Professor Liao Yijum- Dean of Political Theories Department of Xiangnan University

According to Marxism, happiness is a joyful psychological experience that the individuals’ objective demands were fully achieved during their practice of social life. Happiness is a positive evaluation of life. The happiness of each individual is a state and degree of people’s satisfaction with their overall living conditions. The basic elements were included in the following points: first, general material and spiritual needs can be satisfied generally; second, rare cynicism, pessimism and resentment of society can be found among social people; third, a high and continuous satisfactory rate of environment is kept for social people; forth, people generally behave positively, optimistically and happily.

If interpreting “happiness” as Chinese characters “幸福（Xing Fu）”, we can say it this way: “幸 Xing” is made up of land and money while“福 Fu” of clothes, mouth and land, so happiness is for a family that can enjoy their lives well with abundant foods, warm houses, fruitful lands and enough money. Though there are quite different understandings towards happiness, people are always in pursuit of happiness. Besides material demands, the spiritual demands for the satisfaction and confidence of life take up a more important part for modern social people.

Concerning people’s happiness, there are two misunderstandings needing to be overcome. First,  happiness is just taken as an increasing economic index. That misunderstanding is mainly because they do not realize the true happiness, which is based on happiness of every family and is for the sake of individual happiness. Second, happiness is just taken as an increasing support provided by the government. Actually, besides the government’s support, people’s happiness is more inclined to the revolution of more perfect politics, economy and mechanism. People’s happiness and dignity should be fully protected by relative mechanisms and laws.

How to practice the happiness of people? First, the transformation of ideas should be accelerate from the pure pursuit of GDP increase to the increase of “happiness index”; second, laws and mechanisms should be further perfected to enable people with the real feeling of happiness; third, “people-oriented” should keep carrying out plans on the basis of people’s demands and respect people for the sake of greatly upgrading people’s happiness. Only by practicing the above ways, can people achieve real happiness.