Revolutionary narratives of self-compassion among older women in post-Mao Beijing

Abstract

Drawing upon interviews and participant observation conducted with hundreds of middle-aged and elderly Chinese women in rural and urban neighborhoods in Beijing Municipality between 1993 and 2012, this paper explores the emergence of revolutionary new narratives of self-compassion among older women in reform-era Beijing. Taught before 1949 that they should first and foremost serve their families and after 1949 that they should put their own individual needs aside and serve the party and the masses, many older Chinese women in Beijing – after the seeds of market reform were sown in the late 1970s – slowly began to focus more attention than before on themselves, their past and present experiences, sources of and solutions to past and present distress, and their own personal enjoyment of everyday life. The analysis shows how western theories of both gero-transcendence and individualization as modernization are insufficient to account for the complex cultural formations of self-care that have developed among older women in the first decades of post-Mao China.

Keywords:

• alleviation of suffering
• self-compassion
• care of the self
• aging
• women
• China
• reform era
• social change
• popular healing practices
• Qigong

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with China, National Science Foundation, Freeman Foundation, Paramitas Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, and University of Vermont Dean's Fund for Faculty Research. It was approved by the Human Subjects Committees of Harvard University and the University of Vermont. Writing and revision were supported by Harvard University, the University of Vermont, Fudan University, and Academica Sinica. Any errors or omissions are the author's own.

Conflict of interest

None.

Notes

1. This post-Mao Chinese version of self-compassion is distinct from the current discussion of self-compassion in Western psychological circles (e.g., Neff 2011), which contends that self-compassion is preferable to self-esteem, whether self-esteem stemming from the boundless praise of indulgent parents or from the driving criticism of Tiger-Mother types.

2. As Tornstam (1989, 55), a key player in the theoretical formulation of gero-transcendence, defines the term: ‘This latter can be described as a shift in meta-perspective from a materialistic and rational view to a more cosmic and transcendent one, normally followed by an increase in life satisfaction’.

3. All names of informants are pseudonyms.

4. Of course, as Scheid (2002) has shown, contemporary Chinese medicine in China is an invented unitary tradition constructed through the bricolage of nationalist Maoist modernization.