10. Self-as-Method,

Looking for a New Discourse

This is the last section of Self-as-Method. I hope you have enjoyed it as much as I have. If you haven't been following, may I suggest going back to the beginning to give it a read. Xiang Biao is a refreshing practical individual that doesn't talk airy abstractions or political correctness. He doesn't base any of his discussion on the "axioms" of the current political narrative, as an assumption, that of “course you all buy into”. There is lots of wisdom in what he says, and delivered in a lively discussion format that is loaded with questions, for him to answer. This chapter is particularly good.

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May I also encourage you to check out our new discussion format blog, Why Not Think (Differently).

It is here. (Right-click to open on a new tab.)

It is new, but designed to treat short, to-the-point topics, that are easy to express your concerns or opinions on.

We have some very powerful posts coming soon, On WOKE, on MISOGYNY, on what is it about our Language, that gives us a certain mind-set, often different than other cultures? What hope is there for our mutual understanding? May I suggest if you are following WNT, please consider subscribing. Don't miss these posts.

For me; I have a separate email address for each substack, so I do not care about more or less emails received. We have new ideas on how to use substack for discussions. Please watch for it.

So now back to Self-as-Method:

Wu Qi: When you talk about the situation of class mobility and universal feelings about life, I think most readers can empathize, but they still lack the tools or the framework to understand them. In the context of the late 1990s or early 2000s, there was a discussion about left and right, and both sides had specific ideas in their description of China and the reasons for this description. For example, the left argued that the problem had to do with the huge capitalist system, while the right talked about the corruption of power itself. But now, a big problem is that, first, this antagonism is gradually disappearing, and second, perhaps because it is disappearing, public discourse itself is also disappearing, and not responding to everyone’s true experiences and feelings, so there is a prevailing sense of not knowing what to do. On the one hand, everybody feels like their lives are really changing, sometimes in positive ways, but at the same time, they feel like it’s not enough. They don’t know how to understand it, and they don’t know what to resist, so they decide not to worry about it too much and just get on with life, which is after all fairly comfortable.

Xiang Biao: You’re right. There are times when things are going well, and yet the anxiety does not really go away. The pressure from work, from your mortgage, from your kids’ education is still there, and you feel like you have to work hard, but everyone feels like this pressure is nobody’s fault, and they just keep pushing. I completely agree with your analysis, and in the intellectual scene in China today, there are still debates over specific issues, but the big divisions that once existed are no longer there, which forces us to look for a new discourse to describe today’s situation.

Today, the question of lifestyle is as important as capital and state power. It is really difficult at the present moment to state clearly what the relationship between capital and labor is, or the relationship between the state and citizens, or even your relationship with yourself, because everything is blended together in your lifestyle. If we try to look at things from the perspective of class or labor it is hard to see things accurately, and it’s better to look at lifestyle or entertainment. And when we do this kind of cultural analysis, we can’t do like we used to and treat culture as a variable. The reason why we need cultural analysis is in fact because we want to foreground those whom we are analyzing, by which I mean the ordinary people, and especially young people, as the leading thinking subjects.

Wu Qi: The viewpoints that come out of your research on these subjects are quite vivid, with implicit value judgments, but the judgments are not expressed as commentary, and instead emerge from careful attention to detail. How did you go about thinking about them? Was it that from the outset you did not focus on viewpoints or where your feelings were taking you, and just went ahead with your description, or had you already internalized the kind of intellectual concerns that we criticized earlier on, so that they surfaced later on in the description?

Xiang Biao: Objectively speaking, I think it was the latter. I have been programmed, too, and have definitely been influenced by intellectual trends. When I am looking at a specific problem, my two most important interests are probably, first, I want to see the inner contradictions. Nothing develops totally smoothly, and there are always opposing forces pushing in different directions, and you have to understand who won and who lost. Second, I like to paint the overall picture, and I feel like valuable work should draw a map for the reader, and provide a sense of direction.

For example, I have recently been thinking about “logistical power.” Mobility is an important part of social change in China. In the past, most of China’s social organization was based on immobility. People did not change jobs, they did not move, and all material resources were allocated by the plan. After reform and opening, beginning in the villages, people started to move around, things started to move around, and so in the early 1990s, Sun Liping pointed out that the “free movement of resources” and a “free space for activities” had become basic elements in China’s social change. The basic understanding at the time was that power used to be sustained by immobility, and now that the free space for movement had grown, the things that power could control directly would diminish. So, at the time, Sun Liping’s prediction was that people would increasingly obtain life resources and development opportunities from an autonomous “society,” a civil society would gradually emerge, and the power of the state would weaken. But what do we see now? Mobility is absolutely increasing, but state power is clearly stronger as well. So, something I want to understand is how this big picture evolved.

The idea behind “logistical power” is that at present a kind of power based on logistics is being created, a kind of power that does not try to control mobility, but instead takes mobility as its foundation. The idea of the “normalized entanglements” gets at something similar. Daily life in China is increasingly normalized. It used to be a real pain to buy a train ticket, and there were scalpers and all that, but that’s gone now. And things are cleaner and more orderly than they used to be, but this sense of order has not brought people a sense of calm, and instead, their feelings of insecurity have increased. How do we explain this contradiction?

Raising these questions is perhaps related to intellectuals’ concerns, and if it is, then I admit that it is a limitation. Not that having a concern is a limitation, but it means that my thought has been programmed, and always goes in a certain direction. Readers may think that this is simply a matter of having a consistent problématique, but I don’t aim for consistency, and to my mind, it is more a matter of a lack of imagination or a lack of understanding of the richness of practice.

Wu Qi: If we set aside the historical role of intellectuals and talk specifically about some of their qualities or concerns, do you see anything there that is positive and should not be abandoned? Some people see these concerns as common sense that should be protected, or as moral principles, which should be a beacon, leading us forward. Although you describe the consistency of intellectuals as a limitation, on the other hand, it is natural to want to be consistent. Is there something here that we should keep or maybe even learn from?

Xiang Biao: What is the most important intellectual temperament or trait? As a profession, or as a group, intellectuals may disappear someday, as everyone can become an intellectual. At that point, what distinguishes an intellectual from everyone else? To my mind, it is the capacity to reflect. This capacity is a new thing because the goal of traditional intellectuals was not to reflect on things, but instead to explain or interpret things that were already known, providing everyone with a kind of order and worldview. The idea of reflecting was popularized by the Frankfurt School, which itself is quite modern, and what they said was that people don’t need intellectuals to interpret the order of the world—what we need instead is for people to criticize that basic world order. This is badly needed. Because nowadays the basic mission every day for most people is just to get through that day, and once that mission is completed, they still have to keep moving forward. The meaning of reflection is that I want to stop myself, hold myself back, and not keep moving forward in the same direction. I want to think about why I’m doing what I’m doing today and wonder whether I can’t do it in some other way.

Actually, what intellectuals give us is just a lifestyle. Everyone has their lifestyle: Daoists live like Daoists, and financial directors live like financial directors. The main point of an intellectual’s lifestyle is analysis and reflection. Reflecting means asking questions, why are things this way and why can’t they be that (other) way. The questions must be asked with a certain logic, based on comparisons that come out of observing reality. This is not necessarily driven by a sense of responsibility for other people, or a sense of community responsibility, but is a self-reflection, or a reflection on things at hand. In fact, the community tradition is much stronger in non-intellectual circles. Peasants and workers, including people working in offices, have a strong sense of community even if their level of knowledge is relatively low because they are working together in the same physical space. Intellectuals are quite selfish, with a strong sense of individuality, but this historical limitation may make an intellectual lifestyle more appropriate for young people in the present era since individualism is quite a strong trend among young people as well.

We have talked about intellectuals a lot today, but I have never understood the role I play in these terms, and have never seen this book as something to be read by intellectuals. But intellectual discourse in China remains strong. For example, the discourse surrounding the spiritual independence of universities sometimes tends toward the worship of Western universities, which is not necessarily a good way to think. Western universities are more independent than ours, but we have to ask how they maintain this independence in daily practice. It has less to do with spirit than with method. On the other hand, it would not be hard to be independent in China, but the problem is that senior professors want to become officials, and once you are an official you have resources, and once you have resources you don’t want to give up your position, and that means you are no longer independent. But it is possible as an ordinary scholar to be independent, as long as you don’t rebel and don’t become an official. There is no need to make such a fuss about it.

Wu Qi: You have mentioned many times that the work of scholarship should be transformed to become a tool to help people understand problems. This includes your expectations of non-fiction writing and your hope that it can move into different realms, but I am always skeptical, or pessimistic. Most of what I see now is that people still live and pursue the original kind of academic life and the benefits it brings, they like living in an ivory tower and pronouncing on the state of the world, and few people have made a fundamental shift. What is your view? Has anyone responded to your call?

Xiang Biao: This is all pretty new. I think the strategy is simply to get started and then see how things go. Documentary drama, non-fiction writing, and migrant workers’ literature are all new possibilities. For example, the 2000 play, Che Guevara, was no great artistic achievement, but this is not the way to look at it, because it had a great capacity to mobilize people, and was kind of an invitation. I think it would be possible to add more scholarly depth to that invitation. The academic system is not going to change overnight, and scholars have to publish and do all the stuff they have to do, but in their free time, they could still experiment in this way, working with artists and writers. For example, Internet novels can be commercialized, but anthropologists could get in there and ask some questions, or ask for contributions from the public to reflect on particular points. This may generate new discussions and make people think.

Wu Qi: This touches on a much larger question of the social position of scholars and even the social sciences as a whole, and may be part of a major shift in the humanities. Do you still emphasize the role of individual action in accomplishing this transformation?

Xiang Biao: You have to start with the individual. If you are always just calling on people to do something without showing them a sample of what you are talking about, people won’t listen, so you have to start on a small scale. I think I’m more Wenzhou + Oxford, and that I’m not so much Beida. Wenzhou people make lighters, and Oxford has its tradition of empiricism, in the eyes of which any kind of big talk is immediately suspect and everything is subject to empirical proof, with the emphasis on materiality, on how things work. Wenzhou people make lighters to sell them, and to sell them you have to show them to people. These are important characteristics of anthropology. I have always believed that there are many ways to illustrate a theory. You have tightly structured, deductive theories, but you also have theories that draw pictures. Ethnography is the latter, built up stroke by stroke through the accumulation of countless details, like a huge fresco, which cannot be reduced to a conclusion. It’s all about common sense, but what is interesting is to figure out what details stack up behind common sense. This is also the source of my optimism, that young people want to read texts that reveal such details, which is a perfectly reasonable request, which anthropologists should help to meet.

Anthropology as Intermediary

Wu Qi: Whenever you come back to China to lecture, or when you publish articles here, a lot of young readers are keenly interested, which is consistent with my own observations that young people are getting interested in anthropology in a way they have not been before. In the past, for example, when I was in university, politics, economics, law, journalism, and even history were more popular than sociology and anthropology, but in the past few years, it’s like there’s a new breeze blowing, and everyone is going abroad to study anthropology. The other disciplines seem like they are known parts of an existing structure, while anthropology, which used to be unpopular, offers a new space for imagination and praxis. Have you noticed this? Are you in contact with these young people who are so enthusiastic about anthropology? Have you discovered any changes?

Xiang Biao: People who study anthropology are interesting people, and a bit different from the rest, but, just like you said, these “oddballs” have become a small mainstream. In my view, the popularity of anthropology comes from people truly wanting to learn some mid-level analytic tools that are in direct relation to their experiences. If you just study the experience itself, this has an entertainment value and a comfort value, and it satisfies a certain emotional need, but things move on quickly, so it’s like eating cold fast food. There’s a market for big theories now, which also satisfy emotional needs, and a lot of big theories are aiming to stir people up. The kind of intellectual analysis that we need should have a direct and organic connection to people’s experiences. Everyone wants to understand society, which naturally means that they first reach for studies they can understand. “Understanding” means recognizing something. When someone else says something that I understand, it means that I recognize that thing that might happen to me, therefore I immediately understand what the person I am talking to actually wants to say. Everyone is yearning for this kind of analysis.

But I still haven’t seen younger colleagues using lively and passionate language in social analysis. When they are talking about it orally, we find it interesting, but when they design their research they revert to the norm, and produce uninteresting, run-of-the-mill stuff. Even how they express their passion is kind of stilted, more like a religious search for meaning than a real engagement with social reality. Of course, the search for meaning is great, but it has to link up with the richness and complexity of reality, so there are a few more steps that younger colleagues need to take. This is where those of us who are a bit older might be of service.

Wu Qi: Where do you see this “service” being put to use? In teaching? Graduate training? Or maybe in other public activities and cultural exchanges? What else do you see?

Xiang Biao: I feel like supervision of dissertations is important, a sort of one-on-one education. It is also important to provide good examples. The skills we seek to develop are quite broad, which makes it hard to tell students exactly what to do, you can’t just write it down in a “guide.” Training this way of thinking and working, such as knowing where to enter a topic, how to find its richness, how to continually question oneself—is not something that can be taught solely through words and has to be developed through practice. Everyone has the latent capacity to do this, so it is not that the capacity has to be taught; it’s the other way around, in the sense that you have to spot that capacity and tease it out. The first thing to do is to see ourselves as primary and secondary school teachers, or even kindergarten teachers, and learn how to put ourselves on the same level as our students. Then we have to dig in, learning their weaknesses, shortcomings, and enthusiasms, ultimately bringing a latent thinker to the surface. So, you have to teach everyone differently. This is why thesis supervision is important because you wind up understanding the student fairly well and engaging in genuine exchange with them. In addition, I think it is quite important to organize ad hoc small discussion groups to respond to contemporary issues, which may have nothing to do with dissertations or research topics. This helps keep our thoughts engaged at all times, connected to social reality. All thought comes from experience, which seems to be a natural thing, but to do it right requires frequent training, to train the accuracy of your observations, the speed of your deductions, and your ability to see cracks or contradictions.

Wu Qi: That day when you gave a lecture at Tsinghua and talked with the M.A. and Ph.D. students, is that sort of interaction something you have less of at Oxford? It seemed like you and the students were both soaking it up and learning a lot. Was that a more or less ideal situation?

Xiang Biao: Your observation is absolutely correct, and it’s the thing I like the best about China. The situation at Tsinghua is of course in large measure due to Wang Hui’s work and the foundation he laid, which earned a lot of space and institutional support. I was also moved by the warmth of the students, which I really wasn’t expecting, because the things I was talking about were rather narrow, and not the fate of the nation, but everyone was excited, which was encouraging.

But from another angle, I am always a bit anxious, because I feel like I should deliver solid research, and that writing interesting commentary is not enough. I should put out something with practical ramifications that people can go test or weigh its usefulness. This problem is partly because at present my world is quite fractured. The things I teach at Oxford have to do with China, but the approach is different.

For example, “infrastructuralization” means that Asian governments are increasingly investing in manpower training and other policies to provide a good environment for people to start businesses and increase income, that is, by providing various types of infrastructure, including hardware and software. However, simply having the infrastructure does not mean that people will actually set up businesses and increase their income. Infrastructuralization refers to this kind of development model: the government does not provide actual benefits but instead creates the conditions allowing the people to achieve those benefits themselves. This indeed is one generalization that we can make about development trends in Asia, but it seems like it doesn’t go far enough. Another example is my concept of “would-be migrants.” Current migration studies normally start with the moment of migration and treat the migrants’ return to their home country or the time they spend waiting to migrate as side issues. In my view, we should turn things around, because, in many developing countries, waiting to leave the country seems to be a widespread experience, and has a direct impact on people’s lives. Only a small number of those waiting to migrate actually migrate, which is often due to random reasons as to why they succeeded and others didn’t. What do you do while you wait, especially if you wind up waiting for years? So, the focus of the analysis should not be the actual process of migration, but rather the process of waiting to migrate. This is what I talk about at Oxford, and it has no traction in political terms in Asia. I haven’t yet found a solution to this.

Wu Qi: In our interview at Oxford, you talked about the writer’s block that you experienced in the process of your transition between East and West, between your anthropological scholarship and your more politically oriented public engagement. Have you found a solution to this problem?

Xiang Biao: Not really. My guess is this is a common problem for many scholars, although it may be more acute in my case. This is because the M.A. program on migration that I’m in charge of is obviously influenced by the public concerns in the West, for example focusing on the refugee crisis, the social integration of immigrants, and the education of the second generation. But I am quite political, and emphasize local engagement, and I don’t have a strong sense of local engagement with these issues, which creates a fair bit of tension. This also touches on how I currently understand the role of the social sciences and anthropology as intermediaries, that the first thing they should do is to serve as intermediaries between the actors and scholars of other disciplines. The second thing is to mediate between diverse ways of articulating meaning, including between social research and arts and humanities. The third, and perhaps the most important for me, is the mediation between local issues and global perspectives.

Any real problem is a local problem. One of our biggest problems now is that social research and analysis have become excessively globalized. The concepts and the theories used in journals and conferences are all the same, and it is not easy to express what the actual problems are. These theories all make good sense, but how do we grasp the true issues and convey the messages so that they will have power and punch? Locality is complicated, because not only do problems originate in a particular place but audiences are also localized and have their own understandings, which means that your narrative needs to be localized as well. To get a handle on a local problem, you need to keep a certain distance from global discourse, but at the same time you need to maintain a global vision, accurately locating the local problem on the larger map—this is the only way to arrive at a sure judgment. So, my feeling is that anthropology should slowly come to play this kind of intermediary role, setting aside comparative research and first writing up our local settings, which will give everyone mutual reference points.

When we take each other as reference points, we need theory. We have talked about the relationship between theory and the mass line, and the idea of theory as intermediary is like Mao Zedong’s theory of the mass line, where you start from the masses and return to the masses. In this kind of process, we need theory, because only theory can integrate disparate experiences, and can make the results of this integration interesting, organic, and useful so that they can return to the masses. Even more important is when things return to the masses, you need theory to explain why this experience can be useful, how you are meant to use it, and what future it will ultimately produce. The theory is meant to facilitate interaction.

The reason that thirteenth century Europe and especially fourteenth and fifteenth century Paris saw the birth of the modern university had a lot to do with population movement. Migration forces people to interact. One of my hypotheses is that mobility stimulated advancements in the development of abstract and empirical reasoning, because different people met together, and had to interact, compare local practices with practices from other places, explain why their ideas are not the same, and figure out how to reach an agreement, in the process of which, theory popped up. If we had remained in completely homogeneous, closed groups, we might not have needed theory to explain life, because religion, tradition, and norms might have been sufficient explanations. The point of talking about this hypothesis is to say that theory is interactive, and that theory is a kind of persuasion and a kind of mobilization. If there is no spirit of interaction, there is no real theory.

We talked about my life situation a few minutes ago, and from an optimistic point of view, we might also see it as a kind of mediation between local issues and global perspectives, a process that might produce the seeds of new theories. For example, when I talk about infrastructural power and infrastructuralization, it looks to be quite academic and global, but it can also help me understand local issues. The infrastructuralization model does not directly give you things, but rather helps you find a possibly existing job, trains you, and empowers you in this technical way. There are mobile phones and WeChat to make you feel connected to the outside world, without allowing you to organize yourselves. This is all about potentiality, in that these measures help you become employable, entrepreneurial, and potentially wealthy, but the actual opportunities for employment, entrepreneurship, and development may not necessarily increase in reality. The state’s investment in development increases, but the actual welfare of the people may not. Who actually reaps the benefits of the potentiality is an interesting question.

Recently, I’ve been reading papers from some conferences in China, and it does seem that scholars on the left have as many problems as those on the right. These dogmatic denunciations of imperialism and of the West don’t read like anything Chinese authors would write, because they are basically copying the left-wing in Europe and the United States, and vastly blowing it up, and it’s a long way from the Chinese experience. It’s a crude reductionism and a crude elitism at the same time, saying “you people are being manipulated, and I will reveal the truth to you.” This kind of scholarship can in no way serve as an intermediary.

Wu Qi: That makes me think that there are a lot of scholars now whose fix on global issues boils down to one term—global neoliberalism—and they think that this explains everything. But is this kind of theoretical framework really enough? Do we need to find an alternative theory to describe it, or should we completely get rid of this idea?

Xiang Biao: My feeling is that we shouldn’t use it. What is global neoliberalism? How do you understand this “global”? Nor is it clear what “neoliberalism” means. China has neoliberalism, and the United States has neoliberalism, but the two are so different that you wonder why we use the same word. It is clearly not accurate. Why is everyone still using it? One reason is to hold onto established discourse, allowing scholars to recognize one another, go to conferences and publish papers, even if regular people have no idea what they are talking about. This isn’t really a question of scholarship or academics, but in fact, it is a question of practice, a question of power, or how academics play the game. In the academic game, most of us write articles for other scholars to read, and we are not writing to be recognized for what we are researching.

To my mind, the next move is not to look for a new model, because a new model will simply create new hegemonic discourses, which is pointless. What we should do is start with local problems. Having a global perspective does not mean having a ready-made global answer to every problem, but instead means focusing on diversity, doing what you can to inform yourself, looking at what China is doing, at what India is doing, and it doesn’t matter how far you can proceed in one go because this is the work of a lifetime. So, we’re not looking for a replacement vision, and instead we need to move past this simplistic framework.

The Local Gentry: Once More with Feeling

Wu Qi: Being back in Wenzhou, we should talk about the local gentry again, since it was your experience of living here that is the source of your gentry spirit.

Xiang Biao: If the gentry spirit gives you a sense of autonomy, then what sustains the spirit itself? To my mind, it is an interest in the details of daily life. For example, in Wenzhou we talk about how to make a sponge cake and how to make fish balls, going step by step, spending a lot of time. This is the collective labor of the entire family during Spring Festival, as well as the local culture constructed over the centuries, in which people take great pleasure. In fact, this is something very valuable in China, namely, that every place is different. I am interested in folk culture.

Folk culture has been dying out as a field of study, but suddenly became one of the most profitable disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, because when you apply for World Heritage recognition, build museums, or promote local images, you need displays and justifications. I try to remain optimistic, thinking that this is a good thing, that using these resources to probe local culture is always better than nothing. The key is the next step. Scholars should adopt the spirit of taijiquan,*1 in which “propensity” (shi*) is the key. Wang Hui often says that propensity is a latent force that is uncertain. Conditions are always changing, and you have to follow the potential where it takes you. Now the question is how to turn the resource for folk culture research into something more than a museum display, turn it into a foundation for something. It should become a series of narratives, a strong sense of self-awareness, which, once articulated, allows you to feel grounded in this world, so that if you don’t understand something from the outside, you have the courage to say that you don’t understand it.

1 Translator’s note: Taiji or Tai chi (lit. “great pole”) is a Chinese cosmological term for the “Supreme Ultimate” state of undifferentiated absolute and infinite potential, the oneness before duality, from which Yin and Yang originate. The well-known exercise practices (quan = boxing), consisting of changing patterns of often very slow movements, adopt the concept to the human body and its relations to the cosmos.

This kind of detailed observation, if practiced in an amplified way, is one way of giving life meaning, allowing you to feel that life is all the more interesting, and to avoid getting lost in life’s flickering images. Why do some people make this kind of observation? Many people never bother to observe, but observing is the particular character of the gentry. One of the things the gentry used to do was to write local gazetteers, which prompted them to carry out this kind of observation. This goes back to the cultivation of learning, a certain curiosity about people and life, and constant questioning: observation becomes a pleasure in and of itself.

Humanities education should start with this. What we call knowledge means having a well-grounded understanding of what is happening in the world, and on that basis, to observe, to let your observations settle in, and ultimately to build your own foundation.

Wu Qi: You mentioned earlier that your uncle had a great impact on you, and when I met him in Wenzhou this time, he turned out to be a Wenzhou expert, who seemed to know how everything works in Wenzhou, and he stands out as a concrete example of the local gentry. In fact, China has always had many such people, found in all walks of life. It’s not easy to come up with a unified definition of them, but they know a little bit about everything, and can talk about things in an interesting way, in a way that reveals the many textures and levels of social life.

Xiang Biao: This idea of texture is important. We used to watch local propaganda documentaries about Wenzhou, which were completely over the top, and they would mention fish cakes, but there was no texture, so it was like explanations you read in a museum. The difference is subtle. Students can go to museums but not feel the texture of the objects, not to mention their underlying spirit, because museums have a preconceived narrative framework. My emphasis on empirical evidence is typical of empiricism, the idea that all truth comes from things that have happened. This is obviously philosophically untenable, because what happens in your head has also happened, but external things cannot be so readily shrugged off. The specifics of a fish cake are important and you cannot lightly “conceptualize” it by saying that it is a “symbol of Wenzhou,” and so on. You have to know how it is made in the physical sense to grasp its underlying spirit.

Wu Qi: Your uncle’s expressions were also very vivid, all very colloquial, and all grounded in something specific, such as a family member, or a dish at the dinner table, which led him immediately to a story or to something in his network of local knowledge. I can feel the influence of this kind of description on your work and your way of thinking, and I think we will need a lot of training if we want to master this kind of description.

Xiang Biao: It’s very difficult. With my students at Oxford, my goal is to get them to have a clear vision of what is going on around them, out of which develops a clear vision of their research project, because this is what empirical work really is. When he was young, my uncle did process work for other people. There were a lot of people in Wenzhou who would ask him to build one part of some production process they needed, so he bought a precision machine and set it up in his kitchen, where he worked with my aunt. He learned an incredible amount and constantly observed life in its most minute details. My mother said that when he was a child, he could never finish cleaning the windows because he was using newspaper to clean the glass, as soon as he saw the words he would start to read. It’s a pity that his education was interrupted; there are too many people like that in China.

Wu Qi: What was the most exciting for you, coming back to Wenzhou and seeing your family and classmates? Especially in comparison to Beijing.

Xiang Biao: It gives me the feeling of moving between different worlds, which in itself can serve as a reminder that the world is many different things. Another thing is that talking to my classmates and family reminds me to try to be more organic. In fact, I am a fairly nerdy person, although I try to speak in normal language. For example, at yesterday’s class reunion, there were a lot of jokes about romantic and sexual relations, the kind of thing I don’t hear very often as jokes and don’t really know how to participate in. Being aware of this sort of thing is quite important for anthropologists because jokes like these make up a big part of what daily communication is for everyday people, and romance and sex are a big part of life too. So, for me, it is a reminder that I must remember that there are different ways of communicating.

This also makes me wonder why sexual relations have become this kind of teasing, an important part of what former classmates talk about. This may have something to do with age because Chinese people in their 40s and 50s are already “degendered,” or maybe they are “beyond gender,” in the sense that their children are all grown, and they no longer talk about falling in love and things like that, but at the same time they may also be a little nostalgic for their youth.

In addition, this also has to do with our perception of sexual relations, and gender relations. In the West, for example, these jokes would be unthinkable in middle-class groups like my former classmates, especially when men and women are both present. If you make this kind of dirty joke with a Westerner, like someone is making out with someone, they at first think you are talking about something factual and may freak out. When you tell them, don’t worry, it’s just a joke, they don’t get it, because they don’t see anything funny. For Chinese people, however, there is a sense of liberation, which within the group may create a sense of intimacy, so it’s interesting. This kind of joke is also quite rare in India and Japan, also it depends on specific social circles. This in turn is related to the understanding of gender relations. At Chinese class reunions, men and women are fairly equal in how much they talk and how much alcohol they drink, but women also generally accept specific gender roles and don’t care about off-color jokes, and sometimes they even defend the mainstream gender roles.

Everyone is at the same time a young daughter-in-law and an old mother-in-law, living the life of the daughter-in-law and speaking the language of the mother-in-law.2 Gender relations are both equal and unequal.

Wu Qi: On these kinds of social occasions, are you an active participant or more of a spectator? Is there any social pressure to join in?

2 Translator’s note: The relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is often depicted as the most fraught of Chinese family relations. The daughter-in-law marries in from the outside, and has to knuckle under to the mother-in-law, who is often a very powerful household leader. At the same time, the daughter-in-law is now inserting herself between son and mother, and as she bears children is on her way to becoming a mother-in-law herself.

Xiang Biao: I do my best to stay on the sidelines and laugh. Of course, since I’ve come back from abroad for the dinner, I was a special guest, so I won’t be left out, but I don’t participate all that much. It is quite important to directly perceive what this social scene is like. There is no pressure, and it’s a good opportunity for me to observe. My ability to integrate into a group has declined in recent years, probably due to issues of energy, because it requires a lot of energy. In this respect, I was lucky that I was not born into a high-class intellectual family, which can be quite closed, in the sense that their friends and colleagues are probably all high-class intellectuals, so my ability to interact with larger, more diverse groups would be even worse.

Sometimes, these kinds of exchanges give me interesting ideas. Yesterday at dinner, we were discussing whether to send our children abroad to study. One classmate said that someone had recently posted a post to the classmates’ Internet chat group, saying that the children should go abroad, but they should have a serious girlfriend or boyfriend before going abroad because then the parents would know that he or she was “normal,” and they won’t have to worry that the children would “become” homosexual overseas. The discussion is directly related to my topic “social reproduction,” and to the connection between mobility and conservatism that we talked about earlier.

Wu Qi: So, this becomes new material for research.

Xiang Biao: It was more of a learning experience than a data-gathering occasion. You have to understand what is “reasonable” for each person. I think this kind of socialization is more interesting than when you hang out with people like yourself. It can be a little uncomfortable, but it is interesting because it is more stimulating. Communication among intellectuals is more about self - and mutual recognition, so it’s not that different from a panel discussion.

I have an aunt who used to work in a school-run factory and then went to a leather buying station in a county town, and then opened a noodle shop, where she worked for a long time, and she sometimes inspires me. Frank Dikötter (b. 1959), a scholar who works on modern Chinese history, has talked about documents he found revealing how much beef, rice, and tea Communist cadres consumed at meetings during the famines created by the Great Leap Forward. At dinner, my aunt’s husband said that in the past they didn’t have enough to eat, and said that it didn’t make sense that the peasants who cultivated the land couldn’t get enough to eat, and my first reaction was to talk about Dikötter’s research, and how much was taken by officials, which we now know from archival materials. My aunt immediately said: they didn’t eat it, they took it home. This was a completely intuitive response, and contains two messages: first, she did not question the relationship between forced grain procurement and the famine; second, she did not think like scholars did, i.e., that these cadres were corrupt and greedy and ate their fill, but in fact, they probably wrapped the food up carefully and took it home. This is also a kind of redistribution, extracting it from the bottom, redistributing it at the top, then redistributing it within the cadres’ families. This is not the same as the wasteful behavior I originally imagined during the meetings, based on Dikötter’s finding. I think my aunt’s judgment is probably spot on, that at that time it was impossible to waste things, nor could they stuff their mouths and splurge in this way, and we might see it as a bottom-up redistribution, or a reverse redistribution. My aunt’s insight instantly brings out the richness of how the system functions.

This kind of patient and relaxed approach to daily life is not felt in Beijing. Beijing is a big city and no matter who you talk to, everyone talks the same way. Wenzhou is different, and the Wenzhou dialect is strange to start with, much of which cannot be directly translated into Mandarin, which may help people to think relatively independently. Another thing is that Wenzhou has a sense of distance from the system. Without this sense of distance, it is too easy to either defend the system or to go to the other extreme and imagine the cadres during the Great Leap Forward as being as greedy as wild animals. The sense of distance creates accuracy.

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Thanks for your interest in this book and your interest in the China experience.

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We have some great works coming. At first we will go back to Russian thought with Gumilev.

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