Is China becoming less happy? China dropped to 93rd in the 2019 UN World Happiness Index, marking a fall of 14 places since 2017. The “Easterlin paradox” famously states that economic prosperity does not necessarily correlate to higher levels of happiness. Key facilitators of happiness identified by Martela et al in the World Happiness Report 2020 (Sustainable Development Solutions Network: 2020) include comprehensive welfare benefits, low corruption rates, well-functioning democratic institutions, and high levels of autonomy, freedom and social trust. The pursuit of happiness in China appears to have its work cut out.
And yet, as Becky Yang Hsu sets out in the Introduction to The Chinese Pursuit of Happiness, much of the data in the World Happiness Report is gathered through Cantril Ladder questions, which use the analogy of climbing a ten-rung ladder to visualize the pursuit of happiness. This question format does not necessarily make sense to all respondents. Could it be that true levels of happiness and their causes are not being captured accurately? Hsu and Madsen's volume argues that research into happiness must consider the distinctive sociocultural norms and practices that shape everyday lives. The book therefore adopts a “cognitive-evaluative” approach to exploring the “social construction of happiness,” using sociological and anthropological interviews and fieldwork to elicit how Chinese people define their pursuit of happiness.
Preceding the fieldwork-informed chapters, Lang Chen's historical account of changing notions of happiness in chapter one informs the reader that the contemporary term for happiness, (xingfu), was first expressed in China in its modern sense in two 1902 essays by Liang Qichao on Bentham's utilitarian notion of happiness. The demands of 20th-century nation-building linked various notions of inner joy (le), with practical striving for material prosperity. In classical Chinese, xingfu had been understood pejoratively as fu (longevity, prosperity, high social status, an untroubled life and plenty of offspring) achieved by blind luck (xing), except when xingfu was used to describe humble gratitude to a superior – a sense that Lang suggests has explicitly informed the Communist Party's understanding of the term since 2014.
Hsu's investigation of filial piety in chapter two demonstrates how happiness for some young adults in China hinges on the desires and anxieties that arise from interactive relationships with other family members, particularly parents. Drawing from Erving Goffman's notion of face-work, Hsu points to the sense of moral self-worth that parents gain in the company of their peers after their adult children marry and produce offspring. Some of Hsu's younger informants have a more expansive view of happiness than their parents, yet say their happiness is also contingent upon their parents’ happiness – and therein lies the rub.
Deborah S. Davis's detailed study of 42 Shanghai weddings in chapter three reveals spiralling wedding costs, commodification and an increasing number of wedding rituals, such as tea ceremonies at the parental homes and the exchange of rings at the wedding banquet. Davis argues that the proliferation of rituals enables all participants to share in the joy of the occasion without necessarily understanding the implications of the new order. A key anxiety Davis uncovered among young adults was the fear that their parents would not enjoy the wedding and that this unhappiness would cause their parents to lose face among friends and acquaintances.
James Farrer's analysis in chapter four of happy and unhappy meals in Shanghai uncovers the pleasure found in the light-hearted chit-chat that accompanies meals with friends. By contrast, the instrumental face-giving associated with eating out for social and business obligations made his informants tired and unhappy. “I have to sacrifice myself to eat with these bastards,” was the bitter comment offered by one senior academic. For Farrer, the unhappiness his informants described during socially obligatory meals reflects a tension between the material and idealized emotional (ganqing) aspects of happiness that have emerged in contemporary China. Farrer further shows that anxieties about food safety are shaped by class and regional prejudice: migrant vendors are distrusted by Shanghai locals; the rich fear that low-waged restaurant staff are spitting in their food. Anxieties about food safety and other forms of “bad eating,” in Farrer's view, are closely linked to deeper concerns about the social order.
“Making the government happy!” is how one of Richard Madsen's social worker informants ironically describes the role of social work agencies in chapter five. Madsen paints a depressing picture of a young social work profession in despair at the government's restrictions on its activities and ambitions. For the rights activists who form the subject of chapter six, with whom Jay Chen has worked over many years, China's political situation causes feelings of unhappiness and frustration. In their struggle to “make Chinese society better”, tensions frequently arise between their personal values and the value-systems operating in their families, work units, and government security bodies. Nevertheless, happiness and fulfilment are also found through family, friends and colleagues; a further source of gratification is recognition and support on Chinese social media and from overseas intellectuals.
A strong Epilogue rounds off the book, in which Madsen argues that the intense jostling between different value systems in China's “compressed modernity” results in heightened dissonance and tensions in Chinese society.
The volume's attention to face (Hsu, Davis, Farrer) and ritual (Davis, Farrer) are familiar ground for China historians; their continuing relevance in contemporary China is proven in these chapters. But the volume could have pushed the use of these concepts further. For example, to what extent are young people's claims of parent-dependent happiness themselves a face-giving ritualized expression of filial piety? In terms of everyday practice, what kinds of ritualized face-giving performances are required from social workers and activists to keep government officials happy and to create spaces for professionals to build a happier China? More fundamentally, to what extent do face and ritual play a role in producing happiness, not just inhibiting it? Mentioned in chapter one's historical overview, but unexamined thereafter, is the happiness achieved through cultivating gratitude and loyalty to a revered Party-state; not mentioned at all is the patriotic pleasure engendered through grand visions of China's global image.
Minor criticisms include the limitation caused by three of its chapters focusing only on Shanghai, the lack of Chinese characters accompanying pinyin terms, and the failure to acknowledge – although I confess some bias here – Wielander and Hird's Chinese Discourses on Happiness (Hong Kong University Press, 2018).
Nevertheless, the volume offers nuanced and textured moral and ethical understandings of the good life in China at individual, familial, and societal levels. Its chapters provide fine case studies for modules in Chinese studies, anthropology and cultural sociology. It sets a high bar for future mappings of happiness imaginaries.
