Well-Being Entrepreneurship and the Moral-Emotional Landscape of Reform-Era China

Since the launching of economic reforms in China, diverse forms of expertise and educational programs have promoted the pursuit of well-being. In this article, we introduce the concept of “well-being entrepreneurs” to analyze charismatic agents who shape conceptions and practices in this field. These individuals carve out niche enterprises within the tensions—and sometimes convergences—between state-led campaigns and market trends, asserting their distinct, invaluable expertise. Our analysis is grounded in a biographic ethnography of a well-being entrepreneur running a private academy in rural Zhejiang. His career trajectory spans multi-level marketing in the 1990s, psychologized life coaching in the 2000s, and, from the 2010s onward, “family education” grounded in Confucian traditions. These phases reveal the continuous and shifting conceptions of well-being during the reform era, demonstrating how political projects, globalized discourses, and grassroots initiatives co-construct ideals of flourishing, positioning well-being as a collective aspiration and a contested, commodified project.