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Anxious China is a book written by Li Zhang, a professor at the University of California. This book is organised into seven chapters. Chapter 1 traces historical developments of psychology and mental health care in modern and contemporary China and provides the background on the rise of the “psyfever” that led to the inner revolution. Chapters 2 to 4 take a closer look at how Chinese therapists and clients reconfigure therapeutic practices and therapeutic relationship in response to the particular social and cultural conditions and specific problems facing them in life. Chapters 5 and 6 address how middle-class urbanites cultivate new forms of self and family dynamics through the notion of happiness and therapeutic tools. Chapter 7 examines how certain therapeutic techniques are appropriated by individuals and organisations in the wider social and political setting to revamp post-socialist governing at a time when socialist thought work has lost its effectiveness.
In her book, Professor Li Zhang uses the concept of “anxiety” as a unique perspective to examine human subjective experience. The book is an ethnographic account of a new type of revolution that is unfolding. As an anthropologist, Professor Zhang obtained a lot of first-hand data during her eighteen months of fieldwork in nine years, deconstructing what is going on in her life and that of Chinese people in this era during their transition period. Even as Professor Zhang herself is one of them, her conversation with the interviewees contains her own entanglement.
The relationship between culture and medicine has long been a central issue in medical and psychological anthropology. Noting that, in China today, people of different social classes are experiencing not only medically defined anxiety, but also a wide range of social anxiety, Professor Li Zhang introduces the topic from the psychological to the cultural level, specifically how therapists and clients negotiate cultural norms, values, and practices reg