Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China with Gil Hizi (NUS Press, 2026)

Podcast: New Books in Sociology · New Books Network

Opublikowano: 2026-09-30

How do individuals seek to become better persons in contemporary China? How do they navigate the complex demands of personal growth given the fragmentation of China’s moral landscape? Gil Hizi’s careful ethnography on “soft skills” workshops in China examines the pursuit and enactment of virtue, termed “capitalist virtuousness,” through the expanding genre of self-improvement. Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China (NUS Press, 2026) reveals how these workshops create heterotopian spaces that offer participants “transient optimism and virtue realization,” in which individuals experientially exceed their social reality. They perform an idealized sense of self-worth and...