ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY ROBERT VENABLES

Shortly before the accident, Ding Ying's friend invited her out for drinks. The friend had just lost her job and was depressed, but Ding, a 29-year-old office worker in Beijing, begged off, saying she was too busy. A few days later, the friend died in a car crash. Wracked with guilt, Ding sought help at a local support group and assertiveness training center, the Dazhao Institute. Her voice cracking, she confessed before more than 100 people how terrible she felt for "taking friendship as something ordinary." The audience applauded and cheered her openness. "I hardly ever mention that event anywhere else," Ding says later, "but here I feel safe."

Self-help à la Oprah and Dr. Phil is sweeping China. A people long taught by Confucian doctrine to rely for support on strong families—and instructed that the individual matters less than the community—is now turning to strangers for advice and comfort. They want to find themselves, stand up to bosses, enjoy better orgasms. In part, it reflects the tidal wave of educated workers moving between cities and coping alone with a society in the midst of epochal change. But it's also a by-product of prosperity: Guo Nianfeng, a leading psychologist, sees the development of an entire class of Chinese "whose bellies are full, and now they're thinking about finding happiness." From self-help books to courses in positive thinking, a new industry has sprung up to feed their hunger for self-exploration.

Only in the past few years has mental health become a concern in China. During the Cultural Revolution psychological problems were automatically labeled as side effects of misguided political beliefs. Treatment included forced readings from Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of quotations. ("The real heroes are the masses," reads one typical entry, "while we ourselves are immature and laughable.") The government often condemned dissidents to mental wards, a practice that has yet to be retired: many followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual society have been forcibly institutionalized. These days, the same search for fulfillment that has led millions of Chinese to traditional religions and to new practices like Falun Gong now sends others to seek secular answers. Last year, for example, 400,000 people underwent some form of psychological counseling.

One typical seeker is Mr. Zhang, who asks not to be identified by his full name. He spent much of the past three decades drunk, "living in a bottle" as he puts it. His wife left him, and his boss at a TV production company fired him for stewing at home in sorghum liquor instead of showing up for work. Old-style treatment would have been cold turkey in a Beijing hospital ward. But Zhang, now in his 50s, was luckier. Three years ago he entered a program new to China: Alcoholics Anonymous. "It was hard at first talking to strangers," he says of the 12-step program, taken straight from the U.S. with no adaptations to the local culture. Zhang hasn't had a drink since. As for A.A., which has overcome government suspicion of a foreign-designed, cell-based organization, it's now available in four Chinese cities and is set to spread farther.

As the Chinese grow increasingly comfortable with subjects that were once taboo, doling out sex advice has become a lucrative business. Kiosks in most Chinese airports sell Your Sexual Self: Every Woman's Guide to Sexual Fulfillment. Written by British author Susan Quilliam, its frank advice and explicit illustrations cover everything from hunting down erogenous zones to sex after mastectomies. In Beijing, the doctor who translated the classic sexual behavior studies of Masters and Johnson, Ma Xiaonian, hosts a popular call-in radio show about sex. On a recent program he advised a premature ejaculator to "wear a condom" and assured a woman who found hard-core photos on her son's computer that it was "normal teenage curiosity."

The Internet is where Miss Yang (a pseudonym) gives her bedroom tips. A former elementary school teacher in Beijing, Yang needed support after splitting from her boyfriend last spring. She discovered the "love chat" rooms of China's biggest portal, Sina.com, where she built a network of virtual friends who, she says, were "all confronting sex and relationship problems." Yang found she had a knack for giving advice, and these days she spends eight hours a day answering questions. (Her handle in the chat room is "Who Wants My Orgasm?") Yang's wisdom is especially sought by migrant men from the countryside who want to know how to impress city girls. "I tell them to be pure and confident, don't care only about sex," Yang says. "That's what women like."

While many Chinese want guidance in the bedroom, even more need help in the office. In the hurly-burly of China's rapid change to a capitalist economy, offices have become places of Darwinian struggle. The survivors are those who better know how to win friends and influence their superiors. That's the pitch of the Carnegie Institute, which uses the teachings of self-help guru Dale Carnegie who pioneered self-assertiveness training in the U.S. 90 years ago. On a recent day at a five-star Beijing hotel, Singaporean-born coach David Chao stood in a packed conference room during a final session and asked his students to relate what they had learned. A doctor named Wu confessed that all the nurses he worked with feared him "because I went around looking to criticize people's mistakes." Chao and his helpers radiated smiles and thrust their thumbs into the air in support, thrilled by his revelation. Dr. Wu concluded, "Thank you, Carnegie."

"China is harder than Singapore and Taiwan," says Chao, who has spread the Carnegie message across Asia for 16 years. Since he began offering classes in China last year, some 1,000 people have taken the 12-week courses, spending $900 each. Mainland Chinese don't like talking openly about themselves, he says. "It used to be that if they admitted to a fault, it went into their dossier." But Chao's biggest problem isn't reticence: it's knockoffs. China now has numerous assertiveness training programs, some of which illegally use the Carnegie name.

That's a common problem for all entrants in the self-help field. A translation of Spencer Johnson's Who Moved My Cheese?, an American parable of how to get what you want, has sold nearly 2 million copies and has topped China's best-seller list for the past year. That success has spawned at least eight unauthorized sequels bearing English titles such as Who Dare Move My Cheese?, Whose Cheese Should I Move? and The Person Who Dare to Move of the Cheese. The mania for the 91-page original isn't surprising: in a country where the old order has broken down and everything is in flux, it's become a manual for anyone who has to cope with a job loss, a move to a new city or any other personal transformation. "Confucius would like it because there were great changes in his time too," says Charles Chen, who brokered the book's publication. "We need new models for new times." And new words too. So great is the book's impact that the Chinese word for cheese, nailao, is now used as a synonym for change.

Back at the Dazhao Institute, where Ding Ying grappled with the death of her friend, Chen Yinan is wrestling with a torment of his own. "I have real problems looking people in the eye, unless I'm drunk," the 23-year-old tells the floor. The trainer, Huang Dazhao, has Chen walk through the room, shaking everybody's hand and looking them square in the face. Chen makes the round, his hand soggy and trembling. "You need to stand taller," orders Huang, and Chen straightens his back. A half-century after Chairman Mao announced that the nation had stood up, the Chinese are learning—one step at a time—to stand a little higher.

—With reporting by Ed Lanfranco/Beijing