 Before that, let me just remind everybody that this wrapping up will be recorded and at the end of the presentation, if you would like to raise questions or make comments, please use the Q&A box and don't use the chat box. And if you would like to stay anonymous, you're welcome to do so, but it would be very helpful if you could provide information in the Q&A box as to who you are, that would simply help me to pick questions to put to the speaker. But if you say you would like to be anonymous, your wish will be respected, not without your name or identifiable information for you. Over to you, Professor Zhang. Thank you so much, Steve, for inviting me and for hosting the event and also many thanks for your kind introduction. And thank you all for coming. I really look forward to some productive discussions today. Let me share my screen first. Okay, here you go. My talk today is intended to give an overview of my recent book, Anxious China in the Revolution and the Politics of Psychotherapy, published by UC Press. The image of my book, the cover, I just want to say a few words, is artwork by a very talented artist, Chinese artist, Hong Zhang, named Brady Defield, and I saw this picture, it immediately caught my attention. I feel like it really captures the mood I want to carry in this book, Anxiety and Restless. So today I hope also to take a closer look at one of the issues regarding the rise of therapeutic self to give you a sense of how I, as an anthropologist, approach this complex subject of psychotherapy through ethnographic field work. I know Zoom events can be exhausting, so I'm going to keep my talk under just about 40 minutes to allow more time for Q&A. China's economic reform has brought about profound ruptures in not only socioeconomic structures but also people's inner landscape. The National Center for Mental Health actually estimated that over 100 million Chinese people suffering from different kinds of mental illness today. Faced with relentless market competition, rapid social change and pressure to become successful, many Chinese people today are feeling unsettled and distressed. So some are turning to psychological counseling to grapple with their problems in hope for a quick fix. In this context, a new language, a therapeutic language of self care and self mastery, along with a very medicalized language of managing anxiety, depression, depression and stress, yali, is emerging in Chinese society. So these are very much medicalized terms when you add the word zhen. As a reporter once put it, quote, this is a radical shift in a nation where focus on the individual was largely discouraged by both socialist ideology and the traditional culture. So my book is an ethnographic account of how a new inner revolution is unfolding in urban China. As my research shows that this is a bottom up popular psychological movement. Okay, so it's not a top down by the state. This inner revolution is profoundly reconfiguring the self, family dynamics, social relationships and modes of governing. I call this phenomena inner revolution, in order to highlight its transformative impact on so many aspects of life, even though it's still in its early stage of development. Like some other revolutions you have heard the cultural revolution, the consumer revolution and so on. This inner revolution is relatively quiet, but it engenders profound changes from within. In the midst of a thriving therapeutic culture, a host of Chinese work units, that way, such as schools, enterprises, the police, and the military are increasingly keen to incorporate psychological techniques into their personnel management when these organizations also face multiple challenges today. Therefore, psychological counseling is not limited to the reshaping of the individual and the family, but also extends to governmental practices and broader social domains. Inner revolution I demonstrate is simultaneously personal, but also political, intimate, but also social, subtle, yet powerful. Before this reason, in the book My Ethnographic Gaze travels from clinical space to broader social spaces such as family, school and workplace, so it's not just limited to psychotherapy, clinical practices or hospitals. Now let me first say a few words about the context for my research. Since the early 1990s, a side fever, Xinling Ru, has been sweeping Chinese cities. It includes a broad range of things such as the teaching and learning of psychology, group and individual counseling, self-help and cultivating happiness workshops, and other mental health concerns. Numerous books and magazines on mental health and psychotherapy have been published. And also, there is a virgin regime of private counseling centers, training workshops and websites on psychological well-being. For example, this is a most popular psychology magazine as you can see it's catered for middle class, open middle class professional women. This is one of the training centers. These are young women who just acquired their license after they passed the national exam. At the center is the instructor. International experts are also invited to lecture, to large crowds of Chinese who are eager to learn how to escape emotional pain and attain the good life. This is Harvard's lecturer Ben Shah, talking to Chinese. Usually his lecture is very expensive and will attract a thousand to two thousand people in the big theater. While the majority of such efforts are directed at middle class urban nights, some marginalized social groups, for example, laid off workers are also subject to some kind of therapeutic intervention initiated by the government. So this therapeutic turn here forms a stark contrast to the time under Maoist regime when psychiatry and psychology were largely nonexistent and considered a useless and harmful bourgeois intervention. So I have a chapter in a book tracing the early emergence and the later development of psychology in China if you're interested. So how do we explain this significant shift in the way people manage their well-being, endure distress and recast the selfhood when family bonds and social ties today become increasingly fragile. How can it be that a popular side fever has taken hold in China at this particular historical moment. So in my book, I explore the causes, the logics and ramifications of this expanding therapeutic culture. So you'll notice my book is titled Anxious China because I argue that among various forms of mood disorder, anxiety, 焦虑, here broadly construed in both medical and social terms has become a key indicator of the pulse of contemporary Chinese society. So over the past two decades, it has come to my attention that people in China of diverse social strata are experiencing not only medically defined anxiety, but also widespread social anxiety for a number of reasons. So here I will go into the detail but we can talk about it in Q&A and also it's in the book about the triggers for social economic triggers. This sense of edginess is particularly palpable in China today because this society has been undergoing decades of profound structural and cultural transformations. So it's in this particular cultural milieu that I examine how this new psychotherapeutic culture take roots, thrives and transforms across a broad range of social and political domains. Now, before I turn, before I turn to the content of the book, let me also say a few words about my fieldwork and the personal experience that inspire me to write this book. I'm an anthropologist, right? So fieldwork, ethnographic fieldwork is the cornerstone of our research. From 2010 to 2018, I conducted extensive fieldwork in the capital city of Kunming, that's the capital of Yunnan province. It evolved over time from a relatively poor borderland city into a regional hub of tourism, commerce and international trades in the southwest. Also, it's also my hometown where I grew up and did extensive research for my previous book on housing, city planning and middle class living. During my fieldwork, I was able to sit in a dozen of the private counseling sessions in the individual counseling or family counseling and participate in numerous psychotherapy training workshops. I also followed several key therapists for many years who became my key informants and I participated in a lot of enterprise training for their employees. If you have a chance to read this book, you also see that this is a deeply personal project, unlike my previous two books, I think this one is really close to my heart. I've tried in a book to incorporate my own encounter with anxiety a few years ago after the passing of my mother. I also tried to incorporate my own family history, especially my late mother's long term suffering concerning mood disorders, as well as some stories of my close Chinese friends. These lived experiences opened up a rare opportunity for me to connect with my informants and understand their emotional pains in a much deeper and intimate way. Now, let me turn to the three central issues my book addresses and I'll follow all this discussion so with an ethnographic example. So these are the three central themes of the book. The first one concerns the crucial role of culture in therapeutic encounters. Psychotherapy took hold and spread in China so quickly, largely because it's regarded as a potential answer to marry the social and the personal problems that needs to be addressed. Now, the key step to make imported psychotherapy work in China is through this process called the Ben Tuhua. Namely, side practitioners must drive to make globally circulated psychotherapy comprehensible for their Chinese clients and suitable for their social and cultural sensibilities. So Ben Tuhua is not just an intellectual project but part and parcel of the broad effort to tackle a host of difficult issues facing Chinese individuals, families and organizations today. And it's also not a simple translation but a complex and dialogic process during which Chinese practitioners must select, rework and make sense of different strengths of therapeutic practices. There are many strengths and traditions of why do Chinese therapists choose certain ones but not others. There's in great detail why among many branches of psychotherapy, Chinese therapists selectively embrace and rework three of them. So these are the three popular approaches. The first one is the Satya family therapy model, second cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, and the third Yongyang inspired sand play therapy. So for example, here I'm trying to show why how each of them is connected with some kind of elements of Chinese cultural practices. For example, the core of the popular Satya family therapy is to situate what appears to be the individuals problems in the larger family system, rather than isolating the problems and trouble solely by focusing on the individual. Satya, Virginia Satya, who invented this therapeutic model. She was an American psychotherapist and her books, many of her books have been translated into Chinese and very popular. So this model makes sense to many Chinese counseling clients. The therapist I spoke to suggest that the strong preference for family oriented therapy is largely shaped by a long standing Chinese cultural expectation of the self. As a social self, one's obligation to his or her home family and collective oriented ethics. My research shows that while, however, the Satya family model resonates well with most Chinese people thinking about the role of the family in shaping an individual. In practice, it is very difficult to secure family participation due to time pressure, financial limits, gendered understanding of parental responsibilities and emotional care. We have several cases talking about why parents, especially fathers are reluctant to participate in the therapy of their children, even though it's necessary and very important. Another example for Ben Tuhua is making the connection between cognitive behavior therapy and a long standing socialist practice known as thought work, so the gist of CBT is to use psychosocial intervention to help clients develop better coping strategies by modifying their dysfunctional thinking and their behavioral patterns. That's the basic principle. Although the content and aim of thought work differ greatly from those of CBT treatment, one can still identify some interesting parallels between the two interventions. In fact, the three therapists I interviewed brought this to my attention because all of them had been in the profession of doing thought work at universities or state enterprises before turning into therapists. So I thought it was very interesting. They found CBT a good fit with the way Chinese people think about the relationship between thought and the behavioral change. Even though their focus on CBT work now is not a political ideology or political persuasion, but rather on promoting personal growth and tackling emotional problems and family problems. The communication skills they had learned from previous thought work can be applied to talk therapy easily, particularly they claim their ability to listen attentively and then persuade people for behavioral change. That skill is very useful. So we can talk a little bit more about this in Q&A. The second theme I discussed in the book is therapeutic governing. Some researchers have argued that modern welfare states tend to normalize the marginalized social groups by subjecting them to the help of health experts and social workers. The basic assumption is that these people cannot govern their own life or adjust to the demands of increasingly stressful everyday life and therefore they need help, expert help. For example, psychiatrist Thomas Zath depicted an even more dystopic image of the therapeutic state encroaching deeply into civic life, including the health and the soul of people. So here I instead want to adopt a more nuanced approach. The notion, you know, I use the notion therapeutic governing to reveal how psychiatric and psychological interventions are used here by both the state and the non-state authorities to shape, regulate and manage the conduct of individuals and social groups. In a very subtle way that many citizens are willing to embrace because they see some benefits in that and they find it appealing. For example, under recent political regime, a preferred style of governing is through the notion guang ai, loving care, so rather than through the rule of domination and the political control. Now, what is guang ai? One of the ways in which kindly care, loving care is practiced is by integrating psychological care and education into personnel management for the military, the police, schools and other state enterprises. Now the goal here is to create stable, resilient and efficient subjects. Now here's a picture of a police training camp using psychological techniques to train their new recruits. Another picture is a local large state-owned enterprises hiring a psychotherapist training their employees so they can be more efficient and happier, not grumpy workers. In the book, I also have an example of a paramilitary hospital in Kunming that used the psychological testing to screen new soldiers and establish psychological profiles for future use in case of promotion and so on. So now soldiers are also offered counseling and training, especially using positive psychology to enhance their psychological resilience so that they can deal with trauma and stress better. So many of these soldiers are deployed to disaster relief work, right? So the incorporation of therapeutic techniques into organizational life like this one in the name of care is transforming how governing is carried out in China and how citizens are reshaped and managed from the inside out. But the reality is often more complicated. These therapists, especially those who work in the military and the police, are usually also party members and have to negotiate their dual role to fulfill their political loyalty to the party and to protect their clients' privacy. And it's a tall order. It's very hard to do. Now let's turn to the third theme, therapeutic self. This is just one more picture of state-owned enterprises working with a prominent psychologist there. The third theme of the book is the emergence of therapeutic self. This is a mode of self created with the aid of psychotherapeutic engagement through either private counseling, group counseling, or self-help. So here I ask why is the self granted extraordinary salience among the middle class today? What specific projects of self-development and self-care are emerging? As you know, the question of self or the self-cultivation has a long genealogy in Chinese history. So here I don't have time to get in, but in the book I treat some important continuities and discontinuities from the dawn of the 20th century to Mao. Mao is the socialism to the post-Mao period. But what I want to point out here is that unlike the past, self-cultivation today has become a technical matter involving psychological experts intervention. So this is rather new to China. And theoretically, I'm very much influenced by Foucault's notion of the technologies of the self, namely practices that seek to transform oneself through a number of operations on their bodies, thoughts, and the conduct. But I also want to argue in the book that such technologies are very much historically and culturally conditioned. So I borrowed Nicholas Rose extensive study of what he calls the psychological complex in England. And I want to show here that the self, along with Nicholas Rose notion, the self is not a pre-given, of course. Instead, it's formed through social recognition and negotiations with one's own social obligations and the cultural norms. So in China, the making of the self, the remaking of the self is further complicated by multiple existing expectations and the ethics. Briefly, if we want to group them, we can call them the traditional set and socialist and neoliberal. And over the past two decades, this socially embedded selfhood has been undergoing profound transformations. Yet the search for the self is still very much entangled with one's social obligations, socialist ethics, and prevailing cultural values. So my ethnographic account unravels this constant articulation of the self and the social, right? It's not one or the other, but it's an articulation. So here, let me give you one ethnographic example of this dual process. I call it the dual process involving disentangling and re-embedding how this process works. This is just a picture of a boy in a sand play therapy session. And this is a typical sand play training workshops. I also went through one of these workshops and got certified along with other people. In this case, I want to talk about it is very special. So, one day at the sand therapy training workshop. I met Fungang. I don't have his face here for privacy. I met Fungang, a distressed 35 year old police officer, who was going through a great deal of anxiety and confusion because of the growing tensions with his supervisor and the family. He sought psychotherapy training to deal with his own social dilemma and emotional turmoil. So we later became good friends because we shared a special moment when I was training session like this. And I was assigned as his therapist in a simulated sand play therapy session. The arrangement he created was very telling. This is the sandbox arrangement he made. It was a desert scene with a red snake that appeared to be stranded in the sand. Nearby, there was a cluster of green cactus here and a jade horn symbolizing hope, green cactus, like a oasis. It took him a long time to put this simple thing together. Then he said softly, quote, I feel that the snake is very lonely and stuck there. It's trying to move towards the green plants, perhaps an oasis in the desert, but it's very tired, and will probably never get there, unquote. So I asked carefully, does this thing speak to your situation? He nodded and tears came rolling down. He said this snake is just like me. I never had the chance to look at myself like this before. I was somewhat shaking at first because I did not expect to encounter such an emotionally charged situation. I then learned that Fongang was a plain clothed policeman responsible for catching pocket pickers on city buses. So his work was highly demanding and sometimes dangerous. Yet his supervisor did not trust him and accused him of slacking off. And when Fongang began to take counseling classes in his spare time, he had to hide it from his supervisors and coworkers. At home front, it was also difficult for him. He had a newborn baby at home. His parents in law lived with his family, but they questioned why a man like him wanted to study psychology and disparage him frequently. Fong looked depressed, but never went to see a psychiatrist or got a diagnosis, partly because mental illness was still very largely stigmatized, and partly because he thought he could just puff it up, right? As many men thought they could just puff it up. Yet he was sleeping into deeper and deeper isolation and depression. This feeling of bewilderment was a man factor pulling him towards psychological training. So he cherished this group training sessions that gave me a safe private space to look deeper into his own psyche and dilemma. Attending his own anguish and opening up his feeling to others in the group training session was a first step towards healing. So I call this form of intimate yet still social therapeutic space, psychosociality, right? It's like this space. It's private, small, but it's safe. And in a way, it's social. Fong later offered me his reflection on self work like this quote, quote,自我 self has two layers of meanings. One is the當下的我, the self that's living here and now, which is deeply embedded in a family king and society. The other, the pristine self, he calls原始的我, detached from the reality, which emerges from time to time when I'm alone in meditation. I'm longing for the disentangled self, but at the same time I cannot abandon the socially embedded itself because both together makes me human, unquote. So here, disentangling refers to detaching oneself through therapy temporarily and mentally from one's family workplace and other social world. Re-embedding refers to the subsequent return to the social nexus after therapeutic self work. So in my view, Fong statement is very powerful because it highlights the complexity of the self as relational and dynamic, constantly being constituted and reconstituted through this different layers of sociality and the personal desires, you know, one always has to negotiate both forces. Two years later, we met again, Fong's mood and the personal circumstances have improved greatly. He continued to study psychotherapy and practice self cultivation at the same time. He was more engaged with his family and volunteered to give free counseling services to school children with emotional troubles. So he looked much happier. I think in this case you really can see how he did this dual process of disentangling and re-embedding. And of course, this is not a one step process. It's a constant back and forth dialogic process. Throughout my fieldwork and writing of this book, I have maintained a deeper sense, a deep sense of ambivalence towards side fever and psychotherapy. On the one hand, there is the risk to psychologize a host of social and economic problems that are derived from and demand structural change, right? We definitely see this trend and risk. And this is not about China. It's a general critique of psychotherapy that you tend to psychologize everything. Psychotherapy can be used as a political tool to neutralize hegemonic, naturalize hegemonic ideologies by turning our attention to the individual psyche. For example, in the case of the enterprise training, it seems that all the problems they are facing, the employees are facing, are said to be inner individual. It can be managed by individuals rather than looking at the structural problems. On the other hand, psychological intervention can provide much needed relief and hope for those who are struggling with emotional anguishes and longing for a better life. Therefore, I feel that it's better and important to treat this therapeutic trend seriously by discerning both its promises and shortfalls, claims and unintended consequences rather than dismissing that as some kind of bourgeois or brainwashing efforts. If anxiety is a general symptom of a society in distress, the aim of my book is to offer a glimpse of how individuals, families and organizations grapple with this condition. It's also my hope that the stories I presented in my book will convey not only anxiety, fears and the pain of the people who shared their life with me, but also aspirations, hopes and resilient spirits in their search for the good life in the midst of this massive societal transformations. Finally, I want to say a few words about COVID and the pandemic period. Anxious China, my book was published in August 2020. That's the, we can call the early stage of the pandemic and the entire world at that time had just entered the COVID-19 pandemic. And this pandemic has lasted over two years and we're still in the midst of it. China's zero COVID policy served the country relatively well in the, let's say 2020, 2021, until the rapid spread of the Omicron there it hit the country, and this strategy started to fall apart. Some of you may be following the news, right? So we see massive and unpredictable lockdowns, Xi'an, some other places, but now Shanghai, the massive Shanghai lockdown took a huge toll on not only the country's economy, but also Chinese people's mental health. There's no doubt COVID-19, the pandemic has a huge impact on the Chinese population's mental health. The anxiety level and the need for psychotherapeutic help has been rising steeply more than ever. So this is something I've been following online. Perhaps, you know, we can talk about this during the Q&A. I can only say that, you know, I literally don't know when the book came out, the anxious China, that now, yes, it's very fitting I think a China and the world is very much in the age of anxiety. And there's so much work that needs to be done, right? So, well, thank you all for listening and I really look forward to questions and discussions. Thank you very much indeed, Lee, for this amazingly thoughtful and insightful presentation. Before I open it to the floor, I would like to ask you, kick off the seminar with a question about the kind of issues that you have found in China through your field work, the kind of anxiety that you have discovered with your sessions. Are they really the kind of common anxieties that people face in the 21st century, whether they are in China or in the Bay Area in California or in London or in Delhi or elsewhere? Or how much of it is actually very China-specific? And China-specific, in particular, related to its political and social and economic systems, and a kind of particular type of pressure that people found because of the particular socio-political economic conditions in which they lived and work. Yeah. Great question, Steve. Yeah, very, very good question. I think, you know, on one level you can say that anxieties they experience or the expression of their anxieties share a lot in common with people elsewhere. But if you look deeper, the triggers and the context in which these anxieties arise I think are more specific, some of the issues are more specific to Chinese society. For example, I talk about in the book several major factors of forces that gave rise to these anxieties and the inner revolution. One of them, for example, is food safety issues. It continues to be a problem, but especially a few years ago, food safety is a big problem that people feel unsafe to consume a lot of food. There's this awful reports about the DGOU, the restaurants were used to really recycle the oils in the ditches and refine them and cook food. And there are a lot of practices that they put harmful chemicals in vegetables in order to make them look bigger and nicer. So food safety is a big issue in China that caused a lot of anxieties. I'm not saying that other places don't have, but it was very intense in China. I think it continues to be a problem when we go to outside to consume food in China or buy food in China. And another thing that was unique to China earlier on was the air pollution. Some of you may have watched this documentary under the dome talking about the awful traumatic air index impact on people's lives. For a while, the movie talks about that every morning people get up in Beijing, they will look at their air quality index and their mood will be literally affected by the index level because sometimes it will hit 500. And that's unimaginable. Here when we have over 200, that's considered very bad. But in more recent years, I think the government has done something to improve the air quality. So that problem seems to be getting better. However, Beijing's getting better, other places are not necessarily getting better airs. So my point is that I think that's a good question. So always think about what is unique to China, but what is more commonly shared? And I think there are specific social economic conditions that gave rise to their anxieties. But if you look at the expression, yes, you can probably say, well, yeah, they look similar in terms of anxiety, shared by people. And then another one I think that Steve, you mentioned about young people, the enormous pressure shared by Chinese youth today, largely because many of these are singletons, and they show tremendous family pressure and expectation on them. They have to perform. They always have to be the, hopefully the top 10% of their class, but what are you going to do with the 90%? So these kids are under a lot of pressure. They are under the pressure to perform, and they cannot, they don't have the choice to exit this enormous pressure. I think Xiang Biao also write about this nature of culture in revolution, kids felt as a, I think, response to that you mentioned the top 10 line flat. I think it's a really Chinese youth resistance strategy. So say, okay, I cannot exit this, relate this competition, but cannot just like I refuse to participate. But that seems to be not a choice either. Yeah, so there are some factors more unique to China than other places. Yeah. Thank you. We already got quite a few very, very good interesting questions, but I also continue to encourage anyone of you who would like to raise any questions to use the Q&A box. It would be helpful if you provide some indication as to who or where, who you are or where you are. But if you would like to stay anonymous, just indicate at the beginning of your questions and I will respect that. The first question I picked for you, Professor Zhang is from Dr. Jennifer Bond and alumni drop so was. She says, thank you for a fascinating talk. I was wondering if you can say more about the certification for counselors in China. Do they have to be approved or registered with a national or state controlled body. What are counselors allows to disclose by law. In the case of the UK, for example, I believe is only if people are planning acts of self violence or terrorism can a counselor break confidentiality. Do religious groups provide counseling services. And she's somebody looking to read your book. Yeah. All very interesting questions. Yes, I can explain briefly here and many of them are addressed also in the book. So certification process that is very unique. I call it a global kind of like assembly line paper for training for getting the certification. So these young people usually will go through three months that intensive training study periods. They study several subjects, child psychology development psychology, very compact training, and then they will go to take this national examination to get certified and a lot of memorization involved and it's not very difficult to get that certification. Right. The problem is that many of them can pass and get the national certification. However, they are far from being able to practice and that's why a lot of them have to go to more advanced training. And it also turns out my book shows that many of them are not interested in becoming a psychotherapist. They take the training and the exam as a way of learning psychotherapy and counseling systematically in order to help themselves and their families. And they argue that this is actually cheaper, even though you have to pay several thousand kwai to go through this process, but they want to learn the tool to help themselves. And it's cheaper than going to see a counselor because the hourly rate is very, very high in China today in Kwun Ming, it's about 500 to 800 yuan per hour. And that's, that's a lot of money because the ordinary teacher problem makes 4000 a month, right, so you can, you can imagine that. Okay, but one quick thing I want to note is that this national certification program program actually was canceled a few years ago by the state. It's still the whole country in the chaos. People were not sure what's going on. I think the rationale was that the government is going to decentralize this process eventually hopefully provincial government city government will be in charge of professionalization of the government rather than the state. Confidentiality is a big issue. They are required to protect the privacy, and that's their cardinal rule. But when do you reveal certain suggestions. I think only when they feel it's going to threaten the client's life. They would only do so reveal all make suggestions that suggests that the client to go to see a psychiatrist but otherwise, most of them would not report, except for the military and the police, that is very hard. They have to report to certain issues when they encounter that's why I mentioned the dynamic they're facing them. And finally quickly, religious organizations, some of them began to provide counseling services, I know some of the questions and the Catholic organizations, they send their, some of the employees to go through this kind of psychological training in order to help their clients. So yeah, it is being integrated into some of the religious organizations. Thank you so much, Jennifer. Next question I pick comes from Graham Hutchings in Oxfordshire. What does the Communist Party have to say it is doctrines and ideology about the self and mental well being on the service. It would seem that CBT might have a bigger role to play in the happiness of the Chinese people than fidelity to Marxism, Leninism, and Xi Jinping thought, would you agree. Let's see, I didn't quite to come understand the question so what is the parties doctrine about the self. What does the party think about the self in terms of his ideology and his doctrine about the self and about mental health. So, yes, I guess, you know, for the party, even though today we're in a very different time but as far as the party is concerned that the doctrine of the Communist Party about self is that always the self you don't have a private self. The self is always a social self and the self always serves the greater society and well being of the society and serve the party right that's very clear. So I think from the party's perspective, the self always should be subjugated or eclipsed by the party states demand and the collective's needs, and that that's usually the case. I am in the beginning bit of surprise that these enterprises the party actually allows psychotherapy and psychological counseling to even enter these organizations because it kind of runs against the party's notion right of self and self relationship to the social. But I think the party is also changing I guess it realized because the party used to do a lot of thought work and everything. People just get so bored of it and they turn that fight deaf ear to it. So the party wants to figure out some ways that can incorporate these techniques into their work to create efficient resilient human beings. So I think for the party, it's a big compromise. It's a big compromise to even allow psychology and psychotherapy to be integrated into governing techniques. However, I think I mentioned a little bit only certain brands of psychology are used to particularly positive psychology and the satir kind of upbeat socially oriented psychology that can be integrated but not brilliant for example that type of psychology and some other psychology. Yeah. Next question comes from Rosita from Lithuania. Does the political system and framework of China adds to the high anxiety level in China. In your research. Do you see what or when was the breaking point when the anxiety level started shooting up in China. So when does the anxiety level started should have been China. There's a couple of things right I think I did notice in more recent years I would say since 2000 as the economic reform deepens and the social inequality skyrockets in China that's another big factor trigger is the inequality and the pressure for people to perform. People are always now afraid of falling behind falling from grace. There is a book in America calling falling from grace the middle class as a good deal of anxiety of falling behind other people. In this context, I started to see anxiety level shot up, but another factor I must say is that also when this language, medicalized language of anxiety depression enters China people started to have a language to grasp on to describe their suffering. And also contribute to the prevalence, I think of anxiety so there are two levels of why is that researchers always deal with this. How do we know it's the actual cases rise, or it's because, because of reporting because people have the language to describe, and also, maybe it's getting diagnosed right so we're never fully sure but I think both of them contributed to the skyrocketing of anxiety and depression is why is they have the language and the diagnosis but also the actual experience existential experience all contributed I would say since the 2000. Yeah, I began to see more and more of anxiety and depression in China. What about the earlier question about the political system and does that affect the mental health and anxiety. The political system. It's interesting. I heard earlier you said that the people who are the person who asked question for was the we need right I have some very close question from this lady from Lithuania. Yeah, yeah I think it's very interesting I understand you know, especially in the previously socialist countries and now China we call it post socialist whatever it is but it's still a largely socialist countries. And I do believe that the political system also contribute to the level of anxiety, particularly you know, let's say authoritarian state right. I think at the lockdown today, the policy, even though the state claims it is for the greater benefits for the population as a whole. So, it is okay for some cities and some individuals to suffer a bit to endure hardship of lockdown for the whole country. So that's their, their rationale. But because of that. Gee, you know I've been following the Shanghai lockdown. The amount of sacrifice and human suffering in this period. It is extraordinary and I think largely because of the policy the zero COVID policy by a authoritarian state right so. So yeah, I think the political system does contribute to that. Okay. Let's say, next question comes from Cindy. So is a student postgraduate student that saw us therapeutic governing seems to have some elements of a top down phenomenon in that people in leadership position to use psychological intervention and self refaction on others. How do you reconcile this with the bottom up nature of your inner revolution. Very good question. Yes. So as a whole, the phenomenon that the side fever, I describe here I said it's a more bottom up because there's demand that the urban middle class professionals they encounter issues they want to solve their problems to say they seek counseling right so in that sense it is bottom up. When you go to organizations that then you start to see a bit top down meaning some of this so in one of those organizations I went it's a big tobacco companies. We organized this retreat. It's called retreat at a five star resort to encourage their employees to attend. Many of them were not willing to. So they named the some they think potentially troublemakers to attend the workshop by giving them incentives because at the time off, they get all this banquets, a five star hold the results and stuff as incentives, they can't really force them to go, but they provide incentives for them to participate. But once they are there, I began to talk with the employees is very interesting a lot of them said when they first came they were like kind of reluctant. It's something you know from the top and they were suspicious about that. Once they were there. They began over time to enjoy it. Because of the content. They were happily surprised that they were not there to study. They were able to read the documents and all this other thought works. They were actually given very helpful techniques to manage their own mental health and to deal with their family issues, including meditation and some other things. So, the bottom up movement does not completely preclude the top down efforts, however, it is even though you can call this a top down but it's not a forced upon their techniques to incentivize employees to participate and once they are there, they become more willing participants there. So it's a very interesting phenomenon is much more nuanced than than a black and white picture here. Right. Let me pick the next question which comes from Dr. Norman Stockman in Aberdeen, Scotland. The sources of psychotherapy you discuss are mainly modern scientific and Western. Are there also attempts to draw the traditional Chinese philosophies, for example, the Zhuangzi to understand and deal with the anxieties you have identified. Thank you for bringing this up because I didn't have a chance to even talk about this, but that's precisely I think what you said here. While most of them like the Satie family model and CBT are more modern scientific imported from the West. People, psychotherapists in China also have begun to incorporate more traditional Chinese cultural philosophy and practice this. One of the areas you can see this most obviously is in the third therapeutic model I talk about the Jungians inspired the sand plate therapy. That one actually is the closest to traditional Chinese cultural philosophy. So in the book I describe the reasons right so young himself was deeply influenced by Chinese and Indian traditional philosophy and the culture, for example, he wrote a preface to a German translation of eating he was a strong admirer of traditional Chinese cultural practices. And then the inventor of the sand plate therapy, Carl Dwarf, she was a young student and she herself was very much influenced by traditional Chinese culture. So, Chinese therapists, some of them are very interested in sand plate therapy, largely because of this cultural affinity. They find it very familiar and easier to apply that to their Chinese clients. So yes, there is a great deal of what I called blending or hybrid model right using traditional Chinese practices and the philosophy to explain things in the so called now Western psychotherapy. So it's not just the Western psychotherapy, there is a great deal of effort of hybridity going on there. So the book has more information if you're interested. Thank you. Next question I picked comes from Mexico. From Adriana Martinez Gonzalez, Gonzalez has Xi Jinping's daughter who studied psychology, managed to make an impact and cause any change in the top party. What are the ways ways of dealing with mental health or the importance they attached to mental health, particularly during the COVID lockdowns. Right. Well, great question. I wish I wish I knew. I don't know I heard rumors that she was studying psychology at Harvard and all the so people talking about that and hoping that she would have some impact on that but no, I don't know. I don't know about the details. I thought it was worth a try. Contrast between the Chinese and the Western approach and this question comes from Ray Seito. You mentioned that CBT matched Chinese understanding of psyche and behavior. What is to you think bridge Western and Chinese understanding of them. In other words, what philosophical or political elements share in comment when it comes to understanding of psyche and behavior. I mean, there is China specific anxieties or cultural specific anxieties CBT tends to be chosen for the treatment. Do you think it has greater efficacy or should one be dismissing cultural values. Okay, very complex question. CBT and tradition. I mean, and the Chinese way of thinking about behavioral change and the psyche. I think in both the cases, you know, like I mentioned, thought work right socially thought work. The g stuff thought work is also that that one can change one's behavior by changing your ways of looking at things and thinking about things. So your attitude and your way of perceiving the world can directly impact your behavior. So in the CBT is your psyche. There's a clear connection between your cognition, see cognition and your behavior changes. So in that sense, they're not completely the same, but there is both believe in this connection between how you think and perceive the world and in January behavior changes. So there's that link there. And let's see evidence. Yeah, so CBT in, I don't know about in UK but in North America CBT is a preferred treatment modality by all insurance companies, because it claims that CBT is evidence based it can produce results, relatively in a relatively short period of time. So insurance companies would allow, for example, 10 sessions and hope that it would generate evidence of change, positive change, while other modalities of psycho treatment usually requires months and months and even years of intensive treatment, which is really costly. And we can't really say whether CBT generates the results, right. However, in the international community psychotherapy communities that whether CBT really is more effective efficacious. That's still debatable though, that's still debatable. It's not a foreground conclusion, right. But because of that reason is more preferred. And then in China, insurance doesn't cut most insurance does not cover any of this therapy so it's not so much the insurance cost that matter in China. But Chinese people do in my chapter I write about that the psychotherapy with Chinese characteristics, Chinese clients most likely they when they come, they demand results to they want to they want the psychotherapists to tell them what to do what they can do. And then they want to see the results very quickly. They're not going to come back again and again. So because of that reason CBT I think also fulfills that desire for quick results and action. So I don't know whether I answered your question is a very complicated question you presented here but yeah, those are some of the thoughts. The question comes from a completely different angle it comes from a medical doctor, Dominic Stevens, our doctor who relied heavily on prescribing medicine for in quotation marks life problems, partly because of the time constraints, but also antidepressants seemed to work, though anti anxiety medications are fraught with dangerous. Are you concerned by this. And I will add to that. Is this a problem that is even more accurate in China or not. Yeah, very good question. I totally understand where you come from right so in China. If you go to a psychiatrist for your issues, most likely, the doctor will talk to you for 10 minutes, and then give you one of the SSI antidepressants, whatever Zoloft selectors, one of those you know Prozac. So that's how they do it because precisely they said they don't have time to talk and they're not trained in psychotherapy, either. So it's a quick diagnosis and then give you medication and and also in the book I describe one of the episodes I went with my mother. The doctors are swamped by patients they have to see 60 patients a day. They give you seven minutes each patient. So, seven minutes, the intake is just really quick and then they prescribe a medicine so that's a problem. So the the other thing I'm describing this book are mostly people, Chinese people are very wary about psychotropical medicines. They do not want to take it unless it's absolutely necessary. Some of them would struggle and deal with the issues and then when they can't deal with that they might find a psychotherapist to talk and hope a couple of sessions would help them solve their problem, and they will do some behavioral cognitive changes. And then the problem is so severe that they cannot solve through psychotherapy and the psychotherapy so probably refer them, say you need to see a psychiatrist to get medication they will go to the psychiatrist to get medication. So, I am concerned for some of the people who just go to the psychiatrist and get a few minutes diagnosis and handed in some kind of psychotropical medicines, because, as you say, they're serious side effects of those medicines. And particularly they're not monitored by their psychiatrists. If you don't come back, nobody's going to call you to follow up. So it's all on you. And we all know that those medicines is particularly when you take them in the initial stage and for younger people, particularly young kids and kids and young people, you need to monitor them because some of them might have suicidal thoughts and worsen their condition. So it is a big problem. It is a big problem. In China, just the sheer volume of people, doctors, psychiatrists really understand that they cannot follow up or do a two hour intake session with the patient, not possible. So it's a huge problem in China. Next question from Lan Feng, who is a post-grad at SOAS. Could you please clarify with more details about how the Chinese authority practices governmental power over the population by means of self-micking? I'm not quite sure what this question refers to, how the Chinese governmental, could you repeat? I don't quite get the part of the question. Could you clarify with more details about how the Chinese authorities practices governmental power over the population by means of self-micking? I want to say, first of all, this whole business of self-care, self-making, is part of the open middle class professionals initiative and their effort to take care of themselves, to seek happiness, to live a good life, a better life. Now, the government comes into play in certain circumstances. Not that the government intentionally comes into these organizations to say, you know, I want you to do this, this and remake yourself. Yes, that I would say in those cases of enterprise and the military, the government comes in with a different aim, right, to try to train a more resilient, efficient workforce, but at the same time, that very effort impact on the way the self is shaped. So I would say that self-making and self-remaking definitely is a byproduct of many of the governmental efforts, but not necessarily the clear goal of the government. So it's a byproduct because how can you not change how you view yourself and your relationship with others by practicing all the stuff we described here, I described in the book, you know, through the enterprise, through the military, the police, the training. So, yeah, I don't know, I mean, exactly what you're looking for, but that's my sense is it's inevitable byproduct of a lot of this intervention by organizations. Yeah. Next question is anonymous. I am wondering what are the consequences for people who suffer from mental health. Other than lying flat. Can these individuals suffering generate larger scale resistance as transformative power against the structure, which caused the mental health issues in the first instance. Next question. And also, my hope is that it might and maybe will. However, it is extremely difficult under the circumstance, because of the very tight control by the party state in many ways. So, whether the suffering will transform into essentially your question, not just lying down as a form of resistance but whether this kind of suffering can transform into some productive forces resistance forces that I think is open any of the question. It's very hard to predict. I wish it would but so far it seems not quite the case yet, however, in the recent case of Shanghai lockdown, we do see some sparks of this right so when some residents are under strict draconian measures and they really have to suffer in many different ways. Some of the Shanghai residents did a pushback and made made the government to change its measures and the policies, not the whole entire lockdown policy, but some elements. So the government in certain cases back down a little bit and not to pursue certain really extreme measures so I do see a bit transformation of their suffering into distance and actually produce some results. So it does happen because in one example during the lockdown, the Shanghai government actually send into teams into individual households to spray their houses in order to kill the virus and germs, which actually doesn't help doesn't help but they decided to do that. Usually a lot of people's like a content of their computer their clothing stuff so it costs outreach among the Shanghai residents, and the government eventually decided not to do that so after a few days and back down and not to do that so that's, I think, a welcome sign. But nevertheless, they could not change the whole entire lockdown policy, Shanghai got 60 days lockdown it's gradually emerging back but the damage is huge. Next questions come from Katie Lee in Scotland. How are Chinese students coping if parents and young people are getting anxiety. How are the children doing. And I will attach to that another question from BJ someone else who asked you, what about people in the rural areas. So first one, I think children are doing badly. I think according to some research, they did some kind of surveys that's even pre pandemic in some Chinese cities among school aged children. The percentage of the children who have suicidal thoughts is so high is startling, I think more than half or something like it's just shocking. They are not doing really well. And they are also under this tremendous pressure for Gaoka National College entrance exam right so not really well and if their parents are suffering. A lot of time you know that so when parents have issues try children also absorb their anxiety and worries right there's this intergeneration. Transmission of mental suffering distress. So it's a huge, huge issue. And most Chinese schools and colleges today have a counseling center now office but I think it's still far under staffed and they need definitely more workers in that area to help children. It's a big problem. I have to say though, having said that in the US. It's also a huge problem. I'm a professor teaching you know this 500 student class and many, many of them are dealing with the various kind of issues it's just really sad and disheartening to see how much struggle, they are going through. In that respect it's not just China, but rural area I don't know a whole lot I only know from secondary source research done by other researchers and it's also a problem in the rural area but I think not enough research has been done in the rural area except for a couple of people. So we don't know enough, perhaps, you know, some more research needs to be done in the rural area as well. So the question I picked comes from Jai Chen. How does this site fever addressing interpersonal relations interact with neoliberal feminism. And do you think that is a fetish section of emotional stability among the young urban Chinese. It's interesting. So, side fever in relation to new liberal time feminism. I have not done too much research on that topic so I can't say how that relationship with how the two articulated with one another but with regard to your question about whether there's a fetishism about emotional disability stability. Perhaps, you know, I think once now you have the language and the awareness. So people talk about that more so it could become a fetishism people obsessed with once emotional stability emotional well being much more than before, but whether that's a good thing or not. I think before, because of the lack because of the unaware of those issues, I feel it's actually good that people now are more aware of their mental condition, emotional condition, rather than just kind of a, you know, sailing blindly. Of course, we don't want that to go to the other extreme that people are so obsessed with that. So it's a matter of balance, you know, to have mental health awareness, know how to take care of one's own emotion and self, but not go to the extreme be completely consumed and obsessed by that. So that's a, I think that's a balance balance act. I still think China needs more, actually, a lot of people are not quite aware of that yet and then there's a huge social cultural stigma about emotional disorder and seeking help and I actually think they need more awareness. I think we're just less than just over three minutes left. What I think one last question from is about Henry and would you have a sense of how mental health and psychotherapy or psychiatry play out in the ethnic minority regions of the PRC, especially in the border regions where there is a lot of political control and contest. Um, certainly I, it's interesting so in a way I did not go out to study the ethnic dimension but at the same time, you know, I did my research in Yunnan province of my Kunming. So even though Kunming is largely Han Chinese but inevitably I also encountered some ethnic minority people in this process and I myself. I'm Bison, my father is from Dali so I'm one of the ethnic minority groups. They impact, so in my research, I have not seen the ethnic dimension as something really standing out. So it's still largely for me when I did my research a Han kind of Chinese phenomenon although I did encounter a couple of people who are from the ethnic minority groups. But I cannot say that their issues are directly related to their status as ethnic people, right. But a colleague in Yunnan University, there I encountered, she was doing research in one of the ethnic groups in the rural areas and there's this do long. So this particular village ethnic groups has really high suicide rates. So she was trying to do some research in this group but as you can see you know I was going to collaborate with her go back to do some research but then call it happened I couldn't go back. And also, this is a pretty sensitive issue. That's not very easy to get permission to do research but I'm aware that she was doing some research there in this particular ethnic group area. So I imagine it has something to do with the more marginalized social economic conditions the status of this particular group of people there. But I cannot say too much further about that. Thank you. Well, thank you very much. I think I'm afraid that time is coming to a closed. And I do apologize to those of you who have put questions in the Q&A box that I have not been able to put to our speaker. So I'm sure that all the questions will have been saved and they will be sent on to Professor Zhang so that she will know what question you have raised with her and whether she's just got any way to contacting you is a different matter. We just end this by thanking Professor Li Zhang of the University of California, Davis for a very enlightening and insightful evening of conversations for us and for a morning conversation for you. Thank you so much, Steve, and thank you for the wonderful stimulating questions. I will make sure that I read all of them and think about them. I do appreciate your participation and the thoughts. Thank you so much. And thank you also to all of you who have taken part in this webinar. I hope to see a lot of you in our next and other future events. Goodbye. Bye-bye.