"Officials' Heartache" Depression, Bureaucracy, and Therapeutic Governance in China

This article offers an anthropological approach to the study of therapeutic governance that emphasizes the role of experts in psychosocial programs by focusing on nonexpertise diagnosis and those subject to psy power. I examine the informal diagnosis of depression for Chinese government officials who have committed suicide and the experiences of those subject to such diagnosis. By pathologizing those officials as psychomedically depressed, Chinese media and the government implicitly cultivate an ideal subject for the state's autocratic bureaucracy, one who is rational, masterful, and psychologically healthy and who promotes social harmony and self-actualizes through public service. This biomedical approach turns bureaucratic politics into mental health management as it implements new forms of regulation and control through psychological care and permissive empathy. I demonstrate that while resonating with reductive Western therapeutic governance, which replaces substantial social, economic, and political progress with psychosocial practices, the Chinese mode of therapeutic governance diverges from its Western counterpart by de-emphasizing psy expertise and varying according to groups. It is a devolved exercise of power manifest in mass adherence to China's political project of social harmony and stigma, invoking informal diagnosis and drawing on both Western and local healing practices.