Xiang Biao, The End of the "Educated Youth Era"

Xiang Biao, “The End of the ‘Educated  Youth Era’ in Chinese Social Science”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xiang Biao (b. 1972) did his undergraduate work at Peking University and is currently Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford University, as well as a Director at the Max Planck Institute.  Xiang began his scholarly career by studying migrant workers in Beijing, and subsequently broadened his focus to high-tech Indian “migrant labor” in Australia, and then later still to the subject of unskilled labor migration from China to Japan, South Korea and Singapore.  Among his many well-regarded publications, Global 'Body Shopping': An Indian International Labor System in the Information Technology Industry (in English) won the Anthony Leeds Prize in 2008, and “Predatory Princes and Princely Peddlers: The State and International Labor Migration Brokers in China” (also in English), won the William L. Holland Prize in 2012.  His 2020 volume Self As Method (in Chinese, 把自己作为方法), has already sold over 150,000 copies and was voted “China’s most impactful book for 2020.”  Xiang and I are collaborating on an English translation of the book.  Xiang’s cv is available here.
 
The text translated here offers Xiang’s reflections on the significance for the Chinese social sciences of the retirement of the “educated youth” (or “sent-down youth,” or Zhiqing 知青) generation from the front-lines of scholarship, which occurred in roughly 2015, the date of the initial publication of Xiang’s essay.  “Educated youth” refers to the 20 million or so urban Chinese young people who were sent to the countryside for extended periods during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), either to peasant villages or to state/army-run farms in the border areas, for reasons both ideological (urban youths needed to “make revolution” together with the poor peasants) and practical (the Cultural Revolution reduced many Chinese cities to chaos, there were few jobs for high school graduates and universities were closed, so restless Red Guards needed to be somewhere other than in China’s cities).[2]  Unlike Qin Hui’s personal reflection on his time as a sent-down youth in a Guangxi village, Xiang Biao is concerned less about the experience itself, and more about the effects of this singular experience on the outlook and research methods of the sent-down youth who went on to engineer the rebirth of the social sciences in China during the reform and opening period.
 
A few words of explanation are in order here.  Xiang Biao was born in 1972, and is thus not a member of the generation in question, but he is a social scientist trained at Peking University by Wang Hansheng 王汉生 (1948-2015) and other faculty who most definitely were.  Under their direction, Xiang, as an undergraduate and then a Master’s student, undertook what can only be called a remarkable study of “Zhejiang Village” in Beijing—a “migrant village” to the south of Tiananmen Square, where technically illegal migrant labor from Zhejiang established a flourishing semi-legal or illegal set of businesses, which subsequently spread throughout China and to some extent throughout the world.  The study is remarkable first because Peking University gave him the freedom to do it; for extended periods during the course of his study, Xiang was able to devote virtually his full attention to it, and became immersed in the community to the extent that he resolved disputes and offered business advice to community leaders, even as he wrote an excellent scholarly thesis, which is remarkable in its own right.[3]
 
But what is most remarkable is what Xiang Biao discovered while doing his work on Zhejiang village, which I believe to be the source of the reflections that inspire the text translated here.  What Xiang Biao found was people creating a new world through their own practice and intelligence, and succeeding against all odds and expectations.  Xiang’s fieldwork began in the early 1990s, when Chinese authorities had decided, with much hesitation, to open China to market forces, nonetheless under the direction of the Party-State, for whom control is a major preoccupation, to put it mildly.  In the eyes of China’s leaders (actually Beijing’s municipal leaders, in the context of Xiang’s study, but the generalization largely holds), China’s little people lacked “quality 素质,” by which they meant that they were uneducated or under-educated and knew nothing about how the world worked, and if setting up markets and operating market forces were left to them, they would certainly make a royal mess of things.  What Xiang Biao found, to make a long story short, it that the little people knew perfectly well what they were doing, and through intelligence, persistence, creativity, and determination created multiple functioning markets in spite of constant interference and resistance by the infantilizing, know-it-all, nanny-state authorities.
 
It is not hard to imagine what a thrilling experience this must have been for Xiang Biao.  His first major research project turned out to be a gold mine, a new world a-birthing, simply waiting to be explored, which Xiang did brilliantly by dint of immersing himself fully in that world and figuring out its logic, structure, and discourse, without the encumbrance of theory, which Xiang was too young to have mastered—he figured out the reality on the ground first, and added theory later.  In addition, Xiang is himself from Zhejiang, so the world that he was uncovering was his “tribe,” in a sense, a tribe that was “resisting” China’s omnipresent state, but in a positive sense, and succeeding.  It is hard to imagine a better way for a young scholar to spend his twenties than how Xiang Biao spent his time in Zhejiang village in the 1990s.
 
Appropriately, this study launched Xiang’s career.  He did his dissertation at Oxford, and over the next decade or so, expanded his research to high-tech Indian “migrant labor” in Australia, and then later still to unskilled labor migration from China to Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, in each case employing some version of the “immersion” approach he adopted in Beijing, and revealing yet new worlds and new logics.  His book Self as Method is written in part as pedagogical encouragement to Chinese students and young scholars, urging them to open their eyes and use their own experience to guide their research and life practice.
 
Back to sent-down youth.  As I already said, Xiang himself was not a sent-down youth, but his teachers were, and he certainly felt that in his work with Zhejiang Village he was using the approach, methodology, and spirit of his teachers, which he continued to do even after leaving China.  Yet while Xiang expanded the horizons of social science research in his work outside of China, those same horizons narrowed within China itself.  The story is complex, but can be reduced to a couple of basic elements. 
 
First, the Zhiqing social scientists, despite their entrepreneurial energy and their improvisational brilliance, also sought standardization, by which I mean they wanted to be part of the establishment.  Of course, many of them were already part of the establishment, as children of high-level cadres, but they wanted to be a part of the remaking of Chinese scholarship that has been an important component of reform and opening.  This meant becoming professors, perhaps deans, ensuring that their vision—which they saw as open and democratic—would guide China’s way forward.   
 
The Chinese state also wanted standardization, but not for the same reasons.  The Chinese state certainly wanted a new and improved academy, world class in its research capacity, but, if not at the beck and call of the state, at least under its firm control.  Xiang’s argument seems to be that the state and Zhiqing intellectuals made common cause for roughly 25 years, from the early 1990s, when the transformation of China’s university system began in earnest, through roughly 2015, when the Zhiqing generation retired, but the Chinese state, naturally having deeper pockets and greater staying power, is winning the match as the next generation(s) of scholars take the place of the “sent-down” retirees.  It is not, Xiang argues, that this new generation has completely and docilely bought into the state discourse of “stability maintenance” but rather that life has simply gotten too comfortable, career trajectories too well-defined.  Without an experience like rustification, what motivates them to be entrepreneurial, to take a risk? Why resist when life is good?
 
To Xiang Biao, this represents a missed opportunity for social science in China and perhaps the world.  Once anthropology, or any social science, is “mainstreamed,” it slowly forgets its true purpose—which is to figure out how the world works, or to discover the new worlds that are constantly being created and destroyed—and simply “follows the leader”—the Dean, the Education Minister, the leading lights and talking heads of any field. 
 
Xiang (mildly) scolds the Zhiqing generation for not having somehow “theorized” their experience, but to my mind, “theorization” is its own form of standardization, and it is hard to imagine any system building in the kind of life-altering shock that being sent down to the countryside was for the generation of Xiang Biao’s teachers.  In any event, in terms of my “Reading the China Dream” project, Xiang provides an alternative explanation for the explosion of creativity that I have discovered among China’s establishment intellectuals between 2000 and 2015:  it was the era of the Zhiqing scholars.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“Academic practice during the Zhiqing era was a pioneering, diffuse style of exploration under limited material conditions, basically organized in informal circles, and infused with a strong sense of mission.  After 2000, scholarly activities became professional endeavors, formal projects carried out in formal institutions, with the main purpose of obtaining funding and recognition (in the form of school rankings, praise from leaders, formal titles, and individual popularity).  The Zhiqing era created a semi-grassroots 民间 research space, but it maintained effective communication with the state sector and ‘pushed’ the government toward reform by exploring new issues that provoked public discussion and even shaped social trends. In the post-Zhiqing era, research activities are highly specialized, but academics are also an object of administrative governance; the grassroots or semi-grassroots production of expertise no longer exists, and cooperation between scholars and the government is mainly aimed at strengthening the effectiveness of state governance of scholarship, through consultation with closed ‘think tanks’ and writing reports on topics set by the government, all of which rarely has an important impact on the government's thinking.”
 
“This essay focuses only on two pairs of contradictions that are prominent in the sociological community. One is that Zhiqing scholars excel in non-normative, non-academic approaches to research, but at the same time are bent on promoting academic standardization. The second is that Zhiqing scholars have a wealth of life experience that is beyond the reach of other scholars and are committed to advancing empirical research, but they are also committed to processing experience so that it becomes matter for theory, and building a unified system of thought that transcends the diversity of experience. The interaction between different sides of these contradictions was an internal dynamic of the academic ecology of the 1990s. The end of the Zhiqing era meant the end of the interaction of the contradictions. However, the concrete manifestations of the contradictions not only continue to exist, but have rigidified in the absence of confrontation, becoming a negative legacy left to us, so that the richness we could have drawn from the Zhiqing era is now somewhat lost. The contradiction between the standardized and the non-standardized has now become institutionalized; a relatively narrow empiricism has left academic work without a solid, autonomous foundation for innovation, not only blocking breakthroughs in research, but also leaving us with a lack of resistance in the face of institutionalization. These contradictory movements are not the cause of the end of the Zhiqing era—these causes are very complex and are not primarily found within the academy—but they give us a clue as to how to understand how history has changed. More importantly, I hope that this clue will reveal the main dilemma we are facing today.”
 
 
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Translation
 
If we take the sociology department of Peking University as an example, 2015 may mark the symbolic end of the “Zhiqing (Educated Youth) era" of the Chinese social sciences.[4] At about this time, scholars who were born before 1960, whose education had been disrupted and incomplete, and who had had the experience of being “sent down youth,” withdrew from leadership positions, and most of them stopped teaching. At the same time, the 1970s generation, which had received a complete formal education and had little life experience outside the academy, became the mainstream of the scholarly world. Zhiqing scholars had played a decisive role in the construction of Chinese social sciences after 1978, both as leaders and as active participants. On August 13, 2015, my M.A. advisor, Professor Wang Hansheng 王汉生, who had played an important role in the reconstruction of Chinese sociology, died suddenly (at the age of 67!), which only drove home further to me the symbolic meaning of the year 2015.[5]
 
The end of the Zhiqing era does not in any way signal the end of these scholars' academic careers or the diminishing of their influence. Overall, their research accomplishments will not be fully surpassed by "post-Zhiqing" scholars in the near future. The issues and ideas they put forward will serve as an important foundation for the development of Chinese social science for a long time to come. By the end of the Zhiqing era, I mean the end of a unique style and character of academic practice and methodology under their leadership. The evolution of the modern social sciences in China may not follow the exact path identified by the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), that of periods of paradigm construction (i.e., the gradual accumulation of knowledge) alternating with periods of paradigm transformation; the evolution of social science may be more about the changes in patterns of academic practice, and different generational practices of knowledge acquisition and accumulation. If we do not grasp changes in modes of accumulation, we may not be able to carry out effective knowledge accumulation at all.
 
Academic practice during the Zhiqing era was a pioneering, diffuse style of exploration under limited material conditions, basically organized in informal circles, and infused with a strong sense of mission.  After 2000, scholarly activities became professional endeavors, formal projects carried out in formal institutions, with the main purpose of obtaining funding and recognition (in the form of school rankings, praise from leaders, formal titles, and individual popularity).  The Zhiqing era created a semi-grassroots 民间 research space, but it maintained effective communication with the state sector and "pushed" the government toward reform by exploring new issues that provoked public discussion and even shaped social trends. In the post-Zhiqing era, research activities are highly specialized, but academics are also an object of administrative governance; the grassroots or semi-grassroots production of expertise no longer exists, and cooperation between scholars and the government is mainly aimed at strengthening the effectiveness of state governance of scholarship, through consultation with closed "think tanks" and writing reports on topics set by the government, all of which rarely has an important impact on the government's thinking.
 
The Zhiqing era of government bureaucrats is drawing to a close with the end of the era of Zhiqing social science.  After 2010, the vast majority of local cadres below the prefectural and municipal levels do not have a Zhiqing background, but in terms of social background, educational experience, ways of thinking, and lifestyle, are closely aligned with academic personnel in universities. The professionalization of the civil service in terms of education and other norms has brought new legitimacy to the bureaucracy, but it has also made it an increasingly entrenched, self-interested group primarily motivated by self-preservation. Although civil servants and establishment intellectuals have both expressed opposition to the "stability maintenance" policies put in place in the late 1990s, they are nonetheless ultimately interested in maintaining stability, because this is where their greatest interests lie.  In selection of topics to work on, they follow the lead of top leadership, with the main goal of "maintaining stability" in terms of their personal careers.
 
This is almost the direct opposite of the pattern in China in the 1980s. At that time, Zhiqing scholars in government research institutions, universities and semi-grassroots cultural groups, formed emotional and intellectual alliances with middle and lower level cadres in ministries, as well as local cadres everywhere (many of whom had Zhiqing backgrounds), linking up with each other, proposing new ideas, exploring new practices, and constantly breaking through bureaucratic rules and regulations. Even when I went to Zhejiang and Hunan to do fieldwork in the mid-1990s,  I could still take advantage of these circles because of my relationship with Wang Hansheng. Local cadres also eagerly asked: What new ideas are coming out of the Institute of Economic System Reform, especially by the team from the Agricultural Research Office? The cadres in power talked endlessly about innovative ideas, while those who were not in power wanted me to "expose some problems" through fieldwork. They all liked to discuss things, while today's cadres seem maintain an attitude of cautious calm and peace. Under the pretext of safeguarding national security and national interests, they are resolutely safeguarding their own political security and political interests.
 
One of the greatest contrasts between today and the 1980s is that the end of the Zhiqing era of social science and bureaucracy seems to have coincided with the beginning of the Zhiqing era of high-level politics. From 1990 to 2013, leaders who came from a background of engineering and "the university of the Cultural Revolution" emphasized systems, norms, and harmony; since 2013, the focus has been on breakthroughs, will, and ideals. Small group politics can be bold. This "Zhiqing temperament" at the top is out of step with the intellectual world and the world of  lower- and mid-level civil servants. Without the intermediary of intellectuals and civil servants, there is a big question as to how effectively high-level politics can represent different social interests. This situation is an important background for understanding the historical implications of the end of the Zhiqing era.
 
It is not entirely a coincidence that the end of the era of Zhiqing social science and the accentuation of the style of Zhiqing high-level politics occurred at the same time. They share a common origin and are the result of the same historical process. The key to this is the relationship between the Zhiqing and the state system. In the discourse on Zhiqing since the 1980s, many people have stressed their "grassroots" nature, how, for example, during the Cultural Revolution, especially after the Lin Biao (1907-1971) affair in 1971,  they were able to "go underground," read on their own and think independently, and criticize the Cultural Revolution. This is quite one-sided.

In the restoration and reconstruction of Chinese social science in the 1980s, there were two circles that intersected in a noteworthy way:  the “scholarly circle,” represented by the “Toward the Future” series and the “Twentieth Century Library,”[6] and the "think tank circle" centered on the former Institute of Economic System Reform and the former Rural Policy Research Office of the Central Secretariat of the CCP. Graduate students who were still studying at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and Peking University were also active in these circles. Important scholars, as well as today's politicians, emerged from these. It was not because of their "grassroots" posture that these Zhiqing scholars and students were able to make such a big impact. The reason the issues they discussed attracted attention was first because they were part of the development of socialism itself. The main source of their ideas were debates among European socialists. The contradictions within the Soviet Communist Party, the rethinking of socialism on the European left after 1956, the socialist tendencies after 1968 (e.g., Sartre, Camus), the reforms in Yugoslavia, etc., were particularly important. In terms of self-awareness, they strongly identified with the People’s Republic and naturally considered themselves sons of the socialist revolution and masters of the nation.

The question before them was:  where China should go next? The most crucial thing is that many of the active Zhiqing scholars, especially the leaders, were the children of high-level cadres. Otherwise, they would not have had access to what were called the "Gray Books" and the "Yellow Books" during the Cultural Revolution.[7]  After the Cultural Revolution, the top ruling group considered these young people to be part of them, and the local government regarded them as uncrowned kings. This background led them to develop a self-confident style that looked down on authority with an attitude of “if I can’t do it, who can?”
 
After the 1990s, the relationship between the state system and this group underwent a major change. One group was designated as the successors, and they moved into important, low-profile, positions and withdrew from intellectual debate. The other group was no longer considered "part of the inner circle," and those with scholarly aspirations returned to the academy to work on standard academic research. This transition from “thinkers” to “scholars,” as it was called, was motivated not only by an admiration for the scholarship being carried out in developed countries, but also, and more importantly, by a reflection on the radical ideological movement of the 1980s. The main themes of the Zhiqing scholarly era of the 1990s were the goals of building a professional system of knowledge and methodology while keeping the government at arms length, seeking relative independence through standardization and systematization, so that scholarship could become the basis on which to build democracy and long-lasting social stability.
 
The advent of the Zhiqing political era today was virtually inevitable, and the question was simply who would be selected. The end of the Zhiqing era in academia, on the other hand, was unexpected and meant, in the final analysis, that efforts to promote social democracy through academic professionalism and independence have been unsuccessful. A formally standardized academy has been fully institutionalized. The change in the system of the Academy of Social Sciences is particularly clear. In this shift, as the sociologist Ying Xing 应星 (b. 1968) points out, Zhiqing scholars played a key role in the late 1990s.[8] Where I disagree with Ying Xing's explanation is that I think we cannot blame this on their dual personality ("innovative yet listless, pioneering yet greedy, pragmatic yet vulgar"), and we cannot assume that the changes in the scholarly world were the result of the moral evolution of the Zhiqing as a group.

What deserves more attention are the contradictions inherent in the academic practice of Zhiqing scholars. This essay focuses only on two pairs of contradictions that are prominent in the sociological community. One is that Zhiqing scholars excel in non-normative, non-academic approaches to research, but at the same time are bent on promoting academic standardization. The second is that Zhiqing scholars have a wealth of life experience that is beyond the reach of other scholars and are committed to advancing empirical research, but they are also committed to processing experience so that it becomes matter for theory, and building a unified system of thought that transcends the diversity of experience. The interaction between different sides of these contradictions was an internal dynamic of the academic ecology of the 1990s. The end of the Zhiqing era meant the end of the interaction of the contradictions.

However, the concrete manifestations of the contradictions not only continue to exist, but have rigidified in the absence of confrontation, becoming a negative legacy left to us, so that the richness we could have drawn from the Zhiqing era is now somewhat lost. The contradiction between the standardized and the non-standardized has now become institutionalized; a relatively narrow empiricism has left academic work without a solid, autonomous foundation for innovation, not only blocking breakthroughs in research, but also leaving us with a lack of resistance in the face of institutionalization. These contradictory movements are not the cause of the end of the Zhiqing era—these causes are very complex and are not primarily found within the academy—but they give us a clue as to how to understand how history has changed. More importantly, I hope that this clue will reveal the main dilemma we are facing today.
 
I entered Peking University in 1991 after a year of military training[9]—a government-imposed response to the student demonstrations in 1989—and joined Wang Hansheng’s "Migrant Workers" research group in my second year of university (1993). In the 1990s, there was a what was called the "Wang Hansheng Workshop" among sociologists in Beijing, in which a group of middle-aged scholars, who gravitated around Ms. Wang, and who had made core contributions to Chinese sociology, met regularly to discuss and organize collaborative projects. I started my M.A. under Ms. Wang's direction in 1995, and graduated in 1998, and in the course of all of this, came to know this group even better.  Through them I came to see a new world, consisting of a unique set of social relationships and academic practices.

As a student of Ms. Wang, I had the privilege not only of witnessing her charisma (which is how many people have characterized her approach to the world), but also had the opportunity to experience this charisma as something that grew out of concrete life experiences, and thus as a group phenomenon. Only by returning charisma to concrete historical practice can we establish an effective connection with it and know whether and how we might inherit it today. In this sense, the Zhiqing referred to in this essay are not a specific group of people, but a vehicle for a series of socio-historical factors. The ways that Zhiqing scholars act as people and as scholars can also be seen in many "post-Zhiqing" scholars, but the overall context in which we find ourselves is very different. It is not the advance or retreat of Zhiqing scholars that determines the changes in the academy, but the changes in history that are reflected in the ebb and flow of this group.
 
Why Standardization Leads to Institutionalization
 
"They’re very good talkers, and really sharp.”  This is a typical description of Zhiqing, made by many scholars, especially those from Hong Kong, Taiwan and abroad.  Talking was an important part of the work style of Zhiqing scholars at the time.  In the early 1990s, young and middle-aged scholars at universities and research institutes began to be assigned to dormitories with living rooms. The availability of convenience foods like frozen dumplings and sausages also made it possible to have impromptu, long, often overnight, conversations.

Talking and writing are fundamentally different. Talking  is about “points”—making your point, stopping once you’ve made it, pivoting to another. The point should be impactful and explosive, and should be clear within two or three minutes. If you extend the point to a line, and look at it in the broader context of the literature on the subject, then talking won’t work.

Writing, on the other hand, is all about drawing lines. Before sitting down to write, you need to have a framework in your head that you can set down on paper, and the process of writing is to connect the dots between different ideas with lines. This requires clear categorizations, distinctions, and definitions, which must be meticulous, detailed, and consistent. Breakthrough and impact are not the main goal. Professional scholarship is not written to excite readers, but instead to win the approval of the most important (who are editors and reviewers, rarely more than five in all). Even oral speeches are all scripted, whether they are presented by scholars or officials. It is not that revolutionaries did not write, but the backroom debates and the public speeches were more important, and the newspaper reviews and pamphlets that were madly scribbled overnight were an extension of the debates and speeches. This improvised, unpredictable, and uncontrollable character of "talk" also tends to unsettle conservative forces. One of the reasons British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was disgusted with then-Egyptian President Nasser was that he felt Nasser's speeches resembled those of Mussolini and Lenin. This set the stage for the Suez Canal War in 1956.
 
The thought process behind talking is necessarily scattered and jumpy. Talking requires a high degree of imagination. Everyone has to figure out what the other means, where their viewpoint came from, and what their underlying message is, and to be constantly thinking about how to make uninteresting topics interesting, to avoid a lull in the conversation. The unconventional imagination of the Zhiqing scholars may also have to do with the relative paucity of academic information at the time. I remember once talking to the sociologist Sun Liping 孙立平(b. 1955), confessing I didn't understand a certain question, and his answer, "Who does?" Then he tilted his head and squinted his eyes and said, "One of the reasons we find foreign scholarship so intriguing, is probably because we don’t really understand it. In this space between understanding and not understanding, we give a lot of benefit of the doubt to the foreign scholars."

Misreading can lead to "enlightened reading." Instead of being afraid of misunderstanding, we should boldly grasp enlightenment. This autonomy of mind turns a lack of resources into a source of innovation. Imagination is also linked to the Zhiqing desire to form general judgments about social phenomena. No matter what they are talking about, the question of "what is the essence of socialism?" and "where is China going?" are questions that linger in their minds. Thus, they have to jump from the “point” to the “surface.” Their interdisciplinary or non-disciplinary orientation also further enriches their imagination. Since they want to arrive at an overall judgement of Chinese society, their thinking naturally roams through the fields of philosophy, history, politics and economics all at once.
 
Talking is by definition a collective activity. What talk is after is the electricity of thought vibrating between friends, and no one thinks about ownership or who is the first or second author.  In the 1990s, when China started to have telephones at home, small-scale connections and dynamic communications were very effective. At the time, the Internet basically did not have search functions, but personal computers, printers, and photocopiers became popular, and small circles made copies of each other's books and circulated and commented on these "printed drafts."[10]

The Taiwanese sociologist Gao Chengshu 高承恕 (b. 1948) once participated in a survey of the market in Baigou, Hebei province, organized by Wang Hansheng and others, and was particularly impressed by the fact that people rode bicycles to the countryside, traveling in groups, chatting loudly with each other, always ready to stop and buy baked sweet potatoes and ask about the livelihood of the potato sellers. Later, cars replaced bicycles, and everyone drove their own car. This closure of physical space and individualization may have heralded the end of the Zhiqing era.
 
For a student to be able to exchange ideas and debate with an accomplished teacher and her peers that are 20 or 30 years older is surely a rare thing in this world. This does not necessarily mean that student-teacher relationships have deteriorated; the really important change is that colleagues hardly ever debate with each other anymore. Relationships between colleagues are "boring 无聊."[11] Nor does the fact that I was that lucky necessarily mean that Ms. Wang paid special attention to her students; to the contrary, at the time there was not much of a notion of teacher-student relationships, nor much of a sense of generations. 

If the student was interested in the topic, why not let him listen in too? If the students’ friends were passionate about something, why not ask the students what they think? Once, when we were discussing how to understand the theoretical implications of the migrant worker issue while eating, Sun Liping suddenly said, "I clearly saw a piece of spare rib fall into the soup; how come I can’t fish it out?" It is not necessarily a matter of being modest and open-minded.   He was really trying to find the spare rib, and this was really part of his way of thinking and his anti-authoritarian life-style.  His style was naturally open and egalitarian. 
 
These academic practices are obviously inseparable from their life experiences. The lack of jealousy among colleagues and the all-night group chats may be a continuation of their “sent down” lives. It is surely related to the fact that in the 1990s, the academic world was less materially motivated than it is now and was more loosely managed (there was no need to worry about being on time for tomorrow’s meeting). Their highly concentrated and even dramatic historical experiences in the 1960s and the 1970s gave them a particularly broad perspective, enabling them to quickly capture the big picture from small incidents and sniff out where the ribs are. Their experience of grassroots life and close observation of various life lessons also lent them an extraordinary sensitivity,  so they can intuitively grasp the "point". Their unplanned reading experiences and diverse professional backgrounds (Ms. Wang herself may have originally studied mathematics, and she also had a strong interest in mechanics and philosophy) made their minds extraordinarily active. They entered the social sciences solely out of a personal interest and sense of mission.
 
In the 1990s, the Zhiqing scholars had a self-critical attitude toward such academic practices. The consensus at the time was that building professionalized disciplines was the order of the day, that scholarship should be a dialogue among intellectual communities based on certain standardized criteria. Thus, the urgent tasks were seen to be the review how the scholarly literature had evolved, and the clarification of the analytical framework employed.  Although Wang Hansheng had not studied or worked abroad, she strongly contributed to the collaboration between the sociological world in Beijing and the international community. Many Zhiqing studied in the West and Japan in the 1980s and especially in the early 1990s, bringing Western academic research paradigms back with them.

Another of Wang Hansheng’s outstanding achievements was the promotion of special project-based sociological research, advancing the systematic collection of empirical material in a way that distinguished it from opinion or commentary writing. But what we did not expect at all in the 1990s was that management's enthusiasm for academic standardization soon overtook that of scholars. The Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index System (CSSCI), journal ratings, impact factors, base-level construction, grant applications, subject evaluation, international cooperation, and international rankings quickly became the baton directing academic work. Deng Zhenglai 邓正来 (1956-2013), a Zhiqing scholar who played a leading role in promoting the standardization of Chinese social sciences in the 1990s, spent the last years of his life talking less about standardization and more about autonomy, especially in opposition to the "age of knowledge planning."[12]

He pointed out that in this age, research was based on political power and the academic institutional arrangements defined by it, and that "political power and 'academic' institutional arrangements have largely defined not only our modes of knowledge production, but also shape its concrete content."  According to Zhejiang University sociologist Liang Yongjia 梁永佳, this in fact reflects the worries of Deng and people like him about the appropriation of their earlier standardization efforts.  These standardization efforts unexpectedly promoted institutionalization, which was inseparable from the transformation of the country’s governance.  Since the 1990s, the government’s legitimacy, which had been forged over the course of the long revolution and reinforced through commonly accepted socialist reforms, was no longer beyond questioning, and the government needed to shape a new legitimacy that would earn the "consent" of the governed.

The formal standardization of academic research and its relatively independent functioning are the foundation of the legitimacy of the administrative management of academia. Administration-led standardization does enhance the independence of research. It is difficult to enter the field without extensive training, the knowledge of academic and administrative terminology, and the understanding of various explicit and implicit rules. Within the discipline, scholars can use highly academic language and express views that cannot be expressed in other contexts.
 
At the same time, the former approach of prohibiting work on certain subjects and controlling the content of research had become less and less effective, and management increasingly shifted to the technical regulation of the day-to-day management of academic work. The majority of scholar-administrators today are calm and unruffled.  A minority of people has a monopoly on resources, mainly by virtue of understanding certain rules, and filling out certain forms, applications, and assessments. Young and middle-aged scholars even actively seek to become administrators as part of their career plans: first they get a position and recognition; then they seek to enter administrative leadership positions; then they try to establish their own research centers with attached researchers and separate accounts, with full-time office staff, preferably in a small, independent building.

Moving from academic research to an administrative position is often extremely easy, but going from administrative work back to academic research is sometimes a shock to the system. The main criteria for evaluating the success of an academic is where he works, what title she has, and the resources at their disposition, and the content and contribution of his or her work are clearly secondary. As the post-Zhiqing generation has moved into middle age, establishment academics has become warm and cozy.  Colleagues talk about gentility and respect, harmony and balance, each in his or her own way. (This is also true in the civil service. Low- and mid-level officials are very measured in pointing out that your research has its value, but that all the problems are already under government control; then they express their concern about your family life and physical health, and talk about Confucianism, Zen Buddhism, and the tea ceremony).  The ingeniousness of these management techniques exhausts the scholars, which in turn makes the hierarchical—or perhaps paternalistic—system more difficult to fight.
 
Formally independent social science research is inseparable from symbolic capital such as diplomas, titles, and fame. The government does not directly control this symbolic capital, but it controls the process of capital formation and transformation. Symbolic capital does not exist naturally, but must be constructed. This is a complex social process, in which financial investment and promises of benefits may well play an important role. More important, symbolic capital always functions in interaction with other capital. The recognition bestowed by the scholarly community on a research center (e.g., a publication or an award) can be directly exchanged for a prize, which is to some extent a recognition of the independence of academic symbolic capital, but the recognition is intended to arrive at a price, which can be redeemed. In the processes of the formation of symbolic capital and the transformation into different forms of capital, many layers of relationships are formed around questions of entrusting and representing various interests.
 
From this perspective, some of the seemingly faulty logic in the institutionalization of scholarship is easy to understand. For example, the government emphasizes the need for universities to resist the encroachment of Western ideas, but specifically encourages Western recognition of the fruits of Chinese research. According to the rules of some universities, research published in foreign journals and approved by leaders receives additional "performance points;" the concrete value of the points and their conversion rate to RMB depends on the level of the journal and the position of the leader. It may not be easy for a scholar to keep officials happy and have foreigners admire them at the same time. But institutionalized academic management needs both. Officials determine who gets resources, and foreigners bring legitimacy to the system. Both officials and foreigners embody the importance of external standards of recognition. What officials and foreigners have in common is that they are not the common people who are studied by the scholars, and their recognition can be exchanged for RMB.[13]
 
The standardization sought by Zhiqing scholars and the institutionalization with which post-Zhiqing scholars are confronted are not of course the same thing. But we should also see that the demand for standardization gives legitimacy to institutionalization, or at least diminishes our vigilance and resistance to it. Is there a limit to the standardization of social science itself, and is the idea of independence not illusory? If the social sciences do not form organic links with other parts of society and make clear for whom and to whom they speak, then formal independence is also de facto isolation, which facilitates its incorporation into more powerful forces . Institutionalization is precisely about making academic research into its own system, making its development more and more involuted, making the system self-reinforcing, so that it becomes more and more dependent for its survival.
 
Independence was indeed an important condition for the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research to be able to produce the Frankfurt School in the early twentieth century. But this independence was not an independence from politics and society, but from an already independent academia. What they wanted to challenge was precisely the "traditional theories" already claiming to be independent. The Institute was born out of the expectation and excitement that Germany might enter a completely new era after the tragic defeat following a world war, and to welcome a Soviet-style proletarian revolution. But soon the workers' movement failed and the Nazis came to power. How to explain this reversal became the central question of the Frankfurt School. The penetrating and innovative nature of its theory comes ultimately from the close examination of this reversal.

The question we have today is not whether the distance between academia and the state is too close, but rather what posture we want to take and on whose behalf we want to interact with the state. Nor do we need to artificially pursue "de-standardization.” The key is to clarify why we need standardization, and to prevent it from becoming a silk burial shroud for intellectual mummies. Making institutionalized academic research "organic" again will naturally be a long struggle and a process in which it may be helpful to reflect on the category of "experience.”
 
Knock on the Emperor’s Door to Deliver a Memorial? or Con Your Way through the Underworld by Telling Stories?  The Breakthrough Potential of “Experience”
 
Empirical research was the be all and end all for Zhiqing scholars in the 1990s. But the following several questions need to be asked. First, if empirical research came to the forefront because dogmatic Marxism could not explain reality, why did it not appear in the 1980s? In Japan, every time left-wing intellectuals became skeptical of Marxism, they developed a new interest in folklore and anthropology, as represented by the case Kunio Yanagida 柳田国男 (1875-1962).[14] They found this natural:  when Marxism could not explain grassroots social movements, they sought to develop a more direct understanding of the grassroots experience through folklore and anthropology. In 1980s China, the slogan "practice is the sole criterion for truth" did not lead to a concrete examination of practice, but rather to theoretical and cultural crazes, with the intention of replacing one grand system with another abstract idea.
 
Second, why did Zhiqing scholars not transform their unique experiences into theoretical resources? What made the student movements in Europe and the United States in 1968 such an important opportunity for the development of Western social science in the twentieth century was, in large part, the experience of scholars' personal participation in the movements, which gave them new perspectives on the importance of personal consciousness, lifestyles, popular culture, and so on, allowing them to think about new implications for politics, the state, and much more. The rise of Nazi Germany was part of the global Second World War, but its impact on the Western humanities and social sciences was often greater than that of the war itself, which changed the world landscape in its entirety.

This is because a group of scholars, particularly European Jewish scholars, reflected on a range of issues based on their own unique experiences under Nazi rule. Ethical-philosophical reflections like Hannah Arendt's (1906-1975) are very much individual-empirical in nature. In non-Western societies, South Asian scholars have made important contributions to theories of the nation-state, not only because of their close observations of national independence and the partition of India and Pakistan, but also because their life experiences, especially their involvement in social movements after independence, have provided them with new perspectives.[15]

The Japanese scholar Yoshimi Takeuchi 竹内好 (1910-1977), who is very familiar to Chinese readers,  offered a very original analysis of Lu Xun and Mao Zedong by remaining faithful to his own experience, especially his experience as a soldier who participated in the Japanese invasion of China. He consistently tried to make a connection between his own experience and that of the subject of his study, and in the process, unique ideas emerged. If, on the contrary, we make it a rule to put aside all individual experiences and deal with these movements and wars as events simply as macro history, then it is impossible to arrive at such theoretically stimulating results.
 
Why has an exceptional experience such as the Cultural Revolution not yet stimulated a new set of ideas? In mainstream discourse, the Cultural Revolution is treated as a "mistake" and the focus of the discussion is on the causes of the mistake. Among liberal intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution is the subject of accusations. The lived experience of a billion people over a decade has not been fully explored. Yu Luoke's 遇罗克 (1942-1970) "On Family Origin," in which he denounced the idea that “class” could be “inherited,” is viewed as a "Chinese version of the Declaration of Human Rights," seemingly without recognizing that it was part of the struggle of different groups within the Red Guards for the approval of the Party hierarchy; only by combining that kind of thinking with that kind of experience can we really understand that text and fully appreciate its value.

We have tried to recover the pre-1949 academic tradition that was "interrupted" by the revolution, while basically ignoring the tradition that evolved after the revolution, not realizing that this "interruption" itself is the most important thing to be confronted and analyzed, and should not be the object of a mere course correction. We also seem to be unaware that the reason why pre-revolutionary scholarship was so vibrant and formed its own tradition was that the life experiences of scholars at that time and the language they used were organically linked. In short, we may have placed too much emphasis on knowledge in its textual form, without examining the experience behind the knowledge and knowledge as experience; we may have placed too much emphasis on the accumulation of knowledge itself without focusing on the transformation of the way knowledge is accumulated.
 
There are at least two reasons for these problems. One is probably related to mainstream traditional Chinese social thought. As some scholars have already pointed out, Chinese culture, which is very empirically oriented, had to import the analytical category of "experience" from the West via the Japanese language. Confucianism emphasizes experience because it stresses "practical rationality" and denies sacred norms that transcend real life practice; however, in Confucianism, experience is the way to implement the ritual order, and experience is the object of intervention, but not the foundation of analysis, and not an autonomous category.

As reflected even in today’s thinking, this means that experience itself is meaningless and always acquires meaning only when illuminated by the light of theory. Second, it has to do with the social status of youth. Zhiqing were a product of  unequal relationships within the socialist system. The term "Zhiqing" refers not to all intellectual youth, nor to all urban intellectual youth, but instead to urban intellectual youth who were sent down to the countryside. The voluntary and involuntary deprivation of their superior status created an unconscious intellectual aristocracy among them.

On the one hand, they are mindful of the world and take pleasure in simply reading and thinking, not worrying about their material life. But on the other hand, they were unconscious of their position, believing that their thinking truly represented the truth of the world. When reading the memoirs of the sent-down youth today, the extent to which they identify with the peasants and understand them is a real question. In this way, although Zhiqing scholars have accumulated many observations, due to the lack of a thorough analysis of their own position, their observations remain at the level of raw data, and the experience has not led to new dimensions to be explored, nor opened onto new theoretical paths.
 
In the 1990s, as the primary task of empirical research was to oppose dogma and empty arguments, the understanding of experience at that time was close to facts and data as found in economics or even natural sciences. Objectivity and repeatability were emphasized. At the same time, the Zhiqing era pursued a macro-level, unifying narrative. Not only was it necessary to provide a comprehensive framework for explaining China, but the hope was also that this narrative be widely accepted, i.e., not representative of one particular position. In this way, the individual, subjective, divisive, and conflicting character of experience was often filtered out as "noise."
 
The understanding of experience during the era of Zhiqing scholarship has important implications for the social sciences today, especially for anthropology, the discipline I practice. Experience is the lifeblood of anthropology. But the philosophical and political explanations for why experience takes precedent over theory, and why ethnography stresses detailed writing about experience, may not be entirely clear. For non-anthropologists, anthropology is a method that is equivalent to fieldwork and the search for raw materials with "Chinese characteristics" to be taken up by other disciplines; for those of us who practice it, the real ambition of anthropology is to establish its own theoretical system and exchange with other disciplines.

Under the current pressure of institutionalization, anthropology, which was originally the most opposed to institutionalization, has the strongest desire to be "institutionalized" in order to obtain resources. When the heads of anthropology departments of various universities sit down together, the most important topics are, first, how to elevate anthropology from the second level to the first level in the national disciplinary ranking system; and second, how to promote anthropology in close connection with mainstream discourse (including concepts such as "harmony", "governance," as well as “One Belt One Road", and of course "Chinese knowledge production"), in hope of gaining mainstream recognition.

Senior professors and Ph.D. advisors at key institutions preach to undergraduate about how anthropology has created the richest, most powerful people, people who have changed history. There are also scholars who talk about how anthropology abroad has historically collaborated with national intelligence agencies—not with the intention of criticizing the West, but instead to point to a direction in which Chinese anthropology can develop. It seems to be completely forgotten that the main task of anthropology is to describe as fully and precisely as possible the multiple social contradictions that the mainstream cannot and will not face, to grasp and express the ideas of those people who should not exist in the eyes of the mainstream, and to question the theories of the center with the experiences of the margins, thus helping to liberate everyone from mainstream discourse.
 
Because of its strongly self-marginalized positioning, anthropology is not mainstream throughout the world. But the rise of an anthropological view of experience can be seen as a central thread in the development of modern Western social science. As R. W. Cornell pointed out,[16] what is now called sociology in textbooks is a response to Western industrial society and modernity, a product of recent history; the original goal of European and American sociology was in fact to explain "differences throughout the world.” The title of a sociology textbook published in 1881 was Sociology, Based on Ethnography.[17] Indeed, it is difficult to imagine why people would be interested in examining their own life practices without an awareness of other cultures. At first, these differences throughout the world were explained through cultural diffusionism, especially evolutionary theory.

What makes Malinowski's long-term, field-based, participatory investigation so revolutionary is that it emphasizes that different lived experiences cannot be treated as differences between evolutionary stages. Lifestyles that surprise, confuse, and disgust us have their own logic. So we have to learn to see things through the eyes of the locals, the people involved, and at the same time learn to reflect on and critique our own experiences. Only in such a perspective will routines of daily life, fragmented individual experiences full of differences with no place in philosophical discourse, take on rich meanings and constantly stimulate new social science questions.
 
The study of other cultures is not the essential characteristic of anthropology, but rather an accident of history.  This accident lies in the overlap between a new understanding of man and society by European thinkers (e.g., Kant's idea of "immanence," the idea that the forces that govern society come from within society rather than from external deities, and British positivist philosophy, with its cognitive emphasis on induction, etc.) and European colonialism. In the absence of such concepts, colonialism alone would not have produced the anthropology we have now. The massacres engaged in by the colonists in the Americas, the African slave trade, and French Egyptology, constructed out of highly scientific principles—none of these are same thing as anthropology, nor they did they lead to anthropology.

At the same time, any discipline can, and in fact does, study other cultures. If the goal is to serve mainstream politics and business, then international trade, comparative politics, and military relations are far more efficient in the study of other cultures than anthropology. Anthropology values other cultures not because of "difference," but because an anthropological view of experience gives "difference" a unique meaning. For example, economics is a study of all human beings, including, of course, many who are different; but in economics, all these differences can be assimilated.

By contrast, in anthropology, these differences themselves cannot be so readily reduced. Study of other cultures enhances and sensitizes our reception of different experiences, allowing us to problematize our own lives more effectively. In short, without the readiness to objectify oneself, without the desire to question systematic claims on the basis of seemingly trivial experiences, what we call anthropology would not exist. It might be worth reflecting on the reasons why Chinese ethnographers, despite having carried out excellent investigations of several southwestern minority groups in the 1950s, did not fabricate new social ideas out of this rich raw material.
 
One of the legacies of the Zhiqing era is perhaps an excess of sociological imagination and a poverty of anthropological imagination. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) advocates a "sociological imagination," that is, learning to understand one's own life journey in relation to social structures and historical changes. This is almost natural for Chinese intellectuals, especially Zhiqing scholars. The trajectory of an individual's life is directly shaped by the major practices of the state. The meaning of an individual's life is only reflected in the grand narrative of the state. There is no other discourse outside of this narrative to convey meaning; and the vast number of experiences that escape of this narrative appear to like dust in the wind, not worth mentioning.

Clearly, if we only talk about what has been deemed worthy to talk about, then we will stay locked in our cage, and intellectual breakthroughs will be few and far between. The anthropological imagination starts from concrete life experiences and confusions, using one's own experiences to understand others' experiences and using others' experiences to imagine the possibility of another life for oneself. The experiences and voices of ordinary people are weapons in themselves, and do not necessarily have to be theorized to provide inspiration and courage.
 
People push history forward over the course of their lives, but this is not their reason for living. "The bird sings, but not because it has an answer;" the eagle takes flight, but not to show the way. Why should we pen lyrics for the bird’s song or map the eagle’s path? 
 
The end of the Zhiqing era in Chinese social science is not the end of a "generational" phenomenon, nor is it the end of a "chronological" historical period, but the end of a Hegelian "era" in the sense of the philosophy of history.  By “era” here I do not mean a notion of time, but a movement towards a clear future, reflecting confidence in the direction of history, a sense of mission to advance history, and a collective consciousness based on this. "The New Generation of the Eighties," a song that has been sung all over the country, can be regarded as one of the last symbols of the era in this sense.
 
In the post-Zhiqing era, generations defined by the rhythms of natural life, what we call the 1970s generation, the 1980s generation, etc., dominate our sense of time. In an age of generations, the conventional daily life becomes our main experience; establishment academic research becomes a path for the urban middle class and its children to maintain their middle-class status; the civil service group evolves into a special interest group seeking stability. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Young researchers from the urban middle classes may have become more sensitive to everyday experience and thus perhaps more skeptical of the kind of research that makes big judgments and offers grand solutions.

Highly educated civil servants are also a huge body of readers who want to read illuminating depictions of experience rather than theoretical statements. The decline of media authority and credibility and the rise of social media provide space for the presentation of rich and vivid experiences and new possibilities for exploring the combination of social science and humanities research and other literary forms. Every consumer busy with online shopping is also a potential revolutionary, and behind every vulgar advertising claim there is an idea that can be revisited. This imagination is all the more vital as everyone becomes a consumer and advertising is omnipresent.  But the potential for revolution and new ideas has to come from the contradictions, alienation, and diversity within everyday experience, and not from outside beliefs.
 
Compared with the Zhiqing era, perhaps in the future we will be able to calmly (ask questions) based on (our own) experience, then proceed to (others’) experiences, and finally return to (our own) experience. What is important is that post-Zhiqing scholars understand that they cannot be truly "independent" and cannot represent the "times," and that they think clearly about who they are, who “their questions” belong to, on whose behalf they are researching and writing.  If today you are concerned about a powerful voice, then the best thing you can do is perhaps to paint a picture of another voice. This voice may be faint, but as long as it is based on concrete life experience, it will be like the sound of distant thunder, muffled but with an underlying force, and will resonate in different corners of the earth, and may converge into an undercurrent, a counterbalancing force.
 
Notes

[1] 项飙, “中国社会科学“知青时代”的终结,” originally published in Beijing Cultural Review 文化纵横, 2015.6:  70-79, republished on the website of the same journal on July 10, 2018. 

[2]Translator’s note:  For a brief if thorough overview of the rustification movement see here.

[3] Translator's note:  The original Chinese volume is 跨越边界的社区:  北京浙江村的生活史, Beijing, Sanlian, 2000.  An abridged translation is Transcending Boundaries:  Zhejiangcun:  The Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing, trans. Jim Weldon, Leiden, Brill, 2005.

[4] Zhiqing scholars include what are called the “three old classes," those born at the time of the revolution and thus finished middle school or high school in 1966, 1967, or 1968; the “three new classes,” who finished in the 1969-1973 period; and the “last five classes,” who finished in the 1974-1978 period.  In 2015, most of them had reached formal retirement age for university professors (65 for men, 60 for women).

[5] The idea of “the end of the Zhiqing era” appeared in the spring of 2015.  When I was in Beijing in June of that year, I had planned to get in touch with Wang Hansheng and ask her about her thoughts about her sent-down experience.  Yet something came up and I did not make the call.  Many of the points I raise in this essay are speculative, and require further discussion.  Wang Hansheng was born in 1948, and after graduating from Tsinghua Affiliated High School, was a sent-down youth in a village in Yan’an.  After the university entrance examination was restored, she studied at Shanxi Normal University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Peking University, and stayed at this latter after graduating.

[6] Translator’s note:  Both of these were massive translation projects, launched in the 1980s, with the goal of “making of for lost time” and getting China back in touch the with (mostly Western) world.

[7] From 1960 through 1980s,  the Central Propaganda Department and the Central Translation Bureau organized the translation of a series of “internal reference and criticism «works on politics, history, philosophy and literature, most of which had to do with the international Communist movement.  Usually they were known as “gray books” or “yellow books” because the book cover was generally simply one light color.  Zhu Xueqin’s 1995 essay in Dushu on the impact of these books is available online here (in Chinese).

[8] Ying Xing’s article is available online here (in Chinese).

[9]The experience of this year had a significant impact on us. In a strict hierarchy and in a totally closed environment, we developed a style of hard work, focus, and self-discipline, as well as character traits such as the skill of both working with and making use of authority, being efficient, and seeking approval from authority.

[10] “Printed draft” was a technical term at that time; paper and ink were expensive, and the printed draft refers to a version that had been basically revised on the computer and printed specifically for comments.

[11] Translator’s note:  This is a play on words, in that the word for “boring” —无聊—literally means “without talk.”

[12] Deng Zhenglai’s text is available online here (in Chinese).

[13] In a text from 2004 available online here (in Chinese), Chen Guangxing and Qian Yongxiang also note the contradiction between state interference and the hegemony of Western academics in Chinese scholarly production.  As in the case of many changing areas in China, this comes on the one hand from an internal demand generated within Chinese society, and from the changing nature of the state on the other.  The results are significantly different from what everyone originally envisioned.  In any event, it is an internally generated change, and not an imposition by “Western hegemony.”

[14] See Mori Koichi, 1980, “Yanagita Kunio : An Interpretive Study.”

[15] The novelty of Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism lies in highlighting everyday experience. Nationalism is not an "inevitable" historical development, a direct product of shifts in modes of production or social structure, but is related to the rise of the novel, the modern printing press, newspapers, maps, roads, schools, etc. His emphasis on people's concrete experiences and perceptions strongly explains why nationalism, a very recent ideology, has become so rooted in people’s hearts.

[16] R. W. Connell. 1997. “Why Is Classical Theory Classical?” American Journal of Sociology .Vol. 102, No. 6: 1511-1557.

[17] Charles Letourneau, 1881, Sociology, Based upon Ethnography. London: Chapman and Hall.