Ethnographic Perspectives on Change and Continuity in China - Transcript

Opener (00:00:02)

 

This is the Nordic Asia podcast. 

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:00:09)

 

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm your host, Ari-Joonas Pitkänen, a doctoral candidate at the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku in Finland. In this episode we will be talking about China's rural and urban transformation from an ethnographic perspective.

 

My guest today is Suvi Rautio, an anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in Finland.

 

Suvi's academic interests are related to the social orderings of marginalized populations living in China, and she is currently working on a research project on the transmission of memory and loss among Beijing's intellectual class during the Maoist era.

 

Suvi has also hosted her own podcast series on Chinese studies here in the New Books Network, and our listeners are encouraged to check out Suvi's profile on the website, where you can see a list of the episodes that she has hosted. Okay, welcome to the podcast Suvi!

 

Suvi Rautio (00:00:49)

 

Thank you so much for having me Ari-Joonas. It's really a pleasure to be here today.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:01:07)

 

Thank you, it's great to have you. So as I just mentioned there in the introduction you are currently working on this research project on memory and loss among Beijing's intellectual class in the Maoist era, which sounds like a really interesting topic. So to start with, could you tell us a bit more about this topic? Just introduce your topic, and what sort of questions you're focusing on in this research.

 

Suvi Rautio (00:01:29)

 

Yeah, absolutely. So the project starts, as you just mentioned it's about Beijing intellectuals during the Maoist era, I'm looking at one particular university ground, not intellectuals on a kind of wider society level, and the project itself starts, it begins from my own family history. So I'm going to describe briefly what this means, I'm going to describe briefly my own family dynamics and how at the birth of Mao's China, my family was anchored to a city that none of them were from.

 

What I mean, that none of them were from Beijing. My grandfather himself was from Fujian, from Fuzhou, and he was from a merchant family and he was able to attend university and study as a psychologist, and he was one of the first... oh and there was a wave, at the time there was a wave of intellectuals, of students going to France with stipends and to study there from Tsinghua, from Beida and so forth, and my grandfather was one of them who was able to ride this wave to Europe and study abroad. Quite a privileged position to be in at the time because the stipend allowed them to live relatively well off in Paris.

 

And my grandmother was in Finland and she was visiting a friend in Paris and that's how she met her soon-to-be husband. And considering the limited options for my grandfather at the time, and he was growing increasingly politically aligned with what Mao Zedong had already grounded in China, so he wanted to return to China and he wanted to be a part of this project. His own family had already migrated from Fujian to Taiwan, what at the time was a common migration pattern for those who were not politically aligned.

 

So as I mentioned, this project starts from my own family history who were moving to a city that none of them were from. So my grandfather was driven there for political reasons, but of course also for work and he brought his whole family there with him. At the time China was in a very different position in terms of treating foreigners and intellectuals especially, and my understanding is that the first few years my family lived relatively comfortably. They were respected in society and there was an excitement, a general kind of energy in the air, that they were kind of feeding off at the time.

 

So the purpose of the study is to one day expand from this family history, so I do hope to go to Beijing and get to collect the stories from the community of other families who were from intellectual backgrounds and who were teaching on university grounds and to understand the stories of the intellectuals' children's lives at the time who were in close contact and continue to be in close contact with my father and uncle to this day.

 

But anyway, at the moment, considering I'm drawing on the stories from my own family history, I think it's opened up all kinds of interesting preliminary findings. On one level it's adding to... I think there is very little information about the stories and experiences of foreigners in China during the Maoist era, and there is not much recognition of the plurality and multiplicity of these stories. Each of the families who were moving to China at the time had their own objectives and motivations for living in China, oftentimes politically aligned, but their political affiliation and ideology had its own background, had its own history, narrative and drive. And I think that there is a common assumption that these foreigners were living in conditions of privilege or in a vacuum separate from the reality of Chinese people at the time, but the stories that I'm collecting at the moment with my father and my uncle complicate these assumptions.

 

The stories that they are sharing with me are much more about losing place in the world. They are about youth, they are about vulnerability and at the same time finding a sense of belonging in a community, with their friends in a neighborhood, who were themselves also odd outcasts in their own ways. But perhaps what I find most interesting from the preliminary interviews that I've been doing with my uncle and father here in Helsinki is that even though their age limit is relatively close, the political discrimination that they felt is so vastly different, and it really points to just how different family members can experience political discrimination. It's in no way a singular kind of force, and even though the entire family was a target of state violence for its impurity, the stories that I am collecting from my uncle and father, again, are very different, so even though they were both considered politically impure, my father was also racially flawed and my uncle was himself physically disabled, so these also added another layer to their kind of target for state violence and targeted discrimination.

 

But on the story of targets of the state, my grandfather was sent to university prison and he was then soon after, two years after, sent down to the countryside under the Down to the Countryside Movement, and throughout this time my grandmother was under house arrest, so in the mid-1960s my whole family kind of fell apart entirely and my father also became a target in schools where teachers pointed out to students that they should have nothing to do with him, as kind of an outcast, as a foreigner, even though himself, his whole life, his whole world had been shaped in Beijing at the time. He was also labeled as a petty criminal, and he was placed into re-education camp or xuexi ban, and later he was released. And even after he was released he was frequently sought after and gathered with other petty criminals to be surveilled and punished.

 

His stories all carry an underlying message of surveillance and watching over, or constantly being watched basically, constantly being under the eyes of political rule and anyone who he was involved with then became a target of political rule, so he was kind of contagious to those around him. Another kind of interesting find from these preliminary findings is just the way that people recall their narratives, how they recall their histories I found really fascinating. So my uncle draws a lot more vocabulary to explain his discrimination, he uses terminology such as “third class citizen” to kind of justify what was done to him. He recognizes that there was a systematic flaw, rather than necessarily his individual flaw, whereas my father pieces together his histories much more based on facts, which I find he is trying to do in order to locate justice to what was done to people like him and his family at the time. Another difference between the two is that one boasts much more than downplays the victimhood that they experienced, where the other one pays much more attention to giving the details correctly. So what I find really interesting about these recollections is that they are both attempts to cope with the past. They both carry agency in order to find comfort in what they and their generation lost. It shows how historical narratives are produced and reproduced in everyday life, to shape who we are, and to make sense of where we stand in the world. And I don't think that any of these ways of attempting to cope are unique to these stories that I'm collecting... Sorry, the way that my father and uncle are recollecting their histories is not unique to them, but it speaks to the conditions of the time that arguably continue to work through in the sense of belonging and place that people associate with China to this day.

 

So as I mentioned at the beginning, I don’t intend to keep my project purely focused on my family histories, but at the moment, considering travel is restricted to China, it is kind of all I can work with. At the same time beyond interviews and these narratives which are much more personal, I'm also going through boxes of archives that my father brought back. Over the years, he collected a lot of the Red Guard pamphlets that were being distributed in university grounds that he himself was also distributing at the beginning when he also very much carried a sense of loyalty to the Party. Going through these archives has also been really fascinating because I'm constantly reminded of the faith and the belief that Red Guards felt at the time. The kind of moral zealousness that was spreading across China, especially at the first years of Cultural Revolution, which of course also led to violence, these were integral to Red Guard troops and justified through their theory. This kind of belief and this zealousness really does come through in these pamphlets that we are going through together.

 

One of the biggest findings that I will probably continue to encounter throughout my research is that, and this should in no way come as a surprise, but which will constantly have to be processed and worked on, is that building an anthropological intervention around history and biography is really not an easy task. It is really challenging personally and intellectually and I'm really constantly having to process what it means to and how I can better redefine my role not as a daughter but as a researcher in front of my family. And I think that at the same time my family members are struggling to redefine their role as interlocutors or as intimate others, as subjects of my research, rather than as my family members.

 

And this will also then expand if I do ever make it to collect the stories of my interlocutors in Beijing where they are going to be associating my role through my affiliations with my family and shaping their stories around that. So this kind of draws back to the continuous questions that anthropologists ask about objectivity and subjectivity and seeking to remain professional and paying attention to the kinds of emotions that are being roused when we listen to stories that often times have many layers and many other ways of interpreting them. So this is something that I'll constantly have to work on as my research unfolds.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:10:27)

 

Okay, yeah. Well, sounds like a super interesting topic and you obviously have a really special personal perspective and also access to these archives and personal resources that you have so, definitely really interesting and I can't wait to hear more once your research progresses, and obviously we hope that you'll be able to go to Beijing sooner rather than later. Obviously the current situation is challenging regarding travel, but fingers crossed on that. Sounds super interesting.

 

Your current research obviously focuses on Beijing, which is an urban environment, but your previous research has focused on specifically rural village life in China, and you wrote your PhD dissertation based on this quite extensive ethnographic fieldwork in a village called Meili in Southwest China, and based on this, in your PhD dissertation, you asked quite a big question: What constitutes and defines a village in China today? So, what sort of place is the village of Meili and what sort of answers did you find to this question of, you know, what constitutes and defines a village in China today based on your fieldwork in Meili?

 

Suvi Rautio (00:11:39)

 

Yeah thanks, that's a really good question, a big one as you mentioned. But yeah, just to give some background, so Meili is an acronym I gave to the village where I did my research, in the landlocked province of Guizhou in Southwest China. Meili is a Dong ethnic minority village with a population of 1,306 registered inhabitants. It is surrounded by mountains and terrace fields and it is very compact and sits in a deep valley. So within 30 minutes or even 25 minutes you have walked from one end of a village to the next in terms of where people are living. Of course the mountains and the fields kind of add a whole other aspect to the village space, but it is a very compact space, where people are living kind of on top of one another in their wooden framed houses. To this day the kind of vernacular architecture, these wooden frameworks are very well kept and in addition to the wooden homes there's numerous other landmarks that define it as a Dong ethnic minority village, such as as rainwater bridges (fengyuqiao), drum tower, and for example carved stone pathways and multiple other remnants from the Qing dynasty. And in recognition of this kind of holistic, well-kept vernacular architecture, Meili is listed under numerous heritage protocols. In 2014, along with 50 other villages across the nation, Meili was listed as a model traditional village, so chuantong cunluo. It has also gained other nationally acclaimed merits as a national heritage site, including UNESCO's World Heritage Convention, Dong Village Tentative List. So to this day they still haven't gained recognition in the list, but it is on the Tentative List with 22 other Dong villages in Guizhou and neighboring Guangxi and Hunan.

 

So I lived in Meili for total of 13 months between 2014 and 2017, so the longest stay was was 11 months and then I did visits before and after that official doctoral fieldwork. When I first started my fieldwork, I thought I would be studying the trees and the landscape of the village, which I found fascinating because during preliminary visits I was soon to learn that the trees carry kind of a spiritual entity of healing children and there was also the risk of outsiders coming in to loot some of these endangered trees, so I was interested in studying the value of these trees and the forests. When I started my official doctoral research in 2015 I was soon to find that I wasn't getting very far talking about the trees and the landscape on a daily basis. Instead, everyone wanted to talk to me about the planning of the heritage scheme, or specifically the lack of its planning, the lack of things moving forward.

 

So this is something that really did take over my thesis, even though of course I do still write about the trees and the forests, and these kind of healing properties that they carry. As an anthropologist, my fieldwork was prioritized spending time with families. I was present in many of the families’ everyday lives, and in the ceremonies and family gatherings, including funerals, weddings, one year old birthday parties (song manyue), and I followed people and took part in the work required in patty fields and their gardens and their kitchens and these ceremonies, and it became a vital task of mine as it is to many anthropologists to be present in the lives of the people I ought to know. It was in no way an easy task. I was often refuted for my presence as a foreigner, and in such a compact village where word spreads fast and there was a lot of badmouthing and gossip, I very often struggled to differentiate what was real and what were rumors. This is something I write about a lot in my thesis as well, and that I continue to work with; on notions of secrecy and the truth that people express through words or the kind of flawed interpretations of that.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:15:07)

 

Okay sounds really interesting and a learning experience, I guess ethnographic fieldwork can always be a learning experience no matter how much you have done that and you know, that's the beauty of it: as you mentioned, you were first focusing on the landscape, but you noticed that the people wanted to talk about something completely different and then sort of let that guide you into a different direction. That sounds like a really interesting and organic path that you took. But you know, this point about the village being a heritage site or wanting to be a heritage site, or apparently the process is ongoing, how do you see this dynamic between heritage preservation and modernization in general in the countryside in China? Because oftentimes these can be tricky things to juggle, when for example a lot of these heritage projects are motivated by commercial interests for tourism for example. They want to create tourist sites out of these traditional places and there can be competing interests that can make it tricky to sort of preserve the authentic old, while still sort of creating the conditions for rising living standards, economic development and so on. How do you think this has worked in the case of Meili?

 

Suvi Rautio (00:16:20)

 

Yeah, absolutely. I mean I think we constantly return to that question, is it progress or preservation? And I don't think there is absolutely a clear answer to that, and to seek to answer that is based on, you know, the kind of epistemological grounding that one comes with. But in terms of Meili, you know, this big shift of moving urban capital to rural China, of course, that is kind of at the groundings of the heritage industry and rural revitalization schemes that are happening across China, which is leaving many villagers domiciled and forced to move in to subsidized housing in order to create historical tourist sites out of villages. And in Meili, there was very little of that kind of shift when I was doing research. There were suggestions to some households who wanted to for example tear down a wooden barn and then the local government officials told them that okay, we will give you subsidized housing in a county town if you can make sure that you don't touch this barn. But at the time of my research there was no follow up to this, so there was very little action done on this and the families that were buying property in the county town were obviously those of more economically stable backgrounds.

 

But these schemes are of course very politically driven, and this is especially prominent across Guizhou, which has one of the lowest GDP per capita among China's 34 provincial regions, and it is frequently referred to as the home of the poverty-stricken population. So it is oftentimes the politicians who gain from these schemes and at least in Meili this constant disappointment was voiced to me, that the preservation scheme was not attending to the development of the village exterior, it was not attending to alleviating poverty, of which families were most concerned with. But in addition to this kind of political performance, there is a lot written about face projects of these heritage schemes or development schemes across China, but in addition to this face that the Party puts on through developments, I also learned that people do respond. They seek compromise through these development schemes, through rural restoration. And even though Meili was not one of those villages that had lots of urban investors, although this was growing just at the end of the final weeks of my research actually, and the discourse of heritage is present in the lives of Meili inhabitants and plans are constantly showcased around them, but it does not in any way define who they are. It is kind of in separation from their everyday life, and it doesn’t over-determine their life and experiences. So instead, considering it is a kind of separate realm from their everyday life, that remains important to people of Meili, this leaves room for compromise, which I have studied through this example of material compromises of heritage schemes. So in this notion of material compromises I talk about how villagers rework plans through the materiality of the village, so they take part in deciding what texture the walls of the village should be, how smooth the rustic stone pathways need to be, whereas if this was up to the decision making of the heritage scheme, this materiality would be based on this kind of ideology that in an ethnic minority village, the materiality needs to be unworked and it needs to be raw.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:19:23)

 

Okay yeah, but moving again from the countryside back to the city and back to Beijing actually, I want to talk a bit more about Beijing because you, as you mentioned in the beginning you have this special perspective on Beijing because of your own family history, but also because you actually grew up in Beijing yourself and you worked there for quite an extensive time apparently before your academic career, and it just so happens that Beijing is also the Chinese city that I am most familiar with since I have lived there twice, first in 2012 for exchange studies and then in 2018 for an internship, and even in that short period of time, I was able to also see the modernization and transformation of the urban environment in Beijing, and this is of course something that people often talk about, the pace of change and how fast Beijing as the capital of China has also been changing, and that has also not been without its various types of problems, and you know, the destruction of heritage and these kind of things, or the commodification of heritage. So, just based on your background having grown up and lived in Beijing, how do you see this modernization and transformation of the urban environment in terms of Beijing?

 

Suvi Rautio (00:20:35)

 

Yeah, that's a really interesting question and it is also really interesting to kind of hear your experiences with that and you know being based in Beijing. I somehow have always struggled to really... I mean, I think I have always, I have thought about this a lot obviously, and I somehow struggle to really approach this question of change in general, especially in the context of Beijing. Of course, you know, I think Beijing's transformation, its development, its urban transformation is very much representative of wider urban development across the country. At the same time Beijing is very unique because it’s a capital and a political center.

 

And this is very much visible in how developments in the city have taken hold. There are still sort of neighborhoods, due to their proximity to political landmarks, that have seen very little development in comparison to something like the CBD district. This is not to say that the real estate prices haven't grown, it's just that the change, the visibility of change isn't as prominent, it’s not a homogeneous kind of entity that has taken over the entire city. I'm still working on this idea of change, and I guess that really does come through in my project as well, this current project, because of course there is change, there is visible change, there are vast changes in people's lives and living standards and, you know, just the comfort of their lives, the family dynamics have changed tremendously, so much has, and at the same time I think we do have to avoid getting too carried away, and always return to kind of look at where narratives of the past do come to the surface even amidst change and development projects. So I guess this is something I do think about on a wider level quite a lot but I haven't yet learned how to formulate it in words, but maybe my point is more that I'm a bit suspicious of claiming that, you know, everything has changed. Of course there has been a rupture, but I do think that especially in Beijing, there are a lot of reminders just how much the past does resurface and continue to exist in places that are maybe more hidden from the eyes of glossy magazines or development schemes.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:22:37)

 

Yeah, really interesting perspective there, and just the idea that maybe it still hasn't, it could be an outsider's view when we emphasize just how much the city has changed when in fact there's also so much that hasn't changed and there's also continuity instead of change, so yeah, a really interesting take on this perspective.

 

One of the reasons why I'm interested in the change in Beijing is actually because during my second stay there in 2018, I actually lived in one of these redeveloped traditional residential areas, and it was located right next to the Forbidden City, on the eastern side of the Forbidden City, in what used to be the imperial center of Beijing. This area was called Nanchizi, and it was interesting because it used to be this traditional hutong area, and to the listeners who are not familiar with Beijing or don't know hutongs, they are these old residential areas with narrow alleyways and traditional courtyard houses with communal living and communal facilities and so on, and often they are painted as the true old urban and social fabric and social heart of Beijing. And these types of communities in Beijing have obviously been, you know, threatened by modernization and demolishing and so on.

 

So this area of Nanchizi was actually marketed as a sort of pilot project and blueprint for modernization while still preserving the heritage, and this could be used as a pilot and blueprint for other similar projects later. It was done somewhere in the early 2000s, I think started in 2002, I'm not quite sure about that, but anyways, what happened was that this so called pilot project actually became quite a notorious example of how not to do modernization and urban redevelopment or preservation, because what happened was, you know, similar things that you mentioned there with the countryside, just you know, demolishing almost all of the buildings and building new imitations of old traditional houses in their place, relocation of most of the residents out of the community, and then most of them were actually not able to return to that community because after it was finished it was marketed as prime real estate, it was priced as prime real estate and sort of this upper scale residential area, so actually many people, they were really not happy about how this turned out, and it became a sort of cautionary example of what can go wrong when you try to combine the modernization and development, and preserving the old traditional areas. So I was wondering how do you think about this in terms of Beijing and do you think this is something that happens a lot or perhaps are there more successful examples where they have been successful in combining these two things?

 

Suvi Rautio (00:25:25)

 

That's a really fascinating example. It must have been even more fascinating to watch that unfold as you were living there. I think your question, successful examples of redevelopments, again it depends on, you know, it draws on these bigger questions of is success here progress or preservation? What's the gain here? If it is perhaps from heritage specialists' perspective, the building itself is an embodiment of specific points of the past and its value is inherent to the building. This is kind of the logic of the field itself. Buildings become unique materializations of time and the past is seen as something under threat if buildings are demolished. For somebody who is, you know, maybe renting a building, and for example in a hutong, and doesn't get enough heat in the winter because of the cold air coming through the cracks of the wall, and there is no inbuilt toilets, and maybe they also have a broken foot, so they have to constantly you know step over the numerous steps that are inbuilt in hutong and it is quite a hassle, progress might appear more appealing to them.

 

This is not to say that they would refute the heritage specialists' point of view, but I do think that, you know, the measure of success does really come down to the epistemological approach that people have to spaces in general, to buildings, to the materiality of these spaces. But to answer your question, I mean, I do not think I would have said this when I was writing my thesis, and I kind of scorned people who said that Meili was a successful example because it clearly wasn't a success, you know, people were dissatisfied. At the same time, the people are still in the village, so there hasn't been an actual demolishment. So because so many of the kind of plans have failed and been pushed aside, it actually means that a lot of the preservationists are winning because it just means that the buildings are being left untouched, maybe there is, you know, ideally, and they have done this for some of the older buildings, I shouldn't completely criticize their work, but they have, you know, fixed general electricity, lighting, pluming, these kind of basic infrastructural requirements of the older homes just to make them more comfortable, but the exterior is kind of left untouched just because so many of the plans have failed and this whole village project has become something of a taboo. You'd rather not have anything to do with it, because if you do get involved as maybe an architectural company coming from Beijing, and it fails, people will know, okay, again there was another failure here, so there is a kind of a risk involved there. So because of this in a way the heritage specialists are winning because the buildings are left untouched and it also means that people still have their homes, so like I mentioned, there's a few families who have made the decision themselves to buy a home in the county town, but they oftentimes still have their family home in the village.

 

My last visit in 2018, people still had access to their paddy fields and their gardens, so this constant talk of opening new roads, of doing a eco-museum and this land taken away from the villagers, and actually the villagers very much approve of the land being taken away because they want that road, but because the plans keep failing the road never gets built, at least it still wasn't built when I was there two years ago, but then the villagers go back to the paddy fields. So they still have access to this security in their lives, their paddy fields, their gardens, their homes, so in a way these reoccurring examples of demolishment and the everyday very familiar character chai, which was more present, you know, before Xi Jinping, across urban China and rural China. This is not something that you see in a village like Meili, and of course this also speaks to a complete renavigation of policy, where Xi Jinping has very much tailored rural restoration, rural revitalization schemes away from demolishment schemes, but it does not mean that populations aren't being relocated, but the older methods of demolishing by the government have been re-navigated to maybe private investors or outsiders themselves. So it means that maybe the widespread demolishing that was very prevalent especially leading up to the Beijing Olympics and after that, it is not as present at least where I was working in, in Guizhou.

 

So in a way, is it a successful example of redevelopment? It's not a celebration, it's not a victory, because people of Meili still do not have a way of making an income. There just aren't enough tourists and tourism development isn't working in terms of allowing families to be reunited in their homes, and giving enough jobs for local villagers, so in that sense it is not a success, but it does mean that the population hasn't been entirely relocated and entirely reshifted. Their lives haven't been changed entirely away from where they want to be.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:29:58)

 

Yeah, sounds really interesting and there's, you know, even a sort of paradox there when you mentioned that, you know, the fact that these sort of, you know, schemes haven't been going forward, actually has meant that from a preservationist perspective the heritage has been preserved in a way. Quite an interesting dynamic and obviously there's a lot of different perspectives that you can take, and that then of course influences whether you think it is a success or not.

 

You mentioned there the character of chai, which, to our listeners, basically it’s the character that means demolition that is painted on the walls of the buildings, and as I understand it's actually become somewhat of a symbol of this demolition craze in China and also, it’s talked about in Beijing as well, especially in the early 2000s and so on, you would see so many old buildings with this big character painted on the walls and you'd know that okay, these buildings are going. But, I guess not so much yet in the village of Meili. There's many sides to it and I guess from what you said you can't really say from an objective perspective is it a success or is it not. You know, different perspectives and really interesting questions nonetheless.

 

Besides this ethnographic research and anthropology, you have also actually taught BA and MA level courses on anthropology in Finland, with specifically focusing on China. I was wondering how do you see the academic field in Finland when it comes to anthropology focused on China specifically. I personally have had the sort of a feeling that maybe there isn't that much ethnographic research or anthropological focus on China in Finland. Maybe I've just missed it or, you know, haven't been noticing these, but I feel like other things, you know, political science or more traditional sinology for example dominate. What's your take on this? Am I mistaken in this view?

 

Suvi Rautio (00:31:50)

 

No, I definitely don't think you are mistaken, and I think that it's a really important question, that I think goes beyond anthropology, but I should point out that just in the past year there have been quite a few new PhD students who have joined the anthropology discipline in Helsinki, one in particular working with Anni Kajanus who of course has established her research between urban China and London, Helsinki if I'm not mistaken, so she is looking more into kind of cognitive anthropology, but she is bringing in some Chinese anthropologist to work with her on this, and there's also been some researchers coming in to work on, again, more urban projects, looking at technology and surveillance in China. So, bringing in more students, bringing in researchers is a very promising sign and it is only with more people that disciplines and universities themselves can start to navigate towards a certain geographical location, like China.

 

But nonetheless, I mean the underlying problem here is, and of course this isn't unique to Helsinki, it is not unique to Finnish universities, but it's just, you know, the lack of financial support towards I think not just anthropologists, but Chinese researchers in general. I mean it is shocking how few teaching positions in China related research there is across the entire country, especially if we compare with our Northern European neighbors.

 

So I think you're absolutely right. There is kind of deficit of anthropology related research on China, I would say across research towards China in general. It is not just anthropology, and there definitely needs to be more financial support from the university, from funding bodies, from the entire system, the government as well. Considering China's role in the world, it’s kind of an embarrassment just how little is being worked on to kind of bring together Finnish people who are specialists working on the country, because it’s such a vital place to understand in its multiplicity. So here, as you mentioned, there might be more priority or there might be a wider field of political sciences or maybe international relations, which is just as important, but we need multiple perspectives on the country, so that requires engagement across disciplines in the university, across academia to bring in all of our specialists and all our specialist skills to understand China in its multiplicity and its plurality. So even though I really enjoyed being able to and am very thankful of being able to put together a course on anthropology of China, it wasn't something that I could continue to do, it was kind of a one off. I got really positive comments and feedback from my students and I think I was really able to engage with them, many of them who had very little to do with China as a country in general, and it was really unfortunate that I wasn't able to continue to do it yearly or at least every couple of years, because it means that, you know, good courses are put on, but then if there's no financial support, then it just kind of dissolves. It doesn't get implemented in the syllabus, in the teaching of let's say anthropology in Helsinki University.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:34:38)

 

Yeah, okay. Well, let's certainly hope that in the future we get more focus on ethnography and anthropology and at least based on today's discussion, I'm even more interested in these things than before and I'm pretty sure many of our listeners will be as well. So fascinating stories, both from the countryside and the cities in China, so many things happening there. Unfortunately, our time is up for today's episode, so thank you very much, Suvi Rautio, for these really interesting insights on ethnography and anthropology in China, and I look forward to hearing more about your ongoing research later in terms of your own family history and Beijing and intellectual life in Maoist China, so, really interesting topics. Thank you very much for joining us.

 

Suvi Rautio (00:35:25)

 

Thank you Ari-Joonas, this has been such a pleasure. You have such good questions and it has been really nice discussing all of this together with you, so thank you so much for inviting me and for having me on your show.

 

Ari-Joonas Pitkänen (00:35:36)

 

Thank you. Yeah, and that's it, and to our listeners, thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast, showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.

 

Outro (00:35:45)

 

You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast.