Wang Mingming interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 22nd July 2008

0:09:07 Born in Quanzhou in 1962; father started working as a young boy making ice cream for cinemas; at Liberation in 1949 he had the opportunity to become a border soldier but his mother was not happy as he was her only son and withdrew him; he moved back to the city since when he has worked as a civil servant; mother trained as a nurse in a school some seventy miles away; at that time it was in a Republican area; she came here to work in the first hospital; although my surname is Wang my face looks different from the Han Chinese; mother's mother has brown eyes and people here say she is of Persian descent; there was a huge number of Persians here in the Yuan Dynasty in the thirteenth century, either merchants or soldiers employed by the Mongols to control this area; our genealogy says that our first ancestor was one of the three brothers who conquered Fujian in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdom period; they were from Henan and established the Bin state; I do not know if this story is correct; my father and mother still work for the Government; my mother's mother often complained that her fellow villagers gave her the nickname "cat's eye"; her village was not recognised as a Hui (Moslem) community so she never thought of herself as a Hui or Persian; we have never been interested in this ethnic matter in the family, but I do think I look different from Han

6:54:09 I have two sisters, one living here, the other, in the Philippines; this is typical for families here; for my undergraduate degree I wrote an article on the huge emigration; noted a demographic decline in population in this area during the Ming and Qing; according to local historical studies it wasn't through death but through emigration; think that the Imperial State did not allow enough space for commerce which was critical to their livelihood; agriculture here was not good; there is a saying that the Fujianese treat the sea as their field; as the late Imperial Empire was closed, those who had gone overseas were not able to come back and know that they could leave again; also there was too little agricultural land and a large population due to earlier migrations from North China, from the Jin period onward; in my dissertation I tried to argue that it was heavy pressure on the land that forced people to go out but the Ming ban on Maritime trade meant that they didn't come back as once they had

11:11:18 My experience in Quanzhou has informed my studies; my view was clarified when I went abroad, especially from England, when studying anthropology; this is a city of mixtures; when I went to London I realised that in Western social anthropology people emphasise categories without paying much attention to mixtures of peoples; in this place, the mixtures are enlightening for any anthropologist, so am especially interested in this topic; of course, structural anthropology has taught us a lot about mixtures in kinship but doesn't deal with historical mixtures; I have written quite a lot, only in Chinese, about this

13:54:11 First went to primary school aged seven called 'The East is Red School'; about two years after the Cultural Revolution became quite violent so the school was not working effectively even though the teacher tried hard to maintain order; older students could arrest teachers and struggle against them in front of us; we were encouraged to throw stones at the teachers to humiliate them; I remember throwing a piece of brick during one struggle meeting; later I found that the older students who did this were those naughty boys who had not done well in school so hated the teachers; Chairman Mao had thus provided them with a means to display their anger; I went to the school in 1969, before which, in 1966, I went to a kindergarten; there was tension among the classmates; my older sister was in another class; I remember on my second day, a big boy in my class who was actually aged ten but backward, held a red flag and led us into the street and we demonstrated against Mao Tse-Tung's personal enemy Liu Xiao-Chi, the President of Peoples Republic of China; I continued to receive such revolutionary education until university; later on in middle school we had a music teacher from Beijing; she was sent down in early 1970's to the mountainous area of Fujian because she had said something bad about Mao Tse-Tung's wife; she  performed music so well that the Government moved her to our school; as an excellent music teacher she attracted a lot of good students; I joined her team and learnt the violin in a semi-secret manner; we had to be trained in Western style, not Chinese, but the musical scores were not available so we had to copy them; this had a big influence on me; her conscientious behaviour helped me to form my own opinion about the school; the teachers were good but the institution was awful; I continued to play until I was a student in Xiamen University; I stopped and I went to London without my violin as I thought that British people would be extremely good at music; I was also very busy trying to read Western books; I became an archaeologist and later changed to anthropology; I listen to music now in Beijing, but very little Chinese music, only that which sounds Western; it is a stupid prejudice but it is part of the legacy of my middle school experience when I thought that Western music was perfect; they liked Beethoven and Tchaikovsky

23:47:18 On Maoism, I have complex feelings; sometimes now I think that Mao was partly correct because young children had more time to play; nowadays all children study all the time; I find that towards the end of the Cultural Revolution his ideas were wrong because there were so many stories about Deng Xiao-Ping; he was a legend among ordinary people and I had to think which one of them was correct; at fourteen I had a big argument with my father who was quite  a senior cadre, a Party Secretary of a State owned sugar factory; I said that maybe capitalism was correct and he was really angry with me; that people should seek a better life and avoid suffering seemed quite sensible to me and that Deng Xiao-Ping was aware of this benefit of capitalism; certain rituals of the school and the country during the Cultural Revolution turned out to be ironic in the end; on the one hand they were enjoyable as when Mao Tse-Tung announced to students that reading too many books was useless; he forbade us to study English; at that time we didn't speak Mandarin, only Hokkien, so we were quite grateful that our English lessons were stopped; every day there would be some ritual activities like going to the street to shout against something or other; gradually these rituals became quite funny; the teachers needed to organize us into official gatherings, but they were ashamed to be wearing red scarves themselves; they tried to teach us Mandarin but their pronunciation was awful; at Mao's funeral, the Principal of the middle school was chairing our ceremony, but his Mandarin was so funny that I laughed; I was heavily criticised by my teachers; the images of the ten years of the Cultural Revolution may be marvellous for anthropologists, but for us it is more complicated as there is a mixture of positive and negative about it; I cannot reject those in the West who call our generation ignorant; we haven't paid sufficient attention to our history; we are children of revolution; we are responsible for a lot of disasters in this country; when I was small knowledge was called reactionary, nowadays knowledge is everything

31:04:11 Looking back at Mao's experiment I think it was a disaster though I should not say so in China; I have a more sensible explanation of the disaster as I don't think Mao was responsible for everything and neither was the Communist Party; long term history explains it, beginning in the mid-Qing Dynasty when the relationships between cultures, economies and nations changed; there were more contacts but less consensus among different cultures and this was the main driving force of later violence which contributed to the formation of Chinese modernism; this modernism had begun gradually but in 1895 Chinese thinking changed radically because of its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War; we had been defeated by Europeans in the early nineteenth century and seemed not to care too much because these were different races; the Japanese were our students so how could they defeat us? A lot of intellectuals then turned their attention to Japan; they found it had been successful because it had absorbed European culture so we had to do the same; this had already changed the Chinese mind by the beginning of the twentieth century; during that time China has pursued modernity in a radical way; Mao is part of that continuum; he is different from other modernists as, unlike Marx or Lenin, he put his trust in peasants; he had a great knowledge of strategies, of traditional wisdom, and thought he would win by trusting the peasants; he stirred up this great revolution of the peasantry; this was very different from other branches of Chinese modernism; for instance, Sun Yat-Sen was a synthesizer of social theories and Chang Kai-shek wanted to gain support from national capitalists; Fei Xiao-Tung placed a lot of emphasis on the gentry class and thought that to promote Chinese modernity one should rely on the elite, who know how to write; Mao was totally different; if the Cultural Revolution is a disaster it is a disaster of one option that was successful; this was an option derived from the majority - we call it the correct option in social science; wonder whether this emphasis on the will of the majority is a mistake in social science; The Great Leap Forward was similar to the Cultural Revolution as another instance of Mao's desire to improve livelihoods for the nation; he saw himself as an heroic leader who could achieve the goal of development; he wanted to catch up with Britain, to modernize China

39:51:05 At school I listened carefully to teachers and did what they told me to do; I was quite good in all classes except sport; I enjoyed making collections of things like cigarette cards; I was selected for the elite class in secondary school; if I had not studied music I would have gone to a university for science and technology; I was very good at maths, but bad at chemistry; found maths teachers were always eccentric, their classes interesting, and they behaved differently from other teachers; found it very interesting; after school spent three years trying to get into a music academy without success; maybe my standard was not high enough; during the transitional period, between 1978 and 1981, when China opened its universities to everyone, not only to good workers, the intellectuals were liberated again; they had a lot of children and relatives to come into the music academies; freedom began in the field of arts, so more freedom for intellectuals to choose which subject to follow; my father was not aware of these music academies so I had no back door method of getting in; by 1981 I was fed up with failure so decided to give up desire to go to a music academy; took the National exam in humanities and was quite successful; I went to study archaeology in Xiamen University; I enjoyed archaeology although my father wanted me to study management; for me, archaeology meant that I could travel to remote sites to dig; even now Chinese archaeology is good and has a lot of content, while social science is very empty; I was interested in dating artefacts; was not really aware of the great discoveries at the time but felt I just needed to study the many books, new and old, that I found in the book stores; I felt so ignorant as I had been taught not to study; to look at a text book was more than enough; I read more and more and the books were so exciting; one could even get European novels whereas before they were forbidden; that kind of blossoming of a hundred flowers was exciting; I don't know whether there were more discoveries in archaeology as there were discoveries even under Mao, thanks to Guo Moruo, a great scholar of archaeology; he was digging even during the Cultural Revolution; the only journal that continued to publish academic articles during that time was on archaeology; a quotation from Mao appeared on the front page, but the contents were good; I was influenced by Su Bin Qi, the Beijing University archaeologist and Zho Heng, also at Beijing University; later on I had a chance to meet with Professor Tong Enzheng of Sichuan University; he moved to Michigan Museum in the 1980's; also Zhuang Weiji and Ye Wencheng, great archaeologists, whom I find very interesting; I had to finish my degree so followed the archaeologist Zhuang Weiji, who died some years ago; he was the discoverer of the Sung boat in Quanzhou port; I studied with him in the final year and he taught me a lot about Quanzhou archaeology and I wrote the article on demography under his instruction; I read a lot of his work and became interested in this city

51:59:09 In the third year at University our section had been enlarged to include an anthropology department which had been established in 1983; the archaeology section was attached to the Department of History before then; I took the post-graduate exam and got a high grade so became an anthropology student; it was a different kind of anthropology to what I am doing now; it was called ethno-history and was the study of ethnic groups in ancient times in South China; my teacher was Chen Guoqiang, the founder in 1981 of the Chinese Anthropological Society; he studied with Professor Lin Huixiang who was in Academia Sinica before Liberation, and had studied anthropology in the Philippines; he was the same generation as Professor Fei; as a post-graduate student I had the opportunity to join the movement to promote anthropology in China; I began to do some translation of basic text books which my teachers assigned me; I had a lot of opportunity to read more and more English books; I had begun to learn English in 1981 as part of the necessary exam to go to university; I continued to study it in University without being able to speak it; I finished a Master's degree in two, rather than the usual three years, and then I went to London in 1987

55:46:22 Our University had received a document from the Ministry saying that three students could go to England on a Sino-British Friendship Scholarship; I took an exam and was selected as one of the three; one of them went to Oxford to study finance and has become a top stock market advisor here; I stuck to anthropology, particularly ancient anthropology; it may have been the wrong choice; later I tried to go to Africa, but without success; I went to SOAS Department of Anthropology in October 1987; I was looking forward to arriving but after landing I felt so sleepy; the first room I had was in the Chinese Ministry of Education Office in London where they had a hostel; I remember watching TV and finding that I couldn't follow it as they spoke so quickly; I fell asleep immediately; the next morning I discovered the weather in October was so cold and that Underground tickets were so expensive, the equivalent of travelling from Xiamen to Beijing from the suburbs to the centre of London; I felt so badly about Britain in the beginning; felt very depressed and homesick; at home my parents could give me money but here I just waited for the Chinese Government to pay something into my account which I had to open in a bank; I had never done so before as banks were not popular in China; those Chinese students who had come from Beijing or Shanghai were so excited, but I came from a small town which was a third of the size of today's Quanzhou; I just followed these students as they could manage city life, were open minded and talked to the British people; I couldn't speak even though my English was much better than theirs; I spent a month in an English school for language tuition