Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person

323 Pages·2011·1.33 MB·English

by  Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei, Jinhua Guo

DEEP CHINA
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the Sue Tsao
Endowment Fund in Chinese Studies of
the University of California Press
Foundation.
The publisher also gratefully
acknowledges the generous contribution to
this book provided by Harvard University.
DEEP CHINA · The Moral Life of the Person
what anthropology and psychiatry
tell us about china today
Arthur Kleinman Yunxiang Yan
Jing Jun Sing Lee Everett Zhang
Pan Tianshu Wu Fei Guo Jinhua
University of California Press
Berkeley Los Angeles London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2011 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deep China : the moral life of the person, what
anthropology and psychiatry tell us about China today
/ Arthur Kleinman . . . [et. al.].
p. cm.
Includes index.
isbn 978-0-520-26944-6 (cloth : alk. paper) —
isbn 978-0-520-26945-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Medical anthropology—China. 2. Cultural
psychiatry—China. 3. Ethnopsychology—China.
4. Identity (Psychology)—China. 5. Group
identity—China. 6. China—Social conditions.
7. China—Moral conditions. 8. China—Social life
and customs. I. Kleinman, Arthur.
gn296.5.c6d44 2011
306.0951—dc22 2011012375
Manufactured in the United States of America
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmen-
tally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC
Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a
30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that
is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all
ansi/niso (z 39.48) requirements.
To Joan Kleinman
September 4, 1939–March 6, 2011
Sinologist and Ancestor
Even after you have entered the
darkness, we feel your deep spirit and
abiding concern for the moral
underpinnings of things Chinese guiding
this book.
C O N T E N T S
Preface ix
Introduction: Remaking the Moral Person
in a New China 1
1. The Changing Moral Landscape 36
Yunxiang Yan
2. From Commodity of Death to Gift
of Life 78
Jing Jun
3. China’s Sexual Revolution 106
Everett Yuehong Zhang
4. Place Attachment, Communal Memory, and
the Moral Underpinnings of Gentrification
in Postreform Shanghai 152
Pan Tianshu
5. Depression: Coming of Age in China 177
Sing Lee
6. Suicide, a Modern Problem in China 213
Wu Fei
7. Stigma: HIV/AIDS, Mental Illness,
and China’s Nonpersons 237
Guo Jinhua and Arthur Kleinman
8. Quests for Meaning 263
Arthur Kleinman
Glossary of Chinese Terms and Names 291
Notes on Contributors 297
Index 299
P R E F A C E
This book is a true collaboration between its eight authors. We jointly contributed
to the introduction. Each of the chapters is authored by one of us; yet all of us com-
mented on each of the chapters at meetings in Shanghai and Cambridge. As a re-
sult, we feel we are all authors and editors of Deep China. We share a passion for
the study of Chinese society and its modernization, particularly for understanding
the lived experience of Chinese in our times. We are students of how the immense
changes in the social life of Chinese have affected their emotional and moral lives.
We share the belief that to really understand China and the Chinese, the conven-
tional concerns with economics, politics, and security must be complemented by the
study of society and individuals.
All of the contributors, with one exception, Kleinman, are themselves Chinese.
Six of us are anthropologists, one a psychiatrist, and one an anthropologist-psy-
chiatrist. Yan, Jing, Pan, Wu, and Guo took their PhDs at Harvard. Lee and Zhang
were postdoctoral fellows at Harvard. Kleinman, who has taught at Harvard for
thirty-five years, was on the PhD committees of Yan, Jing, Pan, Wu, and Guo at
Harvard and Zhang at UC Berkeley. Kleinman supervised the postdoctoral fellow-
ships of Lee and Zhang at Harvard Medical School. Five of us teach in China: Jing
Jun at Tsinghua University (Beijing), Pan Tianshu at Fudan University (Shanghai),
Wu Fei and Guo Jinghua at Peking University (Beijing), and Sing Lee at the Chi-
nese University of Hong Kong. Yunxiang Yan is a professor at UCLA, Everett Zhang
at Princeton, and Arthur Kleinman at Harvard. Yan, Jing, Wu, and Guo have worked
ix