjects?’ And, finally, the telos answers the question: ‘What is the kind of being to which we aspire when we behave in a moral way’, to become pure, or immortal, or free, or masters of ourselves? ³⁶

In the analysis of my fieldwork data, the most salient feature among these middle-class respondents turned out to be emotion and the management of emotion. They all experienced negative emotions in either their work or life, which they attempted to transform into positive ones by working on them. Eva Illouz observes a similar development among the new middle class in the United States, who practise careful management, control and regulation of their emotional life ‘under the incessantly expanding ideal of health’ as a result of them being ‘located in intermediary positions’ of controlling and being controlled. ³⁷ The main negative emotions my participants experienced included fear (worry, anxiety, panic), anger (frustration, resentment), disappointment, and loneliness. The major positive emotions that they acquired included love (gratitude/gratefulness/appreciation) and satisfaction. ³⁸ Emotion thus constitutes the ethical substance of my analysis.

The initial goal of the community under study was professional enhancement through collective reading that was expected to serve as a platform for mutual encouragement and inspiration. Members usually met in a cafe roughly once a month over the weekend, and had group discussions of what they had read at home prior to the meeting. In the process of reading, community members gradually began to feel that professional enhancement was important, and that spiritual or soul growth was fundamentally crucial. This was because, through collective reading and other activities, they decided that the most serious obstacle blocking their growth was their negative emotions. If these emotions could not be overcome, spiritual growth would become extremely difficult. Take Yanfen as an example. She always appeared to be enthusiastic and active in front of others. She told me several times that she suspected she was suffering from depression or bipolar disorder, because her emotions tended to be polarized at times. For instance, she would become overexcited when speaking or discussing at community activities. She sometimes would even go too far and put words in others’ mouths, neglecting the principle of listening and giving equal opportunities for communication that the community advocated.

Yanfen also told me a few times about a ‘different self’. She once attended a reading activity about breath and relaxation. At the sharing session, she broke down and could not help crying. Later on when she recounted the incident, she said that she was actually under great pressure all the time from work and family. Community activities did not, however, alleviate this pressure even though these activities exerted a great influence both within and outside the community. Yanfen herself received an award conferred by a national newspaper in 2015 for championing reading. In a 2016 interview, she said, ‘The most confusing problem in [my] mind is still how to keep a balance between work and family.’ The reason that she started the reading community, as she repeatedly emphasized, was ‘to facilitate my growth…. [It] should bring me benefits in the first place, and these benefits could be of emotional satisfaction, or professional improvement’. Yet, her involvement in community activities resulted in complaints from her husband, who said that she was ‘acting like a lunatic and jeopardizing family life’. Pressure also came from her role as a mother: she described how she sometimes lost her temper in front of her child even though she had just read a book about how to educate children patiently and creatively. This inability to become a person who could combine knowing and doing dismayed her. As indicated in her narratives, Yanfen did not realize then that family life did not necessarily work against self-cultivation. In fact, when speaking about the care of the self, Foucault already contended that self-care should also ‘fulfill one’s obligations to mankind, to one’s fellow-citizens, and to one’s family’. ³⁹

Yanfen also did not feel relaxed in her work unit, nor did she identify more with her work unit. In a recent interview, I found that the performance assessments of her work unit, as well as her leaders’ haphazard decision-making and their disrespect for her work, put Yanfen under great pressure, causing her to feel a lack of achievement and recognition. This work atmosphere was largely attributable to an expansion of audit culture in an increasingly wide range of professional domains. The rise of audit culture is primarily associated with neo-liberal governmentality, and the idea of audit originating from financial regulation has been introduced into the public sector to rank and assess professional performance against bureaucratic benchmarks and economic targets. ⁴⁰ Nonetheless, audit culture has severe consequences at both institutional and individual levels. For instance, for individuals, it results in growing workloads and stress-related illness for those who have been audited, and it creates docile auditable bodies. ⁴¹ Worse still, given its ‘progressive’ discourse of transparency, quality, and accountability, the legitimacy of an audit culture is hard to challenge on moral grounds. ⁴² Further, as I document elsewhere, ⁴³ this new technology of governing in the Chinese educational system has colluded with and mutually reinforced the conventional Chinese idea of paternalism. In such governing, equal communication or debate between policymakers and ordinary citizens is absent because ideas or policies are transmitted bureaucratically or vertically to those in lower positions to practise or implement – an approach to management that has prevented transparency and possible challenges to those in power. This style of governance was widely criticized by Yanfen and other community members.

It was under this condition that Yanfen found that, as a researcher, she tended to delay completing research projects, a subconscious resistance to crude, quantifiable templates of audit culture. And she said that this became ‘the very first thing that presses on my mind’. Because of a relatively low performance at work, she had not yet been promoted despite having been eligible for a higher position for more than two years. Fortunately, her community enabled her to ‘escape’ to a certain degree from ‘external constraints’ in work, such as achievement, reputation, or benefits. She said to me that she would not go all out to pursue these external interests, because she ‘cares more about a genuine sense of happiness’ that she could only find in community activities. However, she explained:

If it [the chance of promotion] is lying in front of me, I will capture it if I can. I will not give it up … [since it provides] a little more income. After all, [I need to] support the family…. [I] am quite annoyed, I feel that it is not easy to be a nobody in this city…. I miss the life in the countryside during my childhood. [Life] was poor, but [you] did not see much, so you did not wish for much either. ⁴⁴

The last sentence shows what troubled her deeply – the attachments or enslavements that were out of her control, ⁴⁵ and from which she needed to find a way to free herself.

Feeling these pressures, Yanfen told me that she always felt physically and psychologically unwell. Visits to doctors became one of her routines. In the course of medical treatment, she increasingly reflected upon her daily life, in the hope of finding the fundamental cause of her troubled health condition. She finally came to a conclusion that she ‘has always had a nervous disposition’: she was anxious and did everything quickly, including eating and walking ‘too fast’. She said that she could not even slow down when she went to the toilet. This fast pace of life reflects Yanfen’s striving to keep moving to higher levels of achievement as shown by her educational pursuits and endeavours. As a result, Yanfen became very sensitive to her body’s reactions and responses, and she concluded that the correct way to turn her negative emotion of anxiety into a positive one was to slow down. Yanfen’s realization of the connection between mind and body helped her to develop a healthier relationship with herself, because she realized that she could not develop a positive relationship with others if she did not have a positive relationship with herself in the first place. As a matter of fact, she gradually stopped viewing her involvement in community activities as something which clashed with her family life, and started to make an effort to find ways to combine the two spheres organically by, for example, organizing outdoor activities that her family could join in. This eventually turned her family life around. Her husband and daughter became the most fervent supporters of her community. In her latest chat with me in the spring of 2018, Yanfen excitedly told me that she was currently doing yoga as she finally realized that an ‘instrument’ (or technique) was fundamentally necessary for her to redress more effectively her ‘wrong’ (or hurried, anxious) approach towards life. However her negative emotions towards her work still remained.

Next, consider the case of Huayun, a primary schoolteacher in her early 40s, who had long been pushing herself to excel, for fear of failing or falling short, and thus had placed too much pressure on herself, which made her quite ‘impetuous’. After joining the community in question, Huayun’s idea of becoming an excellent teacher was gradually replaced by the idea of becoming a happy person. She assessed her community as follows:

In a society where everyone is in a rush, why would a group of people want to get together in this way? Because we have truly felt happiness: [we are able to have] a little peace and quiet, a little rest and relaxation. [We] have such a quiet environment. [This] has made our soul quieten down, [which has enabled us to] manage our family and work more meaningfully, and live a better life. ⁴⁶

Since the community to which Huayun belonged promoted and advocated reading, it made Huayun realize that ‘reading can change the whole life of a person’. She then set up her own small community, which specifically aimed at popularizing reading among her pupils and their parents. Through community activities, the most important message she intended to send out was ‘slow education’, which is what she did at a reading meeting she organized in 2013. At this event, teachers, students, and parents from across the Taiwan Straits discussed and came to realize that slow meant to have a slow mindset (but not ‘procrastination’, according to Huayun) as opposed to an impetuous, or ‘fast food’ society. Huayun suggested that slow education was about a type of mentality, an unhurried attitude toward life as a whole. ‘It is a method, and even an art’. She appealed to all the participants to patiently and quietly observe their children and to be a part of their growth. This approach was similar to Yanfen’s assessment of her ‘hurried’ lifestyle. This new insight about slowing down changed the mentality of her community members and it made them feel that they no longer needed to chase after goals set by society at large. This was a way of transcending their negative emotions acquired from their previous experiences.

Furthermore, the community members practised slowing down in their daily lives and found that they reaped more benefits, and consequently were more fulfilled internally. They started to pay close attention to every single beautiful thing around, a flower, a meal, or a tour. Ahui, a primary school teacher in her 40s, said that in the past she was lonely and felt a great urge to communicate with others who appreciated beauty. She then started writing, through which she expressed her feelings, recorded the growth of her kid and her own subjectivity. Later on, she posted her writings on the Internet, and got to know like-minded people. A social network of writing enthusiasts was formed, and according to Ahui fellow writers not only enjoyed each other’s writings but also discussed all sorts of ‘positive topics’ in life and worked in pursuit of a ‘less utilitarian mentality’. Ahui also liked travelling, which she engaged in to find beauty. Ahui claimed that travelling, together with writing, distanced her ‘from the hustle and bustle of the city’, and ‘dark side of life’, both physically and mentally, putting her in contact with herself, in what Foucault calls a ‘spiritual retreat’. ⁴⁷

This lifestyle and mentality gradually enabled Ahui to ‘treat daily life like a poem’. As she wrote in a blog:

If you offer the world a smile, the world will offer a smile back to you. Whatever attitude you adopt to treat life, life will treat you in the same way…. Facing life, whether it is good or bad, cherishing every day, being happy every day, and making your life beautiful!

In one of our conversations, Ahui explained her views: ‘Everything is arranged in the best way, therefore I gladly accept all gifts that life presents.’ The message behind this attitude was: never complain, but accept. This idea was influenced by a cultural mindset observable in East Asia towards the world – one that is ostensibly related to the notion of karma. This way of thinking emphasizes a grateful attitude towards daily life, and the human and natural worlds. In this vein, to help others would be interpreted as a generously offered chance by the helped to the helper to provide assistance. Despite different techniques or self-development activities, Ahui and others shared a fundamental desire to cherish every day, consisting in an appeal to what Marcus Aurelius calls ‘moral perfection’, ⁴⁸ which is an attitude towards and mastery over one’s emotions.

This type of gratitude is closely associated with mingyun (命运, roughly translated as fortune) in the Chinese tradition. While ming refers to destiny or fate – which people should accept – yun means luck or fortune when it is a noun and to transport or to operate when it is a verb. Therefore when the Chinese believe in ming, they at the same time keep in mind that ming as a predetermined condition is not unchangeable, which depends on how one behaves/acts, that is, yun. Therefore, mingyun ‘points toward the very existential dilemma around which action revolves’. ⁴⁹ Putting aside the differences between mysticism and secularism for the moment, this Chinese dualist version of roughly the structure/agency framework thus encourages people to behave appropriately and actively to improve their ming, as Huiling explained. People are expected to remain ‘moderate’ (中庸), ‘a traditional Confucius interpersonal style with emphasis on interpersonal harmony and connection’ ⁵⁰ to obtain peace of mind at the individual level and a harmonious atmosphere at the institutional level. This style of dealing with interpersonal relations is particularly important when individuals have to maintain harmonious relations with their powerful and, according to Ahui and many others, usually ridiculous superiors, if they do not want to get into trouble or risk losing their job. People like Ahui tended to turn their attention more towards daily life beyond their work, including community activities, in the hope of avoiding potential conflicts with their highly bureaucratized superiors or colleagues, and in the hope of changing their ming to a certain degree. Nonetheless, in my view attempts by Ahui and others to maintain harmony is a deep-rooted form of resistance, which should not be understood as a direct conflict between individuals and the social system, but a way to stay true to one’s original self by avoiding potentially harmful relationships with their bureaucratized superiors or colleagues.

Huiling, like many others, also stressed the significance of gratitude, which she believed was very important to emotion management. When she felt gratitude, she learnt how to cherish, for it was the cultivation of the soul that produced positive emotions. Moreover, she said that the cultivation of the soul was found in all aspects of life: meditation, cooking, touring, and doing charity. She deepened her understanding of health and aesthetics and switched to a vegetarian diet. She viewed vegetarianism as a relatively healthy lifestyle, which could further refine our ability to differentiate nuances of taste, especially when food was cooked in a simple and ingenious way. In addition, through a thoughtful combination of different foods, and careful presentation, food would become, in Huiling’s words, an artistic work with an ‘exquisite colour, smell, taste, and shape’.

The purpose of making daily life exquisite for community members, as Huiling put it, was that ‘we can realize beauty in small things, can feel the [significance] of daily routine, [which would serve as] a power preventing us from becoming desensitized and alienated from society’. This shows that Huiling’s pursuit of beauty was based on her reflections on society. The aim of her cultural practice was to strengthen her internal power whilst resisting an increasingly numb world. In this light, the attitudes and actions of community members seemed in the first place as if they were targeted at escaping the politics of injustice to pursue aesthetics or ethics. But in fact these attitudes and actions consisted more in reflections upon and re-understandings of the social system, the self, and the relationship between self and society, as well as on which basis to learn ‘to give new definitions of work, social relations, and material environment’ ⁵¹ as far as group participants were able to manage the latter. Based on this new set of knowledge, community members realized that ‘If I cannot change the school, nor can I change the system, then let me change myself’, as a male member Chengwei put it. This is the result of them redefining ‘a different way of dividing up true and false’ and acting upon it. ⁵² Their redefined notions of true and false incorporate ‘slow–fast’ and ‘love–resentment’, as seen earlier, and also include ‘simple–redundant’. For instance, the requirement for an exquisite lifestyle that Huiling proposed was accompanied by a principle of simplification of life itself, an appeal for clearing our collective polluted conscience. She said that by getting rid of the things that are not essential to our lives, life would become truly happy. She termed this process ‘subtraction in life, addition in happiness’ – a similar idea to her simple and ingenious way of cooking. The idea behind all of this was to ‘return to one’s conscience’, or ‘return to oneself’ because:

Our conscience has already been polluted by all sorts [of things] in our life. What you need to do now is to allow it to return to its original place, where it would become most intelligent, and it will definitely tell you what suits you best. ⁵³

This subtraction–addition rule helped Huiling to reach the goal of ‘the independence one is capable of with regard to everything that is not indispensable and essential’. ⁵⁴ This is what Foucault terms ‘an ascetic practice’, ⁵⁵ an ethical conduct that Huiling reflexively practised to achieve mastery of herself.

In her effort to practise ‘the best part’ of herself, ⁵⁶ Huiling did her best to memorize logoi, or truth, by actively participating in a meditation programme run by her husband, who holds a doctorate in Buddhist studies, in the hope of linking the subject with truth.

When you are practising meditation, it is actually simple: just pay attention to your breath. [In doing so,] you will start to pay attention to [memorize] what you tend to neglect in your daily life. Then you will realize the way [of memorization], and then bring this intention and consciousness back in your life…. How can you make someone possess this type of capacity? Just start training.

When you close your eyes, dealing with the relationship with yourself, you will find [it] very difficult…. At the beginning, your innermost being is very weak, not powerful enough. This power, you should make it grow as your body grows. How to grow? Continue ‘paying out’ [to others]. You will grow if you pay out…. There is a saying: ‘I love you, but it has nothing to do with you’. That is what I meant. [To grow your innermost being] has something to do with yourself. ⁵⁷

The idea that ‘to pay out has to do with the self’ shares a similarity with the reason why Yanfen set up her community, as well as with the grateful attitude of a helper toward the helped, as described earlier. Both Huiling and Yanfen were acquiring, assimilating, and transforming truth into a principle of action, that is, turning it into an ethos, a sign of freedom. ⁵⁸

When Huiling criticized the increasing numbness and insensitivity of the world, and spoke about the idea of returning to one’s original (‘pure’, ‘unpolluted’) place, she asserted that everyone should seek out their ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ self. But Nealon warned that ‘Foucaultian ethics is not a matter of seeking out and conforming to universal or practical norms, but about resisting the largely punitive, policing discourses of morality’, ⁵⁹ and that we should imagine and build up what we could be. ⁶⁰

Community formation and extension

Foucault suggests that one needs the help of others to attend to oneself, that is, one’s social relations serve as the support of one’s soul practice. ⁶¹ For the members of the community under study, their community was the primary platform of social relations and social interaction. After 10 years of development, many members forged a tacit understanding of each other, and their interactions no longer required the medium of books. Huiling excitedly recalled a meeting among several core members in 2015, and talked about group cohesion:

In the past, communication in our community was probably mediated by a book, and we needed a book as a way to interact with one another. But as time progressed I found that, whatever the angle from which we spoke, we were always able to return to the core issues, such as happiness and beauty. Even if we talked about home purchases, at the end we returned to that core of happiness or sense of worth…. You did not have to specifically care for someone; whether someone was listening or speaking, an energy flowed [among us] naturally…. You would then feel, even if someone’s talk was from a perspective with which you were unfamiliar, you would feel good, you would be happy to learn [something new]. If you all spoke about something similar, you would feel good for you had something in common. ⁶²

This integration effect among community members was confirmed by a retired researcher:

This type of community has brought teachers something that we seriously lack at the moment: happiness, joy…. I found that nowadays teachers are not that happy…. We badly need all sorts of communities…. This type of community can reactivate people’s thoughts…. [At the moment] even though they have opinions, teachers are not given a chance to express or communicate. This community has met teachers’ desire for expression. ⁶³

Indeed, this platform beyond public institutions meant a lot to its members in the sense that it eventually led to the formation of an integrated community. However, a few relatively powerful members were able to forge an integrated community within public institutions, for example Jinbing, a middle-aged headmaster of a rural school. Initially disappointed when he was transferred from an urban to a rural school at the bottom of the rankings in the region, Jinbing soon realized that ‘this is a very good field of blessing that we are privileged to cultivate’. This insight came to him after being ‘enlightened’ by the chairperson of a Buddhist charity – of which Jinbing, though himself not a follower of the faith, was a volunteer. This chairperson said to Jinbing, ‘You would be a better headmaster if you had the mentality of a volunteer.’ Jingbin had once viewed voluntary work as a means for him to obtain status, reputation, prestige, and resources, that is, symbolic capital ⁶⁴ that he would not gain easily from his formal employment. After the chairperson’s reminder and his own reflection, however, Jinbing no longer viewed symbolic capital to be more important than self-cultivation. He resolved to do something valuable for the rural school. Jinbing set up a reading group, and organized charity activities among teachers, aimed at what he saw to be the most important endeavour: the care of the soul. He believed that ‘it is not necessary [for our students] to perform that well in examinations. In the Chinese educational system, high examination scores are absolutely achieved at the cost of children’s childhood, and their all-round development, especially among our rural children.’ In this light, he worked together with teachers to slow down the rhythm of their school, and more time was invested in the care of the souls of both teachers and students. According to Jinbing, ‘A better grade and a better school are all consequential benefits [of the care of the soul].’ Jinbing did not feel that the school had to top the rankings after it had secured a good position in the region-wide examinations at the time of the interview. Jinbing’s changed practice reveals the way in which he, as the headmaster of the school, exercised both technologies of the self and of power over others successfully.

Working in a rural school provided Jinbing with an opportunity to observe and compare rural–urban divisions, which made him feel that it was deeply unfair that all students in the region had to sit for uniformly designed examinations. Competing according to the same yardstick, rural children would always lose out because, as Jinbing said, ‘We do not possess the same infrastructure or human resources as those urban elite schools have.’ Douglas Downey, Paul von Hippel, and Melanie Hughes argue that, despite poor performance in achievement tests, the schools that serve disadvantaged populations do not necessarily have a less positive impact on their students in terms of the rate of learning, and this particularly holds true when the effects of school and non-school influences are separated in school evaluations. The distinction between success and failure in this context is nothing more than a reflection of the discriminatory and inequitable policies tailored for different schools in different locations, and a meritocratic education is not more than a self-deceiving myth. ⁶⁵ This inequity was also strongly felt by urban teachers when they extended their volunteering to rural schools. The teachers provided rural schools with books specifically catered for rural children, as Huiling recalled:

Those rural kids, their intelligence, curiosity, their reading abilities, and desire for knowledge, are all not different from kids in our school. Kids in our place grow up more quickly intellectually. That is because their platform is better, and they have a large variety of opportunities…. I sincerely feel that the current inequality in education might be narrowed down through this thing [reading], because reading does not have a threshold or a boundary, and thus could become [a starting point of] equality. ⁶⁶

These volunteers not only kept extending their reading programme to other rural areas with funds offered by philanthropists in the hope of making this ‘starting point of equality’ truly beneficial to those at the margins of society. The volunteers also went to local urban schools to promote reading among teachers, first by persuading school administrators to enhance the suzhi of the whole school from the top down. Via these activities, the volunteers were trying to teach ‘school masses’ a ‘right’ way of education, which can be viewed as a Foucaultian exercise of technologies of domination of others.

Summary and discussion

In their work and life, members of the community in question shared some fundamental ideas concerning a ‘good’ or even a ‘beautiful’ life that they pursued by turning their negative emotions into positive ones. Emotion and the management of emotion constitute their ethical substance. By targeting emotions, community members gained some level of mastery over their lives. Their ultimate hope consisted in freeing the self from both institutional and individual (including their own) constraints. To achieve this goal, community members employed a range of techniques, or self-development activities. In so doing, a mode of subjectivation took hold in line with a professional-aesthetic self-stylization, primarily characterized by a mindset of slowing down, love (gratitude or otherwise), simplicity, and beauty. These mindsets and related practices constitute what Arlie Hochschild terms ‘deep acting’ (vis-a-vis ‘surface acting’), in particular cognitive deep acting. ⁶⁷ Cognitive deep acting is a strategy that ‘people [use to] change their perspective on a situation in order to feel differently about it’. ⁶⁸ Examples of such deep acting include Huiling’s assertion that ‘your happiness has nothing to do with money’, Huayun’s statement that ‘to be happy is more fundamental than to be excellent’, and Chengwei’s words: ‘If I cannot change the school, nor can I change the system, then let me change myself’.

Various practices among community members, on the one hand, were grounded in their understanding and interpretation of Chinese sociocultural institutions, such as the work unit (school or other public institutions), family, and community, as well as in their relationships with these institutions. On this basis, their practices were also embedded in their understanding and creation of an ideal (ethical) self. However, in the process of grappling with dominating forces, community members paradoxically shared an idea of professional improvement within their institutions, the agency of governments and society at large. This idea holds true despite the degree to which their shared ideas varied as a result of an emphasis on personality over character in an individualizing era. Thus, one can see from a number of examples in this case study that personality ‘heralds the calculated and freely chosen participation in a diversified public sphere in which obligations towards public institutions are dependent upon a cost-benefit calculus’. ⁶⁹ Nonetheless, no matter how they expressed their personality, at the end of the day, no one would want, for instance, to become a teacher who lacks professional capacities, or be the headmaster of a low-performing school, in spite of their negative attitude toward ‘standardizing’ neo-liberal technologies such as audit culture.

Quite the opposite, all of them hoped very much to make their teaching more effective and enhance the performance of their students by voluntarily organizing various activities or adopting diverse technologies. By so doing, they hoped to solve the ‘problems’ they are facing at work and in life by cultivating the self in the first place, coupled with the support of self-cultivation activities and aspirations of other members through their community platform. Furthermore, they also extended their practices and ideals to groups or individuals beyond the community, such as rural schoolchildren and urban teaching staff; or advocated finding the authentic self that is embedded in everyone. In so doing, community members not only joined technologies of domination with those of the self to form a governmentality for cultivating themselves. They also practised technologies of domination of others in the hope of improving their whole community as well as those who stayed at the margins of society or had insufficient suzhi or represented ‘impure’ selves. This contradiction is exactly what Foucault calls a ‘political double bind’, which he defines as ‘the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modem power structures’. ⁷⁰ This inevitably reminds us of the very similar way in which the newly emerged bourgeoisie in the 18th century first applied the rigorous techniques for sexual control on themselves before these techniques were eventually extended to others. ⁷¹

At the same time, however, their cultural practice reveals their willingness to redefine the division between true and false, and on this basis to govern self and others. This is what Foucault terms political spirituality, which opens politics to spirituality, or the politicizing spirit. ⁷² Foucault takes ‘the work of inventing subjectivity and values as a necessary constitutive site of politics, and point[s] to the need for a much deeper reworking of who we are’ ⁷³ (although a much deeper reworking of who we are may be a less appropriate interpretation than ‘who we might become’ in a Foucaultian fashion). In short:

For Foucault, this cultivation of an ethical self would involve a search for political spirituality. To ‘teach anew the vision of a future’ such that we become able to escape the b(l)inding spell of the already long-lost dreams of progress, development and modernity would involve a struggle for a new subjectivity. ⁷⁴

It is in this sense that community members of this case study acted politically as they reworked or invented subjectivity. They brought spirit and politics together as a consequence of their being ‘involved in a much wider sphere of participatory activity’ under/against the pressure of authoritarian regimes. ⁷⁵ This politics is less likely to lead to a conventional understanding of politics, that is, social movement or revolution. Rather, it corresponds with what Raymond Williams terms ‘the long revolution’ for a good (democratic) society, a process in which ‘pluralistic forms of discussion on the nature of virtue’ and ‘certain ethical sensibilities’ are cultivated. ⁷⁶ This kind of practice means citizens ‘engage in deliberative argument about who we might become, and … consider how we might lead virtuous and just lives in specific cultural locations and contexts’. ⁷⁷ The cultural community that this study focused on has provided an example in which citizens learned together through communication and acquired social skills or ‘qualities’ of a cultural citizen. I thus suggest that while community members may not clearly be aware of the implications that their professional-aesthetically oriented practices might have for larger society, their constant practices – or ‘eternal recurrence’ ⁷⁸ – are undoubtedly a form of civic engagement, and thus have civic significance. To point out this civic significance is particularly crucial when such practices may also be disciplinary, confining, or entangled with neo-liberal forms of power in which responsibility for a good life rests solely on the shoulders of individuals, and in which structural forces are being ignored.