Transient Becoming - Self-improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China

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Gil Hizi

How do individuals seek to become better persons in contemporary China? How do they navigate the complex demands of personal growth within the fragmentation of China's moral landscape, which celebrates enthusiastic consumerism and requires political conformity, where a lively and expressive popular culture coexists with official narratives of nationalism, heteronormativity and social hierarchy, where a rigid, exam-driven mass educational system is preparation for an economy of great market disruption and employment uncertainty?  

Gil Hizi's careful ethnography provides nuanced answers by examining the pursuit and enactment of virtue, termed "capitalist virtuousness," through the expanding genre of self-improvement. The book reveals how workshops in "soft skills" create heterotopian spaces—distinct moral imaginaries that offer participants "transient optimism and virtue realization" in compensation for the perceived futility of their ambitions and the socioeconomic uncertainties of their daily lives. Through affective intensities, particularly zheng nengliang (positive energy), and role-modeling interactions, individuals experientially exceed their social reality and perform an idealized sense of self-worth and "individual autonomy," even if these transformations remain short-lived and bounded. By analyzing phenomena like the expression of "dreams" and ambitious projects aimed at the future and "the next generation," Hizi illuminates how self-improvement becomes a constant state of incompleteness, requiring self-validation, in the context of aspiration for a "purified and moral image" of global capitalism.

With a deep appreciation of the moral turn, this books offers insights to Chinese studies, affect studies, anthropology and sociology, by meticulously detailing the lived experiences of person-making amidst globalizing forces and the contradictions inherent in modern aspirations.

“In Transient Becoming, Gil Hizi offers a penetrating and elegantly argued account of self-improvement culture in urban China. With conceptual precision and ethnographic sensitivity, he demonstrates how morality, affect, and personhood are reworked within market society. This book stands out for its refusal of theoretical simplification and for its sustained attention to lived moral dilemmas. It is a significant and timely intervention in debates on subjectivity, morality, and market modernity.”
– Yunxiang Yan, University of California, Los Angeles

Gil Hizi is a sociocultural anthropologist working as a lecturer and researcher at University of Cologne.

Publication Year: 2026
184 pp, 229 x 152mm
Paperback
ISBN: 978-981-325-319-3