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At a time when multiple strands of work are being pursued in parallel, I had not intended to schedule additional activities. However, over the past week, I attended two events in London, organised respectively by a Chinese writer and his team, and by a group of scholars and their team. Although the two events differed in format and approach, both achieved unexpectedly successful outcomes. Through on-site observation and participation, it becomes possible to understand more clearly how Chinese culture and scholarship are entering the global space in the present moment.
I have recently begun compiling The Globalisation of Chinese Social Sciences: A Forty-Year Witness. For this reason, following the events, I stayed up through the night to record and organise not only the relevant material, but also the reflections it prompted, so that they would not be lost in the passage of time. The following account begins with the most recent event.
Entering the University Context through an Academic Community: The Practice of FANG Lili
On 27 March, at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, I attended—after 35 years in London—my first event in an archaeology department, crossing disciplinary boundaries. I had originally gone simply to support Professor FANG Lili as an academic colleague, but it was striking that the lecture was fully attended.
The title of Professor Fang’s lecture was “Post-Agricultural Civilisation: Insights from the Development and Transformation of China’s ‘Porcelain Capital’, Jingdezhen.” Based on her long-term fieldwork in Jingdezhen, she proposed the concept of “post-agricultural civilisation,” which is highly thought-provoking. The short films shown before and after the lecture lent a certain performative dimension to what would normally be an academic talk, adding further layers to its intellectual expression.
It is worth noting that this week of exchanges at University College London was primarily coordinated by Professor Rodney Harrison of the Institute of Archaeology. The short film shown before Professor Fang’s lecture indicated that Professor Harrison had previously conducted fieldwork in China on multiple occasions, during which he was received and accompanied by Professor Fang. This visit can be seen as part of an ongoing pattern of reciprocal exchange: from China to the UK, returning to the concrete setting of the university, and forming a transnational mechanism of exchange grounded in personal academic connections.
Lili Fang was the last postdoctoral researcher of Professor Fei Xiaotong, one of the key founding figures of Chinese sociology and anthropology. She has inherited and further developed the platform of the China Art Anthropology Association established by Professor Fei, which now has a membership of around 4,000. After the lecture, we revisited the 2019 event we co-organised in the United States, “Following Fei Xiaotong’s Path by His Students,” which included a series of activities at the University of Chicago. At that time, there had also been plans to continue this academic trajectory in the UK, but due to the pandemic and other factors, this has yet to be realised.
Interestingly, during the lecture at UCL, a scholar raised the question of comparing the experience of Jingdezhen with that of Chile in South America. This question in fact touched upon an earlier idea: the original UK visit plan had included a field visit to Stoke-on-Trent, Britain’s “pottery city,” as early as 1981, when Fei Xiaotong came to the UK to receive the Huxley Memorial Medal, and the Royal Anthropological Institute had arranged for him to visit the area. This unrealised comparative pathway has now been implicitly reactivated in a new academic context.
After the lecture, during the reception, I introduced Professor FANG Lili to several PhD students in anthropology at UCL, and we took a group photograph together. To some extent, this also facilitated a mutual introduction between her and these anthropology researchers, expanding their academic networks between archaeology and anthropology.
Entering the University Context through Literature and Publishing: The Practice of Xue Mo
On 21 March, at SOAS University of London, I arrived at the venue after attending another event. In comparison, the scale was quite impressive. The event was titled “New Literary Writing and Cross-Cultural Communication among UK-based Scholars — A Symposium on the Works of Xue Mo and an International Academic Exchange.”
Looking back to 2013, we held the international conference “Weber and China: Culture, Law and Capitalism” at the same venue, with scholars participating from many countries. In terms of overall attendance, the scale of the two events appeared to be broadly comparable.
Xue Mo is an internationally recognised novelist and cultural scholar. I edited the overseas Simplified Chinese edition of his book The Mind and the Heart, which was launched at the London Book Fair in 2024. The book is included in the Chinese Concepts series of Global Century Press and is a work with a clear intellectual orientation.
In recent years, Xue Mo has participated in major international publishing platforms, including the Frankfurt Book Fair, as a writer. Through multilingual publications, on-site events, and continuous presence, he has gradually formed a stable international readership and a network of dissemination. His success is reflected not only in the cross-linguistic circulation and continued publication of his works, but also in the sustained presence and visibility of both the author and his team in international cultural spaces.
As I arrived when the event was already nearing its end, I happened to see several of the panellists engaged in the discussion. Two of them were familiar to me: Professor Hugo de Burgh, former Director of the China Media Centre at the University of Westminster, where I served as a visiting professor for several years; and Dr Yukteshwar Kumar, currently Programme Director of China Studies at the University of Bath. During the Beijing International Book Fair last year, I chaired a dialogue between him and Xue Mo.
At the final stage of the discussion, the moderator invited those present to leave the audience with a single sentence. Taken together, the various remarks revealed a shared orientation: although approached from different pathways, Xue Mo’s works were consistently understood in terms of their underlying intellectual dimension. This was also the original intention behind our publication of 《人心》The Mind and the Heart—to present Xue Mo as a thinker to readers. At the same time, this process of entering the same text through multiple pathways generated a transcultural space of understanding across different disciplines and cultural experiences.
Before the end of the event, there was also a book presentation session. The books were received on behalf of SOAS University of London by Dr Lianyi Song, Principal Teaching Fellow at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics, University of London, and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Chinese for Social Sciences, published by Global Century Press.
Finally, Xue Mo collaborated with a music teacher from SOAS University of London in a live performance, with the latter providing accompaniment on the pipa. This segment extended what had been an academic event centred on literature and thought into a more integrated form of cultural expression, and shifted the atmosphere from discussion to participation, creating another sense of “presence.” In this process, text, sound, and embodied practice were reconnected, and academic exchange moved beyond the level of language into a form of relational experience generated in situ.
Before parting, I arranged with Xue Mo to visit the Xue Mo Academy in early May, during my fieldwork in Gansu, in order to further experience the historical and cultural context underpinning his writing through its specific spatial and environmental setting.
Two Modes of Entry and Their Contributions to Cultural and Academic Exchange
From a broader perspective, these two events represent two different yet equally instructive pathways of practice. During the 2022 Frankfurt Book Fair, Xue Mo ranked first among international media trending topics outside Germany. Taking the writer and his team as the main agents, Xue Mo has continuously entered the global space of cultural dissemination through international book fairs and publishing systems. By contrast, FANG Lili, relying on the platform of the China Art Anthropology Association, organised a group of twelve for lectures and study visits, engaging in exchanges within specific university settings.
Although these two pathways differ in form, they reveal a shared trend: entering the target space as active agents, and completing processes of dissemination and exchange through presence, rather than primarily relying on external intermediary structures.
This shift is also closely related to changes in technological conditions. Although Professor Fang’s lecture was delivered in Chinese, the use of English PowerPoint slides and real-time on-screen translation, including immediate interpretation during the Q&A session, enabled audiences from different linguistic backgrounds to participate simultaneously. The development of technology has gradually transformed cross-linguistic communication from being mediated by others to a shared process of understanding in co-presence, thereby providing the practical conditions for this form of direct, agent-based engagement.
Perhaps one may draw on Professor FANG Lili’s observation in her research on the transformation of Jingdezhen’s social structure—that in periods of transition, a group of “pioneering actors” inevitably emerges. In this sense, whether it is Xue Mo, who continues to enter international cultural spaces through the dissemination of literature and thought, or FANG Lili, who engages in exchanges within specific institutional settings through an academic community, they are not only participants but also “pioneering actors” shaping the pathways of global social change. What their practices reveal is not merely individual success, but a new possibility for the unfolding of Chinese culture and scholarship in the contemporary world.
