Prof. Dr. Jie Yang

Prof. Dr. Jie Yang

Guest Professor

Elite Master Program "Standards of Decision Making Across Cultures"
Institute for Near Eastern and East Asian Languages and Civilizations

Room: Room 2.272
Henkestr. 91, Haus 8, Stock 2
91052 Erlangen
Germany

Dr. Jie Yang, Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Toronto. Dr. Yang’s award-winning research began at the intersection of linguistic anthropology and China studies, and has evolved to focus on indigenous and non-indigenous psychology in China, therapeutics and gendered self-help trends, Chinese subject formation, evolving components of, and resistance to psychologized governance, and recasting medical or health humanities from East Asian cultural traditions.

Her 2015 book, Unknotting the Heart (Cornell UP), which won the Francis Hsu Book Prize, weaves together ethnography and multiple theoretical stands to articulate two notions of the therapeutic: one referring to a class of experts and their procedures for addressing psychic and physical problems, the other tied to modern welfare state ideologies, programs and neoliberal policies that diagnose and normalize distress in marginalized groups. In 2017, she published Mental Health in China (Polity), a landmark survey of current psychological trends amidst China’s breakneck development.

Two new projects take this work further: one delineates troubling double binds and modes of distress among Chinese officials in the context of widespread anti-corruption campaigns. She pays particular attention to the relationship between aesthetics and mental health, leading to her forthcoming monograph titled Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Heart distress, aesthetic attunement and the art of governing in China. The other project returns to Chinese classics of philosophy, literary work and medicine to investigate Chinese holism and relational ethics and their implications for contemporary psychological practice. She takes an indigenous and ontological approach to explore ways of “indigenizing” Euro-American psychology and recasting medical/health humanities from Chinese/East Asian perspectives.

 

EDUCATION

PhD Anthropology, University of Toronto

MA Sociolinguistics, Beijing Language and Cultural University

BA English Language and Literature, Shandong Normal University

 

EMPLOYMENT

2025—2026                Visiting Professor, Friedrich Alexander University

September, 2019       Professor, Simon Fraser University

2014—2019                Associate Professor, Simon Fraser University

2007—2014                Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University

2006—2007               Course Instructor, University of Toronto

Special issues

 

Books

  • 2018    Mental Health in China: Change, Tradition and Therapeutic Governance. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • 2015   Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance in China. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. (2016 Winner of Francis Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology, American Anthropological Association)
  • 2014   The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia. (ed.) Foreword by Sara Ahmed. London and New York: Routledge. (paperback published in 2016)

 

Refereed Journal Articles

  • 2025    Governing “Officials’ Heartache”: Aesthetic Attunement, Philosophical Counseling, and Psychomoral Training in China’s Bureaucracy. Medical Anthropology, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2025.2558849
  • 2025    Indigenous Psychologies and decolonial research practices: Contributions to knowledge. American Psychologist.(with G. Misra. Thomas Teo, L. Sundararajan, R. Ting)
  • 2024    Plucking Heartstrings: Guqin, Aesthetic Attunement, and TCM Music Therapy (with Wenlei Huang). Review of General Psychology, 29(2), 224-238.
  • 2024     Introduction. Beyond Psyche: Aesthetic Attunement and Alternative Psychological Care through the Heart. special issue. Review of General Psychology.
  • 2023    “Hallucination of China Dream: Forbidden Voice, Articulation, and Schizophrenia in China.” Medical Anthropology 42(3): 250-263.
  • 2021    “Bureaucratic Shiyuzheng”: Silence, Affect, and the Politics of Voice in China. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11(3): 972-985.
  • 2021    “The Power of Aroma: Gender, Biopolitics, and Melodramatic Imagination in the Legend of Zhenhuan.” Feminist Media Studies 21(5): 707-720.
  • 2019    “Hidden Rules and The Heartache of Chinese Government Officials.” Made in China: A Quarterly on Chinese Labour, Civil Society, and Rights 4 (1): 36-41.
  • 2018    “‘Officials’ Heartache’: Depression, Bureaucracy, and Therapeutic Governance in China.” Current Anthropology 58 (5): 596-615.
  • 2017    “Virtuous Power: Ethics, Confucianism and Psychological Self-Help in China.” Critique of Anthropology 37 (2):179-200.
  • 2016    “The Regulation and Politics of Anger in China.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40 (1): 100-123.
  • 2015    “Informal Surrogacy in China: Embodiment and Biopower.” Body and Society 21 (1): 90-117.
  • 2014    “Pai Ma Pi: Flattery as Empty Signifiers and Social Control in a Chinese Workplace.” Social Semiotics 24 (1): 1-18.
  • 2013    “Fake Happiness: Counseling, Potentiality and Psycho-politics in China.” Ethos 41(3): 291-311.
  • 2013    “Peiliao ‘Companion to Chat’: Gender, Psychologization and Psychological Labor in China.” Social Analysis 57 (2): 41-58.
  • 2013    “Song Wennuan ‘Sending Warmth’: Unemployment, New Urban Poverty, and the Affective State in China.” Ethnography 14 (1): 104-125.
  • 2013    “The Politics of Huanghua: Gender, Metaphors, and Privatization in China.” Language and Communication 33 (1): 61-68.
  • 2011    “The Politics of the Dang’an: Spectralization, Spatialization and Neoliberal Governmentality in China.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (2): 507-534.
  • 2011    “Nennu and Shunu: Gender, Body Politics and the Beauty Economy in China.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36 (2): 333-357.
  • 2010    “The Crisis of Masculinity: Class, Gender, and Kindly Power in Post-Mao China.” American Ethnologist 37 (3): 550-562.
  • 2007    “Zuiqian ‘Deficient Mouth’: Language, Gender and Domestic Violence in Urban China.” Gender and Language1 (1):105-116.

 

Book Chapters and Encyclopedia Entries

  • 2025    “Gender and the City.” (with John Hope and Lisa Hoffman). The Sage Handbook on China. Urbanization, edited by Lisa Hoffman, Jennifer Hurbert and Zhang Zhilin. London: Sage.
  • 2025    “Governing Unemployment through the Psychologization of Heart.”  Handbook on Unemployment and Society,edited by Ofer Sharone, Victor Chen, and Sabina Pultz. Edward Elgar Publishing.
  • 2024    “Gongju Ren ‘Tool People’: Alienation, Spiritual Lethargy, and Social Work in China” (with Wenlei Huang). Values and Indigenous psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market,        edited by Al Dueck and Louise Sundararajan. Springer.
  • 2023    “Obligatory Death in Wuhan: The Power to Decide Who Died, and Therapies for Those Who Survived” (with Xiaowen Zhang) In Globalization, Displacement & Psychiatry: Global Histories of Trauma. Sanaullah Khan and Elliott Schwebach. London: Routledge.
  • 2022    “Confucius in a Self-Help Group.” Philosophy on Fieldwork: Critical Introductions to Theory and Analysis in Anthropological Practice, edited by Nils Bubandt and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer. London: Routledge (July 2022).
  • 2021    Foreword. Ignorance is Bliss: The Chinese Art of Not Knowing by Mieke Matthyssen. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • 2021    “The Rise of the Therapeutic in China.” In Mental Health in China and Chinese Diaspora in the Asia-Pacific,edited by Harr Minas. New York: Springer.
  • 2020    “Counseling and Confucianism in China:  A New Twist on Tradition.” In The Routledge Handbook of Global Therapeutic Culture, edited by Daniel Nehring, Ole Jacob Madsen, Edgar Cabanas, China Mills and Dylan Kerrigan, 245-256. London: Routledge.
  • 2018    “Discourse, Gender and Psychologization in China.” The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Discourse Analysis, edited by Chris Shei, 310-322. London: Routlege.
  • 2018    “Happy Housewives: Gender, Class and Psychological Self-Help in Urban China.” In Chinese Discourses of Happiness, edited by Gerda Wielander and Derek Hird, 129-149. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
  • 2017    “Holistic Labor: Gender, Beauty and the Wellness Industry in China.” In Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism, edited by Ana Sofia Elias, Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
  • 2014    “The Politics of Affect and Emotion: Imagination, Potentiality and Anticipation in East Asia.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, 1-28. London and New York: Routledge.
  • 2014    “The Happiness of the Marginalized: Affect, Counseling and Self-Reflexivity in China.” In The Political Economy of Affect and Emotion in East Asia, edited by Jie Yang, 45-62. London and New York: Routledge.
  • 2014    “Beauty Products and Health.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health and Society, eds. William C. Cockerham, Robert Dingwall and Stella Quah. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • 2011    “Renqing, Privatization and Kindly Power in Post-Mao China.” In Along the Silk Road: Essays on History, Literature and Culture in China, eds. Darrel Bryant, Yan Li, and Judith Maclean Miller, 102-118. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press.
  • 2011    “Zuiqian ‘Deficient Mouth’: Language, Gender and Domestic Violence in Urban China.” Language and Gender: A Reader. 2nd edition, edited by Jennifer Coates and Pia Pichler, 183-192. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • 2007    “‘Reemployment Stars’: Language, Gender and Neoliberal Restructuring in China.” In Words, Worlds, Material Girls: Language, Gender and Globalization, edited by Bonnie McElhinny, 73-102. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

  • 2025    Conference Grant, FASS, SFU (CAD$6,000)
  • 2023    “Scholarly Impact of the Week”, SFU VPRI
  • 2023    Partnership Development Grant ($199,669), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), https://www.sfu.ca/sociology-anthropology/news-events/news/2023/professor-jie-yang-receives-2023-sshrc-partnership-development-g.html
  • 2023    SFU FASS Visiting Speakers Fund ($5,000)
  • 2022    SFU VPA Conference Fund ($10,000)
  • 2019    David Lam Center Conference Grant, SFU ($5,000)
  • 2019    SFU FASS Rapid Response Grant ($5,000)
  • 2019    SFU-VPR Travel Grant (Tokyo SEAA Conference) ($2000)
  • 2019    Insight Grant (CAD $121,102), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
  • 2018    SSHRC Institutional Grant ($6990)
  • 2016    University Publication Grant (CAD$ 2000)
  • 2016    Francis L.K. Hsu Book Prize, Society for East Asian Anthropology, American Anthropological Association
  • 2014    SFU Publication Grant (CAD$4,500.00)
  • 2011    Standard Research Grant (CAD $77, 275), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)
  • 2010    SFU/VPR Travel Grant (CAD $600)
  • 2009    SFU/VPR-SSHRC 4A Grant (CAD $9,960)
  • 2009    Research Incentive Grant, FASS, SFU (CAD $500)
  • 2008    SSHRC SFU Travel Grant (CAD $1,500)
  • 2008    SSHRC Institutional Grants (CAD $4,950)
  • 2007    SFU President Start-Up Research Grant (CAD $17,500.00)
  • 2004    Dissertation Completion Grant, University of Toronto (CAD $5,000)
  • 2000    International Recruitment Award, University of Toronto (CAD $25,200/year)
  • 2002    University of Toronto Open Fellowship (CAD $22,000.00)
  • 2000    Wadsworth International Fellowship, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (USD $49,000.00)

linguistic/psychological anthropology; medical/health humanities and its “indigenization” in East Asia, mental health, (non-)indigenous psychology; the affective effect of economic restructuring/unemployment; affect/emotion/happiness; the politics of gender and class.

My research focuses on the affective/psychological possibilities and costs of socioeconomic transformation in China and East Asia. It began at the intersection of linguistic anthropology and China studies. It has evolved to focus on indigenous and non-indigenous psychology in China, therapeutics and gendered self-help trends; Chinese subject formation, evolving components of, and resistance to psychologized governance, and recasting medical/health humanities from Chinese/East Asian cultural traditions.

2024-2025 Recasting Mental Health and Medical Humanities through East Asian Cultural Traditions: an international and interdisciplinary research partnership with 45 global partners and 98 collaborators (25 Asian universities, 12 universities from North America, and 8 European universities).

 

2025 Aug. 28-29: organized a workshop with representatives from these 45 partners (funded by a Partnership Development Grant, SSHRC) hosted by Social Research Institute, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

 

2023 Nov.-Dec. Beyond Psyche: Indigenous Psychology and Alternative Mental Health workshop in Xi’an (hosted by Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine), conducted field research on Indigenous psychology and guanchang meixue “bureaucratic aesthetics”, and establish partnership with 11 research institutes/universities in China

 

2019 July-Aug. Bureaucratic Aphasia and Political Depression

Ethnographic research on the mental health of officials in Jinan, Shandong Province. Interviewed psychiatrists and psychotherapists who counseled public servants in Beijing and Jinan.

 

2018 May-July “Officials’ Heartache”: Double Bind, Mental Distress and “Existential” Therapy

Ethnographic research on the mental health of Chinese government officials in Zhangqiu, Shandong Province and at the National Center for the Psychological Health of Public Servants, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing.

 

2017 Jul.-Aug. “Officials’ Heartache”: Gender, Mental Distress and Chinese Bureaucracy

Conducted in-depth interviews with officials in Zhangqiu, Shandong Province and psychiatrists in both Beijing and Shandong Province who treated public servant patients.

 

2015 Feb.-Aug. Psychiatry, Psychopharmacology and Subjectivity

Conducted participant observation and interviews with patients, family members, psychiatric nurses and psychiatrists at schizophrenia wards in two mental hospitals in Changping, Beijing and Zhangqiu, Shandong Province.

 

2013 Aug. “Officials’ Heartache”: Depression, Suicide and Chinese Bureaucracy

Conducted in-depth interviews with officials in Zhangqiu, Shandong Province, psychiatrists in both Beijing and Shandong Province who treated public servant patients, and collected media discourse on officials’ suicides since 2009.

 

2011 Jul.-Aug. Psychologization and Psychosocial Work

examined the role of psychologypsy/chotherapy in governing urban poverty and the trend of psychologization: managing social, economic and political issues in psychological terms or “psychological” modes of thinking.

Conducted in-depth interviews with party-staff-turned-psychosocial workers at working class communities in Changping, Beijing and professional counselors at a mental health hospital for underprivileged people and attended training sessions in social work and Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) in Beijing.

 

2010 Jun.-Aug. Happiness, Psychology, and Therapeutic Politics in Beijing

investigated the role of psychology in promoting happiness and positive thinking among the unemployed in Changping—that is, how happiness is used as a political technology for delivering therapy and social norms.

spent six weeks interviewing counsellors and reemployment and poverty relief program managers in two districts of Beijing: Haidian and Changping; conducted in-depth interviews with twenty participants (housemaid counsellors) and recorded counselling programs/training sessions.

 

2009 Jun.-Aug. Governing the New Urban Poverty and “Mental Health Crisis” in Beijing

investigated how the government and urban residents’ committees govern the unemployed through state-led reemployment and poverty-relief programs in Changping.

spent seven weeks interviewing six reemployment program managers at the Social Security Institute of Haidian District, Beijing; conducted in-depth interview with trainees of these reemployment programs and asked eight key respondents to write a daily journal, documenting their daily activities and their experience with state policies and programs on reemployment, poverty-relief, and counselling.

 

2008 Jun.-Aug. Green Olympics, Humane Olympics: Development and Environment in Beijing

Beijing’s “Green Olympics” campaign was translated into practices of building “green belts” in its outskirts, which forced local farmers to plant (unprofitable) fruit trees rather than regular crops. This disrupts the local agriculture and causes (involuntary) migration to urban centers.

conducted a pilot project investigating the crippling effects of Beijing’s environmental engineering on underprivileged groups (laid-off workers and rural migrants) in Changping.

 

2007 Jun.-Aug. Gender and Privatization in China

Gender is not a side effect of, but central to, China’s economic restructuring. Underprivileged women like laid-off women are perceived to embody boundless potentialities for entrepreneurial capital. Conducted six-week research on the effects of privatization on women workers, who got reemployed as beauty care workers, informal companion counselors or informal surrogates in Changping, Beijing.

 

2002-2003 Doctoral Dissertation Research on Gender, Unemployment and Privatization

doctoral dissertation research on neoliberal restructuring—the privatization of a state-owned enterprise in Changping and the effects of privatization on workers (women in particular).

Conducted participant observation, audio/video-recorded more than 300 hours of in-depth interviews, narratives, face-to-face conversations, and political speeches in the factory, and collected propaganda on privatization.

  • 2025    Workshop: Recasting Mental Health and Medical Humanities through East Asian Cultural Traditions, funded by SSHRC and SFU, hosted at Social Research Institute, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand (Aug.28-29).
  • 2023    Workshop: “Learning from Chinese Classics: Indigenous Psychology and Alternative Mental Health Care.”  Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine, Xi’an, Nov. 25-27.
  • 2023    organized/chaired a virtual public speech on automaton and emotion by Dr. Daniel White March 18.
  • 2023    Workshop: “Beyond Psyche: Indigenous Psychology and Alternative Mental Health Care Through the Heart” (SFU Downtown Campus, Mar 11–12, 2023).
  • 2020    Zoom workshop: “SARS, Covid-19, and Mental Health in China and Beyond.” Aug. 3.
  • 2019    Workshop on “Indigenous Psychology and Mental Health in China.” Department of Sociology and Anthropology, SFU, Nov. 23-24. http://www.sfu.ca/sociology-anthropology/news-events/news-2019/finding-value-in-the-local-china-mental-health.html
  • 2009    Workshop on “Affects and Markets in Contemporary East Asia.”  David Lam Center, Simon Fraser University, May 16.

  • 2024     “Bureaucratic Aesthetics:” The Heart, Aesthetic Attunement and Indigenizing Euro-American Psychology.” Conference on Narrating Love and Care in Global China of Our Time. Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Oct. 11.
  • 2023    “Aesthetic Governance in China: Gender, Beautification, and Mental Health” Conference on Beauty and the State: Bodily Self-Making, Citizenship and the Politics of Belonging.” July 19, 2023, Free University, Berlin.
  • 2023    “The metapragmatics and metadiscourse of the Xin “heart” in Indigenous and non-Indigenous psychology in China.”Conference on Bilingualism and Multilingualism, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Okanagan, May 15.
  • 2018    “Officials’ Heartache: “Bureaucracy, Double Binds, Existential Therapy in China.” The 2018 meeting of the British Association for Chinese Studies, King’s College, London. September 13.
  • 2016    “Companionable Counseling: Language, Gender and Psycho-politics.” The 9th Biannual Meetings of International Gender and Language Association, City University of Hong Kong, May 19.

Medical/Health Humanities in East Asia

Indigenous Psychology

Politics of Affects and Emotions

Culture, Mental Health and Therapeutic Governance

Happiness and Affective Governance in China

Neoliberalism and postsocialism

Anthropology and Contemporary Life

Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology

Language, Gender and Political Economy

Language, Ideology and Power

Contemporary China: State, Market and Culture

Gender politics in China

  • 2025-2028: Editorial board, Dialogues in Cultural Studies
  • 2025-2028: Publications Committee to the Awards to the Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP), Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences
  • 2024-present: The advisory board, Cultural China, University of Westminster Press
  • 2022-present: The Scientific Board, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
  • 2018-present: Executive editorial board, Pacific Affairs