From Nameless Marxist to Public Sociology: The Liminal Trajectory of Yuan Shen in Contemporary China

• In Event: 063 - Regular Session. Public Sociology

Abstract

This paper is about Chinese intellectuals, the discipline of sociology, and politics in post-Mao China. It offers a sociologically-inclined narrative of Yuan Shen [原沈]—China’s first‘self-proclaimed’ public sociologist, a prominent social scientist in China's academia. While considering Shen’s intellectual trajectory over the last four decades, the author tries to answer the following question: how can one make sense of Shen’s path, beginning as it does with his early work for the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences think-tank in the 1980s, where the goal was to advance the CCP’s vision for China’s economic modernization, and leading to the founding a department of sociology dedicated to constructing an active and civil Chinese society able to defend itself against the power of both the state and the market after the year 2000? The goal of the paper is to go against the sociology of the ‘bad guy’, a class of accusatory realism which depicts the institutional anchorage of intellectuals in a dispassionate manner, combatively denigrates their actions, brings them down to earth and below and quickly discredits their self-proclaimed high-mission (Pels 2001:22). The author presents a more balanced account of the inherent tension of spokespersonship, the act of speaking for others. While relying on the concepts of intellectual self-concept (Gross 2008) and archived identity, the author shows that for Yuan Shen the act of discovering his own intellectual self-concept (public sociologist) was a powerful structuring ideation that extended beyond habitus and field-dynamic.

Author

• Francois Joseph Lachapelle, University of B. C.