Embracing Psychological Science for the “Good Life”?

This chapter explores how the notion of “science” or “the scientific” is invoked by Chinese psychological experts and practitioners in their efforts to translate, brand, and apply certain branches of psychology and psychotherapy to Chinese society. It explains how the popular pursuit of well-being and the “good life” in contemporary China is inseparable from the claims of modern science and Western biomedicine. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork research among Chinese psychologists, counselors, psychiatrists, and urban residents in Kunming from 2010 to the present, the chapter offers an in-depth account of how and why the so-called “science of happiness” is surging in Chinese cities and how it is embraced by different social actors. This wave occurs under the banner of “psychological science” that some experts claim is able to effectively ease personal and social suffering.