Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China with Gil Hizi (NUS Press, 2026)

How do individuals seek to become better persons in contemporary China? How do they navigate the complex demands of personal growth given the fragmentation of China’s moral landscape? Gil Hizi’s careful ethnography on “soft skills” workshops in China examines the pursuit and enactment of virtue, termed “capitalist virtuousness,” through the expanding genre of self-improvement. Transient Becoming: Self-Improvement and Capitalist Virtuousness in Contemporary China (NUS Press, 2026) reveals how these workshops create heterotopian spaces that offer participants “transient optimism and virtue realization,” in which individuals experientially exceed their social reality. They perform an idealized sense of self-worth and autonomy, even if these transformations remain short-lived and bounded. Through this volume, Hizi illuminates how self-improvement becomes a constant state of incompleteness, requiring self-validation, in the context of aspiration for a “purified and moral image” of global capitalism. With a deep appreciation of the moral turn, this book offers insights into Chinese studies, affect studies, anthropology and sociology, by meticulously detailing the lived experiences of person-making amidst globalizing forces and the contradictions inherent in modern aspirations. Gil Hizi is a sociocultural anthropologist working as a lecturer and researcher at University of Cologne. His research is about ongoing social transformations in China with the focus on concepts of personhood, interpersonal ethics and emotions. Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.