China as Context - Introduction

Introduction: China as Context Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia and Ed Pulford 不识庐山真面目，只缘身在此山中. ((宋）苏轼) I cannot see the real face of Mount Lu, because I am surrounded by her peaks. (Su Shi, Song Dynasty) We have to further the study of oriental civilisations among us, not only because it is a matter of national security that we have people equipped in Asian languages and cultures, but because our own title to civilisation must be kept alive by our capacity to view the world impartially. (Maurice Freedman 1963: 12) Conceptual breakthroughs are illuminated when a familiar context crumbles under the weight of unforeseen events, bringing them into sharper focus. This feeling may be particularly strong for anthropologists, who often find themselves reflecting on their own disciplinary understandings and convictions via the words and deeds of cultural Others. The initial idea of this collected volume, China as Context, occurred on the morning of 23 February 2022, the day after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Within a couple of hours, emails and messages flooded the inbox of one of the authors of this text, calling insistently for an educated answer to the question of ‘what China is planning to do’ and ‘if China is going to support Russia’. This unprecedented and overwhelming attention from colleagues struck a deep chord with the addressee of these messages, and not so much because they demonstrated a surging interest in and possible hostility towards China, but more because they sparked a pair of contrasting observations. On the one hand, people – many anthropologists among them – seemed suddenly to have become aware of China’s role in making sense of current geopolitical tensions. On the other hand, after decades of research, there seems to be still limited knowledge about, and limited capacity to meaningfully relate to China, eminently in the context of British anthropology but also more widely, across the anglophone social sciences. Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 2 China as context That is to say, the war in Ukraine had broken a comforting context for our friends and colleagues in the West: the teetering framework provided by Western globalisation. Instead, they now appeared to be reaching towards China in a last-ditch effort to stop meaning from leaking and glitching, sticking context back together with a gesture that, one of us noted, amounted to the intellectual equivalent of reassembling a piece of pottery (or china) in the salvage style of Japanese kintsugi.1 This realisation, and the image of a broken context in need of recomposition, shed light on one tendency within educated discourses of global affairs, including contemporary anthropological analyses. It is often observed that such discussions tend to overlook or ‘abstract’ from China (Mizoguchi 2016 [1989]). In other words, even seasoned observers of culture and politics exhibit a noticeable lack of awareness regarding the global impact exerted by the People’s Republic of China (henceforth the PRC) and the distinctiveness represented by Chinese cultural ideas and practices. The way ‘China’ makes itself felt globally, it bears notice, does not emanate solely from the PRC’s core regions, or the PRC at all. Hong Kong, Taiwan and elsewhere have been very important sources of ‘Chinese’ cultural influence globally (see Yamashita, Eades and Bosco 2004; Shih, Tsai and Bernards 2013). But this book’s conceptual alignment of ‘China’ with the PRC serves a strategic purpose. This alignment represents a break with a tendency long observed in Cold War-era anthropology to evade challenging inquiries about academia’s involvement with power (Price 2016), a point we revisit at different junctures throughout this introduction. In other words, here we take heed of Allen Chun’s recent rejoinder that: ‘to problematise Chineseness as constitutive of an ongoing historical framework […] serves to problematise the nature of contexts that invoke Chineseness as an ethnic or cultural problem’ (2017: x). An appreciation of this distinct intellectual phenomenon and the opportunity it offered to investigate the existing boundaries of our discipline in dialogue with contemporary East Asian decolonial thought (e.g. Chen 2010; Cheah and Hau 2022) compelled us to curate this collective volume. In this introduction, we ask: how is it that we continuously unsee China? What can we learn from China’s absence from our ethnographic theories and narratives? Can we foreground China in ways that bring out the work its presence does among, between and all around us? What does it mean to speak of China as the social glue (the mending lacquer of the kintsugi vase) that keeps our contexts together? How do we conceptually resist and contextualise the extensive efforts of powerful PRC-based voices, most notably the Chinese Communist Party, to present Chinese culture as unified? How do we return the social sciences to a notion of context that is not obfuscating but theoretically generative? Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 3 As elaborated in this introduction, extended versions of the two observations above form the two main premises for our overall argument. First, with its growing expansion into various regions of the world (e.g. Africa, Latin America, Central and Southeast Asia) and its further embedding into the global economy (via commodity chains and infrastructures), China is becoming a non-dismissible element of the social context in which people make meanings and anthropologists endeavour to make sense of them. Second, the rising significance of China in the world has not been translated into increased attention on the part of anglophone anthropology and cognate disciplines.2 In this introduction, we wish to ‘provincialise’ the knowledge-production centres of the Global North by probing into their epistemic blindspots (Chakrabarty 2000). The working example we provide brings the three authors of this text together. British anthropology remains relevant in a number of areas, having contributed substantially to at least three of the main theoretical ‘turns’ in the social sciences of the past twenty years (i.e. the ‘ontological’, the ‘infrastructural’ and the ‘ethical’). However, compared to the quantitative social sciences, anthropology features considerably less work on China, and the Sinophone world more broadly.3 We contend that this continuous neglect and comparatively marginal position that China holds in anglophone anthropology (and other social sciences) may bring serious disadvantages in the near future, not only to the production of adequate knowledge and theories in the discipline but also to the impact that anthropologists can aspire to have in national and international fora shaped by contemporary geopolitics. Corresponding with our claim, the collective aim of this edited volume is to demonstrate, via sustained theoretical and ethnographic engagement, the economic, political, ideological and social impacts that China is bringing to the lives of ordinary people in the world. Within our pulverising global economic order, China appears to be filtering in as the unnoticed mortar that holds a broken structure together, celebrating its cracks and gaps all the while. We hope that our empirical observations and analyses will prove that China is indeed becoming such a crucial sociological context for the formation of subjects and world-making practices on the ground. Furthermore, by tracing the development of the anthropology of China4 in anglophone anthropology, we plan to tease out the historical and intellectual conditions which led to the marginality of ‘China’ and the anthropology of China in Britain and the Global North more generally. Together, we push back against the invisibilisation of China in anglophone anthropology and cognate disciplines and reclaim for our theoretical sensibilities a definition of ‘context’ as revealing of complexity, ambiguity, inconsistency and even abrasiveness. We call for renewed attention to anthropological studies of China – and to the presence of China-inflected dimensions of global Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4 China as context conjunctures and connections that do not, prima facie, appear to focus on ‘China’ – as generative places from which to understand our post-globalised present. ****** Before elaborating on our premises, it is necessary to explain what we mean when we refer to ‘context’ in this book. According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, the term context has two main denotations, with the first overshadowed by the second in academic usage. Respectively, 1) the text or speech that comes immediately before and after a particular phrase or piece of text and helps to explore and explain its meaning, and 2) the situation within which something exists or happens and that can help make sense of it. While the first meaning of ‘context’ emphasises the rhetorical and narratological functions of text and their consequential role in interpretation, the second extends to a much larger scope, referring to the material and semiotic surroundings in which social interaction takes place, synonymous with ‘background’ and ‘milieu’ – 背景 (beijing) in Chinese (discussed later in this introduction) – and allusive to the experience people make of them. Writing about the under-theorisation of the concept of context within anglophone anthropology, Roy Dilley once observed that ‘the history of usage of ‘context’ suggests a shift in reference’: from the act of composing meaningful communication to the necessary conditions which enable an understanding of language and of the possibility of determining its meaning. ‘This shift in meaning’, continues Dilley, ‘also indicates aspects of the relationship between knowledge and context: in the first instance, context is an instrument of knowledge; in the second it is a condition which shapes knowledge’ (2002: 442; emphasis added).5 It is the latter conditional and experiential dimension of ‘context’ that we aim to bring forward in this collection. The first denotation of context is widely used by academics, especially in literary and historical studies and in anthropology since the cultural and postcolonial turns (see Behar and Gordon 1996; Clifford and Marcus 2010; Scott 2004). Although we retain the original insight of the ‘writing culture’ movement that anthropologists and humanities scholars in general inevitably write in and for specific historical conjunctures, and from and within disciplinary canons and epistemological traditions that narrow their field of view and colour their interpretation, in this collective volume we privilege the second meaning of ‘context’. Largely inspired by theories and approaches in linguistic anthropology and communication studies (Gumperz and Hymes 1972; Sperber and Wilson 1986; Wilson and Sperber Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 5 2012; Duranti and Goodwin 1992; Silverstein 2022), ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1984), and by the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (1990a; 1991), we understand ‘context’ to acquire significance both during social interaction and in processes of explication and analysis as an expansive and encompassing conceptual operation of (dis)connection (Strathern 1996). Context and contextualisation provide frameworks and material-semiotic cues for social actors and observers to draw from, envision analogies and contrasts and interpret one another’s actions and surroundings. Social actors constantly work to establish, maintain and negotiate the context of their interactions as observers endeavour to stabilise the context of their analysis. Yet, we think similarly to Ricoeur when he argues that the confrontation between the act of interpretation and the excesses of a context in a permanent state of re-articulation, makes the former a fraught attempt halfway between ‘a stasis and an impetus’ (1990b: 179). Context and contextualisation are themselves enriched and reflexively co-created as interactions and observation intensify, operations which in turn delimit a new context for future actions and interpretations. In this way, context is both grounding and heuristic. It sets the affective tone for and narrows the interpretative bandwidth of indexical objects or unfolding events. It is not a fixture but is constantly evolving and in flux: words and deeds we study ethnographically accrue significance from being reflexive responses to contexts not wholly determined by their authors, and yet they also aim beyond things as they appear to stand, giving expression to new meanings and values and as-yetunrealised possibilities. Therefore, context and the act of contextualising constitute intimately social actors and give shape to shared expectations and the social imagination. Context becomes in and of itself one of the outcomes of social action, achieved through continuous operations of de- and re-contextualisation. Here, it is worth highlighting that the ‘context’ and ‘contextualisation’ we are problematising contain two distinct yet intertwined levels. On the one hand, we see an interactional situation in which social actors endeavour to apprehend, communicate and make decisions in an effort to attach intentionality to their actions and construct meanings for themselves and others. On the other, contextualisation appears as an analytical device which is more typically used by academics to connect and explain social practices and phenomena. Therefore, to extend an apt observation that Bunkenborg, Nielsen and Pedersen make in their theoretically informed study of Chinese globalisation, one consequence of foregrounding context and contextualisation may be that of unintentionally ‘collapsing the boundary between analytical object and analysing subjects’ (2022: 236). The potential for intellectual miscomprehension lies in the gap between these two levels of contextualisation; i.e. scholars often do not recognise Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 6 China as context the local context that ordinary people consider meaningful as significant, while forcibly imposing their own understanding of the ‘wider context’ that should seemingly gain precedence (Englund and Leach 2000).6 As Dilley remarks, ‘phenomena are illuminated […] by appeal to their surroundings; but the problem is that these surroundings themselves are selected and interpreted in different ways’ (2002: 439). And yet, both facets of contextualisation ultimately partake in the apparent need we all share – expert and lay observers alike – to produce meaningful accounts of ourselves as implicated in the life stories and minds of others, and operational descriptions of the world we believe we inhabit. It is at this juncture that ‘China’ begins to matter, insofar as its latent presence and atmospherics in the form of economic opportunities, political threats and alternative metrics of social value and justice come to profoundly shape the lifeworld of an ever-growing number of (potential) interlocutors for anthropology. And this is irrespective of the interlocutors’, or the ethnographer’s for that matter, ability to pick on the extent, intensity and direction said influence may take (e.g. Yanagisako and Rofel 2019). The ethnographies contained in this volume speak loudly in this respect. If ‘China’ (and the anthropology of China), as a prominent material and narratological agent of both vernacular practices of story-making and professional accounts of worldmaking practices, keeps being sidelined, we run the concrete risk of entering anthropology and the qualitative social sciences into a theoretical cul-de-sac. Such a process would be reminiscent of what critics have claimed about the ontological turn – a turn that has progressively unmoored interpretative scholars from the question of what is towards that of what else could be (Candea 2017; Palecek 2022; Fontein 2021; Matthews 2023; Vasantkumar 2022). Therefore, by foregrounding the second definition of ‘context’; i.e. as background, experience, milieu and condition, we are not campaigning for ontological relativism, nor claiming that China represents some sort of radical alterity. As we elaborate below, ontologising China – that is treating it as an incommensurable Other (Povinelli 2001) – may risk acquiescing to the strategic representation of China pushed by the PRC government, and could break apart the shared context of mutual understanding we aim to rebuild with this collection.7 Rather, we ask anthropologists to approach the growing sociological presence of ‘China’ from the perspective of what our interlocutors (regardless of their cultural affiliations) wish, discover through, feel about and attempt to make of it: a new heuristic for a post-globalising world. Conventionally, interpretative scholars may be inclined to treat contextualisation as an analytical move aligned with wholesale cultural relativism, namely, the idea that we cannot make any kind of (moral) judgement at all regarding foreign cultural practices (see Scharfstein 1989; Dilley 1999; Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 7 Kuper 1999). ‘Each culture works in its own way’, Mayanthi Fernando elucidates, ‘and beliefs and practices that appear strange from the outside make sense when contextualised within their particular cultural framework’ (2013; emphasis added). Nevertheless, we maintain that the practice of holding contextualisation as equivalent to strong relativism directly results from a form of naive realism, which treats social facts (i.e. institutions and practices) as given (Harré and Bhaskar 2001). Instead, following in the footsteps of ethnomethodology, we encourage a form of ‘critical realism’ (Huang 2023) when carrying out contextualisation. In other words, we focus on the attempts people make and the heuristics they use to create and interpret these facts in their everyday interactions – what ethnomethodologists usually call ‘accomplishments’ (Coulon 1995). In doing so, we emphasise the active role of individuals in shaping social reality, including the ways in which the trope (and the force) of ‘China’ ends up playing out on the ground. Accordingly, we support recent interventions about analytical styles of analysis and comparison within anglophone anthropology (See Candea 2018; Pelkmans and Walker 2023). However, we contend that comparison as a method could only achieve its full potential after a critical investigation of whether the social accomplishments of building meaningful and shared contexts inhibit conceptual travel and portability of social situations and ‘facts’. Adopting this stance appears necessary when it comes to assessing and comparing different visions and forms of ‘globalisation’ and ‘modernity’ in the current phase of increasing geopolitical pluralisation,8 a process to which we now turn. ****** The discussion above brings us closer to an idea of context as captured in Arjun Appadurai’s classic formulation of globalisation as constituted by the diverging forces of global cultural flows, ‘scapes’ in his language, denoting the diverging pace at which development happens in social realms as diverse as technological advancement, demographic composition, financial investments and cultural ideologies. These contrasting flows, argues Appadurai, produce friction, fractures and competition in everyday life and between nation-states (1990). Yet, for this edited volume, we ought to part ways with Appadurai’s depiction of globalisation, and not only because – writing in the last dwindling months of the Cold War – he appeared to believe that the PRC would necessarily Westernise to serious political costs (1990: 307). Inserting itself in the growing conversation about the ethnography of the global ‘after globalisation’ (Tsing 2011; Rudnyckyj and Whitington 2020; Neves 2020), our collective focus in this volume substantially moves away from Appadurai’s understanding of globalisation as a process underpinned Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 8 China as context by cultural competition and homogenisation to centre rather on collective processes of problematisation, accommodation, mending and collaboration; processes local actors think about and act within as they craft and formalise novel cultural hierarchies between global flows (Rofel and Rojas 2022: 7). These are cultural hierarchies that China appears to be climbing quite quickly, if not sometimes violently, as had been the case with previous rounds of globalisation originating from the West and centred on the dissemination of democracy and human rights (Asad 2000). Adopting this latter denotation may prove even more important to the Chinese reader, who habitually uses two different words to distinguish between the two distinct meanings of ‘context’ we highlighted above: yujing 语境 (literally, setting of words/literary discourse) and the abovementioned beijing 背景 (literally, background picture), which would not usually be translated back as ‘context’. Therefore, by invoking ‘China as context’, we aim to highlight this scopeeffect that the rise of global China is creating via various forms of encountering and interactions with the rest of the world (e.g. Faier and Rofel 2014). As we argue below, China – with its rapid economic expansion and discursive ‘emplotment’9 – is becoming ‘background’, transforming and helping with assembling the very milieu in which ordinary people conduct their lives. To paraphrase William Mazzarella, the rise of China marks ‘the moment when aspects of world-making that have always been fundamental demand to be recognised as politically decisive’ (2019: 54). The strong claim we propose is that, without engaging and understanding China, when it comes to ‘contextualisation’ for interpretation, we, Western-trained anthropologists, would no longer be able to comprehend the full picture of our interlocutors’ actions, aspirations and commitments, especially given our continued dependence on liberal categories and sensibilities for keeping a critical edge and disciplinary relevance to broader public debates (Mazzarella 2017: 10; Candea 2021: 454). Although China is referred to in the singular here, we have no intention to deploy it in a normative sense (Chen 2010: 213–14).10 Rather, we understand and use the term ‘China’, as a process of attunement: an operation, effect and affect of material-semiotic diffusion. That is, we think of (global) China as simultaneously an imaginative topos and atmospheric attunement. China matters ethnographically and theoretically not only because of how its presence is discursively represented and made sense of in everyday interactions throughout the world (Vasantkumar 2020: 1050) but also because it possesses qualities and imparts rhythms, forces, relations and movements to everyday life itself.11 Distinct modes of existence ‘accrue, circulate, sediment, unfold and go flat’ (Stewart 2011: 446) – here we need only think of present-day Hong Kong or Xinjiang12 – because of it. Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 9 We do not treat China as a coherent whole or project (whose Otherness can be explained away or unleveraged to sustain analytical neglect; see Hubbert, Chapter 4, this volume) but as a set of material forces and sticky symbolic referents that tag along with and permeate global economic structures, social networks, linguistic interactions, political institutions and the collective imagination to the point that they become inalienable parts of contemporary social experience. Of course, the meaning of ‘Chineseness’ remains contested (Sier and Barabantseva 2024), for instance in how people around the world understand the idea and what they associate with it vis-à-vis the power of governments and commercial interests from China to craft ‘brand China’ (see DeHart 2021). But the extent and reach of this very contestation is what makes the elaboration of a new theoretical framework with, about and around ‘China’ important (Humphrey, Chapter 3, this volume). Even more important, we use ‘China’ in the ways of and to the extent that our interlocutors identify, instrumentalise or react to it. When calling ‘China’ a ‘context’, not only do we intend to attract academic attention to PRC’s expansion and integration into the global order, but also local people’s reactions and responses to China’s presence on the ground. Both are intrinsic parts of the process of contextualisation we are after, and both are absolutely pivotal concerns for anthropologists working in the anglophone tradition and beyond. ****** After a century of relative political subordination, the rise of China to superpower status, and its expanding geopolitical influence on the global stage, is following a trajectory that according to Chinese authorities themselves seemingly circles back to the central geopolitical role that the country possessed in pre-modern times (Pomeranz 2001; Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011; Thilly 2022). Since the opening of the PRC market economy in 1978 and the country’s accession to the WTO in 2001, Chinese state capitalist enterprises have increasingly embedded themselves in the global financial sector (e.g. Ortiz 2017; Dal Maso 2020). Through their efforts, the PRC is also becoming not only a key part but a guarantor of global supply chains (Chua 2023). As public support for globalisation has begun to wane in the West, China has eagerly moved in its defence. One of the most vivid examples of this came during a 2017 appearance by PRC President Xi Jinping at the World Economic Forum in Davos: speaking in the wake of the UK’s 2016 Brexit referendum and the election of US President Donald Trump shortly thereafter, Xi claimed that both events expressed a popular desire to ‘deglobalise’ and ‘uncouple’ transnational networks. Against these threats to the Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 10 China as context global capitalist order, Xi mounted a staunch defence of post-Cold War globalisation.13 If we put politics aside, at least one thing that the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated is China’s role in sustaining the everyday contexts of people around the globe, essentially because of its dominant position in international logistics (Chu and Harris 2022; Chu et al. 2020). When China was in lockdown, Zambian youths found themselves struggling to find jobs, and European parents had to wait months longer for the arrival of Christmas toys.14 During this period, China busied itself building and extending its own economic networks, exporting its model of development and materialising its vision of globalisation. With the further implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路) – a global infrastructure development strategy adopted by the Chinese government in 2013 to invest in more than 150 countries and international organisations – more and more people from different regions are rediscovering their lives to be considerably shaped by a growing Chinese presence (Franceschini and Loubere 2022: 37–38). Arguably, the commercial and logistical impacts of China on the world are among the most documented global phenomena in the last two decades. Although the majority of the relevant research is produced by economists (e.g. Jacques 2012; Smith 2020) and scholars in development studies (e.g. Brautigam 2009), more ethnographic studies have appeared in recent years, describing how China is connecting and re-shaping the global as well as regional economic landscapes (Nyíri and Tan 2016; Driessen 2019a). To list a few examples, while researching Chinese economic activities in Zambia, Ching Kwan Lee (2017) documents the different rationales and practices in terms of labour relations, capital accumulation and managerial ethos, which Chinese state investments bring to Africa in comparison with private venture capital. Conversely, Matthew Erie (2023a, 2023b) embarks on a comparative ethnographic study of how international trade law is being reshaped by Chinese practices and jurisprudence. Building on large investments in high-end digital technologies, Chinese actors are now reshaping global urban spaces through new consumerist trends fanned by social media crazes (A. Zhang, Roast and Morris 2022) and proposing proprietary definitions of digital infrastructures and platforms as sovereign territory (C. Zhang and Morris 2023). As a consequence, novel digital architectures of state surveillance are gaining global currency (Byler 2022). Lastly, while searching for the mushroom at the end of the world, Anna Tsing (2015) shows how Chinese labour and policies are inflecting global food supply chains and their accompanying regimes of environmental management. Among all these regulatory and commercial ventures, perhaps the most noticeable is the dedication China-rooted actors put into extracting and accelerating the movement of people, goods and natural resources, and this Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 11 to often under-examined effects (see Fioratta 2019; Cheuk 2022). Magnus Marsden (2021) emphasises how the renewal of older Silk Road trade connections with Central Asia is turning China into a place of growing emotional attachment and desire, despite governmental attempts at streamlining trade relationships to maximise profit. Within these overseas engagements, preexisting labour, gender and environmental relations in the receiving countries are being reconfigured and called into question (e.g. Zhu 2022). Chinese infrastructures of extraction and conveyance do not just seep into local economies and ecologies but also intrude into native cosmologies, producing new sources of power and dread (Johnson 2020; White 2024). To this, Alessandro Rippa and Tim Oakes (2023) add the paradoxical absence of China from the field of infrastructure studies. Rippa (Chapter 2, this volume) introduces the case of the globally flourishing amber market, which spans continents from China to Poland and Mexico. Through an amber lens, Rippa reflects on how China remains strikingly absent from both a theoretical and an ethnographic perspective, despite the determinant role it plays in rendering such far-flung social formations viable. Indeed, in the vein of recent anthropological scholarship on infrastructure (e.g. Harvey, Jensen and Morita 2017), we could say that similarly to technological systems essential to the experience of modernity, China seems to equally fade away from view as it turns itself into a prerequisite for the everyday experience of global capitalist modernity. What is becoming more significant in the process of China’s ‘going out’ (走出去, a term with its origins in the 2000s under Jiang Zemin) is a trend whereby the Chinese government – aware, as Xi’s Davos speech showed, of its role as a guarantor of globalisation – is more and more confidently promoting a new set of political and moral values, and a vision, for a deWesternised world order. In the past decade, we witnessed multiple rounds of ideological promulgation: from ‘soft power’ (ruan shili 软实力) to ‘wolf warrior diplomacy’ (zhanlang waijiao 战狼外交), from Confucius Institutes to globalising Chinese media (da wai xuan 大外宣), from ‘third world alliance’ (disan shijie tongmeng 第三世界同盟) to ‘building a community with a shared future for mankind’ (renlei mingyun gongtongti 人类命运共同体). As anthropologists, we should aim to take these promulgations seriously (see Sorace 2017; 2021). Examples of ethnographic research on this front are few but significant. Alpa Shah (2018) cogently shows how an armed insurgency in India takes inspiration from Maoism for organising guerrilla warfare. Similar histories are documented by historian Julia Lovell, whose book Maoism: A Global History (2020) traces how the Chinese Communist Party branded Mao’s thought as political discourse and military strategy for anti-imperialism and decolonisation. Over the decades, this influenced many grassroots movements for national independence and revolution across the Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 12 China as context global south, from Tanzania to Pakistan, Indonesia, Peru and Cambodia (e.g. Cook 2014; Ali and Raza 2022; Galway 2022), and the radical activism of second and first-world intellectuals from Italian (Kirchner-Reill 2014) to African American (Frazier 2014). This shared history against imperialist domination, undergirding the friendship between China and what is still referred to in China as the ‘third world’ (disan shijie 第三世界), is mobilised in the present when the Chinese government seeks diplomatic cooperation and multi-scalar political alliances (Pulford 2021; Galway 2021). Apart from political ideologies, cultural and religious doctrines and practices from China are also spreading at a rapid speed. The most controversial case is the governmental promotion of the Confucius Institute (CI) across the globe (specifically in North America) and the vociferous push-back it has received thus far (Sahlins 2015). As one of our contributors points out (Hubbert, Chapter 4, this volume) the case of the CI should not be seen as primarily relating to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) propaganda as such, but as offering an ethnographic opportunity to better understand how soft power operates in the cultural field in general, and how political compliance is produced. Another movement gaining momentum is the overseas growth of Chinese Buddhism. In the last five years or so, Chinese humanist Buddhism – the most famous branch of which is the Longquan Monastery (龙泉寺) – has established more than a dozen temples in Africa, Europe and Southeast Asia. Although its linkage to the PRC government is ambiguous, Chinese humanist Buddhism is attracting local followers and gradually weaving itself into the local social fabric via charitable work (Qiu, Chapter 1, this volume). As the rich ethnographic studies of this collective volume show, China is not only changing the economic and political landscapes of the globe but also transforming – to fall back for a moment on Arjun Appadurai’s formulation – its ethno- and ideo-scape. More and more people outside China, especially in so-called developing regions, gradually find themselves working and living side-by-side with Chinese migrants, surrounded by Chinese infrastructures, watching Chinese shows, trading and playing on Chinadeveloped digital platforms, and witnessing their socio-economic destinies being even more closely tied with that of the PRC (Coates 2020; Deng 2024; Driessen 2019b; Keane and Wu 2018; Nyíri 2021; Schmitz 2021; C. Zhang 2023). Moreover, cultural, political and spiritual discourses and practices from East Asia (e.g. Buddhist meditation, ethnonationalism, Confucian philosophy, Maoist thought and also the new commercial wave of self-help books and workshops (Hizi 2021)) are attracting growing numbers of followers, providing alternative inspirations to various communities globally. In sum, the rise of China is re-signifying long-standing geopolitical Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 13 assumptions as well as shifting the context in which people make sense of their own lives and reproduce their livelihoods. Basing their research on deep engagement with communities and contexts, anthropologists – and other social scientists deploying ethnographic methods – are uniquely placed to document and critically scrutinise the practical consequences and new scholarly paradigms which emerge from all these trends. What happens when global effects and desires, channelled along routes carved out by Chinese-built roads (Joniak-Lüthi 2016), railways or wireless networks, collide or become entangled with alternative moral values, standards and norms flowing out of China (Karrar and Mostowlansky 2020)? Given the capacity of infrastructurally mediated notions of unimpeded ‘progress’ and ‘development’, as well as the failures of these visions (Pulford 2024), to conjure up visions of the future that both recycle old ideas and recombine with new ones (Appel, Anand and Gupta 2018; Kipnis 2016), how will anthropologists ensure that the future development of their discipline and theory-building adequately take account of – to borrow from another hermeneutic philosopher, Raymod Williams (1954) – newly available ‘structures of feeling’ sweeping the world? While prominent American anthropologists such as Julie Chu (2010) and Aihwa Ong (2006) have, for instance, demonstrated the relevance that a focus on the Chinese experience abroad may have for the study of citizenship and subjectivity in anthropology, British anthropologists of China working domestically have yet to reflect on the wider implications that their material may have for the discipline as a whole (but see Barabantseva 2015, working outside anthropology per se). If anything, the theoretical import of the ‘seamful’ (as opposed to seamless, to evoke once more the kintsugi vase) notion of ‘China as context’ which we propose here has been muffled within the discipline by being wrapped up in more encompassing diagnostics such as that of kinship, relatedness and postsocialism, concepts which have dominated anthropological debates in Britain and beyond for the last two decades (e.g. Hann 2001; Brandtstädter and Santos 2011). Today, we argue, China is writing itself more consequentially into the stories that people tell about themselves and others, in the desire they cultivate and the plans they make for their own lives. What is more, China is ‘emplotting’ itself more deeply into the contexts people routinely fall back on to make sense of and interpret the world around them. Thus, this new situation, underpinned by the contingent, fractured, intermittent, yet influential relationship that China entertains with the formation of new subjects, demands that we develop a finer-grained understanding of how persons ‘come to occupy subject positions’ under contemporary (de)globalising processes (Boellstorff 2003: 225). Processes, this time, originating from the East. Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 14 China as context ****** Our second premise alluded to briefly above – that China’s growing global significance has not been reflected in a commensurate theoretical place in anglophone anthropology – will also require more explanation. The Chinese studies scholars Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere recently remarked that ‘even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system […] most discussions of China continue to be underpinned and bounded by a core assumption – that the country represents a fundamentally different “Other” that somehow exists apart from the “real” world’ (2022: 3). As a social science, anthropology often prides itself on being uniquely positioned to study and theorise about Otherness. And yet, the Otherness of China remains mostly mute in the discipline. Arguably, the anthropology of China has yet to grasp its Otherness, and with it, the potential contribution it could make to educated conversations about the PRC and the Sinophone region more generally. Conversely, the rest of anthropology remains uninterested in the Otherness that the anthropology of China describes. It may thus appear obvious that the position of ‘China’, together with the anthropology of China, remains marginal in the development of the interpretative social sciences in general, and remarkably so in anglophone anthropology. As clearly suggested by the literature we referred to in the previous section, what we mean is not that ethnographic studies of China/Chinese communities are lacking. On the contrary, there has been a significant boom since doing fieldwork in the PRC became feasible after the country’s ‘opening up’ process began in 1978. Nevertheless, theoretical contributions from China are few. If we think about Melanesia, the ‘dividual person’ (Strathern 1988) will probably come to mind. From the Amazon, theories of perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro 1998) and ontology (Descola 2013) have gained considerable currency in recent years. Even when discussing ‘postsocialism’ – a theme not irrelevant to China – ethnographies of Russia (Humphrey 2002; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Grant 1995; Yurchak 2005), former Soviet states (Seabright 2000; Hann 2001) or countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Verdery 1996; 2003; Kürti and Skalník 2009), set the benchmark. Equally linked in the anthropological mind are: segmentation and Africa (Evans-Pritchard 1940); potency and South East Asia (Tambiah 1977); and hierarchy and India (Dumont 1981). No comparably paradigm-changing idea is associated with the anthropology of China.15 As Charlotte Bruckermann and Stephan Feuchtwang (2016) perspicaciously observe, China is merely the provider of ethnographic data rather than a partner of dialogues in anthropological theory-building. This phenomenon is quite peculiar, not only considering the geopolitical significance of China today and the fundamental contributions of the Sinosphere to the Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 15 various articulations of modernity (Wang 2011; Shih 2007), but also considering several serious calls to pay attention to China in British and European anthropology of the past two decades (Pieke 2009; 2014). Whenever this question is raised, a common explanation is that doing fieldwork in China was literally impossible for a long period of time. Although this remains a valid point – and today, many fear that the future of ethnographic research in the PRC may look even bleaker (Schneider, Lord and Wilczak 2021; Alpermann 2022; Shambaugh 2024) – it can no longer adequately explain China’s marginal position in contemporary anglophone anthropology. The ‘open door’ policy started almost half a century ago, not to mention that Fei Xiaotong and Xu Langguang were already among the early generation of anthropologists under the supervision of Bronislaw Malinowski, the founding father of British social anthropology in the 1930s.16 As discussed further below, in this collection, Hans Steinmüller and Tan Tongxue between them provide us with systematic reflections on the intellectual, institutional and geopolitical milieu in which the marginalisation of China occurs and operates. If scholars from outside China have either adopted contexts created by other disciplines or focused too much on context to the exclusion of generalisability, PRC-based anthropologists have been much more concerned with ‘public’ or ‘engaged’ anthropology (Kirsch 2018) than developing portable theories drawing from the Chinese intellectual tradition. Not until the twenty-first century did anthropologists in the PRC begin to take an interest in theory-building in dialogue with the West.17 A brief overview of the historical development of the anthropology of China in the UK may shed some light on why it appears to always be ‘missing the (theoretical) boat’. As several scholars have pointed out (Wang 2005; Liang and Ji 2021; Zhou 2021; Tenzin 2017), in the early twentieth century, when British anthropology was being established, China was not a latecomer. Not only were many Chinese students (e.g. Fei Xiaotong, Francis Hsu, Tian Rukang) – some of whom later became the leading figures of anthropology in China – trained directly by the progenitors of British anthropology, but also a few prominent anthropologists in Britain were keen to study China (e.g. Radcliffe-Brown, Leach, Malinowski). Nonetheless, three major issues hampered the progress of the anthropology of China in the UK. To begin with, ‘China’, as it were, was an unusual object for ethnographic studies. In the eyes of the founding fathers of British anthropology, ‘China’ was neither ‘primitive’ nor ‘rural/small’ enough for significant anthropological investigation (Malinowski 1939; Leach 1983). The academic consensus at the time was that, similarly to India, ‘China’ represented a civilisational unity that should be categorised as a separate subject (i.e. Sinology), especially given the precedent set by other European countries (e.g. France and Germany). Furthermore, despite the colonisation Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 16 China as context of Hong Kong, China was never fully integrated into the British Empire. Neither was China powerful enough to compete with Western nations on the international scene, as Japan was.18 However, during World War II, anthropological studies of Japan saw a rebirth, albeit brief, in the United States (Kuwayama 2004). As a result, the need to study China and comprehend Chinese society for colonial administration or geopolitical security was not as pressing as it was in other regions (e.g. India, southern Africa or Malaysia). Last but not least, as is widely known, the establishment of the PRC in 1949 made long-term fieldwork in China unfeasible until the 1980s. This was the time in which key anthropological ideas and frameworks bound to influence the discipline in the UK for decades to come – structuralism, poststructuralism, materialist perspectives – took shape. As anthropologists of China were forced to the peripheries of Greater China (e.g. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Southeast Asian countries with large Chinese diasporas), the anthropology of China therefore drifted to the outskirts of British anthropology. It was in the 1990s and early 2000s, following Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour Speech (on fully implementing the open door policy) and China’s accession to WTO, that the anthropology of China boomed. With Western scholars gaining access to mainland China for fieldwork and Chinese students – whether PRC citizens or established overseas communities – acquiring training and qualifications from Anglo-American universities,19 an increasing number of ethnographic studies of Chinese social life were produced. Nonetheless, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and Western intellectuals declaring ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama 1989), the majority of anthropological studies on China were made to become ancillary to dominant paradigms, the most prominent examples of which are Western theories of globalisation and postsocialism (see Zhan 2024). Seldom did anthropologists think with/through China (Steinmüller and Feuchtwang 2022). In the present moment of ‘decolonising anthropology’ in the Global North – the attempt made by a younger generation of scholars and students to recuperate alternative genealogies for the discipline while interrogating colonial legacies and structures in academia (Gupta and Stoolman 2022) – China’s ‘oddity’ is taking another ironic turn in terms of improving the position of anthropology of and in China. A new generation of scholars educated or based in the Sinophone world consider the PRC as one part of the Global South. They criticise the steep hierarchy, despotic dispositions and patrimonialism of Chinese academia (Tenzin 2017; 2024). At the same time, they feel responsible for fighting for recognition in the face of intellectual and linguistic dependency from Western knowledge centres and Anglo-American dominance in the global academic market. Quite a few actively seek intellectual alliances with post-colonial studies. They ask what Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 17 the rise of China contributes (epistemically and ontologically) while interrogating the hegemonic worldview imposed by anglophone academia (Tenzin and Lee 2024). Decolonial Anthropology from China contributes to discussions around world anthropology, cosmopolitics and pluriversality (Ribeiro 2006; Liang 2022). They do so by either drawing from Chinese semi-colonial historical experiences or a developing notion of Chinese exceptionalism (especially influenced by the ontological turn in anthropology, e.g. Wang 2023). Nevertheless, Western academics rarely consider China to be a part of the Global South or ever to have been colonised, especially since the Beijing authorities have hardened their stance toward Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan. On the contrary, many in the West see China as a new imperialist force due to its emergence as an international superpower (e.g. Fiskesjö 2017; Millward 2020). This mismatch in perception, combined with China’s problematic place in geopolitics and knowledge production hierarchies, is generating a unique predicament that renders invisible the increasing number of students and professionals from Global South locations who are moving to the PRC to pursue studies or become employed in academic institutions (e.g. Ke-Schutte 2023). This, we contend, is forcing anthropologists of and from China into a double-bind position. On the one hand, any acknowledgement or promotion of ‘Chinese exceptionalism’ is unavoidably problematic and complicit in the global expansion and purported domestic colonialism, of the PRC, particularly in the context of government-led efforts to ‘develop a new social science with Chinese characteristics’ (goujian Zhongguo tese zhexue shehui kexue 构建中国特色哲学社会科学). On the other hand, any critique of ‘China’ (as one’s ethnographic field) violates the ‘unspoken convention’ of engaged anthropological inquiry that one should strive to promote the collective interest of one’s own interlocutors (see Jennifer Hubbert’s Chapter 4 in this collection). In both instances, the endeavour to treat China as an ordinary context faces challenges posed by entrenched power structures, whether of a disciplinary or nationalistic nature. It is as if anthropologists were once again caught between universalism and relativism,20 although this time, the subject holds immense influence, as well as a claim to an alternative universalism. This quandary becomes more severe for Chinese researchers working in Anglo-American academia. As Zhang and Kho cogently report, scholars of China can hardly ‘talk about China without feeling guilty, apologetic or defensive’ (2022: 143). Even more worryingly, American universities are now enacting new laws that prohibit universities from hiring Chinese researchers without special approval from the authorities. Similarly, ‘many Chinese students’, writes Chen Yangyang, ‘face bans on entering the United States based on the institution from which they graduated or their field of study’ (2024). In a similar Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 18 China as context fashion, the headlong drive for ‘internationalisation’ in UK academia is causing various epistemic collisions when trying to work with a Chinese academia that is constitutionally intolerant of pluralism in pluralistic academic collaborations (Owen 2020). Such undercurrents of discomfort and quiet blacklisting, we suggest, are causing the social studies of China to ‘miss the boat’ once more, and may keep anthropology and other interpretative sciences marginal for a long time to come (Pia 2023a). Considering the peculiar intellectual contexts and the power field in which the anthropology of China is inserted, we believe that the more ‘China’ is conceptualised as exceptional or ontologically Other, the more difficult it is to embrace the PRC and its higher education institutions in productive intellectual dialogue. Although we empathise a great deal with the approaches mentioned above, assuming this intellectual posture may run the risk of being misconstrued as a form of academic complicity with the PRC’s governmental strategy of domestic securitisation and international expansion. To reframe what we observed above, by framing ‘China as context’, we are not seeking to (radically) relativise or essentialise China. Rather, following on one of Aihwa Ong’s earlier insights, we treat the social force that China exerts today as an ‘attempt’ to repair old and produce novel relations on the ground, disengaging from, if not even replacing Anglo-American culturaleconomic hegemony all the while (2003: 63). In doing so, we are calling for a systematic comparison of sociocultural dynamics in which China is given a place proportional to its relevance instead of being ignored, exceptionalised or explained away by the global academic market. ****** Drawing from various ethnographic insights about the growing global influence of China’s rise and reflecting on the historical contexts and power asymmetries of knowledge production in the Anglophone world, in particular in Britain, we have put forth two premises. First, a distinctive sense that ‘China’ matters more is intruding on, percolating into, and dispersing across varied social fields. As China becomes part of the background of social action, we run the risk of unnoticing its influence on the bread-and-butter affairs of any anthropological project, namely the course of everyday life, especially when this unfolds at the cutting edge of geopolitical power shifts and their attendant political complicities. Second, academically, research about and insights from ‘China’ occupy a marginal position in the interpretative social sciences. If we juxtapose these two considerations with the observation that, analytically, ‘contextualisation’ is one of the main methods through which anthropologists interpret and understand people’s lives, a sort of intellectual Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 19 paradox appears: the rising significance of ‘China’ in the world has not been translated into increased attention on the part of anthropologists. We contend that this ‘paradox’, if continually ignored, may potentially bring serious disadvantages to knowledge production in anglophone anthropology and cognate disciplines. If the past forty years of ethnographic writings and analyses have gestated within and against the foil offered by the particular Anglo-American brand of neoliberal globalisation (and critical responses to it), our very descriptions of what constitutes ‘field site’ – be it physical, virtual or hybrid – and the ways in which we have learned to theorise about, from and within it, may dramatically fall short in the age of ‘China as context’. To put it even more starkly, without developing an internally articulated and layered understanding of the social forces China stands for, the practice of anthropology may well soon become inadequate. On this front, anglophone anthropology needs to advance. We wish to conclude this introduction by taking on a recent example of a theoretically rich ethnographic study of global China that, in some respects, epitomises the issues we identified above. In Collaborative Damage (2022), Mikkel Bunkenborg (an anthropologist of China) chronicles his disillusionment and regrettable estrangement from his fellow anthropologists and co-authors during their joint research initiative to investigate and compare China’s influence in Mongolia and Mozambique. This venture was originally conceived as an innovative approach to collaborative ethnographic research aimed at exploring the manifestations of globalisation catalysed by China. However, the hope for a shared interpretative framework eventually disintegrates due to pervasive misunderstandings, unchallenged assumptions and intractable disagreements regarding China’s perceived role in the global arena, and the researchers’ diverse interpretations of China’s interactions with local communities. As the authors note in the book’s introduction: ‘In the course of their joint fieldwork in Mongolia, Pedersen and Buckenborg also learned the hard way that what they had initially assumed would amount to straightforward data collection […] became the starting point for profound epistemic divergence and conflicts of interpretation’ (2022: 17). Yet, in the face of ‘recurrent failures to find mutual agreement’ (34), the three anthropologists still capably find a way to theorise about ‘what Globalizing China is’ (30) and the totality of the intimate yet distant relations that are supposedly discoverable in places where Chinese development actors encounter cultural Others. Although we share with the authors of Collaborative Damage a commitment toward a more ambitious anthropology of China (6) – and despite the many similarities between what they have observed and what one of this book’s editors witnessed during fieldwork in Zambia (Wu 2020) – we do have some reservations about the benefits of adopting the analytical style Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 20 China as context favoured by the three Danish anthropologists. We make three examples of how this style collapses the context of their collaborative ethnographic observations onto the flat axis of Otherness, distance and incommunicability, estranging us from ‘China’. First, the authors purposefully engage in the Otherisation of China-led overseas development projects (and of those individuals who work in and for them) by proposing to the reader an extreme interpretation of what interlocutors affected by these projects may sometimes claim about the experience of being enrolled into them: the feeling of being manipulated, of strangeness and indecipherability (e.g. 2022: 21, 226). Be this as it may, projects and project workers behaving as those surveyed in Nielsen, Bunkenborg and Pedersen’s work do (evasive, scheming, even racist at times) are nothing new to the anthropologist adept in the study of economic deregulation. The way we see it, the inequalities witnessed by the three Danish anthropologists ensue less from ‘China’ than from the uncritical worldwide adoption of unaccountable models of private-public partnership in the promotion of development and the provisioning of public goods (such as a road or a freshwater delivery system; e.g. Harvey and Knox 2015; Pia 2017; 2023b; 2024). Second, Nielsen, Bunkenborg and Pedersen make a point of engaging playfully with (racist) stereotypes of Chinese self-seclusion and unreliability in an effort to theorise globalising China from (as opposed to against) the sensibilities of those involved in cross-cultural economic projects and enmeshed in the inevitable conflicts these generate. While we salute this strategy as intriguing and appropriate to the book’s overarching endeavour, we remain wary of the implicit ontologising dangers of syphoning off general principles and concepts from the pervasive atmosphere of fear and rivalry surrounding economic initiatives undertaken between populations sharing a conflictual history (as do the Chinese and Mongols).21 Lastly, Collaborative Damage proposes a particular academic aesthetics for the ethics of intimate intercultural distances. Collaborative Damage basks in the elusive idea that the unfathomability of Chinese forces on the grounds fundamentally shapes the cosmology of those slowly crushed by its tentacular grip. The three anthropologists’ interlocutors are ‘trapped’ (30) – Nielsen and co-authors suggest – in a form of distance that anticipates its own closure. China is compared to a ‘spider-web’ here – we could suggest a kraken, the tentacular monster from Danish lore towering enough to easily occupy the entirety of someone’s worldview if they fall prey to it. Certainly, such distance, and dreams of further distancing oneself from Chinese interests, seem to afford many things to the people appearing in the book, and to some extent, we agree that a globalising China is indeed intruding into the ordinary contexts of people’s lives in ways that it sometimes erode, besiege or scar them. However, we keep wondering about the implications Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 21 of looking at these developing yet fleeting relationships in isolation from the history of Chinese diasporic relationships with cultural Others (Guo 2022) as well as from the longue durée of capitalist development (see Byler 2022). Notwithstanding these divergences, we welcome with enthusiasm what appears to us an ambitious project, recognising the challenges, frustrations and potential strains on friendships that arise when conducting joint research on global China. The prevailing biases and misunderstandings surrounding China, prevalent not only in the media but also within academic circles, including anthropology, are exacerbating the distance between experts and lay observers. One is even tempted to say that it is exacerbating pre-existing divergences between nations, in a geopolitical landscape that indeed for some has started resembling that of the Cold War period (Ferguson 2019). By elucidating the ‘contextual’ impact generated by global China and emphasising the imperative to critically engage with China in comparative studies, we hope to strengthen not just the purchase of anthropological theory but also those ‘affinities that allow’ cultural and ethical borders ‘to be bridged’ (Mair and Evans 2015: 203). Thus, we believe it appropriate to conclude this introduction by conjoining as well as reframing the epigraphs appearing at the beginning of this text. If it appears troubling to grasp the full implications of one’s context by being immersed in it – as the Song dynasty essayist Su Shi claims – it is the analytical effort of making such contexts more intelligible and relatable to ourselves and others that allows us to make claims not just about the conditions of possibility of collaborative anthropological knowledge per se, but about the possibility of learning ‘something about the world’ and about those who people it ‘that we didn’t already know’ (Laidlaw 2013: 219). ****** This book is organised into two sections, moving through various empirical contexts which then serve as grounding for more theoretical discussion. In the first section, ‘China is context’, four chapters document various influences of China on the perceptions and lives of ordinary people in different regions of the world. Yu Qiu opens the section by tracing the stories of interreligious interactions between a newly established Chinese Buddhist temple in Tanzania and different local communities. Qiu’s ethnography reveals how Chinese migrant monks from the PRC utilise various strategies grounded in Buddhist practice to tailor their proselytising methods for the local spiritual market and to navigate social, racial and religious terrains, embedding their presence in the local communities beyond the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Qiu further argues that the transnational religious transmission of Chinese Humanistic Buddhism follows the rationale of ‘growing affinity’ (jieyuan 结 Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 22 China as context 缘) – an interactive process of encountering and mutual adaptation. During this process, Chinese Buddhism not only gradually builds up channels for cross-boundary collaborations and communications, but also (trans)forms, jointly with the local communities, the context (or situation in Yu Qiu’s terms) of religious practices in Tanzania. Following this, our second contributor Alessandro Rippa looks into this ‘transformative effect’ of China through the lens of commodity and commercial links, specifically of amber markets, between China, Poland and Mexico. With the rise and fall of amber’s popularity in PRC, Rippa describes a situation in which ‘China’ need not be explicitly invoked in order to exert considerable influence on an ethnographic setting. Rather, ‘China’ here is an affect that sets the ‘tone’ for local business interactions, which lingers on even after the withdrawal of ‘China’s demand’. In Gdańsk, Poland, largescale economic shifts ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic have reconfigured interpersonal relationships with a distinctive ‘Chinese’ inflection and a more intimate scale. In Chiapas, Mexico, by contrast, few attribute important shifts in the amber market to ‘China’ per se. Nevertheless, ‘China’ remains here what Rippa terms an ethnographic ‘absent presence’. In her contribution, Caroline Humphrey also demonstrates the ‘multiplicity of China’ and its multivocal presences by tracing various names that Russian people have historically employed to refer to ‘China’. Moving through various vernacular, political and poetic epithets – including a Russian calque of the Chinese term tianxia 天下 as podnebesnoe (поднебесное) – Humphrey at once reveals the rich processes of contextualisation which emerge from an anthropological focus on naming practices, and concretely demonstrates how several layered ideas of ‘China’ have ramified across Eurasia for several centuries. Whether ‘China’, ‘the PRC’ or ‘All under Heaven’, this polymorphous set of notions has both had measurable effects in the world as each name is invoked, and reflects an equally distributed set of understandings which Russians have of themselves, and – recursively – of Chinese people’s national subjectivity. As observed in Qiu’s and Rippa’s chapters, ‘China’ here, despite institutional efforts at presenting a unified and unidimensional image abroad, in the process of interaction and mutual adaptations becomes un-flattened in often counterintuitive ways. Lastly in section one, Jennifer Hubbert draws on the example of Confucius Institutes – among the PRC’s best-known proactive attempts to reshape certain global contexts – to explore ideas of modernity and soft power, notions critically entangled with much ‘global China’ discourse. Analyses of Chinese ‘soft power’ initiatives, Hubbert suggests, commonly rest on assumptions about states and societies which are projected from a liberal international order that is still imagined to be hegemonic. Yet this leaves significant blind spots at the heart of discussions about China’s influence on the global world Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 23 order, including epistemological assumptions originating from a context which is itself changing. The three contributors in the second section, ‘The Neglect of China’, explore from different angles the place of marginality to which China has been relegated in anthropological theory-making. Hans Steinmüller offers an analysis of how anthropologists of China have failed to strike an appropriate balance between ethnographic context and theoretical substance. By excessively foregrounding characteristics of their ethnographic settings deemed specifically ‘Chinese’, Steinmüller suggests, anthropologists have both constrained themselves in applying ‘Western’-derived theory to these contexts and also restricted their capacity to generate portable theories, thereby bracketing themselves off from wider discussion. Next, Tan Tongxue further elaborates on the peripheral status of Chinarooted anthropology by arguing that this stems from longstanding analytical preoccupations of Chinese anthropologists themselves. Drawing on the academic biography of Fei Xiaotong, which he sets in a wider historical and intellectual context, Tan contends that the particular political and material conditions surrounding Fei and other first-generation PRC anthropologists lent themselves neither to ambitious theory-building, nor grand ‘civilisational’ comparisons. Tan writes from within (as opposed to merely about) the tradition he himself dissects. This positionality allows him to show how institutional structures, the demands of a vast modernising nation, and an external ‘Western’ discipline often unwilling to engage fully with both of these, have conspired to create the very localism key to Fei’s foundational practice in anthropology. Finally, Yang Zhan’s chapter theorises a different scale of institutional and epistemological constraint on the wider reception of China-rooted anthropology: the enduring legacy of colonial power relations, which relegate knowledge derived from ‘China’ to mere ‘experience’. As Zhan notes, there is not always much that qualitatively separates objective knowledge from subjective experience in anthropological theory other than the degree of institutionalisation. Zhan suggests new ways of producing knowledge which might not only help to institutionalise China-based ideas on the plane of theory but may also offer a means for anthropologists within any field of focus to see their ideas more widely adopted. The volume ends with a Commentary by Uradyn Bulag. As well as bringing together insights from the book’s seven chapters to offer a wider reflection on the place of China anthropology in global currents of thought, here Bulag provocatively suggests that Chinese contexts may already have seeped deeper into ‘Western’ intellectual traditions than we realise, and that distinctively, anthropological thinking has been pivotal in shaping how ‘China’ has been serially redefined in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts. Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 24 China as context Notes 1 Kintsugi 金継ぎ, a centuries-old Japanese art form, repairs broken ceramics with a golden lacquer. The technique, which translates roughly as ‘joining with gold’, uses gold-dusted lacquer to mend shattered pottery, creating unique pieces. The cover of this volume alludes to this analogy. 2 With cognate disciplines, in this Introduction we refer to qualitative and interpretive social sciences such as human geography, political ecology, science and technology studies et similia. 3 For a general overview, see the data collected by Jo Johnson and collaborators relative to research engagement and collaborations between the UK Higher Education Sector and China (2021: 24–27). In the membership directory of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK, members who list China as a regional expertise comprise 3.6 per cent of the total. India is at 12.6 per cent; Russia 1.2 per cent. Melanisianists are 3.2 per cent. Africanist, a much larger category, 19.2 per cent. 4 By anthropology of China, we refer to a sub-branch of anthropology concerned with engaging in fieldwork with Sinophone interlocutors and/or any Sino-coded material. By anthropology in China, we refer to the work done by anthropologists who, independently of their citizenship, are employed by academic institutions in the PRC. With anthropology from China or China-rooted anthropology, we refer to the body of empirical and analytical work produced over the decades by anthropologists through engagement with Sinophone interlocutors and/or any Sino-coded material. Lastly, we use Chinese anthropologists to refer to PRC citizens holding a PhD in anthropology. 5 We can think of ‘context’ in the first meaning as a prominent analytical tool of hermeneutics. In the second, as the enabler of any phenomenological practice. See Ricoeur (1975); Zigon and Throop (2021). 6 One example raised by Price (2016: 94–98) is that of Clifford Geertz who, working on research projects with direct or indirect connections to the CIA or the Pentagon, famously failed to address the US-backed, anti-communist massacres that occurred in Indonesia only seven years prior to the publication of Deep Play (1972). 7 Paolo Heywood notes that in recent anthropological models of cultural difference, radical alterity is often premised on the unspoken assumption that likeness or resemblance is always a given and that the work of theory is that of instituting difference. We are with Heywood in arguing that ‘emphasized differences are necessarily strategic or tactical’ (2020: 553). 8 In his speech at the fifteenth BRICS Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa in August 2023, Chinese President Xi Jinping reiterated his proposal for a ‘Chinese style of modernisation’ (Zhongguoshi xiandaihua 中国式现代化) and the strategic position that the proposal holds for achieving ‘the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’ (Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing 中华民族伟大 复兴). He hoped that the Chinese model would shed light on African developments and, together, China and Africa would reach ‘mutual flourishment Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Introduction 25 of two great civilisations’ (wenming gongxing 文明共兴). See https://www​ .fmprc​.gov​.cn​/web​/zyxw​/202308​/t20230825​_11132507​.shtml (accessed 21 September 2024). 9 For Ricoeur, emplotment or mise-en-intrigue refers to the process of shaping raw events into a meaningful narrative, central to his idea of narrative identity (1991). It involves organising events into a coherent sequence, establishing causal links and interpreting motives and themes in storytelling. Ricoeur extended this concept to show how individuals construct their identities and understanding of the world by framing their life events into a narrative structure, highlighting the dynamic and creative aspect of storytelling and interpretation. 10 That is, we prompt anthropologists to discontinue unwitting participation in the double trap contest of defining modern China as both a ‘West’ lacking specific attributes (Shih 2001) and a cultural-political multitude in disguise (Chun 1996; 2000; Zhang 2002). It is in the friction between the greater assertiveness of the Chinese Communist Party’s cultural and economic vision for the country and the way this assertiveness is interpreted, accommodated and resisted on the ground that we find the generativeness of the notion of ‘China’ adopted here. 11 A parallel here can be drawn with what James Carrier has termed ‘occidentalism’ (1995), the circulation of stylised images on the West through the vehicle of post-Cold War globalisation. However, here we wish to emphasise the often-implicit and silent coordinates of China’s transmogrification into context, shaping physical and discursive spaces in mercurial yet always unfinished and contestable ways. 12 See Franceschini and Loubere (2022). 13 See the full text of Xi Jinping keynote at the World Economic Forum at: https:// america​.cgtn​.com​/2017​/01​/17​/full​-text​-of​-xi​-jinping​-keynote​-at​-the​-world​ -economic​-forum (accessed 21 September 2024). 14 See BBC, 27 December 2021: https://www​.bbc​.co​.uk​/news​/business​-59771575 (accessed 21 September 2024). 15 A thought-provoking attempt was made by Liu Xin in elucidating the theoretical import of Chinese rites for the study of rituals (2000). 16 A quick curious anecdote from across the Atlantic: Marshall Sahlins was the first supervisor of Morton Fried, an anthropologist of China, who was in the same cohort as Sidney Mintz and Eric Wolf. 17 Although the reason for China’s marginality in anthropology is open to further debate and needs more investigation, a quick look at the figures may represent its status well. If one takes the Malinowski Memorial Lecture – among the most prestigious annual events in British anthropology – as an indicator of the relative preoccupations and priorities of the discipline, the numbers speak for themselves: two out of sixty-one Malinowski Memorial Lectures since 1959 have been about the anthropology of China. That is 3 per cent, compared with the 10 per cent about the anthropology of India and the 15 per cent about the anthropology of South Asia. By the time of drafting this introduction, among currently serving academic staff who hold permanent positions Di Wu, Andrea E. Pia, and Ed Pulford - 9781526184320 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 01/12/2026 03:46:48PM via Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 26 China as context at ten leading departments of social anthropology in the UK (i.e. Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Exeter, LSE, Manchester, Oxford, UCL, St Andrew’s, SOAS), there are seven anthropologists specialised in China, three of whom are at LSE alone. Among the seven, only one is from a higher educational background in the PRC. That is less than 1 per cent of the total nationally. 18 We are not claiming that Japan is crucial to British anthropology. Japan (or East Asia in general), like China, remains underrepresented in the development of anthropological knowledge in the UK and the US (see Yamashita, Eades and Bosco 2004). 19 For instance, in 2021, 72.1 per cent of British school pupils of Chinese background obtained a place in higher education in the UK – the highest entry rate of any ethnic group. See Entry Rates into Higher Education at https://www​ .ethnicity​-facts​-figures​.service​.gov​.uk​/education​-skills​-and​-training​/higher​-education​/entry​-rates​-into​-higher​-education​/latest (accessed 25 September 2024). 20 Although we go along with Clifford Geertz’s amused jeer at the fearmongering of those who, during the Cold War, saw in communism an existential menace for the liberal world (1984), we are also very wary of the fact that Cold War anthropologists (including Geertz himself) typically downplayed the clash of political and ideological forces occurring in the background of postmodernist fieldwork, to the point of silencing precisely the kind of ‘context’ we are collectively after in this volume. 21 For instance, Primo Levi offered intriguing insights into understanding the dynamics of German–Italian business collaborations after the war. 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