Research on Chinese Contemporary Social Life

Back to Life

In July 1985, I finished my postgraduate studies in the History of Marxist Philosophy at Fudan University and continued to teach there as a member of the faculty. I began to think over my own future research. As I reviewed and re-reviewed The German Ideology by Marx and Engels, it became clear to me that so-called theoretical studies can only satisfy one’s personal longing in theory. A setback of pursuing theoretical studies is that as one is being drawn into a theoretical construction, one inadvertently loses sight of one’s own blindness. To get to know China, to understand China, to probe the pulse of the times, and to analyze the essence of the spirit of the times, one must start with the humblest life. That is, one must pay attention to people engaged in practical activity. As Marx and Engels put it, “Where speculation ends—in real life—the real, positive science begins: the representation of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men.” ²

I asked myself where I could launch a study on social life. My hometown sprang to mind.

I was born on the eve of the “liberation” near Qiantang River in northern Zhejiang Province. In 1958, I moved to Shanghai. In early 1969, I returned to my hometown as an “educated youth,” and in October 1978, I left my village to study at Fudan University. Back in my village, I know where each watercourse goes; I know which direction each house faces. I remember every villager’s face and everyone’s voice. I dedicated all the years of my youth to that place. Those days of joy and sorrow, of passion and frustration, of hope and helplessness are forever engraved in my memory. More important, in the difficult days when my mantra was solely “living with a clear conscience and laboring in complete faith,” many village folks gave me the support I needed for life. My stepmother, having taken great pains to walk me through almost 20 years, passed away just before I got the opportunity to do something in return! What could I do to repay her devotion?!

So, on December 2, 1988, I left Shanghai and returned to my village to become once again part of the everyday activities of the peasants. In my journal, I wrote with enthusiasm,

The bus is going fast and in the bus my mind is flying even faster. For almost a decade, I had been sitting in the office, reading and doing research. The void and detachment of pure theories and the call of real life pushed me out of the study and back to the every day. This will be the turning point of my research work and a turning point in my life. How many chances do we have in life to put up a good fight? Now I am 40 years old, worn by a long journey, and ready to read the book of real life.

From then on, I became unstoppable. Taking rural areas in northern Zhejiang as my research base, I have done a lot of work that can be called “contemporary Chinese social studies.” My first research was published in 1995 by Shanghai Far East People’s Publishing House. The title of the book is Social and Cultural Changes in Contemporary Northern Zhejiang Villages, with Mr. Cao Jinqing as its first author, me the second. My monograph Farewell to Ideals—Research on the People’s Commune System was published by the Oriental Publishing Center in 1998 and later reissued by the Shanghai People’s Publishing House. I edited the eight volumes of The Footprints of Contemporary Chinese Peasants, four of which are sourcebooks (two volumes are the work journal of a brigade cadre, and the other two—60 Years of Rural Life—are based on archives of a county-level city). The other four volumes are Building New Orders, Boundary of Orders, Theatrical Society, and Symbiotic Economy. The Zhebei Rural Research Database I administrate, Zhang Letian Lianmin Village Database, provides the most comprehensive research data on rural areas in northern Zhejiang. It has been published by the Social Sciences Academic Press (China).

My Research on the People’s Commune System

“Back to life” is to return to everyday social life, but at the same time not to return to life. Some careful examination reveals that an individual’s “in life” is different from a researcher “in life.” Many behaviors of a person “in life” are usually perceptual, routine, carried out without thinking, impromptu, and irrational. People often pre-reflectively and “naturally” carry out the practice of perceptual consciousness in specific social cultural scenes. To study people “in life” and their social life, a researcher needs to “empty the self,” that is, to suspend the traditional culture, common notions, and ideologies that were previously and unintentionally implanted in the self, and to suspend various theoretical perspectives. With such a “humbled open mind,” one can accommodate heaven and earth, and—between them—humans and their affairs at research sites. This is the preparation for going “back to life,” the efforts of a researcher in cultivating the self as a research tool. “To perfect a job, an artisan must first sharpen one’s tools.” ³

I started my research on the people’s commune system by seeking and collecting historical material.

I returned to my hometown, Lianmin village, Haining City in Zhejiang Province, to do participatory observation. Everything was familiar. I acted as an ordinary villager—as swimming with the stream, saying hello when greetings were called for, giving gifts when gifts were expected. Everything seemed a bit strange and the feeling of strangeness led me to many unintended discoveries. In an ordinary funeral, I was surprised to notice that the ritual was extremely similar to my uncle’s funeral, which I had been directly involved in 1970. And the cultural elements contained in the funeral were very similar to those practiced hundreds of years ago!

I conducted a lot of interviews in the village. Every interview triggered memories of my previous life experience in the village. Sometimes an interview turned into my sharing common experiences with an interviewee and became collective memories for interpreting communities in the rural society. When I tried to focus my interviews and recollections on living conditions, on everyday life, the obscuration of ideology gradually dissolved and vivid life scenes came into sight. I saw more of a dynamic, three-dimensional rural society. The recollections of some elderly women and men who had outlived the worldly vanity and illusions enlightened me in a particular way, inspiring me to put forward the concept of “theatrical society.” When Mr. Xiwen Chen read the first draft of my book, he noticed the skillfulness I demonstrated in gathering social life resources while engaging in observation and interviews. He wrote in the preface to the book, “as the son of an ordinary peasant of Lianmin Village, he had his own unique experience of the local customs and sensibilities. From village folks’ everyday casual conversations, he was able to draw a lot of clues and information that are of great value for academic research”.

It is hard to forget how I initially came to collect the social life resources.

As I carried out my work, I was amazed at the richness of the existing social life resources and alarmed at how rapidly they were disappearing and being destroyed. I set out to “rescue resources.” The material I managed to collect from Lianmin Village and the surrounding areas is unsurpassable in terms of its richness, comprehensiveness, details, and scale. Due to the meticulousness and dedication of Mr. Weiqing Jia, and the persistence and close attention of Mr. Shaoxiang Hu, two former village accountants, every shred of paper from the Land Reform to the early 1980s was preserved—many happenings were written down on pieces of cigarette packaging or irregular-shaped paper slips. Mr. Hengkang Zhou, former deputy secretary of the Lianmin Village CPC Branch, presented me with more than 60 work notebooks, dating from 1954 to 1982, which contain over 10 years of records with daily entries. In the attic of Mr. Yilong Zou, a former accountant of Hongmin Production Team, Lianmin Village, I got all the records kept by the team of accountants, treasurers, and timekeepers, including over 40 peasant families’ pig raising records over 20 years, all monthly work-point postings, and so on. To better understand the village data, I also collected a large amount of other relevant material, including accounting and statistical data of Yanguan Town where Lianmin Village is located, that is, data from the town supply and marketing cooperative, the hemp station, the silkworm station, the food company, chronicles of various townships and systems in Haining County, and so on.

Village social life resources are rich, complicated, and full of details. How can one tease out historical logic in them and find key concepts to make sense of the times? Over 20 years ago I came up with the research perspective of the interplay between “external forces and internal/village tradition.” I eventually came to illustrate how the clash, conflict, integration, transformation, and dynamic between the two forces produced the “living transcript” of rural life, and shaped “the direction of the evolutionary history of rural areas. In Farewell to Ideals, I fully describe my research perspective of interaction between “internal and external forces.” The so-called “internal forces” refer to any “endogenous” attributes a research object may have. They relate to long-term history and continuous tradition. “Internal forces” in the context of rural studies are the village traditions that peasants were born into and grew up with. During the period of the people’s commune, undoubtedly, the “internal forces” still strongly shaped the everyday behaviors of the peasants. The so-called “external forces” refer to any external factors that affect a research object, including state power and ideology, as well as globalization and market economy entering into China after its reform and opening up to the outside world. Social life has always been played out through a variety of interactions. Stories like Robinson Crusoe exist only in a world of fantasies and imaginations. Therefore, I am convinced that “interaction between internal and external forces” can be applied to any research on microscopic objects.

Interpreting social life data from this perspective requires me, the researcher, to place any individual detail in the macroscopic whole and place all time points in a historical process. Consequently, on one hand, I am able to understand the implication of a detail more accurately in the macroscopic whole, and also have the opportunity to examine the whole through microscopic details. On the other hand, I am also able to see the “flowing water at the origin of the spring” in its seemingly still “presentation” of the here and now and thus grasp the logic in historical evolution. Therefore, by reading and interpreting the social life data of Lianmin Village, I came to understand the evolutionary process of the people’s communes and clearly saw the “endogenous dilemma of the people’s commune system.”

I believe the key concept for understanding China’s rural economy during the Mao era is “system” [introduced and commanded by the state]. After its initial introduction, the system of agricultural collectivism became embedded in China’s vast traditional rural areas and profoundly affected the lives of hundreds of millions of peasants and limited the path of China’s rural economic development. This lead to a process of historical evolution, which originated from The Land Reform and ended with market reforms and opening up [in the 1970s].

The Land Reform overthrew the landlord class and abolished feudal land ownership without changing the private ownership of small peasants. At that time China’s countryside was at a crossroads as to whether to retain or abolish private ownership. The state chose the latter—to bring about the collective ownership of land by gradually promoting agricultural cooperation.

In the process of agricultural collectivization, the state, as an external force, touched village society from all sides. The interaction between the state and village tradition was mind-boggling and full of enigmas. While the collectivization movement advanced, paradoxically, selfish peasants seemed to become more selfless and progressive. Agricultural collectivization started with mutual aid groups, and proceeded to entry-level agricultural cooperatives. In 1956, most of the country’s rural areas established advanced-level agricultural cooperatives with collective land ownership as the major hallmark. At that point, the state’s forceful political intervention did not go beyond the bottom line of traditional village production and social life, so rural areas maintained basic stability. In many areas, agricultural production started to grow. In 1958 the “Great People’s Commune” was established. The implementation of the system shattered traditional villages, seriously damaged peasants’ families, and caused countless individual peasants to behave inconsistently with social norms. When a majority of peasants embraced the idea “let’s party now when there’s wine, tomorrow life might not be mine,” sooner or later, poor harvests and starvation would certainly follow. In those few years, countless miserable microscopic stories, in the aggregate, formed huge pressure to push the state to make concessions to the traditional villages. So, in the beginning of 1962, all rural areas in the entire country established the people’s commune system with “three levels of ownership of the means of production, with ownership by the production team as the basic form.”

With “three levels of ownership of the means of production, with ownership by the production team as the basic form,” the basic accounting unit was set in a natural space like a traditional natural village or quasi-natural village, [as opposed to “administrative village” in the Chinese system of administrative division.] Therefore, at the level of natural villages, the commune system is consistent with tradition. It is this consistency that gave the rural areas 20 years of stability. In the coastal areas of the southeastern China, agricultural production even unprecedentedly increased. However, at the individual and family level, the commune system seriously deviated from the traditional values of the peasants by not allowing individuals and households to become better off, and not allowing individuals to leave the land, and so on. Thus, peasants in communes had to “resist” in their own ways: “we saw small peasants slack in collective work of production teams, we also saw small peasants secretly leaving the team to make money in rural markets”. Every moment, small peasants eroded the body of the collective system of communes, in which [as Mao repeatedly emphasized], class struggle must “be emphasized every year, every month, and every day.” The people’s commune system operated in a predicament full of contradictions and conflicts, and was maintained by political coercion. However, “it is impossible to maintain a society by coercion for a long period of time. When the revolutionary tides fell, the coercion related to revolutionary purification weakened with every passing day, and the survival crisis of the commune emerged”.

In the early 1980s, the people’s commune system, as a collective organization of agricultural production, management, and distribution, came to an end. Even its name disappeared in the trend of reform and opening up. Yet the series of organizations, systems, and cultures that had developed during the people’s commune period did not disintegrate, but rather became the “Chinese-style starting point” for reform and opening up. In vast rural areas, it is exactly this special “Chinese-style starting point,” forged by the people’s communes, that has structured the “path” of economic, political, and social development in the post-commune era, and has created socialism with Chinese characteristics. For example, the power system of the Party and the government—structured “horizontally to the edge, vertically to the bottom”—was forged in the era of the people’s commune. They have paved ways for reform and opening up and have provided China with more opportunities than any other countries to assemble “concentrated resources to accomplish major undertakings.” Under the leadership of the Party, collective land ownership has provided rare possibilities for great advancement. For example, the rapid extension of roads and railways, the incredible expansion of cities, and the bustling construction sites of development zones across the country. All of them are in one way or another related to the collective land ownership! Therefore, without the knowledge of the people’s commune, one cannot accurately understand China’s reform and opening up.

Exploring the Contemporary Chinese Social Life

In 2011, I founded the Contemporary Chinese Social Life Data Center at Fudan Developmental Research Institute at Fudan University in Shanghai. I intended to collect materials that would allow researchers to gain a deeper understanding about Chinese social life. Over the years, the Center has collected two unique types of materials: (a) a total of more than half a million copies of personal letters between friends, couples, and among family members and (b) collections of personal diaries and meeting minutes, working memos, and historical documents of enterprises, youth leagues, and labor unions spanning across five decades. In the following, I first describe the nature of the collections. I then focus on why these materials are invaluable.

When the Center was first established, I set out to collect social life data scattered all over the country by establishing extended networks and local contacts to purchase “hand-written texts in the general population.” I concentrated on hand-written rather than printed texts because they are unique, one-of-a-kind. At the beginning, I payed particular attention to what types of materials came in. To my surprise, in the few batches purchased separately at different times, I found corresponding letters between two cadres of a central government ministry in Beijing, dated between 1961 and 1987! I had never expected that I would come across special historical data like personal letters, let alone a few hundreds of them between married couples lying unsorted in front of me on the table. Without delay, I started to read them against the clock and quickly recognized the special value of these letters as historical data. With this in mind, I began to instruct my local contacts to look for this type of letter as their top priority.

The initial discovery and decision helped position the Center’s collection. To date, the Center has collected more than half a million letters. The number is still growing each year. Thanks to our purchasing network, we collect and organize letters based on the recipients, who were located in the city of Shanghai, Jiangsu Province, Anhui Province, Jiangxi Province, and so on. Authors of these letters lived all over the country; after the reform and opening up, even in Hong Kong, Macao, and other parts of the world. The time of writing spans half a century, between 1950 and 2000, with most between 1970 and 1990. In a nutshell, letters gathered by our Center have the followings characteristics.

First, letters came in a relatively concentrated manner. After 1949, a series of factors such as the literacy movement and the household registration system massively stimulated letter writing. ⁴ However, each letter was just a few thin sheets of paper and could easily get lost. Only a minority of people would carefully keep their letters. By accident, the letters might find their way out of the house and eventually got into our hands. It is this series of accidents that constitutes the “relatively concentrated manner” of letters collected by the Center. That is to say, these letters were not scattered and disarranged, but rather concentrated in the hands of the recipients. We did the statistics. The 53,581 scanned letters involve 516 recipients, that is, 84 letters per recipient on average. Among all the recipients, a married couple in Shanghai received the largest number of letters. Sweethearts from a young age, the man was sent to Anhui to work in a production team in 1971, the woman as a waitress at the Broadway Mansions in Shanghai. Their correspondence started then and lasted for more than 20 years. It amounted to 789 letters and exceeded 800,000 Chinese characters.

Second, letters are rich in content. Content of the letters include national events, incidents at the work units, and above all else, domestic and neighborhood details. The letters drew vivid pictures of everyday life. The rich nature [of the information] is associated with an era when people wrote a lot of letters and with the ways in which the letters were retained. In the mid- and late 20th century, correspondence was the only means for people living in two different places to exchange information. Therefore, one sometimes had to describe an event in detail in order for the recipient to know its entire process with causes and effects. People sometimes needed to try their best to articulate their thoughts so that the recipients could learn about the authors. Situations like these made many surviving letters rich in content. Yet only a small number of people kept letters because they realized that those letters contained valuable information. In fact, some people who kept letters preferred to write long letters themselves. ⁵ A large number of letters were probably simple, with only a few short sentences in them. Others preserved rich contents.

Third, letters carry emotions and morals. Compared with data such as other types of documents or interviews, an important characteristic of letters is the mental realm presented in letters, including emotions and morals, as well as values. General speaking, emotions are mental experiences that arise in an individual human being in particular social situations and human interactions. When being released and expressed, they could be strengthened, purified, or transformed and turned into various aesthetic sensibilities. In many circumstances, the interaction between family members constitutes a social space within which to share emotions. When geographical distance turns social space into a hindrance to communication, and people lack alternative means to exchange information, letters become the best means for communicating emotions and feelings. We have noticed that communicating emotions and feelings in letters differs significantly from communicating emotions and feelings face-to-face in daily life. The latter is instant: the person expressing emotions has no time to think, which may lead to fragmented expressions. The former is delayed: the letter writer has the opportunity to ponder on and evaluate his or her own emotions and feelings in order to convey them in a more proper manner. ⁶ Furthermore, the depth of emotional communication varies in accordance with the intensity of emotions and feelings the two parties have toward each other. Thus, the wording of emotional communication also allows us to easily tell how close the parties are. More interestingly, the urge to express emotions drives people to search for the most novel and beautiful—or the most vicious—words, and helps people overcome the exhaustion after everyday chores so they can write a few more lines. Because of this urge [to communicate], we are lucky to have letters rich in content to read and to read accounts from ordinary individual Chinese people who were full of emotions and feelings.

Furthermore, correspondence between acquaintances contain many details of domestic and neighborhood trivia, through which we can see rich moral expressions, including parents’ moral preaching at children, children’s implicit self-justification in their narratives, married couples’ endless “battle of words” caused by different moral precepts, and so on. When we read the letters, we noticed that, in order to profess one’s moral righteousness, some people would repeatedly describe one event, or tell the same story, even through such repetition makes the wording of the letters cumbersome and full of redundancies.

Fourth, letters convey values: individual, collective, and national identity. While emotions and morals are often expressed in communication between two correspondents, values are conveyed in the author’s own words on what kind of person he or she wants to be [perceived]. Values involve personal views on relationships between oneself and the external world, especially those between oneself and the collective, or the nation. Therefore, values are associated with subjectivity and self-identification, also with an individual’s identification with the collective and the nation. In letters from the Mao era, we can often hear militant and lofty utterances of “individual heroism,” and self-claimed national identities. Letters bear clear hallmarks of a time and thus become sources that help us understand the era.

The above-mentioned characteristics turn letters into important data for academic studies of contemporary Chinese people and the society. They are irreplaceable and of superior value in at least three major fields of humanities and social science research. First, letters carry incredible details of Chinese people’s life, work, and interactions, and give us the opportunity to see a multi-dimensional, diverse, complex, and fluid China, and countless vigorous, witty, resilient, diligent, sensitive Chinese people. This helps to counter ideology and stereotypes and generate a new overall impression of China and Chinese people. Second, letters contain a large number of texts that involve emotions and mental experiences. These texts are characterized by emotions such as joy, anger, sorrow, pleasure, anxiety, fear, like, and dislike, and also by individual attitudes such as acceptance, tolerance, attention, worry, attachment, care, envy, and especially our hope. These emotional imprints reveal people’s specific behavioral orientations. The behavioral orientation of the majority of people in turn affects the direction of history. Thus, descriptions of the mind help us grasp the trajectory of history. Third, letters open up the space of discourse for the general population, which is different from the space of the official discourse, offering us a chance to find the historical tendencies that were “never thought of” and “different from the mainstream,” thereby helping us more accurately discern the overall, evolutionary logic of contemporary China.

Of course, treating personal letters as data also poses many difficult questions for researchers. First, correspondence is personal expression. Every individual in the world is unique. Every letter written by an individual at a specific time, in a specific place, in a specific setting, is always the piece. Then questions arise. First, how is it possible for us to understand those personal writings? And how is it possible to derive meanings of academic value from specific and personal correspondence? Second, correspondence as data is fragmented. Letters are usually communications between two people who know each other well. The prerequisite for such communication is the common knowledge, experiences, and course of life shared by two parties. Therefore, while writing a letter, the author may leave out a lot of shared information and write just enough for the other to understand. But as an outsider, a reader will find the story incomplete. At the same time, the limited time allowed for writing a letter, the limited space in a letter, and the innate difficulties in verbal expression, and so on lead to fragmented contents. Third, letter contents are hard to verify. Letters almost always contain details about daily life that happened decades ago. As time has gone by, the world has changed drastically. How can we verify those trivial matters that happened in the distant past?

These shortcomings of letters force us to think about the possibility of using this special type of social life source as historical data and ways of using them. Here, I propose four research strategies.

First, making sense of the letters. ⁷ To use letters as historical data, we first need to make sense of them. As time has flown by, the world has changed drastically without our noticing it. What does it take to make sense of private correspondence between two common people a few decades ago? The majority of common people simply disappeared in the constant flow of events that happened in history, without leaving an image, a voice, or even a trace behind. It is impossible for us to talk to them directly. What can we do? Previously in this article I proposed the “perspective of interactions between internal and external forces” in studies of contemporary Chinese social life. This perspective is also useful for us to interpret letters. Here, I further propose the “embedded integrated reading” method, which requires a reader to place the letter in the social and cultural context in which it was created. A letter is the inner expression of the author, yet always in one way or another affected by the external. The external environment as a whole not only made the letter possible but also infiltrated into the contents of the letter from all sides. Here, the whole is a multi-layered concept. The whole at the highest level refers to the era and the nation. For instance, in order to make sense of a letter written in the 1950s, knowing the situation in China at the time would be an important prerequisite. The next level would be the region and the population. For instance, if the author of a letter is a worker in Beijing then relevant knowledge of Beijing and its working population will help us make sense of the contents of the letter. The lowest contextual level is the small environment of the author, including family and work unit, and so on. Families, work units, and so on are themselves often talked about directly in letters so if we manage to learn about the family and work unit by other means (other related letters, for instance), we are likely to develop a better sense about the letter’s contents.

Second, using letters as sources for case studies. Letters are personal, often centered on families, and thus rather unique. Is it possible to draw any theoretical abstraction from the conspicuous particularity of the letters? The answer is “yes.” It is true that no two leaves in the world are exactly identical but each particular leaf has something in common with any other leaves. One can therefore extend the same logic to understand the relationship between the particularity and universality. While particularity and universality differ from each other, universality also resides in particularity and particularity reflects universality. In fact, everything in the world exists in a particular way. Human intelligence always strives to discover universality in a particular being in order to better understand and construct the order of the world. From the perspective of particularity and universality, although every set of letters is unique in itself, it also holds latent attributes of universality. Of course, to use letters for case studies to reveal sociopolitical patterns at the macro level, we need a large number of letters in the set so that the set can capture the personal and/or family history of the correspondence.

As primary data, personal letters offer unique, incomparable details of social life for in-depth research. The mental world of the Chinese people presented in letters is so peculiar and delicate that it always draws on researchers to solve the riddles. At the same time, correspondence offers us the possibility to gain insights into marginalized groups in the society. For instance, in the Mao era, landowners, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, and the so-called bad elements and rightists (the five groups of people’s enemy) were subject to the dictatorship of the proletariat. They were socially marginalized groups who had been discriminated against for a long time. Apart from the phantoms created by ideology, one knows very little about their real situation. We obtained a few sets of correspondence between members of the five groups of families and gained valuable insights about their thoughts and actions.

Of course, when using letters for case studies, we must always be careful not to mistake the particular as the universal. In order to enhance the reliability, I propose to compare and contrast several sets of letters, either complementing or reading against each other.

Third, how to use letters as naturally selected sample. From the mid-20th century to 2000, thanks to the rising level of education, political movements, and the household registry policy, people in China communicated by letters much more frequently and the number of letters vastly grew. Letters are not easy to keep so most of them just disappeared without us noticing it. Only a small portion of personal letters were collected by us and stored at our Center. Each set of letters perhaps has an amazing story to tell, yet the wonderful plots have long been entirely washed away by the flow of time. These letters were not chosen by researchers based on certain rules but rather the natural result of the interaction of multiple factors. We can take this process as natural selection and therefore propose the concept of a naturally selected sample.

After 8 years of hard work, the Center has collected more than 500,000 personal letters. If each set of letters or even each letter can be classified into certain categories in one way or another, then as the number of letters continues to grow, we find that the number of letters in different categories also keeps growing. An interesting thing has taken place. Letters can be used as sample survey to increase our knowledge of certain “category” (“population” in quantitative research). Furthermore, letters also help us learn about certain historical periods and certain major historical events. For instance, we selected some letters written in 1984 to transcribe. The transcript has exceeded 500,000 Chinese characters, offering us an opportunity to observe and feel the outpourings of social forces in the general population at the critical moment of China’s reform and opening up. They also enable us to grasp the characteristics of grassroots forces as we reflect on the historical trend in China’s reform and opening up.

Fourth, conducting fieldwork to situate and complement the letter as research materials. I have begun to use fieldwork to complement the letters as research materials. First, I work hard to closely read the letters in order to make sense of their content and establish the initial research topic. Based on the themes determined by the letter-based study, I then adopt two research strategies: corroborative fieldwork and comparative fieldwork.

Corroborative fieldwork refers to investigating the same population as the author and recipient of the letters in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the social life conditions of the population related the correspondence, or in order to have a clearer view of an event or a period. For instance, in a 2015 undergraduate seminar on “Chinese people in letters” at Fudan University, I asked the students, who were born after 1995, to read letters written by university students in the early and mid-1980s. Authors of these letters happened to be the generation of my students’ parents. In order to make better sense of the letters, I asked students to interview people of their parents’ generation and had good results. Students partially overcame the fragmentation of the letter contents, validated the stories in the letters, and gained a chance to empathize with and think about their parents’ life journeys and the social environments they had lived in. ⁸

Comparative fieldwork refers to investigating another population, event, or period that is different but can contrast with that of the author and recipient of the letters in order to make better sense of the letter contents and draw reasonable abstractions. Comparative fieldwork can provide a comparative perspective that helps a researcher put a better interpretation on the material. Let’s again take the 2015 seminar on Chinese people in letters as an example. A student read letters written by students in the late 1980s and noticed the “craze of going abroad” of the time. He compared it with the current “studying abroad” trend in China and managed to distinguish the two crazes: the late 1980s saw an “idealistic” craze, while the 2010s a “realistic” one.

Conclusion

I consider these social life data valuable in three ways for the study of contemporary China. The first is “to unveil.” There are many layers of obscuration in understanding contemporary China. In general, there are two major ones. One is ideologies inside China, whether it is the ideology of class struggle of the Mao era or the state ideology since the opening up to the present. They form a veil that interferes with our vision of the real living conditions in China and of the historical process after the Liberation. In addition, there was no way to learn from the West when we resumed the college entrance examination and re-established various disciplines in 1977, after the policy of reform and opening up came out. So even today, all our humanities look a bit different. Regardless, all the basic theories in social science I know came from abroad, from the West. We are more and more aware that, from the perspective of Western theories, including those classic perceptions of China, they have become the mainstream understanding of China. But it has become clearer to us, especially after the reform and opening up, that Western theories originate from Western experiences. Chinese development is so different from that of the West that we need to bring out the moral of Chinese development from Chinese stories. To achieve this, we need to first unveil, to get rid of the patterns of Western theories, perspectives, and views. Otherwise, it is impossible to understand Chinese society through its own lenses. In reality, no matter how well China has developed, in terms of economy, quality of life, and all other aspects, if there is no refined, accurate theory to tell people about the morals of the developments, the good fortune it brings to people, and benefits it entails for better life, China will be put at risk. The current situation is that no matter how well you develop, others always insist that you don’t. This is in fact the current situation. Shanghai is indeed good. It is much better than Toronto. But many people say, “Really? After all Toronto is still better.” Because you didn’t put forward the moral of your story. The existing moral is connected to democracy; at the end this is the standard. That is why I say we are a particular case: how to unveil and how to synthesize a set of discourse from Chinese social practice is a challenge. This is my first point: to unveil. The second point is “to notice,” which comes together with “to unveil.” Only when we remove the stained eyeglasses, can we notice the true living conditions of Chinese people and the real relationships among them. We can only talk about “to unveil” and “to notice” in relative terms. Every one of us is under the influence of state ideologies and Western ideologies. Let’s not use the word “brainwash.” Let’s talk about “remove.” But it is easier to talk about it than being able to do it. To tell what truth is, you must have something already in your mind. I am only suggesting that if we are conscious about it, maybe we can do better. Without it, I have to say we will definitely fail. We may do better if we are aware of it. This is my second point. The third point is “to resolve.” In more than half a century, China has walked on a special path of economic and social development. It takes our enduring hard work to understand the Chinese path, to synthesize the Chinese experience. In a sense, this is my attempt to look for resolutions, with the reader, to better interpret the Chinese story and to tell it in a clearer fashion.