A Chinese cookbook for happiness and success. Nadine Koerner

results in China

      A report in 2012 from the Pew Global Attitudes project about inequality was headed with ‘Despite Success, Many See Problems’. According to the report 70% of Chinese said that they would be better off financially than they were five years ago. Furthermore, 92% of Chinese reported that their standard of living would be better than their parents’ at a similar age. However, whilst 62 % of higher-income Chinese believed that most people could be successful if they work hard, only 45 % of middle- and 44 % of lower-income respondents were of the same opinion.^[47]

      2.4 Chinese policies to achieve national happiness

      On March 4, 2010 former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao announced the goal of "happiness for the people” in his Government Work Report to the opening of the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC). This goal is also written into the national 12th Five-year Plan for Social and Economic Development from 2011 to 2015, as a signal of change in China’s development strategy. In an online chat, former Premier Wen Jiabao announced that Beijing would adopt the "happiness of the people" as a new yardstick to measure the performance of officials instead of the 30-year-old yardstick of GDP growth.^[48] Some say that the concept of happiness in China is a natural upshot of the Communist Party’s propaganda about creating a ‘harmonious society’, since happiness is a subject that is consistent with harmony. Others say that the Chinese government is focusing on happiness because of rising prices, unemployment and other economic afflictions which might lead to dissatisfaction of Chinese people with its government. So it was no surprise that in August 2010 the first conference on positive psychology in China was held at Beijing's Qinghua University. Psychologists discussed how to build a happier China and how to encourage positive education in China.^[49]

      Especially since 2010, local, provincial and regional leaders from Beijing to Ningxia, have been setting up "happiness indices" and tailoring programs, projects and policies to increase people's satisfaction with their lives, as well as, of course, with the government. For example, Beijing created a happiness index, which will assess the city's performance using five important indicators. These include access to medical care, improved housing conditions, quality of the environment, employment opportunities and public security.^[50] Beijing’s local propaganda authorities aired a seven-episode television series in August 2012 offering advice to those who were unhappy with help of a professor with a psychology degree from Harvard University, who instructed people on how to find their inner peace, rather than find fault with the government. And Haidian, a suburban district in Beijing, started 127 projects over the course of 2013 to improve its people's happiness index of life by working on issues related to safety, environment, culture, urban civilization and credit system. The greatest percentage of projects focuses on boosting the urban environment, including the maintenance of public facilities, garbage treatment and pollution prevention as well as and control of industrial enterprises.^[51]

      The former party secretary of Guangdong province, Wang Yang, became perhaps the most prominent proponent of the public satisfaction and happiness drive in 2011 when he outlined his proposal for a "Happy Guangdong" province. He allocated 423 billion RMB, the equivalent of 70 million USD for projects to improve people's livelihood and attempted to reduce the province's gross domestic product growth from 12.5 % to 8 %. To measure his success, Wang set up an index of individual economic indicators, including employment, income, education, health care, crime, housing, infrastructure and social security.

      Additional to setting up indices and airing TV series about happiness, rewards for local governments for promoting happiness growth were introduced, for example the ‘China Local Government Innovation Award’. One of the first awards went to Jiangyin city in Jiangsu province in East China. Jiangyin city had one of the earliest happiness drives and the local government set up its happiness index as early as 2007. Instead of just aiming for economic growth, Jiangyin has come up with a range of constituents it believes add up to happiness. Those include health care (there should be 26 doctors per 1,000 people), employment, donation to charity (residents should donate more than 7.35 USD each year) and political participation, without changing the fundamental system. Jiangyin seems to be successful – and happy: salary growth of 48 % for urban residents in just four years and a 2 percent drop in rural unemployment to just 2.9 %. Also, within three years after the start of its happiness project, Jiangyin officials found that 95.87 % of its residents felt happy.^[52] However it has to be mentioned that Jiangyin is one of the richest places in China and consequently is it hard to say if Jiangyin is a Potemkin village for show or if this is a project that should be taken as an outlook on what China might look like in the future.