Paper short abstract:

This paper describes how young adults in urban China who pursue self-development perceive statis in their social world. I further discuss the significance of stasis in the perceptions of personhood under capitalism, as well as the possibility to suspend the fetish of change in ethnographic enquiry.

Paper long abstract:

Social change has been spotlighted as a dominant social fact by both the critical social sciences and more positivist proponents of capitalism and its signature technologies. Youth and young adults tend to embrace this sense of dynamism, both as they represent the prospects of society and as individuals who aspire self-development. Yet self-development also prompts perceptions of stagnation and backwardness in the wider social order. In this paper, I elaborate upon this tendency based on my fieldwork in extracurricular programs in interpersonal skills in urban China, a globally recognized emblem of ‘transformation’. First, market-driven self-development often ascribes underdevelopment to various actors and social practices. In China, this dynamic incorporates modernist ideologies that identify fixed ‘cultural’ values that inhibit personal growth and individual autonomy in domains such as interpersonal obligations, familial roles, and public education. Second, young adults encounter ubiquitous obstacles for their social mobility that counteract the spectacles of development communicated by state campaigns and market actors. This phenomenon is widely defined in China through the term ‘involution’ (neijuan) and is often also accompanied by critique on problematic cultural ‘mindsets’ that invites more wholesome social transformations. I describe these issues in length, while expanding the discussion to the significance of stasis in the constructions and perceptions of personhood under global capitalism.