Zhiying Ma, PhD

RESEARCH 

1) Family and Mental Healthcare in China 

In China, for the past few decades, people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses (SMIs) have been placed under the guardianship of their close relatives, who would decide on their hospitalization and treatment. Despite intense public discussion on patient rights, the 2013 Mental Health Law (MHL) has reinforced the family’s rights and responsibilities in patient management. Why does the family continue to occupy such a critical role in Chinese psychiatry? Dr. Ma addresses this question by examining the family’s involvement in medicine as technological, institutional, and ideological configurations, with the aim of illuminating the changing ethics, affects, and political economy of care and population governance in contemporary China. 

Between 2008 and 2014, Dr. Ma conducted 32 months of fieldwork in psychiatric hospitals, community mental health teams, social work centers, family support groups, and human rights agencies in China. She interviewed policymakers and other stakeholders, attended conferences and legislative debates, and reviewed archival and media materials. Based on this rich trove of data, she identified the workings of “biopolitical paternalism,” a mode of governance evidenced in mental health. It legitimizes the state’s population management as paternalistic intervention, while displacing the paternalistic responsibilities onto patients’ families. This biopolitical paternalism produces ethical tensions and intimate vulnerabilities in households, as well as health disparities across the population, but it is also being destabilized by caregivers’ everyday supplemental practices of care and their sociopolitical demands. These findings have been published in a book and several journal articles/book chapters.  

Across the world, biomedicalized techniques of rule are redefining individual wellbeing and population security, and neoliberal economic policies constantly relegate responsibilities for achieving these new ideals to private agents while creating longings for the state. Therefore, biopolitical paternalism is increasingly relevant for understanding and critically engaging with forces and impacts of social governance beyond China and mental health.    Dr. Ma is working with students to trace the manifestations and continued evolution of biopolitical paternalism, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

2) Development of Community Mental Health and Peer Support in China 

While enclosed psychiatric hospitals have dominated the landscape of mental healthcare in China over the past few decades, community mental health has received increased attention and investment since 2004. This concept is not new, however. In the 1970s and 1980s, psychiatrists in various parts of China experimented with local approaches to community mental healthcare provision, which were praised by the World Health Organization as models for developing countries. 

Why has community mental health re-emerged in China as the frontline of social development? How do policymakers and practitioners translate forms of global knowledge and make them commensurable with domestic situations (or vice versa), given the diverse and ever-shifting visions and techniques of China’s governance? How do these forms of knowledge shape people’s everyday practices and experiences of care? To explore these questions, Dr. Ma works with students and research assistants to conduct fieldwork in community mental health teams and social work agencies, interview psychiatrists, policymakers, and other stakeholders involved in designing and implementing various community mental health initiatives, analyze archival materials on the development of these initiatives, and survey public discussions around mental health in media. 

As an attempt to learn the practice of community mental health by doing and to promote person-centered, rather than symptom-focused, recovery as engaged researchers, Dr. Ma and her team have been working with stakeholders in China to develop peer support services for persons with SMIs, or the use of paraprofessionals with lived experience of SMIs to help others with SMIs meet their personal goals. From 2019 to 2021, with the support of the University of Chicago Yuen Research Fund, our team worked with local partners in Guangzhou to run a pilot project that used a community-based participatory research (CBPR) approach to develop a culturally responsive peer support service manual. The project then trained seven peer supporters and placed them in two social work agencies to serve over sixty clients. From 2022 to 2026, with the generous support of the Cyrus Tang Foundation, we are scaling up and standardizing peer support services in Guangzhou and Yunnan. We use qualitative and quantitative research methods to systematically evaluate the services’ fidelity, feasibility, effectiveness, and client satisfaction. We also work with a CBPR team to formulate guidelines for training, certifying, placing, and supervising peer supporters. These findings and experiences will help us advocate for the adoption of peer support in regular community mental health services across China. 

3) Intersecting Justice: A Participatory Approach to Disability Rights, Care, and Welfare 

Since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2006, a disability rights movement has been sweeping the globe. It champions persons with disabilities as autonomous individuals and demands that nation-states change laws and institutional practices to support their rights. However, in China and some other countries, persons with disabilities are often seen as deficient and dependent, requiring rehabilitation, protection, and welfare subsidies. In fact, governments may argue that socioeconomic rights exemplified by welfare provision are more fundamental than civil and political rights typically featured in advocacy. 

Moreover, in neoliberal economies, the support for persons with disabilities typically falls on paid and unpaid caregivers, most of whom are women. While some disability rights activists tend to downplay disabled people’s need for care/support to highlight their autonomy, caregivers might advocate for services that reduce their burden at the cost of ignoring the voices and equal personhood of disabled people.  

How do debates between rights and welfare, autonomy and care unfold at the conjuncture of global disability rights and local social histories? How do they impact the lives of disabled people and their caregivers, especially in marginalized communities further away from the urban centers? How can we envision care practices, social services, and welfare policies that recognize the personhood and needs of all parties involved, address the multi-faceted nature of marginalization, and strengthen public responsibility and accountability?  

Driven by these questions, Dr. Ma and her team are working with persons with disabilities and their organizations, social service agencies, and other stakeholders in China to examine the service experiences, needs, and barriers of various groups of disabled people, and to analyze strategies of disability rights advocacy and their impact. We compare disability-related social policies and service needs across different countries. We also explore the meanings and practices of peer support among persons with disabilities as an alternative form of care. 

COURSES 

Global Mental Health 

Global mental health has emerged as a priority for multilateral institutions like the World Health Organization and World Bank, for international non-governmental organizations, and for academic researchers alike. This course examines the foundations, practices, and critiques of this field. We will explore how sociocultural processes shape the experience of distress and mental illness; various cultures of healing, including Western psychiatry; gaps and inequalities in service provision; as well as approaches to and challenges of cross-cultural diagnosis/treatment/epidemiology. Specific attention will be paid to how mental health concerns and interventions affect disadvantaged groups such as women and migrants. Building on these explorations, we will examine the tools, programs, and practices that constitute the somewhat amorphous movement called “Global Mental Health.” Ongoing debates of and divergences from this movement will also be discussed. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach, with readings drawn from psychiatry, public policy, anthropology, history, sociology, and so on. Through discussions and assignments, students will develop skills to design, evaluate, and critically reflect upon global mental health interventions. 

International Disability Rights and Justice 

The rights of persons with disabilities have become a new frontier of human rights across the world. This course introduces recent developments in concepts, tools, and practices of disability rights both internationally and in different regions/countries. We will pay specific attention to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, including its principles, provisions on key topics (e.g. institutionalization, education, employment, and political participation), and the role of state and non-state actors in its implementation. We will also consider the implications of disability rights on global social development and humanitarian work. Moreover, we will critically examine barriers and concerns in realizing disability rights, areas where dominant understandings of disability rights fall short, and alternative approaches to conceptualizing and promoting justice for persons with disabilities. The course will consist of reading and critique of literature, large and small group discussions, guest lectures by practitioners, case studies, and student presentations. Students will develop skills to analyze disability policies or design/evaluate disability inclusive development projects in international settings. 

Ethnographic Inquiry for Social Work and Social Policy 

As a research method, ethnography uses the researcher’s active participation and systematic observation to reveal the meaning, practice, and relations of social world(s). This course introduces students to ethnographic research methods through a combination of reading, discussion, and fieldwork practice. Students will learn how ethnographers design their research projects, undertake participant observation in their chosen field sites (offline or online), write fieldnotes, prepare for and conduct interviews, and work with historical and contemporary archives. We will also discuss common ethical and political questions facing ethnographers. Specific consideration will be given to how to conduct ethnographic studies on social work and social policy: what perspective and positionality one might take, what engaged research might mean, and how to think about a study’s implication for policy and practice. Throughout the course, students will practice and apply ethnographic methods to small projects, and will be asked to draft the methods section of an ethnography-based study proposal. 

PUBLICATIONS 

Peer-Reviewed Publications (* indicates student co-authors, ^ indicates me being the senior author in a multi-authored paper.) 

On Family and Mental Healthcare in China 

Ma Z. (2025) Between Families and Institutions: Mental Health and Biopolitical Paternalism in Contemporary China. Duke University Press. 

Zhang L, and Ma Z. (2024). “An Ascending Society in Distress.” In Yang M (ed.), Anthropology of Ascendant China. Routledge. pp.287-304. 

Ma Z (2021). “Affect, Sociality, and the Construction of Paternalistic Citizenship among Family Caregivers in China.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 11(3): 958-71. https://doi.org/10.1086/717516. 

Ma Z (2020). “Biopolitical Paternalism and Its Maternal Supplements: Kinship Correlates of Community Mental Health Governance in China.” Cultural Anthropology. 35(2): 290-316. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca35.2.09. 

Ma Z (2020). “Promises and Perils of Guan: Mental Health Care and the Rise of Biopolitical Paternalism in Post-Socialist China.” Medicine Anthropology Theory. 70(2): 150-74. https://doi.org/10.17157/mat.7.2.747.