Well-Being, Cultural Pathology, and Personal Rejuvenation in a Chinese City, 1981–2012
William Jankowiak
Introduction
Well-being is a notion that embodies numerous elements ranging from good health to emotional stability to integrated goals for a meaningful life. Life satisfaction is organized around a person’s life-orientation or thoughts about the future as they pertain to a person’s accomplishments compared to his or her aspirations. Conversely, life dissatisfaction arises whenever an individual’s achievements significantly do not match his or her level of aspirations. Given the importance of cultural values in structuring a person’s life-orientation or future aspirations, analysis of a culture’s notion of well-being needs to explore the interplay between a culture’s social organization, its value system, its psychological orientations, and the material opportunities available as they impact a person’s life-orientation, and thus the level of aspirations encouraged socially for seeking life satisfaction.
Hollan, i(2006) makes an important observation: well-being is an individual affair best understood through probing psychoanalytical investigations. He believes that errors in evaluation arise whenever a psychological phenomenon is extended to a social phenomenon. I partially concur. It is always fruitful to probe an individual’s perception of life satisfaction as opposed to globalizing our analysis to include the entire society. This does not mean, however, that we cannot also make society-wide generalizations. Robert Edgerton (1992) suggests there are times when it is appropriate to generalize from the individual condition to include the entire community. This requires a different scale of analysis. He suggests that the levels of health and happiness are two core domains from which to evaluate a society’s overall well-being or social fitness. He argues that whenever the majority of people, across all age cohorts, are depressed, malcontent, alienated, fearful, sick, or unable or disinterested in reproducing themselves, the culture can be labeled a “sick society” (Edgerton 1992, 188). I would add to Edgerton’s criteria an additional qualification—the scale of societal alienation. Is it a totalizing experience (i.e., extending across most social domains) or is it a more localized experience, felt when an individual enters into a specific domain of interaction? In times of rapid cultural change, there may be a gap between an individual’s expectations and accomplishments. In this milieu, personal dissatisfaction is widespread. Correspondingly, there will be certain age cohorts (usually youth) who thrive in the new milieu. In making an assessment of a society’s overall well-being, it is necessary first to determine if dissatisfaction is experienced by all or only a few age cohorts. Because rapid social change impacts age cohorts and genders differently, we cannot therefore label an entire culture sick if only people in a few age cohorts are suffering, while people in other age cohorts are thriving. A society in transition may or may not be a “sick society.” However, if the majority of people across all age cohorts in a society are miserable, we can infer that the society, at least at that particular moment, is indeed a “sick society.”
The “single most common finding from a half century’s research,” Putnam writes, “is the correlation between life satisfaction and the breadth and depth of one’s social connections (Putnam 2000, 385). For Lane (2000), happiness is derived from close bonds of affiliation, which he believes are lacking in the modern world. In contrast, Bell believes that individuals require more than close friendship networks to thrive. Bell writes, “If people have been socialized to participate in a relatively open stratification system, they will seek to establish a set of meanings through which to relate themselves to the wider world” (quoted in Xu 2002, 15). These meanings provide a wider narrative of the good and proper life. Because people need to place themselves within this wider value system, “it should be not only empirically possible, but essential, for most individuals to evaluate their life as a whole” (van Praag and Frijiters 1999, 427).
There is a relationship between the ability to obtain desired goods and services, the freedom to achieve, and well-being (Frey and Stutzer 2002; Inglehart and Klingemann 2000). There is also a strong correlation between well-being and whether or not a society has experienced communist rule (Veenhoven 2000, 182). People everywhere yearn to feel in control of their situations (Anderson 1996; Marmot 2004), I argue; living in a totalitarian social organization will undermine their sense of “being in control” over their immediate environment and, thus, by extension their lives (Langer 1983; Anderson n.d.). This is especially evident for people living in a communist social organization. Freemon-House’s (1999) study of well-being in communist societies found that communist political institutions are the worst form of authoritarianism. Life in this political system is experienced with greater “dissatisfaction and suffering than any equivalent social movement in the world’s history” (Inglehart and Klingemann 2000, 165–83). People in these societies often suffer from a variety of psychological aliments that arise from the feeling they have no control over their lives (see Courtois et al. 1999 for an historical overview of how people from different societies fared under communism). The importance of control is not confined to people living in industrialized societies. Anthropologists have found that hunter-gatherer and pastoral populations are far more optimistic about their lives than subsistence farming communities, who cannot move if the local ecological conditions worsen and thus are more prone to witchcraft accusations, suspicion, and pessimism about their future (Edgerton 1971).
Sen (2002, 342) stresses (as do ordinary Chinese people I have spoken with) that the two most important qualities for ensuring a good life or well-being are freedom to choose and having the means to achieve desired resources (i.e., money, land, labor, social networks, and information). Colby (2003, 28) expressed the same notion when identifying autonomy, competence, and affiliation or relatedness as necessary attributes for life satisfaction. Taken together, these perspectives form a kind of self-determination theory of well-being (Ryan and Deci 2000) in which individuals are able to evaluate their lives as ones of satisfaction or dissatisfaction through comparing their goals with their accomplishments, or with the perceived attainability of those goals. From this perspective, well-being is the byproduct of comparing personal accomplishments with aspirations (Frey and Stutzer 2002, 81; Michalos 1991; Inglehart 1990). From this perspective, an individual sense of well-being depends as much upon the possibility of choice and opportunity as it does on the density of one’s social connections.
If the freedom to choose is important for personal well-being, what happens when there are drastic restrictions on personal choice? China represents an opportune case to explore this question. Its fifty-plus years of experimenting with a redistributive command economy, combined with periodic bursts of political fever, made extreme egalitarianism more important than other Chinese values recognizing individual merit, vision, and achievement. Throughout much of Chinese history, these values were widely shared, but in the communist era, an alternative cultural model was stressed: social responsibility for the community and nation. Individuals were ideally expected to de-emphasize their individuality in favor of “the common good.” In China, the juxtaposition of the two competing value systems—extreme egalitarianism versus individual choice, responsibility, and personal achievement—engendered confusion, anger, angst, and unhappiness. In Maoist China (1949–1976), this accounts, in part, for much of the suffering people experienced in living their lives.
In this paper I examine the Chinese cultural model for life satisfaction or well-being in two different eras: work unit (danwei) socialism (1981–83) and market reform (1987, 2000–02). My sample was found in Hohhot, the provincial capital of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China, where I lived from 1981–83, for six months in 1987, for five months in 2000, two months in 2002, and one month in 2005, for a total of thirty-nine months. I will also examine the ways Chinese sought well-being in four different domains: friendship, family, occupation, and fun activities. By analyzing how Chinese conceptualized their lives over time, I will identify the conceptual frameworks individuals used to assess their relative well-being.
A word on methodology: My initial research was conducted in1981–83 and again in 1987. In this research, I was not interested in well-being per se. Rather, I focused on seventy-five key families (forty-five Han, thirty Mongol) on a variety of different aspects of their lives, and also visited, observed, and interviewed other residents living throughout the city. The material found in this chapter was taken from my field notes, personal memories of individual lives, and readings in the literature; and although I was not explicitly investigating well-being, concern over well-being is abundantly apparent in the words of the people I interviewed. Because I took field notes of their attitudes toward a host of things in the danwei socialist era, I was able to record what Hohhotians actually felt about their lives in the early 1980s and not from what they could later recall about their lives during that era; in this way, I was able to avoid the nostalgia problem apparent, for example, in many of the post–Soviet Union studies, in which there is a clear nostalgia by some for “the good old days” that belies the depth of people’s actual dislike for their lives under a communist government. My 2002–05 data was obtained in part through the use of a survey on well-being and happiness given to forty-five Hohhotians (thirty Han and fifteen Mongols; twenty-four females and twenty-one males). Because I did not find ethnicity a factor in well-being, the two groups’ responses are combined. I was able to personally interview twenty-nine of the forty-five people surveyed, and thus obtain more in-depth information concerning what they thought about their lives and their future in the market reform era compared with the 1980s. These conversations enabled me to better understand the value Hohhotians placed on social changes. They also enabled me to appreciate the significance of my early 1980s observations.
Self, Family, Morality and Spiritual Well-Being in Chinese History
The theme of self sufficiency is an important aspect in Chinese spiritual and health practices. The tradition of self-medication and self-sufficiency in healing strived to link the body and the mind together into spiritual wholeness (yuan). Qigong masters grounded their teaching in values of “self-control, mastery, assertion, and . . . potency” (Chen 2002, 71). The central importance of the interrelationship of body and mind is apparent in the frequency of which bodily metaphors are invoked to convey emotional states (Kleinman 1986).
The foundation of Chinese emotions lies in the corporeal body, with the location of emotions thought to be in the heart (xin) (Tung 2000, 78). For most Chinese, affective expressions are intertwined with body idioms, nature metaphors, and ethical codes. Because “the body-person is also the heart-mind’s most important single resource” (Lee 1999, 77), topics of weather, nature, and health often carry within them some evidence of an individual’s psychological state. Images of loneliness, for example, may be expressed with reference to isolated clouds or an empty lake or beach.1 A troubled relationship may be addressed with reference to tumbling leaves along the ground (Tung 2000, 78).
A recurrent theme in classical Chinese writings is the importance of responsibility, choice, and self-growth via achieving mastery of one’s body. Contemporary Chinese self-help books focus on developing a nurturing life through moderation, which means consuming the correct food and drink, and maintaining consistency in daily habits.2 These activities are thought to regulate the heart and mind and, as such, constitute a form of self-improvement (Chen 2002, 263). In this way, Chinese culture has stood against Kierkgaard’s and other European existentialist visions that mankind was born to be miserable. For most Chinese, people are born to be happy and content. To achieve this state, however, you need to be proactive in how you live your life.
Chinese philosophical traditions valued reflection, contemplation, independence, responsibility, and achievement. The Confucianists thought that well-being could be achieved through a strict adherence to institutionalized codes of conduct that link role performance to a person’s place in the social structure. It is a life orientation consistent with the Confucian emphasis on self-cultivation (Unschuld 1985, 62). In contrast, the Daoists strove to liberate the individual from most social obligations through encouraging individuals to situate themselves within a natural universe. To this end, they stressed conformity and passivity to external forces (Unschuld 1985, 101). Unlike the Confucianists, who associated well-being with proper performance of social rites, the Daoists (much like the Buddhists) linked life satisfaction to a relatively stress-free life best achieved through decreasing one’s obligations. This perspective was succinctly summarized in 2002 by a Hohhotian father who advised his twenty-four-year-old son: “Strive to be content and you will find pleasure.”
Both philosophical traditions concurred that hard work, self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-mastery are essential attributes for having a satisfying life. In time, ordinary Chinese integrated the Confucian and the Daoist cosmologies into a synergetic folk system that continues to guide, at least as an abstraction, their orientation toward how best to live a good life.
The Chinese Communist Vision and the Danwei Social Organization
The Communist Party came to power promising to curb governmental complacency, corruption, and economic individualism, and thereby rescue Chinese society from impending economic and moral bankruptcy. Under the party’s guidance, a “socialist ethos” was promoted that stressed public virtue over individual gain, the importance of self-denial and social obligations, and an egalitarian lifestyle. This ethos, the party felt, would improve the moral climate and, in turn, increase the productivity of the entire nation. Toward this end, an increased number of “efficient” production and consumption work units (danwei) were created to function as combined social, political, and economic institutions by providing, among other things, labor insurance, social security, health benefits, residency and travel permits, as well as serving as a means to administer marriage and divorce and investigate crime (Walder 1986, 28–29; Southall 1993). In effect, enormous resources of power were placed in the hands of the cadre (ganbu), a new kind of bureaucrat responsible for the management of the state-sponsored work enterprise.