7. Self-as-Method,

Academics Is Not a Vocation

I am uploading this segment on January 1st 2024, so happy New Year. There are three more segments to finish this book. I hope that I will find additional relevant material from the Chinese perspective. But I still have the two major works of Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev, that I feel must be in our Library.

The first is Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth. It is a long book, around 500 pages in the “non-book” format of letter-size paper. It is written in nine parts with maybe 38 chapters. I haven’t analyzed the upload segments but I hope that I can do it in less that 38 uploads. As the title suggests it is his theoretical book on his Theory of Ethnogenesis. Each phase of the rise and fall of an ethos is illustrated with many historical examples from all over the world. For this reason, it is full of historical insight.

A second major work is “historical”: Ancient Russia and the Great Steppe. This book is even longer than the above Theoretical work, almost 800 pages. It is Russian history from the 9th century, and overlaps much of our previous book “From Rus to Russia”, which was from the origins of Kievan Rus. But this new book focuses in the other direction, on the Mongols. I don’t know how I will break down the uploads on this one? It will take us some months down the road.

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Now back to Self-as-Method

Wu Qi: The opportunity to interview you in Oxford gave me a feeling for your work and life environment there, and the whole thing struck me as very routinized, clean, and a long way from any “center.” No one bothers you, your college is right next to where you live, and in just a few steps you can be walking in the fields. This is completely different from conditions in China. What is your work life like in Oxford?

Xiang Biao: With a few colleagues, I run an M.A. program in migration studies, which is my “private plot.”*1 Oxford gives me a lot of space, and a three-year sabbatical, so for the last three years I was in Japan. If I did not have so much free time, I couldn’t drop everything and rush off to Hong Kong to observe the Umbrella Movement in 2014, or think about ethnic relations in China. I am quite busy, but if I didn’t have so much free time, I wouldn’t be able to fill it up as I do. My wife always says I have too much free time, because she has to get things done every day and does not have time to be “busy.”

1 Translator’s note: Under China’s system of collectivized agricultural production, which has basically disappeared during reform and opening, peasants were allocated small “private plots” that they could cultivate as they wished

Oxford also likes to see research results, and they emphasize social impact. In China, scholars should adopt the concept of “social impact,” which the government is also talking about, and move scholarship away from narrow technical or specialized work. One of the keys to increasing social impact is to pay close attention to emerging public concerns and redefine them in such a way as to change the way the public thinks, which can wind up creating a new campaign or a new action strategy. How do you come up with new definitions of public concerns? For this, you need to collect materials systematically and elaborate rigorous arguments.

Wu Qi: How do research and teaching work together at Oxford? What courses do you give? Does teaching inform your research in any way?

Xiang Biao: I basically give two courses, one of which is called “Key- words,” in which we analyze ideas like “population.” All of us who work on migration use the term “population,” but “populations” don’t really exist in the world. A person is just a person, so where does the aggregate concept come from? “Population” also has its own structuring qualities, such as the death rate, the birth rate, etc. In addition, there are direct connections with political science, and it also relates to the development of statistics and mathematics, which together give you a particular image of a society. Now populations are grouped by countries and linked to national political regimes. We also discuss concepts such as “market,” “people,” and “security.” These days China often talks about national security, which they did not talk so much about in the past, and this needs to be explained. In today’s Europe, illegal immigration is viewed as a security question, which we need to examine too.

Second, I give an optional course on the question of nation-states and mobility. We tend to think that mobility is opposed to the power structure or an established system, but mobility is an important foundation for the establishment of certain power systems. For example, in the Catholic church, the movement of bishops to different dioceses is rather important. The same is true of the mobility of colonial officials during the era of the British empire. In Chinese history, there was the abolition of native rule and its replacement by regular administration,2 in which land that was originally self-administered by minority ethnic groups came under the control of Chinese officials sent by the center.

It is not easy to combine my classroom teaching with my own research and public engagement. One reason is that our students, despite their diversity, are still basically interested in Europe and America, and very few of them work in China. So, discussions I can have here are not as interesting as discussions in Singapore. Our anthropology department is also quite scholarly. I don’t buy what Weber said, that contemporary society has become disenchanted and that scholarship must be a vocation. To my mind, scholarship is not a vocation, but rather a tool, my way to enter society and the world.

2 Translator’s note: This policy, known as gaitu guiliu* in Chinese, was directed at various minority groups, chiefly in Southwest China, who had previously enjoyed a kind of self-rule but were incorporated into the mainstream administrative structure during the Ming and Qing dynasties.

Wu Qi: You said that you had started to work bilingually. How does that work? When did you start?

Xiang Biao: I just started doing this in the past couple of years. If I’m using an idea that was developed first in Chinese, I will explain it in English. In the process of explaining it, I always discover that some things were left out and that there is a lot that needs to be explained. Sometimes I use an ambiguous term to refer to something rather specific, which doesn’t always work. At the same time, if I use a concept that was first developed in English, when I explain it in Chinese, I will also notice a lot of problems. For example, if I am talking about something which to me seemed quite creative, sometimes when I explain it in Chinese there is nothing to it, nothing new—it lacks sharpness or “incisiveness.” Thus Chinese can serve as a test to see how much new meaning is actually included in the content, while English serves to test the process of argumentation, and whether or not the meaning is clear enough. If things work in both directions, then I’m pretty confident.

When you try and fail to explain things to a foreign student, this means that you don’t understand them well enough yourself. You can describe things in two ways. One is to oversimplify, to reduce it to something that is already understood, which means giving it a definition, putting it in a box, and making everything clear. The other way is to explain the issue’s internal complexity, which is endless. People may get increasingly lost because the details spin out endlessly, and the box itself is turned upside down on the table. So, you have to concentrate on the main points. You have to tell a story, and focus only on the big picture, and only by knowing the underlying details can you convey the complexity. Once you’ve got a handle on the basic question, the details come into focus.

There is a simple word in English: “about.” When I counsel my students, I tell them that they have to clearly identify what their research is about. You can work “on” peasants or “on” university students, but “about” has to do with your problématique, so it can be about labor relations, or the power relations in a spatial arrangement, or about gender relations, you have to make this clear. If you don’t, people will not understand where you are going. My bilingual method of working is a way to get the “about” right, through translation. You can also clarify your “about” by talking to friends, forcing each other to specify what the stories are about. Here we have three kinds of translations: between languages, among friends or colleagues, and between data and arguments. Without these translations, or if the translations are too flat or too sloppy, then the “about” won’t emerge, and the same is true for everyday observation.

Nationalism and Populism

Wu Qi: We didn’t talk much last time about your life in Singapore or Hong Kong. Maybe we can start with this. What brought you to Singapore?

Xiang Biao: In 2003, when I had almost finished my doctorate, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) had a project on Chinese migration to Europe and was looking to hire someone. That project was related to Northeast China because the European Union had noticed that people from this region were immigrating to Europe. “Illegal immigration” sounds like it is something that has been with us forever, but in terms of a policy concept it is relatively recent, and only appeared in the 1990s, like “asylum seeker.” These concepts did not exist during the Cold War; then, refugees were just refugees, most of which came from Communist countries. Most of the cases involved intellectuals, and the West offered them excellent conditions. After the end of the Cold War, people from formerly Communist countries could leave when they wanted to, and at the same time there were a great many small-scale ethnic conflicts in Africa and elsewhere, which produced genuine refugees. They were different from the political cases that had been considered refugees in the Cold War, and there were so many of them that the West could not treat them in the same way, so they created the new term “asylum seeker.” This is a strange term in that it does not say that you are a refugee, and does not say that you aren’t, only that you are in the process of being looked into.

Human trafficking is also a political concept that emerged after the Cold War, in the early 1990s. The emergence of this concept was largely the product of the moral panic provoked by the arrival of sex workers who came to Western Europe from Eastern Europe. At first, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western Europe thought that there would be countless people coming from East, which frightened them, and they wanted to prevent it. Second, the general public in Western Europe has deep-rooted moral objections to the sex industry, but cannot denounce it, because feminism in Western Europe is strong, and feminists believe that the sex industry is a kind of “sex work” that deserves respect and protection, not prohibition and moral opprobrium. So, policy turned the sex industry problem into a human trafficking problem. The sense of the policy was that if people came from Eastern Europe to Western Europe to engage in sex work, it could not be voluntary, because no woman would willingly engage in sex work, so they must have been trafficked. This is how the logic worked, and it can be seen as a denial of women’s autonomy. Human trafficking is also closely linked to illegal immigration, and fears of human trafficking are largely similar to fears of illegal immigration, because it is hard to criminalize illegal immigration. In terms of European legal principles, illegal immigration is not a crime, and is a simple matter of crossing national borders without permission, but if you turn it into a case of human trafficking, then it becomes criminal, and you can attack the problem. The concept of human trafficking is also part of the hollowing out of ideology that followed the end of the Cold War, where a sort of empty humanitarianism has come to dominate the discourse, in the world and in China.

In this environment, the European Union asked the IOM to launch a project on Chinese immigration to Europe, and luckily for me my dissertation was about finished, so I went to Geneva. During the day I worked as a member of the research team, and at night I wrote my dissertation. When I started, China still had only observer status on the IOM; China became a member in 2016. In 2017, the IOM formally became a part of the United Nations. So, migration is a big issue internationally. But the perspective from which migration is defined as a problem is clear—a problem that requires intervention, that requires programs to respond, that requires assistance. It is clearly defined from the perspective of the rich countries, even though they talked about it in the language of human rights.

I worked there for more than six months, dealing with all sorts of highly formal language; most people who work in international immigration organizations have never met an immigrant—all the work is paperwork. But I learned something from this, which is that people who understand the situation clearly cannot write it up in a formal manner, and the categories used by the international organizations are often labels, which do not explain things clearly.

At the time we were setting up our migration research center at Oxford, and I was one of the applicants. The Center was approved, but there would be no money for a year, so when I got back from Geneva, I had no salary, even if there was a job eventually waiting for me. To fill the time, I did a post-doc at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. Singapore’s impact on my life was considerable. That’s where I met my wife, who was also at Asia Research Institute. When I was there, the head of the Institute was Anthony Reid (b. 1939), a famous historian of Southeast Asia, who does Braudel-like long durée studies of economic and social history. His goal is to break through the national frameworks we use today. He argues that many transnational links have existed for a long time and might be more important than nation-states. For someone like me who came out of Beida, I thought this was beside the point since the nation-state remains the most important category today and you have to confront that. Later on, I slowly understood that Reid’s vision was important; the idea is not to deny the importance of the contemporary nation-state, but if you understand the history of the nation-state, then you can relativize it, you can achieve a sense of distance, and a gentry vision can reemerge. The reason that the gentry study history, or that Western intellectuals study ancient history, Greece and Rome, is not because they want to stitch together a simple self-narrative—although it can be used that way, and nationalism always wants to construct a continuous, unilinear narrative—but because another sense of time, an understanding of the longue durée, can give you a firmer grasp on today’s politics, as well as a healthy sense of distance.

After I finished a year-long post-doc at Singapore, I stayed on as a visiting scholar, and even after returning to Oxford, I spent more time in Singapore. Later on, Prasenjit Duara became head of the Institute, and the power of his imagination, as well as his insights on important issues of the moment, had a huge impact on me. He held a lot of international symposiums in Singapore, hoping to put the university on the world’s intellectual map, and these events really opened my eyes. But what I found most remarkable about Singapore was not the people like Duara and Anthony Reid, but the group of dedicated people behind them.

You’ve probably never heard of them, most of them are women, and they may not spout grand ideas, but they put their heads down and get to work, with an attitude of thorough professionalism. They work in teams, they are open-minded, and they are quite selfless. There are a lot of people like this in Singapore. Everybody talks about how great Lee Kuan Yew was, and of course, he was important, but getting things done requires not only a great plan but also the step by step implementation. If you don’t do it today, if you don’t make today’s mistake today, you’ll never know how much you will get done tomorrow, so the only solution is to do it. To me, this is the Singapore spirit. Oxford is not like this, because Oxford can rest on its laurels, but for many Asian countries that are coming from behind, Singapore is worth studying.

I’m against ideas of creativity or genius. Everything comes from labor and effort. Our textbook story about Da Vinci drawing eggs endlessly1 when he was a kid tells us something that is true. Art doesn’t rely completely on imagination. Art is very concrete, just like the feeling of the ray of sunlight that touched you this morning. If you want to get a good hold on that feeling, you have to learn to make it, by carving, or painting, getting the color right. Beida is a bit representative of the opposite, in that, students there, talk big but are not particularly good at getting things done. When I was a student there, we all had memorized the sentence “[Beida] is holy ground…” A friend of mine studying political science said that if you call where you are standing “holy ground” you’ll turn everyone else off. China is huge, what is everyone outside of Beida going to think? What kind of attitude was this teaching Beida students? I thought he was right. Big talk is kind of scary, as if some kind of feeling got you all worked up, but once it blows over there is nothing left.

Wu Qi: Singapore doesn’t have this kind of ecology?

Xiang Biao: No. At present, they lack that bit, but their infrastructures and work methods are excellent. What they can do, they do very well, but as for incorporating different ideas to achieve a huge breakthrough, they are not there yet.

1 Translator’s note: It is commonly believed in China that when Da Vinci started to learn to draw, his master made him draw eggs for three years so that he could achieve complete mastery. The detail is not found in Walter Isaacson’s biography of the artist.

Wu Qi: You just talked about the importance of a long-term view of history, which reminded me of when you talked before about your debate with the head of a College at Oxford, when you argued that a short-term view of history can sometimes reveal more layers of an issue, and your preference at the time for short-term views of history in the context of your own research. I wonder if there is a contradiction here?

Xiang Biao: At the time, what I said was that a long-term view of history was like a long novel, which meant that you could take a long period of time to explain yourself, while as an anthropologist, I preferred a poem or a play, which has to explain things clearly within tight limits. Now I kind of regret saying that; I was just ignorant and hadn’t grasped the importance of history. In fact, a good play needs a good feeling for history to know what to include and what to leave out.

When I talked about a long-term view of history during our conversation just now, it was in the context of nationalism and contemporary politics, so it was a different question. A long view of history can serve two purposes: one is to build continuities, the longer the better, which makes everything look more consistent, and identifies the point of departure all the more clearly. Nationalism insists on having a single starting point, from which all else flows. A typical example of this is how we used to talk about how the geologist Li Siguang* (J. S. Lee, 1889–1971) discovered oil, as if this ancient thing had been made just for the People’s Republic of China. This is a typically nationalistic explanation.

The other use flips this on its head, insisting that because there has been so much history, you can see the series of ebbs and flows that make up the world, the different social arrangements, public projects, fights over power, divvying up of interests, etc., which tells us that the current situation, in this much longer context, is a short and temporary situation. Of course, we still have to engage seriously with the world in which nation-states will almost certainly outlive all of us, it’s just that in the process of doing so, we should not essentialize the nation, to use an academic word. When you essentialize something you say that it has always been like this and that it should continue to be like this. When you de-essentialize something, you say, yes, things are like this, but this is relative, or, in Marxist terms, this is historical. This means that everything has its history, its origin, its development, its decline, and the concrete expression of concrete factors.

I am more sympathetic to nationalism than many other intellectuals. Indian scholars have a clear understanding of this. They say that the British aristocracy had no sense of nationalism, and when Indians opposed colonialism by promoting nationalism, the British aristocracy saw them as provincial, and lacking a broad perspective, and claimed that only they, the British, were looking at all of humanity from a global perspective. We should emulate this Indian sensitivity. First, there is no true “all of humanity,” and claims made in the name of humanity always reflect a particular perspective. Second, if we follow someone else’s “all of humanity,” we are in fact betraying our own position in the world. If we want to respect our history of being colonized and oppressed, we must rely on nationalism to counter that simplistic, abstract narrative.

Thus, I feel that nationalism remains quite important today, and I see it as a tool of struggle. But if you take nationalism as an essentialized, eternal expression of the Chinese people’s relationship with the world, then this makes no sense, because we know that nationalism only appeared in China in the late Qing period, and was the result of the struggle of many people. These are the two uses of a long view of history. Do you want to dig a tunnel through a mountain, where you enter on one side and come out the other, or do you want to get out and see the bigger picture, a broader horizon?

Wu Qi: While we’re talking about nationalism, perhaps we could make a conceptual distinction between nationalism and populism, especially since today more and more things seem to circulate between the two and it’s easy to lump them together. I’m thinking of the patriotism of Chinese overseas students, of “fan culture” on the Chinese Internet, of the support for Trump and other populist leaders…How should we understand these? How do we find the more healthy and organic aspects of nationalism without descending into populism in our daily practice? Is there any room to maneuver here?

Xiang Biao: That’s a great question. Maybe we should look at specific cases because it is hard to establish a standard for what is good and what isn’t. European historians make a distinction between civic nationalism, found to the west of the Rhine, and ethnic nationalism found to the east of the Rhine. By “west of the Rhine” they mean the republics, of which France is representative, which have common political understandings to the effect that regardless of your skin color or your ethnicity, you are a citizen as long as you respect the country’s political ideals and the constitution. “East of the Rhine” is Eastern Europe, where the key questions are “who is your father?” “What is your surname?” “What is your religion?” and “what color is your skin?” This is based on ethnicity, not on political principles. Of course, I am oversimplifying it, but it illustrates that nationalism can take on different colorations.

When nationalist feelings are stirred up, you first need to realize that this is not necessarily a bad thing, and not necessarily a good thing. Everything depends on whether nationalism is the result of a reflection on the world situation and power relations, or instead a reflection on ethnic identity. I have problems with Chinese nationalism as an expression of ethnic identity, but from the perspective of resisting American hegemony, it is not unreasonable. In fact, the question is complicated. I once wrote that in China’s socialist revolution, nationalism and internationalism were tied together, because otherwise there would have been no socialism, which is international. In the eyes of the Chinese government, Mao Zedong’s greatest contribution was not building the new China, but was instead “being a great Marxist,” and raising socialism to new heights, which was a contribution to the world. Now, however, Mao is seen as a nationalist. There were a lot of nationalists in China, including Zhang Taiyan*2 (1869–1936) and Sun Yat-sen*, who started out opposing the Manchus and then embraced the Republic. They were looking to define their place in the world, and in this process where to draw the lines around a particular nation kept changing because “nation” is not a natural category.

Today, many expressions of nationalism essentialize the nation, ignoring how peoples and nations evolved in history. A way out is to pay more attention to details. If you’re unhappy about something and want to explain it away through nationalism, then maybe we should first have a chat about why you are unhappy, and see whether nationalism is really the solution to your problem.

2 Translator’s note: Zhang Taiyan was an important philosopher and politician in late Qing and early Republican China.

Singapore Enlightenment

Wu Qi: At Oxford, you sustain yourself through teaching, research, and chatting with friends. What work were you doing in Singapore?

Xiang Biao: Conferences, lots of academic activities. That year in Singapore was one of the happiest in my life. There were no burdens on me because no one knew who I was. I had finished my dissertation and was getting ready to publish it. At the same time, I learned a lot of new things about Southeast Asia. Material conditions in Singapore are excellent. The Asia Research Institute invited a lot of famous visiting scholars. Visiting scholars are always friendly, probably because they are free from routines at home and as guests, there are no fights over who gets what, and they can engage in pure intellectual exchange. Especially when Prasenjit Duara was there, many of the discussions were really interesting. We’d go swimming or go out to eat, and then start a discussion. For me, it was almost a feeling of enlightenment, as if all of a sudden, I’d worked through my scholarly and political problems. Without my Singapore experience, I probably could not have written essays like “The World, Scholarship, and the Self.” I started to get a better understanding of the meaning of scholarship as a human practice; for example, people like Vani helped me to understand that scholarship is like movies, poetry, art, or folk songs, in that they are all means by which humanity expresses itself. It’s kind of embarrassing that it took me so long to understand that scholarship is a kind of praxis. My enlightenment did not occur until I was 30, and I had never understood that at Oxford. I had always seen scholarship as a vocation, and never thought about why we do it, had never considered that scholarship is like a fable or a song.

Wu Qi: It’s surprising to hear you talk about an enlightenment, because from Beida to Oxford, you had access to the best education in the world, in an age of enlightenment and openness, but you did not have that experience until after graduating, and in a relatively small community in Singapore.

Xiang Biao: We already talked about centers and margins. By the same token, big has its drawbacks, and sometimes you see more things because you are in a small place. This may sound strange because isn’t there more to discover in big places? It’s true. China is big and complicated, but one of China’s central concerns is to eliminate this complexity, to simplify it. But in a small place like Singapore, politics of course has to be unified, but in cultural terms, you have to live and let live.

Singapore cannot have a definitive identity, because its identity is defined by other people, and it has to constantly keep its eye on the world context and the regional context so that Singapore positions itself as a brokerage state. Lee Kuan Yew, the leader of such a small country (Singapore is smaller than Wenzhou—Wenzhou has a population of more than nine million, while Singapore’s is five million), had a considerable role to play and a reputation on the international stage and was quite close to other world leaders at the time. After Lee’s wife died, Henry Kissinger called him every week. Lee Kuan Yew had a clear vision of what Singapore is, and he knew that no one would pay attention to such a small country, which meant that Singapore had to pay attention to the larger world, starting with the world around it: its relations with Malaysia and Indonesia, and then as part of East Asia. It had to consider Britain’s perspective, America’s perspective, what relations Singapore should develop with mainland China and Taiwan, etc. In doing so, Singapore constantly plays the role of mediator. Singapore is small but smart and is constantly observing other people, and imbedding itself in different contexts in different ways because they always worry, they will be abandoned by others. By way of contrast, big countries always start with themselves, define the rest of the world according to their own vision, opposing this and proclaiming that, getting less smart in the process.

It’s a good question: why I came to understand “enlightenment” in a small place. I think it was because it freed me from the way I used to think, which was through sort of self-serving symbols and formulas. Vani poked fun at me, because she saw through me right away, probably because she had already seen a lot of people like me. She said that I am the type of scholar who sort of drowns in their nations’ self-narrative: China is like this, China is like that. They are always eager to discuss big issues and put the nation before everything else without understanding the facts of the matter. Singapore can’t do that. Its history is relatively short, and does not have a common language or a common culture; it is a country that “probably should not have existed.” Even today, the government keeps reminding its citizens that “our very existence goes against the natural laws of history,” so they have to work hard to stay ahead of history. They can never take anything for granted.

For a lot of ordinary people in Singapore, the government is always doing this and that, which wears everybody out, but Singapore has come to a thorough understanding of what it means to be “marginal,” and they have capitalized on their marginality rather than cursing it. The whole region of Southeast Asia is fascinating. You’ve got these small, relatively weak countries, but people live quite well, so who says there’s no life outside of world centers?

The Importance of Community

Wu Qi: What was your daily life like in Singapore?

Xiang Biao: Edward Said once said something quite interesting, which was that while he was against war, and opposed American military interventions in the Middle East, he really liked the military lifestyle, in which everything in your daily life is taken care of, you don’t have to worry about what you are going to eat, and you can just concentrate on your work. Like in China’s former work-unit system. Singapore was a bit like that when I was there. We lived in a dorm, and life and work were completely integrated. As a post-doc, I had no work pressure, no courses to give, and no administrative tasks, so it was great. All of our conferences were held at nice hotels, and the content of the papers was interesting, so everything went really smoothly.

I think the best way to work is not to plan. If you feel like writing, you write, and if you don’t feel like writing you let it go for a day or two. At the same time, there is an environment that supports you, so that even when you are feeling lazy there are ideas buzzing around, pulling you back in, so that everyone makes progress together. The Asia Research Institute at the time was just this kind of place, with strong intellectual leadership from people like Tony Reid and Prasenjit Duara, together with a bunch of very diligent Singapore scholars, so that everything was very well organized. I think universities should stress equality because there are some people who don’t write particularly well but who do well in class, so there is no need to make everyone write essays. What you need is an ecology, a community. If it is too individualized it won’t work.

Wu Qi: What are the other post-docs and visiting scholars who were there with you doing now?

Xiang Biao: I’m still in touch with them as friends. We plan on collaborating someday, on mobility-related social reproduction and the life economy. The idea behind this topic is that increasing numbers of people are mobile, but not as productive labor, which means working in factories or on plantations. These days people migrate to be domestic helpers, caregivers, students, or because they are sick or are retiring—or they go to have a child. The point of this kind of mobility is to maintain and continue life itself. We want to put all of these types of mobility together and see how the world is changing.

It takes work to build your own little world. It is not a matter of drinking coffee and chatting all day, you need detailed activity plans, goals, and resources—without it getting to be too much. You need both stars and supporting characters, but they have to feel like they are equal, and not in some kind of hierarchy. For all the talk of China’s rise or Asia’s rise, in the global context, if all they are chasing is material production, then they will never “rise” enough to catch up. Because while you are making solar panels, someone else is investing their time in “new lifestyles,” and lifestyles are what make money.

Wu Qi: So, your community held together even after everyone left Singapore and went home?

Xiang Biao: Yes, and it didn’t take hard work, it was natural. The fact that we have common research interests was one strong link. The fact that we are friends is another. A third factor was our differences. We are all different. I like to dream big, while some of us do more detail-oriented work, so we complement one another. Then there are differences in the countries we work in. You need diversity within a group, and diversity needs to be broad. If everyone is working on the same China problem, then what’s to talk about? This can make relationships tense, and produce conflicts in terms of intellectual property or attribution. It’s okay to work on different issues from different perspectives, and sometimes to differ on some fundamental issues. Some people may feel I’m too vague here, and that this can’t work, but it’s something to talk about, and the very “vagueness” might inspire someone, or spark their imagination. In China, the basic problem is that there is not enough diversity. Collaboration based on homogeneity can’t take you very far.

Wu Qi: Maybe this kind of ideal academic community is hard to put together in any given country, and needs to cross a certain number of national, ethnic, or institutional boundaries, and to transcend specific relationships of work and interest before it can come together?

Xiang Biao: Absolutely, which is why the institutionalization of academic research always comes with limitations. To use a botanical metaphor, we need a lot of “rhizome”1 - like networks, with which people can find their partners while working on their own things, giving life to their own academic thought. If everything is institutionalized, it becomes hierarchical, and then you’re done for. A rhizome is a good image to work with, because it is horizontal, open, and intertwined—relations can develop in any direction and ultimately complement and nourish one another.

Wu Qi: You have yourself experienced several different styles and structures of academic organization in Singapore, Hong Kong, Beida, and Oxford. Could you make a comparison?

Xiang Biao: It’s hard to say which is best, because everyone’s experience is different, so the key is who is making the comparison. Oxford could learn something from Singapore, at least in terms of administrative efficiency. Chinese universities could copy Singapore’s unflashy way of building a strong research infrastructure.

1 Translator’s note: A rhizome is “a prostrate or subterranean root-like stem emitting roots and usually producing leaves at its apex; a rootstock” (Oxford English Dictionary). The French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggested that society should be imagined like a rhizome, consisting of horizontal networks that expand in all directions, in contrast to the image of a hierarchical, stable structure. The term has been widely used in social anthropology since the 1980s.

Wu Qi: How do you set priorities when you make a choice? What are your most important standards in judging an academic structure or system?

Xiang Biao: My personal feeling is that the overall environment is the most important: What is it like to work there every day? Who is there to talk to? What basic tasks do you have to accomplish? The consideration has to be concrete, because you can only really feel things that are concrete, both intellectually and psychologically.

Readers will have to draw their own conclusions about whether they can create a space for themselves in their particular workplaces. Building their own rhizome-like environments, with the help of people other than colleagues, maybe the most important thing.

Wu Qi: In our Beijing interview you said that your feelings about the Chinese scholarly community are quite weak. What does it ultimately mean for a scholar to have a community?

Xiang Biao: I think a scholarly community is badly needed. China’s academic community at present is quite weak because scholarship is institutionalized and formulaic. Think about it, if the Education Ministry decided to launch some kind of reform, there would be no way for scholars to come up with a shared opposition to the reform, which means that no meaningful community exists. Of course, there are intellectual dialogues, but the kind of collaboration where one plus one creates more than two does not happen all that often. Last time I said that I have no sense of community, and this is an objective fact, but it should not be. This is precisely why we need to build a community. Communities only exist when you are consciously building them, even those whose raison d’être was there all along, but once they get stagnant, they lose their meaning and become associations or conferences. In the process of building a community, you need to discuss and arrive at shared understandings regarding the current state of social reality, academic research, theory, and methods, after which you can settle on a strategy. China desperately needs this kind of localized, unstructured academic community.

Wu Qi: Would you like to be a part of this process?

Xiang Biao: Yes, because if you don’t participate, you don’t have the sense of community, or that sense is false, merely a symbolic identity. This is even less useful in building a scholarly environment because a lot of real questions get swallowed up in this false symbolism.

Wu Qi: How would you participate, specifically? Have you already started?

Xiang Biao: I’ve just started. One way is that I am hoping to interact more with friends from the art world. Like I just said, a community needs difference, and scholars and artists may be able to build a community because of their differences. They can learn from one another, attract one another, and conflict with one another.

The second is a project we are promoting at the Minzu University of China* and at Beida on doing ethnographic research overseas. This is a huge shortcoming in Chinese anthropology. If we don’t address it, it will affect Chinese social science and China’s national strength, because China’s understanding of the world will be limited to commerce, military affairs, and diplomacy. I would like to build a community here. There is no way to know if we will be able to suggest policies to the government, nor should we worry about it too much; our goal is to create a certain empathy for the world among the Chinese people in general. When Chinese young people go back-packing, how should they view places with which they are unfamiliar? Through observing and understanding other people, they should problematize themselves and redefine social issues on which they hold preconceived notions.

Chinese scholarship in China is in a rut. We’ve got a handle on a lot of the old questions, but do not often come up with new questions, and we explain the old questions the same old way. It might be stimulating to work outside of China. In addition, this could train future diplomats, because if they study abroad, they will learn about different cultures, customs, and habits, and learn to speak the language. They will have been to these places, and will know how to take the bus, and know what the educational system is like; this kind of knowledge can be very important.

Building Your Own Cross-Border Worlds

Wu Qi: “Building your own cross-border worlds” is an interesting expression. Today, young people from all walks of life have this opportunity, and maybe they are engaged in it. How do you think we should build these worlds? What do they ultimately mean?

Xiang Biao: Max Weber said that rationality can be an iron cage, so we all yearn to resist the system through our own little organic, human worlds that get us closer to our reality. As I said before, the more diverse and plural a small community is, the stronger its power of resistance, and it will be all the more organic. If it is transnational, this first means that it will be quite diverse. An important feature of any system is that it is spatially closed, and can be closely linked to the state and bureaucratic structures, which means that this type of system cannot easily be transnational. Transnational should mean that you can’t readily figure out where the borders are. The logic of transnational is that you can break through state and national systems to create an alternative space. This collision of multiple visions can be a powerful stimulus to your thinking.

A little world is not a cozy nest. For scholars, a little world is first a process of construction and next a process of constant agitation. You build it, but then it forces you, stimulates you to think about yourself, to criticize yourself, and constantly breaks down how you used to understand things. The more active and agitated it is, the greater the feeling of security it will give you, because you live to think, and if you have the feeling that you are always thinking, you won’t feel fearful, because your mind is alive. A transnational community gives you more stimulation and a greater sense of security. A meaningful little world necessarily obliges you to constantly doubt yourself, reflect on yourself, change yourself, and surpass yourself, but at the same time, it all happens quite naturally.

Wu Qi: What is the true function of this kind of transnational network for local scholarly output, thought, and practice? Even if it produces rich and beneficial exchanges, can these truly be absorbed locally?

Xiang Biao: In terms of knowledge production, how the local engages with the global without being consumed by the global is indeed a challenge. The anthropologist Anna Tsing (b. 1952) has talked about the evolution of the global knowledge system. For example, in the botanical classification system, the Swedish biologist Linnaeus used Latin to create a global nomenclature, but the foundational knowledge on which this system relies comes from everywhere. African plants were surely originally described in African languages, including their names, uses, and significance, but when the world knowledge system absorbed this information, it used the Latin-based classification system, simply replacing African and Asian specificities. This means that the formation of a global knowledge system equals the elimination of local knowledge. Once the system is complete, if you want to study botany, you have to know Latin. So first, we need to be wary of what we call “international” or “global,” because these are man-made systems, and what is truly global only exists in countless places scattered throughout the world. Beethoven belongs to the world, but he first was European, not African, and not Latino. Why should European music be more “global” than African music? This is a problem.

Second, we have to be clear about what “local” means. When we meet our friends from Uganda and Scotland, we want to understand their “local” experiences and at the same time we want to build commonalities, and at that point, the question of “scale” becomes crucial. The question of scale asks when and how locality becomes trans-local commonality. Where do we start to overlap? In the commonality that we build, what experiences are abstracted, refined, and eliminated? We need to be clear about all of this. Both “global” and “local” are man-made. When you put together a transnational community, this doesn’t mean you are bringing anything extra to the local players, but instead recognizing the rich meanings that the local had all along, and energizing its capacity.

Wu Qi: Might the research you did for Global “Body Shopping” serve as a concrete model for teasing out relations between the local and the global?

Xiang Biao: The point of Global “Body Shopping” was that the global expansion of the economic system is built on these local foundations. It is partly because of its caste system and its marriage system that India provides the human resources that sustain the global system. The global IT economy is of course man-made, so we have to ask who is doing the work behind it? How are they able to do it? Where do the people come from? Why do they do that? You have to look at questions like personality, ethnicity, and training systems. This might be a pretty good example to look at the global system from a local place, trying to see how it was put together step by step.

Wu Qi: How do you view the scholarly framing of “East Asian modernity?” A priori, this would mean seeing China, Japan, and Korea as a whole or as a unit, which does not seem to accord with where you are going.

Xiang Biao: You are right that I am not promoting the idea of an East Asian community. Some people are doing that, and there is nothing wrong with it, but I don’t see the value, because this is not creating an organic community, but rather a label.

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