‘Being-well-in-relationships’: re-conceptualising students’ wellbeing in secondary education

ABSTRACT

To address youth mental health needs, student wellbeing has traditionally referred to caring for individuals’ psychological health and subjective emotions. However, an individual subjective psychological approach is insufficient in addressing society’s responsibilities to enable individuals to live a happy and fulfilling life. A more comprehensive conceptualisation of student wellbeing is needed to understand the needs of individuals to stay well in society. Hence, the purpose of this article is to re-conceptualise student wellbeing from a relational perspective, emphasising wellbeing as happening, fluid, and always becoming. Taking student wellbeing in secondary education in China as a case, this paper discusses how student wellbeing is currently understood through a non-Westernised lens. The discussions of Chinese students’ wellbeing might be extended to other social groups where wellbeing is conceptualised as ‘being-well-in-relationships’. This is both about ‘fitting in’ and embracing an active pursuit of personal development within the context of interconnected relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychological wellbeing
• Relational sociology
• Secondary education
• Student wellbeing
• Subjective wellbeing

Introduction

Student wellbeing is an inherently positive term. It is listed as desirable for children’s futures and a shared goal for society’s development in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development [OECD]’s (2019) Learning Compass 2030. According to the OECD (2017), students’ wellbeing refers to the psychological, cognitive, social and physical functioning and capabilities that students need to live a happy and fulfilling life. However, students face multiple challenges to realise this goal. For example, limited mental health education, stigma, identity confusion, and engagement are significant challenges that students face in adolescence (Berezina, Gill, & Bovina, 2020; Marinucci, Grové, & Rozendorn, 2022). Internationally, mental illness contributes to 16% of the disease and injury burden in youth aged 10–19 (World Health Organization [WHO], 2020). Compared to previous generations, this rate has increased and has been exacerbated by COVID-19 (Marinucci et al., 2022).

Student wellbeing research has frequently covered topics on subjective wellbeing, including sub-themes in mental health (Marinucci et al., 2022), school satisfaction (OECD, 2017), and positive psychology interventions (Pavot & Diener, 2004). Subjective wellbeing highlights the subjectivity of emotions, narrowing the evaluation of wellbeing down to an individualistic perspective (Diener, Lucas, & Oishi, 2018). Individuals are more likely to experience positive emotions when they meet certain parameters, such as the nonmoral goods of knowledge and achievement and the moral good of virtue (Hurka, 2016). Nevertheless, boosting individuals’ positive feelings is not sufficient to address society’s responsibilities to enable individuals to live a happy and fulfilling life (Shirley & Hargreaves, 2022). Reviews have highlighted the importance of expanding the individualistic onto-epistemological thinking of wellbeing to include alternative and more comprehensive conceptualisations (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023; Rappleye, Komatsu, Uchida, Krys, & Markus, 2020). In particular, a relational perspective (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023; Kitayama & Markus, 2000; McCubbin, McCubbin, Zhang, Kehl, & Strom, 2013; White, 2017; You, 2023) is helpful to better understand the more nuanced and deeper meanings of wellbeing.

Relational wellbeing refers to how an individual’s emotions are relational and interdependent with others (Kitayama & Markus, 2000). An appropriate attitude toward maintaining a harmonious relationship with others is necessary for legitimate membership in a cultural community. In some non-Western societies, positive social relationships are central to life satisfaction because those interpersonal relationships provide psychological, symbolic, social, and material parameters so wellbeing can easily flourish (Atkinson, 2013; McCubbin et al., 2013; Neubert, 2020; White, 2017). For example, Neubert (2020) specifically mentions ‘Ubuntu’ (humanity to others) from South Africa and ‘buen vivir’ (living a good life) from Latin America. Both concepts stress the importance of promoting a society based on solidarity with strong local communities, treating the world as a complex and interconnected ecosystem of humans and nature (Neubert, 2020).

In this paper, the contextual focus is placed upon secondary students in China. There are three reasons for this choice. First, Chinese people tend to conceptualise wellbeing that challenges the dominant subjective – objective dichotomy, placing emphasis on the social, anthropological, and geographical sense of self in an ongoing changing relationship with others (You, 2023). Second, the findings on Chinese students’ wellbeing remain controversial in academic literature. Chinese secondary students have been reported demonstrating ‘high scores but low wellbeing’ compared with Western students (OECD, 2017). However, Askell-Williams, Skrzypiec, Jin, and Owens’s (2016) research contradicts this argument, showing that Chinese students maintained slightly higher subjective wellbeing scores than their Australian counterparts. The ‘high scores but low wellbeing’ debates necessitate a clearer, sharper, and more comprehensive understanding of Chinese students’ wellbeing. Third, adolescents experience more difficulties than younger/older students (WHO, 2020), so the discussion on wellbeing is more crucial for them. Therefore, this paper aims to critically engage with the literature to analyse how understandings of wellbeing play out for Chinese secondary students.

This paper has five parts to capture the nuanced conceptualisation of Chinese students’ wellbeing. Following this introduction, the next section reviews traditional Western academic dichotomies of subjective – objective wellbeing and micro – macro wellbeing. After considering the limitations of the binary thinking on wellbeing, we introduce relational wellbeing as a more nuanced and comprehensive concept. To ground claims and discussion contextually, this paper explores some current issues related to Chinese students’ relational wellbeing, before providing concluding remarks.

Dichotomies of wellbeing

Wellbeing has been widely discussed in academic literature, but many researchers tend to adopt a binary understanding towards wellbeing issues. Such binary understanding of wellbeing (usually considered as a Western way of thinking) ignores the complexity of social cultural issues (Kitayama & Markus, 2000; Rappleye et al., 2020). According to King (2003), dichotomies are –

the elemental structure of Western society … We do love our dichotomies, rich/poor, white/black, strong/weak, right/wrong, culture/nature, male/female, written/oral, civilized/barbaric, success/failure, individual/communal. We trust easy oppositions. We are suspicious of complexities, distrustful of contradictions, fearful of enigmas. (p. 25)

In this section, we review two notions of wellbeing: objective/subjective wellbeing and macro/micro wellbeing; and discuss the limitations of these two dichotomies.

Objective and subjective wellbeing

Objective and subjective wellbeing is largely associated with individuals’ approaches to maintain or enhance wellbeing. Objective wellbeing theories hold that there are some common good things in people’s lives, no matter how much one values them, such as the nonmoral goods of knowledge and achievement and the moral good of virtue (Hurka, 2016). Because different individuals are likely to weigh objective goods differently depending on their goals, their values, and their culture (Diener et al., 2018), the discussion on objective wellbeing in groups and societies cannot be clearly distinguished from the subjective aspects of wellbeing (Deci & Ryan, 2008).

On the other hand, the descriptor ‘subjective’ narrows the evaluation of wellbeing down to an individual’s perspective (Diener et al., 2018). Subjective wellbeing can be roughly divided into two dimensions: hedonistic wellbeing and evaluative wellbeing (or eudaimonia wellbeing) (Haybron, 2016). Specifically, hedonistic wellbeing research is often coined as happiness research (Haybron, 2016), which covers mainly pleasure and positive emotions; whilst evaluative wellbeing (eudaimonia wellbeing) encompasses wellbeing as capabilities to overcome adversities and difficulties, attaching significance to fulfilment and success (Graham, 2016). Likewise, research on subjective wellbeing unavoidably shares objective features because researchers aim to identify more objective predictors or parameters in the promotion of positive subjective wellbeing. An example is Seligman’s (2011; 2018) account of the PERMA model, which proposes that Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment are the building blocks of a good life. Seligman believes that working on those ‘objective’ elements can improve an individual’s overall rating of wellbeing.

However, the objective – subjective lens of wellbeing is limited on its own. It predominantly focuses on an individualistic conceptualisation of wellbeing, implying a neoliberal belief that one’s happiness is one’s responsibility (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023; McLeod, 2017; Rappleye et al., 2020). Such a conceptualisation tends to undervalue the influences of educational traditions and cultures on individuals (Kitayama & Markus, 2000; Rappleye et al., 2020) and reproduce inequality and isolated individuals (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022). Kitayama and Markus (2000) note that in East Asian traditions, to ‘be well’ requires individuals to maintain harmonious relationships with others – and hence wellbeing may have broader, more universal implications. Therefore, to further enrich the existing perspectives towards wellbeing, it is important to incorporate the social lens of wellbeing in the discussion.

Macro and micro wellbeing

The social lens of wellbeing is built on Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) conceptualisation of socio-ecological child development. Bronfenbrenner’s framework inspires the research to take on micro and macro perspectives, understanding children’s wellbeing is closely related to individuals and their interactions with their families, schools, and social communities at various levels. However, such understanding is still limited because it tends to conceptualise wellbeing in a static state, disdaining the fluidity and dynamics of social interactions (Kitayama & Markus, 2000).

A micro perspective on student wellbeing is associated with the individualised subjective and objective views. Research on the micro perspective of student wellbeing is strongly connected to social emotional learning (Marinucci et al., 2022) and positive psychology (Jiang, Fang, & Lyons, 2019; Pavot & Diener, 2004; Ryan & Deci, 2000; Ryff, 2014). These studies aim to nurture the hedonistic characteristics of wellbeing and encourage cognitive assessment to capture how individuals think about and evaluate their lives as a whole, their personal aspirations, their relationship with others, and their behaviour.

A macro perspective of student wellbeing is more closely associated with one’s living environments and conditions, considering culture and beliefs, values embraced by the society, education policies, education systems, and social structures. Research has shown that a positive school climate (Reid & Smith, 2018), engaging classroom practices (Alivernini, Cavicchiolo, Manganelli, Chirico, & Lucidi, 2020), a supportive learning community (Saito & Sato, 2012), and caring family relationships (Greeson, Thompson, Ali, & Wenger, 2015) improve students’ mental health at school. Furthermore, students’ sense of wellbeing is most likely to be influenced by educational systems (Zhang & Bray, 2018), their socioeconomic backgrounds (Alivernini et al., 2020; Li, Yin, & Jiang, 2020), and public policies and national wealth (Pavot & Diener, 2004). All of this points to the importance of facilitating students’ sense of belonging; meeting their needs for autonomy and competence, and relationships; and, helping them maintain self-efficacy rather than becoming alienated from learning (Allen et al., 2024; Brophy, 2008).

Hence, adopting a micro – macro lens for understanding wellbeing proves effective, as an individual’s sense of wellbeing is profoundly shaped by the broader societal context. Hargreaves and Shirley (2021) raise concerns about individuals’ capacity to maintain happiness within a troubled society. However, despite its merits, the micro – macro perspective on wellbeing has limitations; it is still too rigid, overlooking the fluid and dynamic nature of social relationships (Kitayama & Markus, 2000). In contrast, a relational perspective on wellbeing offers a more nuanced and comprehensive exploration of wellbeing issues.

Relational wellbeing

Emerging from non-Western traditions, relational wellbeing highlights the socio-politico-affective (McLeod, 2017) significance of relationships. Relational wellbeing refers to an effect ‘of mutually constitutive interactions among the material, organic and emotional dynamics of places’ (Atkinson, 2013, p. 138). Seeing a society as ‘a net or web of relations’ (Donati, 2010, p. 17), wellbeing is socially and culturally constructed (Atkinson, Fuller, & Painter, 2016). Appreciating relational wellbeing provides opportunities for psychological, symbolic, social, and material conditions, so that wellbeing can more easily flourish (Atkinson, 2013; McCubbin et al., 2013; Neubert, 2020; White, 2017). This understanding is in contrast with mainstream Western understandings which view wellbeing as static and processive, and disregard the dynamics and fluidity of inter-individual relationships (Kitayama & Markus, 2000).

As mentioned above, the relational ontology perspective of wellbeing is neither specific nor exclusive to Chinese philosophy, but widely shared by non-Western and Indigenous people’s worldviews (Callaghan & Gordon, 2022; McCubbin et al., 2013; Neubert, 2020; You, 2023). For instance, Callaghan and Gordon (2022) argue that a sense of wellbeing requires four interrelated factors, the social dimension, emphasising ‘connectedness, relationships, community’ as well as spiritual, emotional and physical factors (p. 224). Says Gordon, Australian Ngemba ‘Aboriginal spirituality is about the connectedness of all things and the obligations all things have to each other. It isn’t a specific thing. It is all things’ (Callaghan & Gordon, 2022, p. 244). Mentioning these ancient origins of relational wellbeing is not to reinforce the Global North – South/East – West dichotomy, rather it is to bring another important perspective to strengthen the cross-cultural understanding (Takayama, 2016). A relational perspective of wellbeing helps us to go beyond ontological individualism, social anomie and the resultant rising narcissism and loneliness (Rappleye et al., 2020). In this paper, we argue that we need to move beyond the individualistic onto-epistemology and develop a more supportive environment to address society’s responsibilities of enabling individuals to live a happy and fulfilling life.

In choosing the term ‘being-well-in-relationships’ throughout this work, a deliberate decision was made to emphasise the fluid and reciprocal nature of the relationship between wellbeing and social connections. Unlike terms such as ‘via relationships’ or ‘from relationships’, which imply a more one-sided flow, suggesting that wellbeing primarily stems from conforming to societal norms, ‘in relationship’ underscores the dynamics and fluidity of inter-individual relationships. It seeks to convey that relational wellbeing entails both about conformity to societal norms and an active pursuit of personal development within the context of interconnected relationships. In the following subsections, we provide more detailed discussions on student relational wellbeing with reference to Chinese secondary students.

Students’ relational wellbeing in China

An essential part of wellbeing is the onto-epistemological consideration of ‘being well’. In Chinese culture, ‘being well’ means ‘being-well-in-relationships’, where the importance of ‘fitting in’ is highlighted (Brunette, Lariviere, Schinke, Xing, & Pickard, 2011; You, 2023). Throughout this section, we discuss the Chinese views of ‘fitting in’, which is for interrelatedness (Brunette et al., 2011; You, 2023) and for self-construction/self-improvement (Uchida & Kitayama, 2009; You, 2023; Zhao et al., 2021). In addition, we discuss some current issues regarding the impact of such understandings on students’ wellbeing.

Fitting in to belong: A quest for interrelatedness

In Chinese culture, wellbeing is socially constructed because self is considered as interrelated to others (Lou, 2015; Uchida & Kitayama, 2009; You, 2023). In this case, wellbeing is both subjective and objective, because it is relational to an external goal – being well in relationships with others. For instance, as families are basic social structures of Chinese society, accepting responsibilities for meeting the expectations of family members is valued in Chinese culture (Ling, Chen, Chow, Xu, & Li, 2022; Zhu, Tian, Yin, & He, 2021). Students are expected to work hard for academic achievement and students who meet this expectation experience a higher sense of recognition and appreciation by their families (Zhu et al., 2021). Nevertheless, students who do not wish to or cannot achieve academic merits are more likely to be seen as ‘stupid and lazy’ (G. Wang, 2022, p. 585), hence experiencing more negative comments from family, schools, and society. Therefore, it is difficult to make an argument on whether high exam pressure leads to low wellbeing for Chinese students, because their subjective wellbeing is relational to how they are perceived by others.

The idea of fitting into the social and natural world and finding a sense of interrelatedness resonates with the ‘Western’ idea of a sense of belonging. According to Seligman (2011), building relationships with others, as one of five key constructions of the PERMA model, helps individuals to seek a sense of belonging. Maslow (1943) explicitly states that feeling belonging and being loved are higher human needs, supplementing other more pressing needs such as food and safety. Bronfenbrenner (1977) also suggests that a child’s development is dependent on how the child is fitting into his/her larger communities – families, schools, and broader social contexts. In a recent study by Allen et al. (2024), the significance of adolescents’ sense of belonging in school, especially their perception of school status in terms of feeling socially valued, is emphasised. This is highlighted as a durable protective factor that has the potential to alleviate future experiences of depression, anxiety, and stress. Similarly, in China, Tian, Zhang, Huebner, Zheng, and Liu (2016) agree that there is a strong correlation between a sense of belonging and subjective wellbeing among elementary students. Chinese students tend to make a strong commitment to fitting into their immediate social groups in order to maintain their relationships with their families and peers – they fit to belong (Brunette et al., 2011).

However, it is worth thinking about what kind of schools we want students to feel they belong to. Our current neoliberal economy produces students to be ‘individualised, competitive, entrepreneurial subjects’ (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023, p. 897); the schools produce students who are successful fits for competition, rather than successful fits for interdependence and relational responsibility (McLeod, 2017). Students’ relational wellbeing is more likely to be adapting to a competitive environment. As a result, the neoliberal school system successfully includes the ones who fit well for schools – the ‘winners’, but unavoidably excludes some ‘bad fits’ – the ‘losers’. The ‘winners’ experience high self-efficacy, self-esteem, and high sense subjective wellbeing (Ling et al., 2022). Moreover, those ‘winners’ in schools have more access to psychological, symbolic, social, and material conditions to satisfy one’s desires, so they are in a better position to be more successful and richer in later life (Cheung & Lucas, 2015). In contrast, the ‘losers’ are portrayed badly in society, as young, stupid, and lazy (G. Wang, 2022) and are disadvantaged in accessing better health, higher standards of living, and better housing in later years (Cheung & Lucas, 2015). Therefore, the neoliberal school system sustains a wellbeing gap between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. This gap has resulted in a ripple effect, leading to a range of negative outcomes such as continuing poverty and mental health issues for ‘losers’ (Cheung & Lucas, 2015). Ultimately, the neoliberal school system has perpetuated a widening social inequality, with more negative impacts on the relational wellbeing of students as it becomes more and more difficult for them to fit in a competitive environment (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022).

Furthermore, the privatisation of education has been shown to exacerbate inequitable wellbeing experience. According to Zhang and Bray (2018), students from disadvantaged backgrounds may consistently achieve less in schools, whereas wealthy families may engage in what Weale (2018) has called an ‘education arms race’, demanding other families to join the competition to avoid being left behind. The ‘fear of being left behind’ or ‘not feeling one belongs’ has boosted the shadow education business especially in East Asian countries (Zhang, 2023). The Chinese government has had to introduce policies to ‘tame the wild horse’ of shadow education business to lighten Chinese students’ academic stress (Jiang & Saito, 2022; Zhang, 2023). The phenomenon of ‘fear of being left behind’ has led to conflicts around the world. For example, in Australia, Ho (2019) discusses the issue of ‘angry Anglos and aspirational Asians’, which reflects ‘Anglo’ students’ discontent towards Asian students being too competitive in schools. ‘Anglo’ students are unhappy because Asian students have ‘driven up the academic standards’, increasing the risk of ‘Anglo’ students falling behind in schools (Ho, 2019). Once again, the term ‘angry Anglos and aspirational Asians’ reminds us wellbeing is relational because students experience their worlds (including their academic results) within their socio-cultural networks. Each network reflects and reinforces the meanings students construct (Atkinson et al., 2016; Donati, 2010). However, this process sometimes leads to divergence, reflecting social inequalities, wherein perceived ‘winners’ gain access to superior opportunities compared to ‘losers’. Therefore, it is important to think about our relational responsibility for self and others (McLeod, 2017) and the kind of schools we want students to feel they belong to.

In China, students grapple with the tension between the individual achievement emphasised by the competitive education system and the cultural stress on relational responsibility for oneself and others (Ling et al., 2022). Fuelled by the competitive nature of the system, students in the Chinese educational landscape often prioritise personal academic goals to fulfil societal and familial expectations (Ling et al., 2022). Despite this emphasis on personal success, relational responsibility remains a significant aspect (Zhu et al., 2021). However, the scope of relational responsibility among Chinese adolescents tends to be confined to significant others. According to Tong, Reynolds, Lee, and Liu (2019), the process of identification of social groups is important to Chinese students’ wellbeing. Social identification refers to the extent to which the community (parents, teachers, students) becomes a meaningful group for its members (students) and the relational responsibility towards those ‘others’ becomes more significant (Tong et al., 2019). For instance, when Chinese adolescents have positive relationships with teachers and peers, they tend to identify as members of the school community, which is associated with improved wellbeing outcomes, such as less stress and depression (Tong et al., 2019). Therefore, given the competitive system, for Chinese students, their relational responsibility towards self and others are often confined to their significant relationships, depending on their sense of belonging in a social group. Therefore, given the competitive system, for Chinese students, their relational responsibility towards self and others depends on significant relationships and their sense of belonging. This sense of belonging provides a measure of personal wellbeing protection even if, or when, inequalities and class-based consequences magnify disparities between privileged and economically-disadvantaged members of society (McLeod, 2017).

Fitting in to become: a quest for self-improvement

‘Fitting in’ conveys a quest for self-improvement because relational wellbeing is fluid and requires effort and resilience to achieve (Uchida & Kitayama, 2009; You, 2023; Zhao et al., 2021). This further resonates with the difficulty of evaluating students’ wellbeing at certain points because their wellbeing is always emerging to a new form of self by learning from others. Learning to become oneself through interrelated relationships sometimes entails the need to de-oneself in emotional scenarios – ‘no-self self (无我)’ (You, 2023, p. 523). In Daoism, ‘no-self self’ is a self-deconstruction and self-reconstruction process that acknowledges the limitations of one’s own perspective and encourages a less ego-centric way to evaluate different things – going with the flow of the universe (Y. Wang, 2022; You, 2023). In this sense, ‘no-self self’ rejects the notion of self as a substantial, fixed and ego-centric entity (You, 2023). It argues essentially against the boundary caused by one’s ego and consciousness (likes and dislikes), which leads to constraints, inequalities, and unfreedom, and encourages flexibility and fluidity (Machek, 2016; Zhao, 2015).

The idea of becoming oneself while embedding oneself in social relationships resonates with Dewey’s (1895) theory of emotion. Dewey (1895) rejects a dichotomy between objective and subjective and argues that emotional experiences are interconnected psychologically both within individuals (in reasoning and action) and within society (in social forms of meaning creation). As such, emotion is a subjective appraisal in response to an objective situation (Dewey, 1895). However, Lu (2010) points out that Chinese philosophical schools do not concern themselves with the individual egoistic emotion too much; rather, they consider students’ wellbeing synonymous with right living, complying with duties and obligations to the objective world. In this case, students may ‘trade off’ between seeking positive emotions for self and others (Y. Wang, 2022; Zhao, 2015). This gives ‘fitting in’ a fresh purpose. ‘Fitting in’ is an active pursuit of personal development within the context of interconnected relationships, resulting in growth and better adaptation to the social expectations (You, 2023). This is different from compliance or assimilation that imply more about passive adherence to external rules and lower levels of integration and motivation in the process of adapting to social expectations.

Interestingly, since wellbeing is fluid and always becoming, it provides another ‘non-linear’ perspective of wellbeing associated with time (Uchida & Kitayama, 2009; Y. Wang, 2022). Callaghan and Gordon (2022) also highlight how Western and Indigenous conceptions of time itself are different. Therefore, in an Indigenous and Eastern world view, the ‘pain now, gain later’ summation is reconstrued in a non-linear, non-sequential conception of time and life-flow. This further explains the argument that high academic pressure is not necessarily a negative influence on students’ subjective wellbeing, because academic pressure could be reconstructed and transformed into positive right living, now and in the future (Cheng, Jin, & Chen, 2021; Ling et al., 2022; Zheng, Wang, Shen, & Fang, 2020). This ‘non-linear’ perspective of wellbeing is about fostering a holistic awareness of one’s identity within the dynamics of social connections. It resonates with Gardner and Hatch’s (1989) work on intrapersonal intelligence that refers to the capacity to understand oneself, including one’s emotions, motivations, goals, and the ability to use this self-knowledge in practical and effective ways. It emphasises the awareness of self for later personal development, rather than comparing oneself to others with a focus on achieving superiority or success relative to others, which may lead to potential pitfalls in terms of negative emotions and strained relationships.

Nevertheless, in the neoliberal school environment, ‘becoming’ a new form of self is more likely to be taught as ‘becoming a competitive self’. As Ball and Collet-Sabé (2022) put it, schools produce inequalities and isolated individuals. In the competitive school environment, students are taught to be resilient competitors to win the ‘education arms race’ (Weale, 2018). The cost of the game is that our students are taught to embrace the individualistic onto-epistemological thinking of wellbeing (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023; Rappleye et al., 2020), not much about caring for each other and taking the responsibility to support each other (McLeod, 2017). Therefore, it is difficult to discuss wellbeing without mentioning the role of education – whether school is a solution for our problem or part of the problem (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022). It is important to think about the individuals we would expect students to become and to think more about ‘relating to ourselves and to others’ (p. 987) and ‘an ethics of responsibility towards others’ (McLeod, 2017, p. 44), rather than an ego-centric way of being.

Therefore, by unpacking Chinese onto-epistemological considerations of wellbeing, we move from the very abstract conceptulisation of relational wellbeing to more concrete discussion of the importance of ‘fitting in’ in schools. In doing so, we critically engage some current issues of Chinese students’ wellbeing in secondary education. Fundamentally, we think this discussion of student wellbeing needs to address the questions of ‘where students should belong’ and ‘who we want students to become’. Furthermore, as human beings, we need to rethink what kind of relationships we wish to maintain between self and others. As Hall and Ames (1987) write in Thinking through Confucius:

Reflecting on the human being as a focus of meaning unbounded by a notion of discrete and discontinuous selfhood, person is then an indivisible continuum between ‘self’ and ‘other’, between ‘I’ and ‘we’, between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, between ‘now and then’. The boundaries between psychology and sociology, between ethics and politics become vague. The importance and influence of a person becomes measurable in terms of the extension into and integration with the selves of others. (p. 119)

Within this interdependent and highly relational model of self, a nuanced and deeper meaning of wellbeing is likely to take one particular form, where interpersonal and social aspects of wellbeing are highlighted (Uchida & Kitayama, 2009). As such, the degree of ‘the extension into and integration with the selves of others’ (Hall & Ames, 1987, p. 119) is crucial to Chinese students’ wellbeing, emphasising one’s interrelatedness and self-improvement. Students should fit into their environments, in particular, positive environments, so they can have a sense of belonging and become better individuals (You, 2023). Taking this approach allows students to transcend ontological individualism and the resulting rise in narcissism and loneliness (Rappleye et al., 2020) and build a society based on strong local communities, treating the world as a complex and interdependent ecosystem of human beings (Neubert, 2020).

Concluding thoughts

This conceptual paper approaches the issue of student wellbeing from a less Western-dominated and more comprehensive perspective. The concept of ‘being-well-in-relationships’ signifies not only about conformity to societal norms but also an active pursuit of personal development within the context of interconnected relationships. These dynamics and fluidity underscore the complexity and depth of the ‘fitting in’ phenomenon in Chinese cultural perspectives. First, relational wellbeing helps researchers, educators, and policymakers to understand students’ interactions with their immediate contacts in societies, the larger societal structures, as well as related emotions (White, 2017; You, 2023). Second, as wellbeing is fluid, it provides a dynamic and transformative perspective to re-think the purpose of education for future generations (You, 2023). Third, it moves beyond the discussion of individual psychological factors and ego-centric approaches towards wellbeing, highlighting society’s responsibilities to enable individuals to live a happy and fulfilling life (Rappleye et al., 2020).

This conceptual paper can support school leaders and policymakers to reconsider what wellbeing is beyond traditional positivist mental health interventions and challenge deep-rooted social inequality in schools. In the context of the broader discourse on wellbeing, as recognised by entities such as the OECD (2017), this paper aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding. Relational wellbeing highlights the active and reciprocal nature of the relationship, where wellbeing is happening, fluid, and always becoming, influencing and being influenced by the dynamics of those relationships, underscoring the importance of acknowledging and nurturing the relational aspects of wellbeing within the complex fabric of contemporary society.

It is also possible to apply the conceptualisation of relational wellbeing to other social groups where individuals have to grapple with complex relational experiences existing within a wider web of interconnected social relationships. For instance, as Galloway, Conner, and Pope (2013) point out, homework in privileged high-performing high schools is associated with seeking socioeconomic upward mobility over others in competitive educational settings. With the expanding marketisation of education, and credential creep, the promise of secure employment, let alone socio-economic upward mobility becomes elusive, resulting in further questioning on whether better wellbeing will be achieved tomorrow (Brown, 2013; Brown & James, 2020). A relational sociological turn in the conceptualisation of wellbeing may encourage a more encompassing and inclusive social vision, producing new/different subjectivity, and promoting common and relational goods (Collet-Sabé & Ball, 2023). We conceive of and seek to enhance student wellbeing by recognising the negative consequences linked to schools, perceiving them as undesirable results of an institution requiring technical reform, tangible enhancements, and more rational organisational frameworks to attain a state of being considered ‘improved’ or, as some contend, ‘more effective’ (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022, p. 986). We seek to highlight the inequalities present within the educational system, prompting a central question: who succeeds and who faces challenges? (Ball & Collet-Sabé, 2022). The core inquiry revolves around whether schools serve as solutions to educational issues or persist as sources of such problems.

Acknowledgement

We sincerely appreciate exceptionally valuable comments and suggestions from two reviewers, who helped us to improve the quality of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.