Wu Qi: Since you published Zhejiang Village and Global “Body Shopping,” the Chinese world hasn’t seen any more books from you, but at the same time we can read any number of specialized articles on theory or methodology. Does this represent some kind of change in your scholarly trajectory?

Xiang Biao: In a certain sense, Singapore marked an endpoint, because I finished my book Global “Body Shopping” there. But from another perspective, Singapore marked the starting point of a new period, when I started to feel like scholarship should be like singing or dancing. After I left Singapore to return to Oxford, I started my project on Northeast China, which meant rebuilding links to China. But I felt like it wasn’t interesting enough just to do another case study, and I needed to go think about something bigger. The topic of my China research at the time was “intermediaries in labor export,” which did not strike me as deep enough.

What allowed me to transition was a series of articles I wrote in Chinese. There was “The World, Scholarship, and the Self,” which in fact was a summing up of various things. Then there was “Looking for a New World—Changes in How Modern and Contemporary China Understand ‘the World,’” in which I was also looking to find my own place. I started doing research and giving talks in China. One talk I gave at Zhongshan University* was “How Ordinary People Understand the State.” They all had to do with discussions of the world, the state, and globalization. These questions were not directly related to my earlier work, but I noticed some of them while doing my earlier research. I learned an important lesson while working on Zhejiang Village. While I and my university friends went there to set up the social work team, trying to help the people in the village to protect and organize themselves, so that their lives outside the state system would be better, they were hoping to establish relations with the state through us at Beida, so as to better fit into the system. Later on, when I was working on international migrant labor, or the activities of intermediaries, or filing petitions, or other questions, I gradually came to have new ideas about this lesson, and wanted to tackle it at a deeper level, but then found that I did not have the theoretical resources. I also realized that these big questions had been addressed historically in many interesting ways, which I knew nothing about. Partly in order to catch up in this regard, with Wang Hui and some other people I started to work on a reader called Debating China. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and I still don’t know when it will be done, but I’m proud of it, and I learned a great deal while doing it.

Had I not experienced this transition, I might not have written my essays on Hong Kong, or on young people, which were of a different style from my previous work. And without those essays, we might not be talking to one another here. In the past, other people may have felt that I was a good scholar, but that I wasn’t someone addressing important public issues. Actually, I like this kind of issue, which is connected to my Beida experience, so when I wrote those essays I felt at ease and happy. Now the challenge is how to deepen my thinking and link everything up with my research agenda. Because these more theoretical things are all over the place and quite ambitious and require a lot of imagination, it is really hard to test them, and you need data from a great many sources. As an individual scholar, there is no way to resolve this in the short term, because once your thinking has extended in many directions, the material you look at is all spread out, too, and any one source may yield any number of conclusions, so you often need more sources to confirm or supplement what you’ve done, all of which means that it is hard to know what step to take next in your research life. I am constantly exploring, and have written many drafts for many projects, which I then set aside. For instance, I signed a book contract for the Northeast China project in 2008, so it’s been ten years and I haven’t been able to finish it. I’m sort of at a loss as to how to improve.

At the same time, I have started writing commentaries as a way of sustaining my thinking. For example, I am now writing a piece on Beijing’s “cleanup” of migrants in 2017, which is hard to do, because I need a lot of information that is not easy to get. Also, because it is topical and I want to get it out on time, and because the process of the cleanup was itself complicated. Writing something with which you are satisfied on this kind of topic is very difficult, it’s scary.

For the past few months, I’ve been working along three lines. One is looking at some specific questions, which are half-scholarly and half-public. I’m writing the preface to the Chinese translation of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which is a commentary and expresses some of my own ideas on the matter. This line of work does not add all that much, it mainly applies what I know already, and is fairly easy to do. The second is to follow up on the question of the migrant population cleanup in Beijing. Since 2001, and especially after the abolition of the forced custody and repatriation system in 2003, policy toward the migrant population became relatively loose, even if there was no basic breakthrough on the question of household registration. So how could there be such a big change at the end of 2017? Was the 2017 cleanup the same as those before 2003? I think they are different, and that what we are seeing now is a new use of power, but it is hard to explain this clearly. This is an issue that I was not prepared for, but once the incident occurred, I felt like someone should take a look at it. The third area is my big topics, such as work on migrant populations and especially on infrastructural power; there is also social reproduction-driven labor migration, because social reproduction has become a driving force in today’s economy; and then there is the issue of religion and ethnicity.

So the first group of projects is quite visible, but they are sideline projects and not really a burden. The second group of projects is important because they represent the work that an intellectual should be doing. The main problem is that I’m having a hard time making progress with the third group of projects. If I didn’t have the second and third group of projects, then the first group would become scattered, and I would start repeating myself. I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I had not foreseen things being quite so difficult.

This is a matter of your basic skill level. By basic skills, I mean the capacity to link big themes with concrete data and push things continually forward. I feel like I still have a lot of work to do on this front. In the past what I did was explain something clearly on the basis of concrete data, or write commentaries on some fuzzy, big issues, but if you really want to integrate everything and produce a truly accurate explanation of a problem, I feel that none of my work has done that yet. I’m currently looking at Western social science research, to see if they have any techniques that lead in this direction. Right now I’m at a loss to know how to cultivate this kind of technique. All of this is related to your individual personality and to what kind of education in the humanities you had. For instance exposure to religion can cultivate a particular kind of temperament and can make you more sensitive to how other people understand life, death, and misfortune. I find that some anthropologists with religious feelings do interesting work because they look at these aspects very carefully.

Wu Qi: Which authors and which books achieved the sort of standard you are talking about?

Xiang Biao: There are a lot of classics in anthropology. The author that influenced me the most was probably Paul Willis. His Learning to Labour has already been translated into Chinese.

Wu Qi: When you talk about difficulties with your transition, it is in fact an example of problematizing individual experience. When you were doing your post-doc at Singapore, you surely did not think about explaining anything on the basis of your individual experience. Is it possible that personal experience can be some kind of bridge, or at least a medium for asking questions when dealing with the need to connect concrete data to larger issues?

Xiang Biao: That’s a great way to put it. In my case, the origin of problematizing my individual experience was dissatisfaction with myself. I felt like I couldn’t achieve any depth no matter what I did, and that it wasn’t interesting. So I started to complain and blamed the system, my parents, and my youth. This began the process of problematizing. The individual experience itself is not all that important, but problematizing individual experience is an important method. We want to understand the world, not ourselves, and the question now is from what angle we should understand the world and understand ourselves. So problematizing our individual experiences is a concrete start in our effort to understand the world. If I am dissatisfied with myself, and take a look at my experience of growing up, I will be looking at my relationship with the world, wondering how other people can see things that I have been unable to, which ultimately brings me increasingly in touch with a concrete world.

Your individual experience is not a natural occurrence, but is part of a certain environment, with its own history, origin, and limitations. Problematizing it does not mean making it into something negative, or getting rid of it, but is instead a better way to embrace it. When I problematized my weak points I came to understand how I got here, and how to live with my limitations. This is the opposite of loving yourself because you are looking outward, objectifying your experience. This is a good psychological exercise, and once you have problematized your individual experience you can be calm. Not that you will have seen through things, quite the opposite—what you understand is that life is complicated and ever-changing. Here’s my place in this world, which often makes me unhappy, but I come to terms with the facts, “accept my fate but do not accept defeat.” Having to struggle is not the problem. Struggle is a part of life, and if I have to choose between struggling and not struggling, I will definitely choose to struggle.

Wu Qi: When we first started this interview, you were worried about talking too much about your individual life, but over the course of our conversation, it looks like you discovered that taking yourself as a subject, or problematizing your individual experience, might indeed be effective.

Xiang Biao: At the outset, I truly had not thought about this, but as we talked it occurred to me that it was a good way to discuss certain questions. Beginning with personal experience, then proceeding to bigger questions, and how to bring the two together, this is problematizing. Experience itself becomes something you need to explain. In the beginning, we were talking more about ideas and how to intervene in society, and I thought that individual experience was just a background factor, but it turns out to be a basic source material of thinking. As to how precisely to problematize it, you need to know a lot of things, like what the educational system was like when you went to primary school, what the social and economic conditions were—you have to have this historical knowledge; you also need some comparative observations about how other classmates did and how they have grown up. So individual experience is an entry point, to which you have to add a fair bit of knowledge to fill it out and reach larger issues. Any style of thinking that gets to the bottom of things is linked and connected to other things. What does “connected” mean? We have said this word many times. “Connect” means to return to practice, because practice is always connected! How do you get back to practice? Practice is so fluid and relentless, and grasping it is not easy. Personal experience is the starting point to start learning to grasp praxis.