Personal Profile

Areas of interest: Mobility, intermediaries, political economy, China, India and southeast Asia

Growing up amidst the intense ideological debates of 1980s China, I became enchanted by big philosophical and political ideas. So in 1990, I decided to study sociology at Peking University. At the same time, I was fascinated by the people in my hometown, Wenzhou. A medium-sized city on China’s southeast coast, Wenzhou had become known as a pioneer of the private economy. Yet the petty entrepreneurs’ approach to life was not to be found in the textbooks. Looking back, this tension between big ideas and small acts has defined my intellectual career.

Disillusioned with textbook theories, I spent most of my time as an undergraduate and master’s student in a migrant community in south Beijing. The migrants, most of whom had come from Wenzhou, had no legal status in the city and were periodically rounded up and deported by the government. Yet they managed to develop a vibrant garment industry and become wealthy by developing networks linking Wenzhou with cities across China. These networks not only facilitated trade, but also helped evade – and sometimes take advantage of –, the rigid, territorialised structure of the state. These migrants’ small acts taught me a big lesson: the interplay between a centralized political structure, fragmented local state power, and an integrative informal economy was changing China.

I was later told that my notes about the community were an “ethnography”, and that “anthropology” would suit me well. This took me to Oxford. There I completed a PhD in anthropology on migrant computer engineers from India working in Australia. In the high-tech sector, engineers like my interlocutors were being dispatched and managed across continents to meet the volatile demand for labour by transnationally connected intermediaries, or so-called “body shops”. The engineers coped with uncertainty in the global job market by drawing on resources from family, the marriage market, and caste-based social networks in India. What we call economic and technological globalisation is real, in so far as the process is sustained by multi-scalar social relations that go all the way down to the village and household levels.

From 2004, I worked on commercial intermediaries who place low-skilled workers from northeast China in jobs in other eastern Asian countries. The intermediaries make money by making order. That is, by creating complex hierarchical relations to seek rent and to discipline migrants overseas. From 2008, I started working on Muslims from northwest China who had migrated to the country’s southeast. There they work as Arabic-Chinese translators and as agents who buy local goods on behalf of foreign Muslim traders. I wanted to understand their role in the globalisation of trade,  which the Chinese state promotes, and in the globalisation of religion, which the state contains. During this period, I also studied student migration, return migration, and Chinese popular perceptions about rapidly shifting geopolitics.

Yet those postdoctoral projects were plagued by confusion and anxiety. Seeking to establish myself as an anthropologist, I sought out research which would have theoretical significance in the latest Anglo-Saxon literature, and I aspired to speak like the leading scholars in the discipline. I failed. Although I came up with concepts about the lives of migrants and brokers that enabled me to publish in academic journals, I failed to reach new understandings that interested me sufficiently to continue along that path. Worse,  felt like I was losing my grip on the issues that really mattered to people. I had become a stranger to myself, and a stranger to the world.

Desperately seeking a way out, I started writing essays for a wider audience and giving interviews in Chinese in the early 2010s. I was surprised by young people’s acute demand for theories – yes, theories! – that could help them understand their dilemmas and worries. I realised that young people want to know why things are the way they are, and why they feel the way they do. And they ask how they can see, and live, their lives differently. They taught me that anthropology, the study of life experience itself, has much to offer. In short, they helped me to rediscover the value of my discipline.

At MPI I hope to experiment with anthropology-for-living – that is, research that provides insights that people can use to build a better collective life. This requires an approach that starts not with academic questions, but rather with concerns that people are grappling with in their everyday lives, concerns that reflect their subjective experience of objective social contradictions. Acutely felt but rarely articulated, these concerns cannot be readily analysed using established theories and methods. As such, I hope this approach will also open up space for theoretical innovation. I want to spend my time on real-world issues that both I and my audience care about. I hope our department will advance anthropology by putting it to good use in real people’s lives.