Wu Qi: Maybe this is the time to talk a little bit more about the obstacles you ran into. We’ve already mentioned it several times, but every time, we were talking about something else, so we didn’t follow it up. It seems to have been a fairly serious crisis, which had an impact on many choices you made in your work and your personal life. So what actually happened? How did it affect your work?

Xiang Biao: It was basically writer’s block. I had been working on a topic for years but was never satisfied with what I wrote, and because I didn’t have really deep thoughts about it, I couldn’t find my own voice, so it got tiresome. So I sort of went back and forth, trying various frameworks and theories, and wound up working myself into a painful state, but I had invested so much energy into it that I couldn’t drop it either. It was the same for other things I was trying to write. I could never get anything to flow and everything seemed a little forced, which is the concrete way I experienced the crisis.

I tried to get past it, and started to write in Chinese, in many instances addressing whatever was going on at the time—Hong Kong, the Educated Youth question. I also started doing some interviews, like one with the non-fiction writer Guo Yujie*, without giving it much thought, but once I had done it I got emails from some former classmates, and it seemed like lots of people had read the interview. So I discovered that a lot of young people on the web sympathized with me, or that I had inspired them. All of this made me happy, and I rediscovered my capacity to feel. This was extremely valuable to me because it was exactly what I had been struggling with, the fact that I couldn’t find the meaning I was looking for, and that what I was saying didn’t resonate with anyone. Writing in English, it is hard to have that kind of connection with people. So I am very grateful for my experiences with Chinese media at the time. It gave me a certain self-confidence, a feeling that what I was thinking and writing about still had a certain value.

Wu Qi: What were you working on when this happened?

Xiang Biao: The project on Northeast China, dealing with labor outmigration. An important part of the problem was that I was hoping to make that study into a really good academic project. But what does “good” mean? According to whose standards? Not the standards of the people of Northeast China, and not my personal standards as a Wenzhou person, but rather the standards of professional Western academic specialists. But that is not my strong point, to keep that goal in my head while doing my work, so I wound up not really immersing myself in those people’s lives and stayed a bit too much on the surface. I came up with various theories and commentaries, and it was all quite professional but it was not that meaningful. I set aside my original gentry style and decided to seek recognition. Why did I want recognition? Because I didn’t have my own little world in a grounded way.

Wu Qi: In a certain sense Global “Body Shopping” is also in the Western academic style, so why did you not have a similar crisis while working on that topic?

Xiang Biao: When I was working on Global “Body Shopping” I also struggled for a long time. This was because I had chosen an academic question, which ultimately seemed somewhat artificial, concerning what constitutes the so-called “diaspora self-consciousness.” I was doing all of this in Australia, and it did not come out well. But while I was working on it I discovered the “body shopping” practice, which inspired me. When I started my project on Northeast China, I had more on my mind, and frameworks started to multiply, but I spent relatively little time there and did not develop enough familiarity with the research materials, so I lacked confidence.

Wu Qi: So what you are always hoping for is to get back to the situation like when you studied Zhejiang Village?

Xiang Biao: That’s right. I really enjoyed that situation, but even as I say that, I doubt myself, because I may not be able to do it again. But let’s go ahead and say it like that, and maybe others can learn from it. I have a desire to return to my gentry perspective. I feel like that out of everything I’ve written, the only parts that were really alive, forceful, and interesting were when I described how people in Zhejiang Village behaved and thought. My comments were more or less just gravy. If I hadn’t been immersed in their lives then I would have been just spouting hot air, and everything real in that book came from the masses, and that’s the truth of the matter. But you need a lot of self-confidence to work this way, and the ability to concentrate as well because it takes a lot of time and it might well be that no one will notice.

Wu Qi: While we’re on the topic of recognition, from Chinese people’s perspective, your book came out and you started teaching at Oxford, which is its own type of recognition, to say nothing of the fact Western recognition is often seen by Chinese people as a higher form of recognition. This seems not to have calmed your anxieties, so what effect did all that have?

Xiang Biao: That’s hard to say. The anxieties I have now have to do with my position at Oxford. If I weren’t at Oxford, I would be at a less famous school worrying about tenure, or maybe I wouldn’t be anxious at all. So you’re right. My position did not allow me to get past my anxieties, but we can turn things around and say that it was because I have this position that I could have such worries. In this sense, I am very grateful to Oxford.

Oxford did help me to realize what my anxieties were about. I experienced some “culture shocks” there. When I first arrived at Oxford, I had to write up a research plan, and my first draft shocked my supervisor. He told me that it was an absolutely infeasible plan, and asked me why I would write it like that. I went back and read other people’s plans, and it was my turn to be shocked, because they were all straightforward and simple, as if they were discussing things with their parents. This strategy is much better than the kind of soaring, formal thing I had written. When we write reports in China, it’s like we have to position ourselves above everyday life, we are pretentious and formal, divorced from life, as if it is not normal to include everyday life activities. Later on, I had to evaluate other people’s applications, and there was one that left a big mark on me. It was a husband and wife who submitted a common project, and they particularly stressed that they were going to do the work together because in this way they were going to be able to take care of their family and allocate their time efficiently—everything was really specific. In China, we feel like we need to avoid that because it has to do with private life, but this is how they wrote it up. After I read the proposal, I gave it an exceptionally high mark, because I felt that their plan was clear, direct, and believable. This is something we in China should learn from.

So to return to our original topic, we should not worry about being marginal, or about not knowing enough. As long as you put yourself out there openly and honestly people will react well. There is no need to put on airs. When you apply for research grants it is the same, you should be concrete, and if you can show me that you have a genuine emotional connection to this topic, then I’ll understand all the more why you want to work on it. I will trust you, and believe that you will do the work. Some topics have clearly been copied from other people, which gives you an entirely different feeling. I think Westerners are right to insist on individuality. It’s the same for politicians. Everyone wants to know what their lives are like, what they eat for breakfast, what kind of liquor they drink, and they will only believe in them once they know these things. It’s clearly the other way around in East Asia, and all of this is hidden. Leaders aren’t individuals, but incarnations of power, which is a very different understanding. When I got to Oxford, I was grateful for the job, which gave me the opportunity to think about such things.

Wu Qi: From talking with you I have the feeling that it is your feeling of distance that allows you to deal with Chinese issues in a calm, unhurried fashion, unlike scholars in China who are often impatient and anxious. Is it because you’ve been working outside of China for a long time? Or some balance between the margins and the center?

Xiang Biao: In terms of my attitudes about daily life, that might have something to do with it, because scholars in China feel the pressure and the direct interference every day, which can affect them emotionally and lead them to make quick judgments. I always stress that we need to immerse ourselves more and penetrate further, but if you’re anxious you can’t do that, so you stay on the surface and rush to judgment. A “sense of distance” is an analytical or a methodological concept, with a certain dialectical relationship to implicating yourself in the object of your research. A sense of distance does not have to do with your degree of concern or familiarity with your research topic, because you don’t want distance here—the closer the better—you need to immerse yourself into your topic as much as possible. When you do your analysis, you need to climb up to the mountain and look out at the plain, which is how you achieve objectivity, flexibility, and comprehensiveness.

Wu Qi: You don’t spend much time in China. How do you keep up with what is going on there?

Xiang Biao: The reason that I pay a lot of attention to non-fiction writing is that it has become a good way to understand what is happening in China. A lot of our media is pretty well-written, with a good degree of detail and clarity, which is quite valuable to me. As the boundary between intellectuals and non-intellectuals gets increasingly blurry, cooperation between the researcher and those being researched becomes more important. In addition, those being researched have many ideas that in terms of the depth of analysis surpass what the researcher is doing. In light of this, the role played by the researcher is more and more that of recording and discovering what their research subjects think, a change that I welcome. If I’m working on young people, it is easy to do Internet-based research, so I don’t have to go off to some village, and their feedback and input become part of the research. What the researcher should bring to the table is a more systematic organization of research materials and a more accurate historical narrative, which is not easy, and can be really dull, but we can no longer count on our own innovative viewpoints to be enough. The viewpoints should come from the people, and our work is to find them and present them. A lot of people are already doing this now, and Chinese society is producing a great deal of discourse and self-analysis, all of which serve as excellent source materials, as well as the source of our inspiration, or even of our theory. We used to get our data from villages and our theory from libraries and books, but things are completely different now.