Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China, by Jie Yang. ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2015, 288 pp., ISBN: 978‐0‐8014‐5660‐2, Price $89.95, hardback.
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12197 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12197
54:3 September 2016 0007–1080 pp. 673–678
BOOK REVIEWS
Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China,by
Jie Yang.ILR Press, Ithaca, NY, 2015, 288 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8014-5660-2, Price
$89.95, hardback.
Unknotting the Heart is a monograph by Jie Yang that investigates a series of ‘state
led psychotherapeutic interventions, especially those that target laid o workers’
(p. xvii) in China. The book reviews the role of contemporary Chinese psychological
workers (including party sta and local residents’ committees) and their part in
‘harnessing the positive potential of the unemployed through psychotherapeutic
intervention’ (p. xvii). The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, which contains
four chapters, aims to scrutinize the ‘psychological dimension of state enterprise
restructuring’ in contemporary China (p.ix). This first part investigates the experiences
of psychosocial workers in their ‘management of marginalized individuals’ and
the way these therapeutic state agents actively attempt to ‘actualize’ the ‘quanli’
(or positive potential) of disenfranchised Chinese subjects (p. xvii). Chapter 1
scrutinizes re-employment counselling programmes; chapter 2 examines the role
of residents’ committees in the proliferation of discourses of self-reliance and the
enculturation of new self-reliant subjects (p. 70); chapter 3 considers an aective
ideological programme (Song wennuan or renqing) (pp. 86–107); and chapter 4
investigates the ‘creative and synergistic use of both Chinese and western therapeutic
methods’ by psychosocial workers ‘to facilitate the implementation of ideologies
and practices promoted by state led programs, including those on reemployment,
counseling, and poverty relief’ (p. 110). Part 2 contains two chapters that dissect the
political implications of therapeutic governance. Chapter 5 inspects the psychological
work of female laid o workers who have been given new ‘professions’ as peiliao
(housemaid counsellors) (p. 145), and chapter 6 examines ‘the training of laid o
men turned taxi-drivers and their experiences with intensified class-based exploitation’
(p. 164).
Above the analyses produced in each of the six chapters, several important
theoretical and empirical developments emerge in this book. Firstly, the book
utilizes Foucauldian concepts of biopower as a way of conceptualizing state led
psychotherapeutic intervention (p. 25). In this regard, Yang views therapeutic
governance and politics as a series of practices that emphasize ‘the self and the
heart over structural forces’ (p. 202). Secondly, in this Foucauldian guise, Yang’s
monograph also points to historical shifts over the way that governance has been
conducted in China. Specifically, Yang makes a distinction between traditional
Maoist thought work and contemporary therapeutic work. Where thought work
often referred to the mental surveillance of the individual consciousness of Chinese
subjects (to encourage subjects to take up Maoist ideology), therapeutic governance
C
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