At the start of the 2013 film American Dreams in China (Chan, 2013), we meet an ambitious youth named Cheng, and watch as he fails to obtain a visa to attend graduate school in the US. Cheng is a fictional version of Yu Minhong, founder of China’s largest private educational company, New Oriental. We see Cheng wandering the streets of Beijing, his dreams crushed, reading Dale Carnegie’s seminal works of self-help psychology. In the film, as in reality, the frustrated student transforms into an educational entrepreneur. Cheng founds a chain of English schools in which teachers address packed auditoriums with the enthusiastic performances of self-help gurus. These teachers model a passionate, confident style of self-presentation, a performance that might help some of their students gain admission to universities in the US. We see Cheng, now comfortably seated in his executive office, advising a student that ‘Confidence is the most basic requirement of American Culture’ (Chan, 2013).

Social theorists have described self-assurance and internal motivation as key characteristics of the entrepreneurial (Bröckling, 2016) or enterprising self (Rose, 1999). This neoliberal figure takes risks, invests in themself, and builds a personal brand. In this chapter, I suggest that the ability to perform this kind of subject is valuable less as an entrepreneurial asset than as a form of cultural capital. By examining how students from China learn to perform for US universities, we can reveal how affects of confidence and passion are not only embedded in neoliberal ideologies of self-making, but are also written into cultural scripts for performing one’s identity. The ability to put on this performance has become a global currency, and, for many students worldwide, it is a precondition for receiving an elite education.

Studying how Chinese students learn to sell themselves to foreign universities can also illuminate forms of affective work that academics perform on a daily basis. In classrooms on and offline, at conferences and in grant applications, academics are performers.