Connecting with China

China disorients the visitor. The scale and bustle of its cities—propelled by the greatest economic growth and urban migration in history—overwhelm. The currency features Mao’s likeness, but new luxury apartment towers have displaced commoner housing all around the site of this summer’s Olympics in his capital city. The ubiquitous advertisements for Western consumer goods in Shanghai symbolize openness to the world, but during the March protests in Tibet, China Daily duly reported overseas Chinese students’ outrage at purported distortions by “the Western Goebbels’ Nazi media.” Along a Shanghai thoroughfare near the “Cowboy Boot Bar,” laundry dries on bamboo poles extended from balconies to the passing telephone wires; at street level, a retailer’s lingerie display would make Victoria’s Secret close the curtains.

Perhaps it should not surprise that such contrasts, arising within a generation of the Cultural Revoluton, can disorient the Chinese, too. Under the twin pressures of the one-child policy and the migration of 150 million rural workers to urban jobs (with a quarter-billion more expected to follow within 20 years), traditional, extended families have shrunk. Frantic growth and projects like the Olympics have uprooted whole communities and created new ones; what will it mean for the way people live, for instance, as 97 new airports open by 2020?

During a recent visit, some of these issues were tackled by alumni and fellows who have spent time in Massachusetts, by Harvard faculty members and their academic partners in China, and by panelists at the Harvard Alumni Association’s (HAA) conference in Shanghai (March 28-30). They also looked deep into China’s history, analyzed its present challenges, and tried to support its pursuit of a more fulfilling future for its 1.3 billion people.

The statistics in official accounts of every aspect of China’s transformation obscure as much as they explain. The pace and scope of change demand the telling of individuals’ stories, of neighborhoods enduring the whirlwind—the tools of social anthropology. But that discipline has scarcely existed in the Chinese academy, apart from ethnographies of minority groups within the People’s Republic.

Now, Pan Tianshu, Ph.D. ’02, one of perhaps a dozen western-trained social anthropologists in the country, is pioneering the field. Trained by faculty members including Rabb professor of anthropology Arthur Kleinman (who has worked in China since 1978 and in Taiwan the prior decade), Pan described how he inserted himself into one of Shanghai’s “lower quarter” neighborhoods. His dissertation details the effects of the “unemployment scheme” that stripped state-enterprise jobs from “work-unit persons” during China’s economic reforms. In response, they began besieging the official neighborhood organizations, once organs of social control, for job aid and welfare.

These same marginal city dwellers—once Mao’s vanguard class—saw their neighborhoods targeted for clearance and redevelopment. Pan said that their initial embrace of the promise of better housing was followed by mourning for the loss of community, and ultimately anger at inadequate compensation. More generally, he said, the residents have suffered from a “change of time-space,” a “compression” of their lives and the city’s meaning for them.

Now an associate professor at Fudan University’s School of Social Development and Public Policy—itself created only in 2004—the energetic Pan is in a hurry to bring such qualitative, humanistic research into China’s more technocratic, quantitative academic mainstream. (The importance of doing so throughout China’s higher education system was a principal theme of the HAA keynote address by Geisinger professor of history William C. Kirby, director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. He observed that for centuries, imperial China’s examination system brought the most accomplished humanists into high state service precisely because they were broadly learned, not because they were experienced administrators or—as are most current senior leaders—engineers.)

Pan is teaching four courses this term and edits authorized translations of exemplary American works. Among them are books by mentors Theodore Bestor, professor of anthropology; senior lecturer Rubie Watson; and Kleinman, whose What Really Matters contains a shattering portrait of a doctor whose life was all but destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and by repeated personal betrayals. Thus Pan introduces a new perspective into China’s contemporary discourse on itself.

Photograph by Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office

Peking University students Zhou Jia and Liu Jiang, and Professor Deng Xiaonan, are part of an international consortium transforming the study of Chinese history.

Pan’s academic work touches on other broad changes in Chinese life. Not only work and neighborhood but family have been redefined. During President Drew Faust’s visit to Shanghai No. 3 Girls High School (where a student greeted her, “Good afternoon, respectable president”), she listened as a student explained the appeal of extracurricular groups: “We are the only child in the family, so we seldom have the chance to organize such big programs.” Faust said that Chinese students at Harvard had told her “how much they felt they were the product of being only children.”

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