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Society for East Asian Anthropology
Society for Psychological Anthropology
Cosponsored - Oral Presentation Session
Jie Yang
Associate Professor
Simon Fraser University
There has been an increasing rate of depression and suicides among Chinese government officials in the context of China’s anti-corruption campaigns especially since 2013. To manage this “existential crisis,” the government, instead of reforming problematic bureaucracy that generates distress and corruption, has offered moral teaching and psychological counseling. Such counseling adopts mixed methods drawing on techniques and precepts from existential psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and the philosophy of neo-Confucian scholar Wang Yangming. This paper examines these hybridized therapies offered by counselors and moral psychologists in Beijing. My analysis focuses on how counselors integrate in their counseling Wang’s teaching on the heart as the Way and the unity of knowing and acting. While Wang’s emphasis on the heart as the ground for knowledge production and moral agency reinforces the inward turn for happiness and fulfillment advocated by Western psychotherapy, Wang’s teaching on action as the way of obtaining knowledge and knowledge automatically leading to action goes beyond inner management of the heart. This unity of knowing and acting cultivates moral agents who live life by actualizing their liangzhi “conscience.” It also echoes the government’s condemnation of networks for insider information, which allegedly contributes to both corruption and distress among officials. I argue that Wang’s philosophy helps shift in governing from a focus on the interpersonal to the existential, which encourages officials to find existential meaning not merely from work but through a more holistic approach to life. Psychologization here includes both a turn to the heart and correcting distress with “holism.”