The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. Anxious China (University of California Press, August 2020) by Li Zhang, professor of anthropology, offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality and the mode of governing in post-socialist times. Received honorable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology's 2021 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing competition. Recommended by The Economist as one of six books to help understand China’s domestic challenges.

Li Zhang teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of anthropological theories, medical and psychological anthropology, urban studies, consumer culture, migration, development, and Chinese culture and political economy. She has won numerous awards throughout her career, including three prestigious book prizes: Winner of the 2012 Robert E. Park Book Award for In Search of Paradise, Winner of the 2001 Robert E. Park Book Award for Strangers in the City, and Winner of the 2011 Francis L. Hsu Book Prize for In Search of Paradise. Her latest book, Anxious China, was awarded Honorable Mention for 2021 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. Her research projects were supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and Social Science Research Council among others. 

View the book at University of California Press