Abstract
As one of the few books that catch public attention with academic concern in China, Self as Method is a recording of three interviews by Xiang Biao, a former Oxford professor and current director at Mark Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, and Wu Qi, a Chinese media professional. According to Xiang, the world is not properly explained through academic catechisms, but through involvement in and experience of genuine social life. Self, just like qualitative or quantitative method, is an analytical tool with which we understand and interpret the world, only as an internal one, not external. Through problematizing personal experience, we get to better know the self, the world, and the connections in between. Broadly speaking, research objectives should be placed under their social context rather than abstract ideas. This holds true for both social scientists and the general public. While not a paradigm-shifting insight, this understanding is a useful truism for postgraduates to keep in mind: what you study is beyond these walls. Experience it, and write down what you find.
Besides being a reminder for postgraduates to orient themselves outward and away from the academy, Self as Method comments on broad issues in Chinese society and beyond: youth depression, the intellectual milieu, nationalism, and populism in the present world. The center-margin structure is investigated, and the culture craze of the 1980s is insightfully treated. Xiang locates social issues on China’s historical thread and social network to which it is attached through experience and details. Each chapter is a mix of multi-dimensional dialogues and interviews, and resists easy summarization. These interviews were conducted over March, August, and December of 2018, in Beijing, Oxford, and Wenzhou, respectively. Topically, the first interview treats Xiang’s growth in Wenzhou, his study and field survey at Peking University (published as Zhejiang Village); the second interview focuses on his study and research at Oxford (published as the award-winning book, Global ‘Body Shopping’) and Singapore; the third introduces his latest and ongoing research. Both the original Chinese and English translations are written in lucid prose. The English translation includes a significant amount of contextual information, added by the translator for the reader’s benefit.
Xiang contributes a new participant in the long-existing paradigm debate in Chinese intelligentsia, with the book’s emphasis on experience and context. He suggests that Chinese scholars return to social practice and focus their attention on the social context in research, proposing a clear opposition to the intellectual distance and objectification that has been mainstream since the May Fourth Movement in 1919. As criticized in this book, this mainstream privileges sophistication and uses vocabulary that implies grand narratives, such as justice, freedom, or democracy. This focus on grand narratives by academics associated with the New Enlightenment Movement of the 1980s is criticized by Xiang.
In the book, Xiang puts forward an ideal mode of conduct for the academic community in the guise of a mainstay of Chinese rural life: gentry. Akin to the Confucian elites of Chinese history, the gentry are committed to being involved in the local community, understanding, explaining, and dealing with local practice. By sharing the wide connection with social production, Xiang’s gentry are like Gramsci’s organic intellectuals (Gramsci, 2011). Xiang’s gentry are depicted as possessing a concern with experience, material, and observation. With these concerns paramount, rational and open dialogs can occur.
There is a strong sense of communitarianism inside Xiang’s concept of gentry, which surmount center-margin structure arisen since the early twentieth century. The gentry are not a pioneer, like communist party member, but an organic part of local life, reflective of the local situation with an inner coherent, localized narrative, and an organized link to the community. They keep a distance from the larger system (primarily the state) while still maintaining communication and a link to it. To the gentry, a sense of meaning is defined by the small world around.
It offers a viable avenue not only to academia but also to public debate and engagement in China. While gentry no longer exist as the propertied class they once were, Xiang believes that a revival of gentry can occur in a shift of perspective available to anyone. This is the root of the Self as Method. The gentry’s stand is diametrically opposed to the enlightenment-style intellectuals, who treat Chinese society as an object of their idealistic, sometimes radical, principles. As we know, factional debate has been a rule, not an exception, of Chinese intellectual culture ever since the late Qing Dynasty. On both sides of any debate, what matters is generally not the objective knowledge of practice and context, but the stance and the abstracted idea, leading to power conflicts rather than consensus in shared observation. These intellectuals, liberal or Leninist, believe in holding the “truth” in hand, and take the mass as an innocent group of people to be educated, to be led. With his apparent inclination toward British positivism rather than French public intellectual tradition, Xiang’s idealized gentry are a redefining of politics and the public sphere in China, especially after the fierce ideological competition in twentieth-century China.
Not surprisingly, Self as Method retains a wide popular audience, having received more than 25,000 comments on Douban.com, the main online platform for sharing and commenting on books, movies, and art in China. As an example of public sociology, it has an average score of 8.4 (out of 10). Douban.com has named it the most influential book of 2020. The book has reportedly sold more than 175,000 copies, and in 2021, around 100,000 people participated in an online celebration of the 1-year anniversary of the book’s publication (p. 3). In the context of such success, both liberals and the new left suffer from state pressure, and even simple public discussion (including online) becomes exceedingly difficult. Under this increased scrutiny, most intellectuals opt for a technical, research paradigm removed from public engagement. Many others become propagandists. Xiang’s contribution is in offering an alternative through Self as Method for academics to engage publicly without utilizing grand narratives and terms that are anathema to the state.
The reader may be disappointed by Xiang’s book if they are searching for systematic arguments or a complete ideological framework. Both the dialectical nature of the work and the occupation of the interviewer as a media professional, rather than as a scholar, preclude any exhaustive treatment of research or philosophies. Social theory and literature discussion is (maybe intentionally) averted. The chief purpose of the work seems to be public engagement, and not scholastic investigation. This is in line with Xiang’s personal biases toward clarity, and away from jargon and obscurity.
Compared to Xiang’s other work, such as Zhejiang Village and Global ‘Body Shopping’, Self as Method has not attracted much academic discussion. While it holds popular attention, only one academic article has attempted to engage with Xiang’s ideas two years after its publication. However, it may still serve to erode some of the habits that Chinese academia has built. One can only hope that postgraduate dissertations in which social practice and detail are sacrificed for grand narratives and theory will be a relic of the past. That is why it will find a position in the reading list for my postgraduates.