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.

It takes work to build your own little world. It is not a matter of drinking 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. This is why 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. Why is social reproduction becoming more important than material production? Is it telling us that there is a new global political economy emerging through migration? The importance of material production is declining while that of social reproduction is on the rise. How many cars, or shoes, a country produces will not earn it much money, and are worth less than good universities, good medical technology, and a good environment for retirement. “Social reproduction” has now become an important source of wealth accumulation and value. 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”Footnote 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.

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, 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.