Is It Possible to Be an Independent Scholar in China Today?

At the end of 2024, as my postdoctoral appointment at a Chinese university was ending, I found myself at a professional crossroads. During the previous two years, based in mainland China as an anthropologist, I had experienced at first hand the constraints that institutional academia imposes on writing and public speaking. This led me to consider an unconventional path: becoming an independent scholar. It was not an easy decision, because in anthropology there has scarcely been any recognised space for independent scholars. Being independent is often framed as either a transitional phase between jobs or a soft euphemism for ‘leaving the academy’.

While ‘independence’—whether voluntary or forced—often reflects the growing precarity of the academic labour market in the Global North, in an authoritarian context such as China, it functions more as a political statement. It signifies a refusal to be coopted by the state-aligned knowledge production apparatus and a deliberate pursuit of intellectual autonomy. But within a highly capitalised academic regime, younger scholars who pursue independence do so at a high cost. One of the most urgent questions is whether fieldwork and intellectual engagement can be sustained outside the institutional scaffolding that typically makes them possible. From this perspective, whether to become an independent anthropologist is not only a matter of livelihood; it also compels me to re-examine my academic trajectory in China alongside the broader infrastructure of knowledge production in the country, to weigh the possibilities and limitations of doing research independently.

In 2017, while still a PhD student, I began conducting fieldwork on the moral experiences of caring for children with intellectual disabilities in Guangdong Province. Over the years, I built sustained relationships with parent associations, disability rights nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), local bio-bureaucratic institutions, and early intervention centres. After graduating in 2021, I continued this work as a postdoctoral researcher at a university in southwestern China. With a formal academic affiliation, my involvement with these organisations deepened, especially after parts of my research were published in Chinese journals. I was increasingly invited to participate as an ‘expert’ in dialogue events between advocacy organisations and government agents, as well as domestic conferences focused on disability research.

Anthropology comes with a built-in demand for reflexivity that pushes us to constantly examine our positionality: who we are and how we are marked by gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, appearance, and demeanour. Even though this shapes our ethnographic work, it was not until I contemplated becoming an independent anthropologist that I seriously considered, through my own lived experience, how the patterns of collaboration among domestic academia, disability-affected communities, and advocacy groups informed both the practice of fieldwork and the narratives emerging from it. The impending loss of my institutional affiliation led to several subtle yet revealing encounters. These moments prompted me to reflect on how disability studies in China has been scaffolded by political opportunities tethered to state agendas and a moral economy of ‘proxy advocacy’, which open certain doors for ethnographic study, but also impose implicit limits on what can be collected and articulated. This realisation began with an awkward encounter in a conference room.

What Does Losing an Academic Affiliation Mean?

In June 2024, I was invited by a parent support organisation with which I had long collaborated during fieldwork to speak at their annual conference. Many of the attendees were familiar faces: mothers I had previously interviewed who were deeply and actively involved in the organisation. I saw the event as a chance to reconnect and catch up. Several of the mothers approached me warmly to ask about my current situation. ‘So … should we call you “Professor” now?’ they asked, half-jokingly. Without thinking much, I replied honestly: ‘Actually, I don’t plan to stay in the university system anymore.’ My answer was met with an awkward pause. ‘Oh … I see,’ an old interlocutor murmured, seemingly unable to find an appropriate response. The conversation fizzled out.

A few months later, a Chinese-language article I had written caught the attention of a prominent clinician specialising in autism diagnosis. He invited me to participate in an interdisciplinary event on autism research—a rare opportunity I had not encountered during my doctoral fieldwork. After my presentation, several physicians and therapists approached me enthusiastically. They added me on WeChat and expressed a strong interest in collaborating with someone trained in humanities and social sciences who could help illuminate the lived experiences of neurodivergent individuals. But when I revealed my intention to become an independent scholar in response to their casual question about my future research plans, their reactions abruptly shifted. I noticed confusion and doubt settling across their faces. ‘Are you saying you are starting a business [创业]? Not doing research anymore?’ one psychologist asked. I did not know how to explain this decision, but the hesitation in her voice told me that potential collaborations that had seemed so close just moments earlier were quietly dissolving, probably with no follow-up.

One of my early anxieties about becoming independent was not knowing how to introduce myself in these professional settings. After all, in China as elsewhere, ‘independent anthropologist’ is not a recognised identity category. In the Chinese context, even the very word ‘independence’ has become politically sensitive after the conflicts in Hong Kong, Tibet, and Xinjiang. But these encounters made me realise a deeper issue: stepping away from the university system carries an implicit cost to fieldwork access and research collaboration. It subtly disincentivises potential collaborators and field interlocutors from engaging with you. I felt certain doors begin to close. Opportunities that could have come easily—for example, access to well-known institutions, invitations to collective activities, and conversations with medical professionals—began to slip through my fingers.

The last time I had felt the weight of academic affiliation shaping field access was in 2019, during my doctoral research. At the time, a disability rights NGO with which I had been working invited me to join a policy meeting with local officials to advocate for job opportunities and a more accessible employment environment for people with intellectual disabilities. This was a rare chance for a PhD student like me to explore government attitudes to such issues up close, and a way to give back to the community that had informed my work. I readily accepted. But days before the meeting, one of the NGO staff pulled me aside, visibly uncomfortable. ‘Would you mind sitting this one out?’ they asked. ‘It’s just … you’re from a Hong Kong university, and that’s … kind of sensitive right now.’ It was late 2019. The anti-extradition protests had roiled Hong Kong for months, drawing international attention. My university had been one of the central sites of student–police confrontation and was now publicly associated with dissent. In the tense political atmosphere that lingered long after, my institutional affiliation became a subversive label that obstructed my way into official settings.

Scholars who have conducted fieldwork in China have written about how researchers’ backgrounds and perceived ideological positions shape how they are received by interlocutors (Harlan 2019; Liu 2010; Wu 2021). Gaining trust in a tightly surveilled society usually requires careful calibration of how much one is exposed to others. As someone raised in China, I understood that my affiliation with a Hong Kong institution could become part of how I was perceived, which could determine whether I was invited into significant conversations or whether people felt safe sharing their views with me. But the awkwardness I experienced when I admitted to being an independent anthropologist made me realise how domestic institutional affiliations and academic credentials constitute the very threshold for certain field access. This is a seemingly pragmatic issue that lays bare the relational, political, and moral terrain upon which knowledge production in realms such as disability rests.

Endorsements, State Funding, and Speaking Bitterness

In post-2010 China, where various forms of grassroots activism face increasing suppression, invoking scholars’ symbolic authority has become one of the few remaining channels through which marginalised groups attempt to influence public policy. Disability service organisations and rights advocacy groups frequently rely on domestic institutional scholars to articulate their demands. This practice is colloquially referred to in Chinese as beishu (背书), meaning to secure the endorsement of intellectual authorities to legitimise a cause. On some occasions, beishu amounts to little more than a symbolic gesture. A friend working in a disability rights NGO once told me frankly:

Even if we know some of these professors don’t know what they’re talking about, we still try to stay in their good graces and support their research. We need them to speak on our behalf, to say things in their reports or interviews that might get the government’s attention.

As she pointed out: ‘Only the words of people with senior titles are taken seriously.’

My friend had observed what many practitioners know well: those who have a seat at the table where policy is shaped typically are senior scholars with institutional power. These scholars are eligible to lead zhongda keti (重大课题, that is, large-scale, state-funded research projects officially designated as nationally significant) that enable them to assemble well-resourced teams and conduct wideranging investigations. One of the aims of such projects is to produce ‘internal reference reports’ (内参) for policymakers. As a result, these scholars and their research teams are more readily viewed by marginalised groups and their advocacy organisations as strategic allies. Perceived as symbolic authorities who can be strategically leveraged, they enjoy disproportionate access to research collaborations, data, and engagement opportunities, especially when compared with researchers from or based abroad.

During my doctoral fieldwork, I frequently encountered the assumption that I was ‘working for’ a professor’s keti, and that my findings, as outputs of these state-funded projects, might translate into tangible resource allocations for the disability community. This expectation often left me deeply uncomfortable. Once, I attempted to engage a group of parents of children with intellectual disabilities in a conversation about their children’s sexuality and intimacy—a topic I assumed would strike a deep chord. Suddenly, one mother cut in with a challenging question: ‘How can your keti be turned into a policy?’ Struck momentarily speechless, I realised the root of their scepticism about my research: in their eyes, such an intensely private sphere was simply not something the state would ever bother to ‘manage’ (管).

Looking back on my fieldwork, I realise that many of my relationships with parents were shaped by a similar kind of moral expectation. A few years ago, I arranged an interview with an older woman in her sixties who had been caring for her autistic son alone for many years. We agreed to meet at the office of a local NGO where we both regularly attended caregiver support group activities. I still vividly remember her words when she rushed in that day. She dropped her bag on the couch and remarked offhandedly: ‘I once talked to a journalist years ago. What came of it? Nothing changed.’ Her comment, while not directed at me, landed with a sting of accusation. It suggested that she did not see our conversation as a personal exchange or casual sharing between friends, especially as it was taking place in the organisation dedicated to advocacy for her benefits. In her view, if my research could not lead to structural changes in her life, what was the point?

While some ethnographers tend to compare conversations with their suffering interlocutors to some form of narrative therapy (Frank 1995; Kleinman 1989; Mattingly 1998), I found that such exchanges in China were often saturated with political expectations directed at the researcher. When parents, especially those from working-class or lower-income backgrounds, shared stories of care and exhaustion, the tone frequently resembled suku (诉苦, ‘speaking bitterness’). In China’s modern revolutionary history, suku was practised as a politically charged narrative genre. Once mobilised in mass campaigns, it functioned as a performative mode of storytelling in which political demands were embedded in simplified, emotionally charged narratives (see Anagnost 1997). During our initial encounters, the parents’ conversations invariably revolved around a shared predicament: their children having nowhere to go after finishing special education and their own entrapment in care responsibilities without a moment to breathe. Looking back, embedded within these repetitive narratives of complaint were some purposeful appeals, pointing to real policy gaps, such as the absence of transitional services for adults with intellectual disabilities and the lack of respite care for families. I must acknowledge that some of our conversations happened precisely because they assumed I would eventually hold a position of influence within the Chinese academy and deliver something in return. After I started working at a Chinese university, my sense of this expectation only intensified.

In popular imaginaries, academics are seen as conduits to, if not representatives of, the official state, who are at least capable of translating the needs of ordinary people (老百姓) to those in power (Xiang 2010). This is particularly true for groups such as the disability community, whose welfare depends overwhelmingly on state resource allocation. Their expectations of native scholars, their ways of expressing demands, and their willingness to participate in research embody the political agency of these marginalised groups. Yet, at the methodological level, this intellectual-political imagination often converts into a tacit reciprocity in the field. NGOs are willing to share data and broker connections for researchers and interlocutors are willing to talk because they believe scholars can act as a bridge between the marginalised and policymakers. For native scholars, especially those endowed with state-recognised symbolic capital, such as those serving as government advisors or holding prestigious academic titles, it is this political expectation, rather than the ‘rapport’ with interlocutors traditionally championed by anthropologists, that generates greater opportunities to engage with potential interlocutors and to expand one’s fieldwork network.

Problematising the Moral Economy of Proxy Advocacy

While this moral expectation placed on native scholars echoes the longstanding image of the Chinese intellectual as a moral agent who ‘speaks on behalf of the people’ (为民请命), the growing reliance on institutional scholars to carry out policy advocacy is deeply entangled with two decades of authoritarian retrenchment and the shrinking of civil society. This is particularly evident in the official restrictions on international funding following the enactment of the Charity Law and the Overseas NGO Law in 2016–17. Many NGOs serving marginalised groups, once reliant on overseas support, now only survive on ‘government procurement of services’ (政府购买服务)—a shift that reflects an attempt by the Party-State to subsume grassroots efforts into its own apparatus of governmentality. Chronic underfunding leaves little room for these organisations to develop in-house research departments and analytic capability. Furthermore, collaborating with scholars based abroad increasingly risks attracting the politically dangerous label of ‘foreign forces’ (境外势力). Consequently, leveraging state agendas to benefit the communities they serve and relying on scholars with the capacity to conduct dialogue with the government have become their primary pathways for advocacy.

Paradoxically, the state’s crackdown on human rights issues and civil society has created unexpected political opportunities for fields such as disability. In recent years, disability studies—once a neglected area—has rapidly emerged as a new academic frontier in China. This is not necessarily due to increased public awareness of disability rights, but rather because once-prominent fields such as labour and gender studies have become politically sensitive and increasingly off-limits. In this context, scholars and activists previously dedicated to broader human rights issues have pivoted towards the disability sector—a domain perceived as not politically threatening—to seek new space for activism. As the Chinese State coopts disability rights and welfare into its broader agenda of ‘building a barrier-free society’ (无障碍社会建设), a wave of somewhat opportunistic ‘disability fever’ has swept through domestic academia. Universities rush to establish disability research centres and scholars who previously had little engagement with the field have rebranded themselves to pursue disability-related funding, attracted by the relative ease of gaining approval for ‘hot’ topics. Although the disability community and service organisations welcome this investment in their issues, these academic opportunists are often less concerned with whether their work promotes justice or tangible improvements in disabled people’s lives than they are with how well their research echoes official slogans to secure state-funded research projects.

The proliferation of these opportunistic scholars highlights the limitations of the model of ‘proxy advocacy’ that has been pursued so far—in particular, its paternalistic assumption that disability-affected communities lack the capability for self-advocacy. Even though—as demonstrated by the mothers of people with intellectual disabilities I encountered—marginalised groups and their representatives consciously leverage this ‘proxy advocacy’ to voice their demands, the academy in an authoritarian society functions less as a bottom-up advisory body influencing policymaking, and more as a top-down interpreter of state will. The outcome of these misplaced expectations of collaboration is less reciprocal and more extractive: too often, NGO networks, community knowledge, and the lived experiences of the disabled individuals serve merely to fuel the careers and symbolic capital of the academic opportunists, ultimately reinforcing the capitalisation and alienation of knowledge production.

Even for those Chinese scholars who genuinely wish to speak for the voiceless, they must go through institutionalised channels and adopt a regulated writing style that aligns with official discourse. One way they do this is by turning their research findings into reports submitted to government agencies or representatives of the National People’s Congress. In this arrangement, the narratives constructed in the research must be calibrated to resonate with state agendas. For example, people with intellectual disabilities are routinely classified by state policies as ‘populations in distress’ (困境群体) who are vulnerable dependants requiring paternalistic care, rather than autonomous citizens capable of participating in public life. Unsurprisingly, most domestically funded disability research projects approach them as targets of welfare intervention and focus more on their caregivers’ burdens and the need for support services. Very few studies centre on the citizenship or activism of people with intellectual disabilities themselves. Ultimately, this means that when marginalised groups participate in research in exchange for proxy advocacy, they fall into a profound double bind of recognition. The moment their demands are recognised by the state, they are further fixed into a diminished subjectivity as passive welfare recipients whose needs must be identified by their service providers, articulated by scholars, and addressed through top-down resource allocation by the state.

The moral expectation placed on native institutional intellectuals—who function as part of the infrastructure of knowledge production—also creates a profound dilemma for early-career scholars. If they hope to meet the expectations of their interlocutors, the ideal path is to gain sufficient institutional standing to strive for a seat at the policymaking table. Yet, attaining such influence first requires surviving the state-led academic system. In most Chinese universities, academic survival hinges on two primary imperatives: securing funding through the national social science grant system and publishing a requisite number of articles in state-approved journals. To survive an essentially authoritarian audit culture, early-career scholars must learn to reframe critical narratives in officially palatable terms or deliberately obscure their analytical stance to bypass the political censorship of grant committees, academic journals, and media outlets. However, this is far more than just a matter of learning to inhabit the constraints of research and publishing. It is insidiously eroding the very ecology of public engagement. After all, those people with whom we work in the field, and to whom we hope to return through our research outputs, are predominantly Chinese readers. Trimming the narrative to satisfy censorship requirements is a prerequisite for making our research visible to this exclusively Chinese-reading audience. Yet absurdly, the parts that must be erased are sometimes the most crucial for understanding the structural conditions shaping people’s suffering.

I was once invited to contribute to a well-known Chinese journal with an article that explored the gendered burden of care for people with intellectual disabilities through the lens of affective intimacy. The piece was quickly accepted. But just before publication, the editor-in-chief returned the manuscript and asked me to delete the section describing how, in the post-socialist era, the withdrawal of public welfare had left vulnerable individuals to rely on personal effort and familial resources to secure their wellbeing. I was also told that the term ‘post-socialism’ could not appear in print. Confronted with the choice between revision and rejection, I reluctantly chose to revise. This kind of compromise is not exceptional. It is the daily reality of academic writing under the state-led academic capitalism, within which what to write and how to write it become matters of meticulous ethical deliberation. In your desire to maintain scholarly integrity, you must ask whether doing so will prevent your work from ever reaching your informants and the broader public, and whether it will jeopardise your institutional position and the moral expectations pinned upon it or even revoke your access to potential field sites.

The In-Between Horizon

Reckoning with the authoritarian infrastructure of knowledge production in China has led me to carefully weigh what is gained and what is forfeited in choosing to become an independent anthropologist. Remaining within the university system offers crucial institutional scaffolding, including funding for fieldwork, symbolic capital that facilitates collaboration, access to libraries and academic resources, and the ability to circulate one’s research through teaching. But these advantages come at the cost of bureaucratic oversight, the burdens of performance metrics, and political boundaries on what can be said and how. Independence may offer a release from these constraints. It creates distance from academic opportunism and the pressures of metric-driven productivity. Once I stopped writing to satisfy the evaluation system, the purpose of writing—for whom and for what—became clearer to me.

Yet, this independence comes with real risks in ethnographic research. Without institutional affiliation, researchers often lose the formal credentials that help establish legitimacy and trust among potential collaborators and interlocutors. In China, where social trust is increasingly eroded, gaining field access to professionalised and tightly controlled institutions such as orphanages, hospitals, universities, or tech companies typically requires an academic badge. Without such credentials, the door rarely opens.

Independence, for me, is about not merely professional reorientation, but also my personal attempt to resist academic alienation. However, if this choice is framed solely in terms of what is forfeited, it risks becoming either a heroic gesture of resistance or a luxury reserved for those with the socioeconomic resources to absorb its costs. For scholars who feel alienated within the domestic academic system yet depend on it for their livelihood, the prospect of taking this leap may feel too precarious to contemplate. I approach the deliberation over whether to become independent as an in-between horizon that brings into view the often-obscured conditions and constraints shaping ethnographic work in specific fields. This thought experiment, which takes ‘self as method’ (Xiang and Wu 2022), has compelled me to critically re-examine the problematic proxy-advocacy models that underpin disability studies in China—models that might have unwittingly unlocked access to the field for me. In this sense, contemplating independence also demands a methodological transformation that replaces representational burdens and instrumental exchange with alternative, reciprocal modes of field engagement. It forces me to ask what kinds of identities, methods, and relational practices become necessary when one loses the backing of an institutional affiliation. And what perspectives only become possible once my institutional credentials no longer matter to potential interlocutors?

References

Anagnost, Ann. 1997. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Frank, Arthur. 1995. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, Second Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Harlan, Tyler. 2019. ‘State of Sensitivity: Navigating Fieldwork in an Increasingly Authoritarian China.’ Made in China Journal 4(3): 116–19.

Kleinman, Arthur. 1989. The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York, NY: Basic Books.

Liu, Shao-hua. 2010. ‘Anthropological Ethics in the Shadows: Researching Drug Use and AIDS Interventions in Southwest China.’ Asian Anthropology 9(1): 77–94.

Mattingly, Cheryl. 1998. Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots: The Narrative Structure of Experience. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wu, Jinting. 2021. ‘From Researcher to Human Being: Fieldwork as Moral Laboratories.’ Anthropology & Education Quarterly 52(1): 106–15.

Xiang, Biao 项飙. 2010. ‘普通人的“国家”理论 [Ordinary People’s Theory of the “State”].’ 开放时代 [Open Times] (10): 117–32.

Xiang, Biao, and Qi Wu. 2022. Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World. Translated by David Ownby. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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