Sunflower Citizens? Resilience as Lived Negotiation among Mental Health Professionals in Zero-COVID China

This article examines how resilience and its key tool, adaptability, were defined, mobilized, and contested during Shanghai’s Zero-COVID period, foregrounding the understudied perspectives of psychological counsellors. Drawing on 30 interviews with 25 counsellors and a discursive analysis of 268 posts from the Shanghai Mental Health Centre (SMHC), it shows how state discourse framed resilience as optimism, acceptance, and disciplined self-adjustment, while counsellors reinterpreted it through trauma, helplessness, delayed collapse, and relational care. As intermediaries increasingly woven into state institutions through outsourcing arrangements, counsellors negotiated between official prescriptions and the lived crises of clients whose distress was shaped by uncertainty, family conflict, gendered burdens, and economic precarity. By tracing these quiet negotiations, the article argues that resilience in Shanghai was neither a universal trait nor simply a neoliberal injunction. Rather, it functioned as a culturally situated, politically charged field of interpretation through which mental health, citizenship, and crisis survival were negotiated. Situating Shanghai within wider debates on resilience, the article shows how resilience became a “multiple”: at once demanded, embodied, contested, and re-signified through the interactions of state institutions, professional ethics, and the uneven temporalities of crisis.