Despite recent socioeconomic transformations, young adults in China construe local social norms as inhibiting their individualized selfhood. Based on a study of pedagogies of interpersonal "soft" skills, this article describes an apparatus of self-improvement where self- and social critique play a pivotal role. Through comparison with Foucault's "technologies of the self," I illustrate that self-improvement in China is largely oriented toward performative expressions that counteract the "local" rather than the habituation of virtues or skills.