[Teresa] during evenings (Yan Yunxiang, “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” 503)

23. Rofel, Desiring China, “Introduction,” 1; Everett Yuehong Zhang, “China’s Sexual Revolution.”

24. Ibid., 199.

25. Yan Yunxiang, “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” 505. At the same time, new negative phenomena developed, such as the cult of money (baijinzhuyi 拜金主義), selfishness at the expense of justice, (jianli wangyi 見利忘義), neglecting common good and developing private desires (sungong feisi 損公肥私), scandals and the sense of moral crisis. For an extensive investigation into this reinvented Chinese subjectivity, no more defined by political and class consciousness but reconstituted as the seat of individual desire, see Rofel, Desiring China. A more general approach taking into account psychological readings of the self and its perception in Rose, Inventing our Selves. On the individual autonomy toward the state at the end of the twentieth century, see Hook, The Individual and the State in China, 16–37.

26. Billioud and Thoraval, “The Contemporary Revival of Confucianism; Billioud, The Varieties of Confucian Experience; Fan Lizhu, “The Religiousness of ‘Confucianism.’”

27. Yan Yunxiang, “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” 497.

28. Ibid., 500. Yan’s article goes on to recall several public protests and riots that broke out in the Chinese countryside in 1993, with many villagers blocking highways, occupying local government offices, and delivering petitions to higher-level authorities. Since the mid-1980s consumer associations as well as protests and collection actions to assert the people’s rights grew rapidly. In 1990, the government enacted the “Administrative Litigation Law,” which, for the first time in Chinese history, gave citizens the legal right to sue local governments and governmental agencies.

29. Notwithstanding recurrent references to neo-liberalism (Rofel, Desiring China, “Introduction”), it would be difficult to consider the market allowed by the Party similar to a liberal system. Yet, it would be difficult to label as collectivistic the contemporary Chinese society, confusing the individualistic behavior of population with the despotism of the political machine.

30. Hansen, Educating the Chinese Individual, 174–186.

31. Mizoguchi, Zhongguo de gong yu si, 58–77.