Paper short abstract:

This paper describes how developmentalist critiques of local culture in China underlie person-centred projects of 'self-improvement'. Through an ethnography of workshops for interpersonal 'soft' skills, I present pedagogies where participants experience their overcoming of Chinese 'culture'.

Paper long abstract:

Despite recent socioeconomic transformations in China, discourses that associate 'Chinese' social norms with 'underdevelopment' continue to dominate educational and intellectual arenas in contemporary China. Correspondingly, individuals who engage in projects of self-improvement in China often endeavour to shed off tendencies of social interdependence, saving 'face', filial piety, and other practices that often symbolise social backwardness. This paper draws on an ethnography of workshops for interpersonal 'soft' skills in urban China where participants try to foster their autonomy while envisioning the constitution of new norms of sociality. In these activities, participants pursue and perform self-improvement through adopting critical rhetoric that identifies a 'Chinese' character as the root of the emotional and economic problems they face. They perceive an ideal of personhood, characterised by individual autonomy, on the other hand, as transcending their social conditions. This pedagogy ultimately emphasises participants' inherent implication in seemingly immoral social mores, while at the same time it facilitates distinct forms of social interaction where participants experientially overcome 'culture'. This apparatus contributes to the affective qualities of self-improvement in China as spaces and moments where individuals experience their distinction from the contours of their present-local reality.