Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

trade, providential price regulations, and management of granaries—the intervention of the state was necessarily limited. It is clear, anyway, that the situation changed drastically with the advent of the Republic, the war with Japan, and with the rise of the Communist Party. A big change started with the end of Mao’s campaigns when the party-state decisively retreated from private life. The new trend eventually paved the way toward a great enlargement of the private sphere, a renewed emphasis on the self and an increasing number of choices for the individual, from ephemeral consumption decisions to those about personal status, residence, job, and even travel abroad—choices which were all unthinkable just a few decades ago.

From the 1980s, new policies allowed for the public reflection on the role of individuals, sentiments, and private life, concluding the period of “emotional suffering.”²¹ Arguably, one of the symptoms of this revolution was the “sentimental education” and rediscovery of private sentiments, which came to be manifested in mass media.²² Emotional education, in particular, “the art of longing,” is also one of the topics explored by Lisa Rofel, who offers rich ethnographic insights into the transformation of the individual in public culture. She documents the replacement of class consciousness with what she calls “quality-based desire” and “movement-based passions,” thereby attesting to the overall transformation undergone by the desiring subject with their self-representation, as well as narration being increasingly associated with individualism, consumption, global culture, economic production, and the redefinition of gender roles. Although some regard this phenomenon negatively and tend to label it as a new form of “enslavement” through induced desires, it is nevertheless a new, important change in Chinese society that is worthy of attention for its many similarities with various kinds of liberation, including sexual revolutions that have taken place in the West during the modern era, and with the current global “production of desire.”²³ According to Rofel, the debate over licit and illicit desires in China evidences the heterogeneity of neoliberal practices diffused in the world rather than a set of coherent “a priori principles that devolve, in a deterministic fashion, onto social