The Individualization of Chinese Society Book

We're lucky to have Yan: he's utterly fluent in a Chinese world and in an elite anglophone academe. He helps bridge the two. And Yan also straddles the eras in China: he and his family directly experienced Maoist China, with its collectivization and Cultural Revolution, as well as much of post-reform era China. Yan is a methodical fieldworker, returning often to a couple of villages in China. He has some good guanxi (social relationships embedded in reciprocity) there, and has built up trust and intimacy with some people.

Still the book never really satisfies. Yan is more of a data collector than a theorist. When he does present theory, it's pretty classic stuff. He's not interested in performativity, the relationality of power, or discourse. It reads more like a 1970s work than one from this century. Still, it's a valuable record of a remarkable era in a place called China.