“A star sent from the heavens,” is how Zihan Han describes Professor Biao Xiang, the academic drawing large, enthusiastic crowds from China’s younger generations, according to the BBC.
About 500 people, mostly members of the Chinese diaspora, packed an auditorium in Singapore to hear Xiang speak recently, the BBC reports. He spoke for more than an hour in Mandarin and, when the session ended, dozens queued to meet him and take photos. One attendee described the event as “an academic fan meeting.”
Xiang is a social anthropologist who now lives in Germany and serves as director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, the BBC says. He has been interviewed by major Chinese outlets and has travelled to leading Chinese campuses, including his alma mater Peking University. One of his talks earlier this year was live-streamed because the auditorium was full.
The attraction is not celebrity in the usual sense, the BBC reports. Young people are drawn to Xiang because he talks directly about widespread anxieties: the difficulty of finding secure work, pressures in relationships, and the strain of trying to keep up in a fast-changing society. A 23-year-old Chinese graduate told the BBC that “the transition from school to the real world brings a lot of uncertainty now, and people often feel anxious because they don’t know how to face it.”
Xiang frames these concerns as part of broader social change. He tells audiences that people often look for approval from systems, such as exams and jobs, and that reliance on such approval can damage self-worth. He argues that seeking meaning and understanding from others can help people understand themselves better, the BBC reports.
He uses shorthand phrases to describe contemporary pressures. “Floating” refers to people working just to survive, like a hummingbird continuously flapping, the BBC says. Another concept he calls “the nearby” describes how people focus on themselves and distant global issues while neglecting the space in between, which can leave them feeling disconnected.
Xiang told the BBC: “Everyone knows where the issue is, but they are reluctant to look at it. Sometimes it is too painful to look at, or they don’t have a way. But as an academic, it is not terrifying if you can describe it, that’s how you analyse and manage it.”
The BBC notes wider context. China experienced rapid economic and technological growth for decades, but that expansion slowed during the Covid pandemic and has not returned to previous rates. Youth unemployment reached 21.3 percent before the government stopped publishing the data in mid-2023, the BBC reports. China’s leader Xi Jinping has described the country’s “principal contradiction” as “between the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development,” the BBC adds.
The BBC also cautions that censorship in China makes it hard to measure the true extent of public discontent. Despite that, Xiang’s candid public talks appear to have struck a chord with many young people searching for language and frameworks to make sense of their anxieties.
For more details see the BBC report: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq70dgdndr46o?at_campaign=rss&at_medium=RSS.
Featured image: Jomyzzzz via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
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