Second Part

0:09:07 Arrived at SOAS and was advised to see Richard Tapper who was then in charge of post-graduate students; he sent me to see Lionel Caplan, the Chair of the department; Lionel asked me what kind of books I had read; I told him Lewis Henry Morgan, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict; he thought that I should do a one year Master's degree rather than starting a Ph.D.; I was in a hurry as I had only three years; he insisted and said he would talk to the British Council; did two terms of an M.A. and followed a quite systematic course on anthropological theory on kinship, ritual, economics and politics; kinship was taken by Stuart Thompson; Christina Torren taught both ritual and politics; David Parkin and Mark Hobart did a special series of lectures on contemporary trends in anthropology; Paul Spencer lectured on classics of social theory; found his lectures good; I couldn't quite catch up with Parkin and Hobart who had new ideas and complicated philosophy though later I did begin to understand them; Hobart was quite eccentric, but enjoyable; Richard Burghardt taught on India and he organised a lot of discussions among students, my English didn't enable me to do much discussion

5:06:01 In Xiamen our professors gave repetitive lectures; British teaching was more practical; they would make you read before the class and tried to make you speak; I found this very attractive even though I couldn't speak; by the second term I had improved and I began to think about the good sides of Britain; before that I was deeply homesick; my class was so international with people from London, Scotland, Wales, Bhutan, Egypt, Japan, Sri Lanka; sadly I have not remained in contact with them because during fieldwork and writing up we went away, and some had gone when I graduated; I still think it was a very good teaching system; I am trying to promote a symposium in China, inspired by the first year in London; during that year I was supervised by Richard Tapper who was in charge of essays but only saw him fleetingly; after two terms I had to take an exam to judge my standard; my essays were submitted to Tapper who read them and found them interesting; he marked them quite highly and then passed me on to Lionel Caplan; he agreed that I could do a Ph.D.; I then spent another year doing library research for my M.Phil. report; I spent many hours in SOAS library which is one of the best in the world, reading sinologists - William Skinner, Maurice Freedman - checking which were relevant; I was interested in ritual and politics; I got to know Stephan Feuchtwang; in my first month he was chairing the London-China Seminar at SOAS; he asked me if I was from Quanzhou which excited him as a number of anthropologists were planning to go to South-East China; originally they had gone to Taiwan; he took me for a meal with Michael Palmer, Stuart Thompson and several other students afterwards; I met him quite often after that and he influenced my thinking, especially writing about religion in China

11:19:23 Stephan is a warm person and a very good anthropologist in China studies; through him I have learnt to respect religion among the Chinese which was not there before I met him; in China we disregard anything deemed superstitious whereas people like him, trying to study Chinese culture and social organization looked at religion; found it an inspiring perspective; in this aspect he has made very important contributions, not just to British anthropology but also for Chinese anthropology; for instance, Professor Fei Xiao-Tung had never studied religious life, only economic; religious studies are one important thing that we can learn from Western anthropologists, and he is a very important bridge; his Mandarin is not very good but his Hokkien was fluent when he was in the field in Taiwan

14:35:09 The theme of my library study was festivals; I wrote a long report which was approved and then I wrote a shorter proposal to the central fund of London University and they gave me a grant to be able to stay in London for a year; my original plan was to go to Anhai township to see the coexisting calendars of rituals; I met with a Buddhist expert who tried to persuade me just to study Buddhism at his temple and tried to stop me from going to any other temple; I thought it dangerous to stay and just become his follower so I left Anhai and went to Quanzhou where I had more freedom as I knew so many people; my middle school teacher, Mr Chen, became Director of the Bureau of Culture so he appointed me as a kind of academic associate; I had the freedom to read his archives; thesis on existing calendars, how the national, regional and neighbourhood, calendars of ritual in some way reflect three senses of space and place, coexisting in the city; for me the national calendar of ritual was defined in terms of national holidays whereas the regional calendar was always changing as the local elite made it for art performances etc.; the third kind was more traditional, each neighbourhood having its own annual cycle of rituals involving the households, including those of officials; could see how national holidays were bound up with the work unit system, the 'danwei' system; if you go out of 'danwei' the so-called cultural arenas are not important; you even have some regional elite who tried to revitalize Quanzhou as a prosperous place by not only fitting on the national calendar but also absorbing traditional calendars of ritual; they are innovative but are built on the knowledge of the history of this area; also they are keen to attract overseas Chinese and foreigners; that is the regional place; then you have neighbourhood territorial cults, rivalry between different communities and what can be shared among households; I was looking at contesting histories within one city; I am ashamed of it as it is less cultural and more political as a sociological analysis of ritual, but proud of it as this sort of thing is still being discussed in anthropology

20:48:00 At the time I was confused; I had read many books and tried to absorb all of them in just one thesis; not only Durkheim, but Bourdieu, Foucault, Giddens - particularly for the national space; my mistake was that I neglected much of the history of anthropology, trying to be too fashionable; I even sounded like Bourdieu in writing; supervisor for this was David Parkin; he was very helpful and read my first draft which was very long; he told me that it was not anthropology but an encyclopaedia of Quanzhou; he said that anthropology should be a case study; this didn't convince me as I thought that Chinese anthropology in Britain and the United States had this shortcoming of just focussing on one village; I tried to do something else using David Parkin's semantic model; I tried to focus on semantic ontology, such as Chinese concepts of happiness, but he didn't like that; he was fed up with me so I talked to Elisabeth Croll and Stuart Thompson; Thompson had been helping me a lot as he had studied China; I transferred to Elisabeth Croll; however, she was very busy but when she spoke in our class she was very interesting, and her teaching was technical on how to analyse and use data, and how to write a dissertation; I did not see her much but relied on Stuart Thompson's advice; I finished my thesis in 1992 and was examined in the following January; I was examined by Stephan Feuchtwang and Chris Pinney and they were very positive as I had studied both history and ethnography; the thesis has never been published as I would have to rewrite it to be satisfied with it; I have written a history of Quanzhou which will appear in another form in English in 2009; it is very historical so quite different from the thesis

28:42:16 Feel the book purportedly by Jacob D'Ancona on Quanzhou is quite exciting; the translator, David Selbourne, has been heavily criticized by both Western and Chinese scholars, is an important political philosopher at Oxford; he  does not need to fake this case of the City of Light; also a lot of the criticisms stem from prejudices about the history of cultural contacts between Europe and China; people are more used to saying that only by the late Ming did Chinese and Europeans come together; my impression is that this is totally wrong; how can you explain the Nestorians and Franciscans; as early as the Yuan Dynasty there were at least two great Catholic cathedrals in this area; we discovered in Italy the journals of those missionaries; some suspicion of this book derives from this foreshortened history of Sino-European contact; I don't say that this book is a totally true story; even if D'Ancona had travelled to Quanzhou he would have used other contemporary writers materials; you can see some mistakes in the writing so it may not be totally trustworthy, but there are also biases against the history; some even doubt that Marco Polo came to China but the people of the city of Quanzhou use him as their trademark, to question it is very challenging; that Marco Polo didn't mention the Great Wall reflects its little importance in the Yuan Dynasty

34:14:03 After SOAS I stayed with Stephan and then went to Edinburgh; I was his field researcher for his project for two years but I went independently to Edinburgh to do post-doctoral research; after that I had another joint project with Stephan; I was in Edinburgh for a year where I got to know Nicholas Tapp who had worked in South-West China on the Hmong; he was a new lecturer there at the time and his wife was Chinese; I worked more with Barney McDougall, the Chair of  the East Asian Department; Edinburgh was a wonderful city that I still miss; then came back to China and spent a year in the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology at Peking University, where Fei Xiao-Tung was a post-doctoral fellow; I was then appointed as Associate Professor and within two years I became a full Professor in 1997 by which time I had written some books

36:40:23 Fei Xiao-Tung's strength was his ability to communicate; he was practical - he had the traditional literati habit of being able to think and do; he was also a good politician but that was also his shortcoming - he was not academic enough; his writing was half academic and half political and this confusion meant that his writing was light-weight; this meant that it was sometimes more effective than more pretentious academic writing; so I have a confused view about him; I am more determined to do what I think is good anthropology which is at once related to his, but also quite different; I am a lot more historical and inclined towards ritual studies, cosmological studies, whereas he was only looking at contemporary issues; in his village study 'Peasant Life in China' he did not do a good study of the temples that exist there; to Westerners this might be a boring subject but in China it is quite important as several generations just destroyed them and neglected their significance; he was a modernizer and could be criticised for supporting the idea that minorities should be absorbed into the Han State; however, under him a lot of intermediate systems were tolerated; one was the gentry class, another was the local native chiefs in Western China; in his theory such intermediate layers had been tolerated but his critics would have liked to turn the whole issue into one of ethnic politics; if they had succeeded it would have been disastrous because before 1950s a lot of ethnic minorities had their own kingdoms; in Western ethnicity theory this is not recognised, they are just seen as ethnic groups; Fei's theories did have some negative effects, both his modernization theory and the pragmatism of his anthropology, prevented Chinese anthropology from becoming even slightly critical or analytical; I am happy with his writings in the 1940s which were historical, critical, and have some spirit;  he was purged during the Cultural Revolution; his two important 1940s works are still not allowed to be published as monographs but have to be included in a larger book; in the 1950s he suffered from the distrust of the authorities and was assaulted by his classmates who had already turned themselves into Marxist ethnologists; thus he became very cautious; still, our generation needs something more, not just to admit but also to rethink

45:11:11 If I was to write on rethinking Chinese anthropology, the first chapter would be 'Why Chinese Anthropology is not Chinese', it is general; later chapters will explain it in several ways; think that Chinese anthropology can contribute to the world's anthropology by looking at China just like our ancestors, Professor Fei etc.; we should not say that this is unique because by looking at China we are looking at human beings and the world; what is the difference of China - this should be explained in specific anthropological terms; in anthropology China is different because no Sino-anthropologists have high positions in general anthropology so far; China is different from either tribal or European civilizations; what is China? - this question we need to discuss; like India, I think it is a kind of third type from the Western perspective; but is China the same as India? - no, it has no caste system; I am thinking about bureaucracy perhaps, a kind of civilizing bureaucracy, which was not only political, militant, but also symbolic and economic; is this perspective useful for anthropology in general? - I think it is quite important; China is both different and similar to Europe; think that if one wants to contribute to anthropology in general, Chinese anthropology needs to be a kind of social or civilizational theory, not just ethnography; ethnography may be important to explain China's difference, but to admit its similarity is also quite important; Western anthropologists working on China, like Freedman, have not tackled this; within China, have only found ethnographies that rely on translations of Western theory; difficulty of using the Chinese language in social science; it was a business language and will take time to become an academic language; we have to write better and better Chinese academic writings; there are no Chinese thinkers who have made direct comparisons between China and  the West; at present, students of anthropology are trying to get good degrees and jobs and are careful about what they do; I have a professor's freedom to think, but I am still powerless; what I am trying to do is not separate from Western anthropology; the important point is to have respect for each culture; we must rethink universalism and be really universalist