On 4 November 2026, Peking University’s National School of Development, the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, the Happiness Studies Academy and CITIC Publishing Group jointly convened a summit on “The Wisdom of Happiness in Chinese Tradition” — at once the 110th session of the Cross-Cultural Leadership series and the 65th Chengze Forum. Tal Ben-Shahar — the man behind Harvard’s happiness course, co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy, and author of Happy Habits — joined a panel of Chinese scholars at the Chengze Garden campus for an extended exchange on the frontier of positive psychology and on what the Chinese classical tradition has to say about living well.
Happiness as a Cross-Cultural, Cross-Disciplinary Question
Yang Zhuang, holder of the NSD Alumni Development Fund Chair and former Co-Dean of BiMBA Business School, opened the forum by arguing that happiness is too large a subject for any single discipline.
Leadership, he said, is at bottom a matter of character, and character is built through small daily actions. The minimum viable interventions set out in Professor Ben-Shahar’s new book, he suggested, can be understood as the smallest viable unit of character training.
Drawing on feedback from students in his own leadership courses, he added an observation about China: as material conditions have been secured, the centre of gravity for Chinese entrepreneurs and managers has shifted away from wealth and reputation and toward inner harmony.
He closed by noting that the day’s four speakers would approach the meaning and the reach of happiness from quite different directions, and that he hoped the exchange would prove both plural and substantial.
Positive Psychology and the Making of Happy Habits
Tal Ben-Shahar began from Chinese sources — the Daodejing, the Analects — and set out a model of happiness with five components: spiritual, physical, intellectual, relational and emotional. The initials spell SPIRE, a word he set alongside the Chinese notion of qi.
On how such happiness is actually built, he offered the concept of the minimum viable intervention: a small action, with a threshold low enough to clear and a scientific basis solid enough to trust, repeated until it accumulates into real and durable change. He gave two concrete practices for each of the five components.
His own framing of the exercise was modest. What he offers, he said, is not new knowledge. It is the old wisdom people already know, restated in the language of modern research so that it becomes easier to act on.
An Assorted Platter of Strengths for Happiness
Wang Lei, Professor at the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Vice President of the Chinese Association of Social Psychology, took the classic triad of knowing, feeling and willing as his starting point. The processes of coming to know the world, of feeling it and of remaking it, he argued, shape an individual’s character and sense of self; emotion in turn has three components — appraisal, inner experience and behavioural response.
From there he proposed a “capacity for happiness” made up of seven cultivable abilities: sensitivity, interpretation, agency, control, efficacy (that is, self-efficacy), willpower and resilience.
These capacities differ in strength from person to person, much as forces do in the physical world, and each of us can draw on whichever suits our temperament and circumstances. He ended by breaking the Eight-Section Brocade — the traditional baduanjin exercise set — into one-minute segments, urging the audience to accumulate the capacity for happiness in the way the old saying has it: knowing and doing as one.
Traditional Culture and the Practice of Happiness Education
Wen Dongmao, Professor at the Graduate School of Education and Deputy Dean of Peking University’s Faculty of Social Sciences, traced his thinking to 2019, when he and three to four hundred teachers held a seven-day study session on happiness education. Out of it came a definition — happiness as “a heart at peace that keeps rising and turning toward the good” — which he then tested against Confucian culture and Wang Yangming’s School of Mind.
Good education, he argued, should promote lasting happiness for every person. Teachers and parents are enablers, not substitutes or controllers; intrinsic motivation is awakened through verification in one’s own experience and inner realisation, not through instruction. Income and status, he noted, correlate only weakly with happiness. Education should therefore guide people to rise and turn toward the good, and to arrive at peace of mind.
He also described a school experiment built on self-cultivation as the foundation and firm resolve as the starting point, with education across five domains — moral, intellectual, physical, aesthetic and labour — as the path.
The Wisdom of Happiness in China’s Classical Tradition
Peng Kaiping — who helped launch positive psychology in China, chairs the alumni association of the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, and teaches at Tsinghua University’s Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences — brought data. His team ran AI-assisted text analysis alongside a survey of more than fifty thousand Chinese respondents.
The finding: when Chinese people think about happiness, what comes to mind first is family, then life itself, then health, then joy. In the West, joy tends to come first. The ordering is not incidental; it reflects a different starting point for the whole question.
“Happiness is pleasure that means something.”
He then translated one strand of Buddhist teaching — the forms of giving that require no wealth at all — into five everyday practices: giving with the face, giving with the body, giving with words, giving with the eyes, and giving with the heart.
His conclusion was that happiness is a capacity. It is not somewhere far off. It lies in every kind thought and every kind act of the present moment.
Small Actions, Structural Pressure, and the Freedom to Choose
The roundtable and open Q&A, chaired by Yang Zhuang, brought all four speakers to the same table. Questions from the chair and the floor pushed on five points: whether minimum viable interventions can withstand structural pressure; how individual wellbeing relates to the wider social ecosystem; how a person should conduct themselves in an environment they cannot leave; whether happiness studies can stand as a discipline in its own right; and what the practices actually look like day to day.
Ben-Shahar conceded that a small action produces no visible change in the moment, yet accumulates over time into a change of trend. Reality, he added, is not a simple chain of cause and effect: causes become effects, and those effects in turn become new causes, generating either a virtuous or a vicious chain.
Peng Kaiping put forward the classical idea of turning circumstance by the mind. The environment is not easily changed, but a person can change their relationship to it — pause before reacting and look again, find joy inside hardship, and, at the limit, change the environment itself. The freedom to choose remains.
Wang Lei advised first distinguishing what belongs to the times from what belongs to the individual. Do not underestimate how much the environment shifts and bears on you, he said; and do not underestimate your own capacity to answer it. Leadership, on his account, shows precisely in leading others out of difficulty.
Wen Dongmao argued for holding to conscience. A white lie is not absolutely impermissible, but one must know clearly what effect it will have and take full responsibility for it. The same standard, he noted, applies to companies.
