Rebooting Qualitative Research in China: Reflections on Doing Fieldwork in the Post-Covid Era
With the lifting of pandemic-related travel restrictions, international researchers are now returning to China. While the end of ‘Zero-Covid’ opens new possibilities for mobility and access, China remains a challenging environment for fieldwork; given current geopolitical tensions, mounting anti-foreign (and anti-Chinese) rhetoric, and an ever-growing list of ‘sensitive’ research topics, it seems unlikely that conditions for field-based researchers will improve any time soon (see Harlan 2019). As concerns about risk and access continue to loom large in the Chinese Studies community, we—three postgraduate researchers in human geography based at an Australian university—offer a discussion of our recent experiences doing fieldwork in post-Covid China. Scholars have written about methodological constraints and coping strategies amid the pandemic (Woodworth et al. 2022; Tan et al. 2023), but, to our knowledge, little has been said thus far about the evolving challenges of conducting fieldwork in Mainland China, particularly outside the main cities.
In drafting this forum contribution, we acknowledge our diverse backgrounds and research interests, as well as the points of commonality that unite us as colleagues and friends. We identify as a middle-aged white researcher and long-term foreign resident of Shanghai, a Chinese female scholar and environmental activist pursuing a doctoral degree at an overseas university, and a Chinese researcher with eight years’ overseas education experience in both science and the arts. We also have diverse academic interests—water governance, techno-politics, China–Africa relations—yet all our methodologies involve qualitative, embedded research strategies in locations where we are simultaneously insiders and outsiders. Our stories from the field therefore demonstrate how personal, cultural, and political dimensions can intersect in unexpected ways during the research process—for instance, when researching ‘peers’ who resist identification, when confronting the gaze of male participants, and when family relationships open the door to official sources. In these experiences, our stories unite around a shared theme of discomfort with how we are identified and how we are forced to comply with the expectations of others.
We hope that by sharing our recent experiences we can, first, provide some firsthand information about China’s post-Covid research environment and the implications for scholars who are or will be conducting fieldwork in the country. We also hope that our stories can inspire others to consider unconventional research sites and approaches, and to think of obstacles in the field as prompts for reflection and, potentially, fresh insights. Additionally, in recent years, we have witnessed the opening of a frank and thought-provoking discussion about the unacknowledged challenges faced by those engaged in China-based fieldwork, both foreign researchers (Braun and Haugen 2021; Schneider et al. 2021; Alpermann 2022) and Chinese academics (Zhao 2017; Sin and Yang 2018; Xiang and Wu 2023). In our own modest way, we hope to continue this conversation by being honest about our identities, our emotions, our histories, and how these collide with conditions in the field. In the current climate, we believe that it is more valuable than ever to share experiences. Rather than thwarting research, the challenges we face can open new avenues for exploration.
I.
Neither Inside nor Out? Researching International Students in China
Zachary LOWELL
Allow me to start with a particularly uncomfortable fieldwork moment. I was seated awkwardly in the dorm room of ‘Remi’ (all names in this essay are pseudonyms), a PhD student from sub-Saharan Africa enrolled at a university in Nanjing. I had recently arrived as a visiting scholar at the same university, where I was to spend one semester researching China–Africa relations at the level of people-to-people engagement. I had met Remi several times in those early days and our relationship seemed cordial enough. He was also exactly the sort of international student I had hoped to interview for my project. When he agreed to participate in my research, it felt like a huge milestone had been reached. All the stress of preparing for fieldwork in China was finally paying off, I thought. As Remi sat and carefully read every word of my project description and informed consent documents, though, it was obvious that he was sceptical. When I reminded him that participation was entirely voluntary and he had the right to refuse, he said that he intended to oblige my request, albeit with conditions of his own: he did not want our conversation to be audio recorded, he did not want to disclose any information about his background or future plans, and he did not want his real name written on the consent form. ‘If they have my voice, and my name, then they have me,’ he said. In this case, I decided it was best not to ask who ‘they’ might be.
I do not begrudge Remi for participating in my project on his own terms. Unsurprisingly, our conversation yielded little in the way of usable ‘data’. Nevertheless, it did provide an important methodological lesson: doing research with other international students was going to be more challenging than I expected. Before beginning my PhD studies, I lived in China for 10 years—first, as a Chinese-language student and then as a ‘foreign expert’ at a media company in Shanghai—and I knew how fast friendships can develop between foreigners who are far from home. Strictures of political correctness rarely exerted any noticeable weight within my circle of foreign friends; as ‘outsiders’ to mainstream Chinese society, what we thought and said among ourselves were not matters of concern. I therefore mistakenly believed that it would be easy to establish rapport with other international postgraduate students based on a shared ‘outsider’ identity. There is a sizeable methodological literature that covers the intersection of researcher positionality and access in China-based fieldwork (Scoggins 2014; Berlin 2019; Fuchs et al. 2019; Zuo 2023), yet, to date, there has been limited reflection on research dynamics that involve both foreign researchers and international students. With foreign students in China now the subject of considerable research interest, I offer my own experience as a lesson to others that the boundaries between insiders and outsiders are often opaque and unsettled, and to suggest that research interactions can be refracted through cultural and personal factors that complicate interpretations of student experiences.
Unexpected Questions
By embedding myself at a university in Nanjing, which offered a specialised course in public administration, one of my goals was to provide a granular view of specific knowledge, networks, and institutions that link China and Africa in areas of human capacity development. With notable exceptions (see, for instance, Sin and Yang 2018; Wu and Song 2023), many studies of foreign students in China, particularly those from Africa, are based on surveys and questionnaire data, rather than ethnographic methods. Throughout the semester, I attended lectures with the students I was researching; we rode the bus together, went on outings together, played board games together, and cooked dinner together. I became good friends with certain classmates and even visited a few of them in their home countries. Experiences like my strained interview with Remi proved to be exceptional, but this did not mean that the research process was free of complication or ambiguity.
As a researcher who draws on ethnographic techniques, one of my major concerns is whether participants are being honest and sharing their genuine beliefs. This is an issue all social scientists will likely face, yet, in China, concerns about surveillance add an additional complication to rapport-building (Ryan and Tynen 2020). Given my background, it was often obvious when Chinese informants did not want to pursue certain lines of inquiry. My research is not particularly controversial, so instances of reluctance were rare, but knowing how to respond appropriately to subtle cues and comments helped to quickly build trust. Speaking Chinese (however imperfectly) and taking part in social rituals such as group dinners also helped to open many doors. Chinese interlocutors working in academia were also familiar with the data-collection process and broadly supportive of my research efforts, to which they could relate themselves.
Among fellow international students, however, gauging true opinions proved rather more perplexing. Differences in culture, class, race, age, gender, personal/academic interests, and national origins raised a variety of complicating factors when it came to understanding their experiences in China. At the master’s level, many of the international students I met were young and not particularly engaged with Chinese society outside campus, which meant that asking about their perceptions and attitudes often elicited inconclusive answers. Even more perplexing, ‘younger’ students (those in their mid to late twenties) would regularly contradict their own previous statements. Were they afraid to tell me their real feelings? Were they just telling me what they thought I wanted to hear, or what they thought they should say? Did such inconsistencies indicate a lack of trust? In studies based on survey data, everything seemed so simple.
For They Know Not?
Two MA students whom I will call ‘Samir’ and ‘Alma’ provide examples of these dynamics. When I first met Samir, he was upbeat about studying in China, but he did not speak Chinese and had difficulties with basic tasks such as finding culturally appropriate (that is, Halal) food on the remote satellite campus where he was living. In further discussions, he revealed that he struggled to understand course materials written in English and frequently did not understand his Chinese lecturers either. Alma noted similar challenges with comprehension: she had previously failed at least one subject and often seemed confused about the academic and administrative requirements of our host university. Given they faced such obstacles, I wanted to know more about their motivations to study in China and what they hoped to achieve in the future.
Once we sat down to an interview, however, both students were keen to downplay the difficulties they had previously mentioned. Everything was fine in China and at our host university, they assured me. After a few perfunctory exchanges, I switched off my recorder and Alma quickly returned to sharing her frustrations with university life. When I remarked on this to her, she laughed sheepishly and put her head on the table in mock apology, which suggested that she also recognised the contradiction. As much as I was concerned with getting at the ‘truth’ of these students’ stories, I found it much more interesting to consider why I was being presented with such discrepant accounts.
At my host university, there were several unofficial ‘representatives’ for the various foreign student communities. These representatives were students themselves who were distinguished by their charismatic personalities, as well as by the support they could organise for peers when other forms of assistance were difficult to access. Such ‘gatekeepers’ are rarely mentioned in the literature on foreign students in China, yet they can be a vital source of ‘insider’ community knowledge. While maintaining the anonymity of participants, I mentioned to a few de facto student leaders the difficulties I was having with collecting and interpreting interview data. Such consultations, combined with follow-up discussions with participants themselves, revealed several possible explanations for the shifting attitudes I encountered.
On reflection, I suspect that a certain amount of male ego could explain Samir’s sudden show of resilience. I was told that command of English is a marker of status and prestige in Samir’s social milieu, as well as a potential source of insecurity for those who fall short of perfect fluency. Further, as a newcomer to China, he needed time to adjust to an unfamiliar environment (figuring out how to order groceries online, for instance, solved many of his food-related woes). As a young man cut off from family support structures, taking care of his own ‘domestic’ needs was also a novel experience that took some getting used to. For Alma, gendered cultural expectations about being agreeable and gracious likely played a factor in shaping our discussions. I later learned that Alma had serious issues with a roommate, which surely affected her academic performance and opinions of student life in China.
Being relatively disconnected from mainstream Chinese society, many younger international students may be dubious about what they are ‘allowed’ to say and to whom. Pursuing a degree in a foreign country is a challenging experience; the students I met were generally content to study in China, but a general unease about being perceived as ‘ungrateful’ means that students may also be reticent to discuss the challenges they face. I believe this was the case with Alma and Samir. Despite our shared status as foreign students at the same Chinese university, this was not sufficient to establish feelings of mutual identity. Even in our momentary occupation of a shared institutional space, our trajectories diverged in many significant respects.
As someone with a white-collar, middle-class background and a US passport, I have the privilege of knowing that other opportunities will almost certainly be available to me outside China; for a young person from the Global South who is still finding their way in the world, lost opportunities in China may be much harder to replace, especially in the context of the post-Covid economic malaise. The inconsistent responses of participants also led me to reflect on the mutability of my own opinions and ideas, which are certainly subject to change based on mood and circumstance. On this general state of ambivalence, I quote one student leader: ‘Don’t worry; they [the participants] don’t know themselves. They have two minds about everything!’ Such statements could just as easily be levelled against me.
This brief intervention suggests two points: first, that care should be taken to appreciate the specific social, cultural, and personal backgrounds of international students to contextualise their experiences in China; and second, that shared ‘outsider’ status will not necessarily lead to shared feelings of ‘insiderness’. My privileged positionality as a white male from a developed country may help explain my naivety, but, given that experiences such as mine rarely appear in the methodological literature, I can only conclude that my assumptions are shared by others. The views and opinions of students can frequently change, but contradictions are not ‘errors’ per se, and are not reducible to fears about censure as one finds in the Chinese Studies community. Studying abroad can be a fraught experience in any context and such experiences should be considered in relationship to the realities of contemporary China.
II
Under the Gaze: Reflections on Conducting Fieldwork as a Female Researcher in China
Mengyao LI
For researchers engaged in qualitative studies across disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, human geography, and other social sciences, fieldwork is a seemingly compulsory part of the research journey. It not only facilitates a nuanced understanding of the world through immersive communication but can also help to cultivate a spirit of reflection and critique. My reflections on the emotions and struggles generated by my fieldwork experiences resonate with more general perplexities about being a female working on China’s environmental issues. As a female researcher pursuing a PhD in human geography and someone long committed to promoting inclusive and sustainable development, I staunchly oppose any form of gendered discipline placed on researchers and research participants. As a young woman from China’s one-child generation, my education and individualistic values emphasise my own will and initiative. In my role as a practitioner working on environmental protection in China, I face both advantages and challenges, as well as tensions and discomforts, stemming from my identity as a professional and a woman.
By discussing the different gazes I encountered during my fieldwork in post-Covid China, my essay endeavours to unpack the emotional challenges I experienced while conducting fieldwork as a female researcher in remote rural areas. Ultimately, this article seeks to draw the attention of the Chinese Studies community to the discomfort and obstacles faced by early career female scholars conducting research in China, fostering dialogue and introspection under a pervasive male gaze and societal expectations rooted in traditional gender norms. The emotional challenges I experienced during my fieldwork spurred me to reflect on my identity as a professional researcher and feminist, and to rethink the role of female researchers in speaking out for other, more marginalised women.
Access to the Field under a Suspicious Gaze
As I stood in the suffocating air, my thoughts drifted back to a year earlier. In my first-year PhD methodology course, I learned that, for qualitative researchers, fieldwork can help us understand the world through constructive dialogue and cultivate a spirit of reflection and criticism. However, as far as I could recall, none of the training I received taught me how to deal with the suspicious gaze of my participants.
‘Reality is a lot more complicated than books,’ the village head said to me, as he stood in front of a red propaganda banner in his office. His impatient voice broke the silence. Even though I had tried to appear more serious by swapping my feminine dress for a plain suit, not wearing makeup, and putting on glasses, this middle-aged man with the power to refuse my fieldwork request made me feel shaky and sweaty, my heart beating fast. ‘I have hosted a lot of experts and researchers, but they just stay for one or two days,’ he continued, ‘so what you said about staying here for two months is impossible, especially since you are a young woman alone.’ Unexpectedly, the referral call I had worked hard to get from his acquaintance did not make it easier to build trust with him in this remote community in rural China.
To some extent, I understood his scepticism, especially in early 2023, when Covid-19 restrictions had just been lifted after three years of stringent controls. As both gatekeeper and village head, he was wedged between administrative duties focused on ‘stability maintenance’ and his role in promoting the local community’s post-epidemic recovery. To him, I was merely an outsider, unfamiliar with local culture, traditions, and beliefs, and someone who potentially could even get him into trouble. This decline in trust was also evidenced by Aassve et al. (2021), who stated that the pandemic disrupted social exchanges and widened the distance between people. The suspicious gaze I encountered mirrors the experience of my friends and colleagues who have been conducting research in post-Covid China: regardless of how strictly we adhere to research ethics protocols and avoid questions that could be construed as sensitive, our in-depth interviews with rural villagers are now routinely accompanied by circumspect questioning and sometimes deep suspicion.
The village head said he would discuss my request with his superiors and asked me to return to the field site the next day. I had never been more depressed since I started my fieldwork. When I returned to my accommodation that day, I decided to clarify anything that could be considered sensitive by this village head. I prepared a supplementary letter explaining the purpose of my fieldwork and clarifying its relevance to local communities. My intention was to convince the village head by showing respect for the community and an understanding of local knowledge and culture. In this letter, I also tried to consciously present the objectives of my activities and find connections with the Chinese Government’s rhetoric, such as that about an Ecological Civilisation (生态文明) and Rural Revitalisation (乡村振兴), to show my conformity with China’s development policies and demonstrate that I was not an outsider in the nation. I also tried to allay his concerns about my female identity by mentioning that a family member would accompany me during my stay, and by listing the many field research activities I had carried out in rural China. I did not reveal my feminist identity or challenge his patriarchal judgement of me. In the end, it worked. Early the next day, I received a call from him saying he welcomed me to conduct fieldwork in the village and would like to assist. This challenging experience illustrates that a crucial step for successful entry into the field is establishing rapport and building trust with the gatekeepers, especially those in positions of power.
When I later reviewed this letter and my subsequent research activities, I realised that to ‘fit in’ and build rapport with the local community, I had disguised myself to make others feel comfortable with my presence. The gaze to which I was subject prompted me to ask myself why I was drawn to certain questions and why I emotionally connected with certain participants and responses. We know that, during fieldwork, relationships between researchers and participants are dynamic, evolving, and negotiated; managing the distance between the researcher and the participant is a continuous process. Although feminist researchers emphasise reciprocity, empathy, equality, and rapport in the field of research (Wolf 2018), I do not think this means we must hide our feelings and always conform. As time went on, I actively communicated with local people, learned about their culture and history, shared my own experiences and feelings, and recorded my opinions and emotions in my field journal. These reflections helped to make me more aware of my own values, attitudes, interests, and demands, shaped my identity as a researcher, and served as the basis for my storytelling and analysis. My very descriptive and graffiti-filled field notes allowed me to ‘step back’ from the situation and generate new insights based on the different emotions I was feeling at that time.
Interviews under the Male Gaze
In the past few years there has been an increased awareness of the challenges that women encounter in the field that are unique to their gender (Johnson 2018). During my first round of fieldwork exploring multi-stakeholder participation in water governance, I conducted several interviews with grassroots participants, not initially targeting specific genders. However, I soon observed clear gender disparities in interviewees’ awareness about and efforts to protect water, alongside an ignorance of the role of gender in the political and social settings of water governance. To better understand the mechanisms of participation, I decided to conduct a second round of fieldwork focusing on female participants. As a female researcher, I had relatively easy access to these subjects. In addition to in-depth interviews with women, including environmental activists, scholars, local villagers, and LGBTQI people, I actively participated in several events and activities organised by some of these women to observe and maintain relations with them. The differences between my first and second rounds of fieldwork were stark.
During my first round of fieldwork, the majority of participants were male and in leadership positions in government and local committees. I encountered frequent questions about why I was doing a PhD instead of getting married. While I was not unprepared for gendered threats and risks, deliberately being less feminine in appearance did not spare me from implicit sexism. The intense focus on my marital status, age, and family, rather than my professionalism and academic achievements, made me very uncomfortable. Nevertheless, I forced myself to keep smiling during interviews, deliberately ignoring the disrespect and discrimination. As a feminist researcher, I was ashamed of these self-protection strategies and my deliberate avoidance of conflict and scolded myself for internalising the male gaze and traditional patriarchal norms (Cai 2019).
In China, women who remain single beyond a certain age are stigmatised as ‘leftover women’ and those with a doctorate may be labelled as ‘the third gender’. Well-educated women are stereotyped as aloof, unattractive, and a threat to men (Li 2023). The place where I conducted my fieldwork was also deeply influenced by Confucianism, the core values of which include filial piety, ancestor worship, the benevolent authority of parents, and a hierarchical order based on gender and age. Even public discourses in mainstream media emphasise the fact that, by embodying these virtues, individuals can cultivate their loyalty to the state (Huang 2023). This partly explains the expectations imposed on me during my fieldwork, such as ‘family first, career second’ and ‘return to your home country to fulfil filial piety and serve the motherland’. As someone who emphasises my own will and agency, I am disgusted by discourses that only prioritise women’s familial obligations and try to discipline women through constructing an ‘ideal femininity’.
The gazes I encountered during my fieldwork reflect a society that expects women to act and behave in certain ways according to stereotypes, including in academic research. Growing attention and scholarship are needed to understand the role of emotions during fieldwork, and to identify the structural impediments of the damaging gender stereotyping of female researchers. I hope my reflections convey a message to all female scholars researching environmental issues in China to embrace our genuine emotions and take every obstacle as a learning moment and a step towards a more equal and inclusive society.
III
An ‘Outsider’ Local Resident: Doing Fieldwork in the Hometown
Yuzong CHEN
My PhD research focuses on how China’s river chief system is impacting water governance. My fieldwork involves interviews in my hometown with officials from various departments related to this system. Many scholars have noted that interviewing officials in China can be challenging, particularly for foreign scholars (Berlin 2019; Harlan 2019). Difficulties arise from distinct interviewing styles (Scoggins 2014; Solinger 2006; Wei 2023), as well as the availability of guanxi (关系) to facilitate interviews (Liang and Lu 2006; Tan et al. 2023). Guanxi refers to the ‘informal and particularistic’ interpersonal connections in China (Chen and Chen 2004: 306). It is well understood that good guanxi is a critical factor for building trust and support to do business or conduct fieldwork (Chen and Chen 2004; Li et al. 2023).
It is typical for scholars to explain such challenges with an insider–outsider binary. As noted by Katyal and King (2011) and Gao (1996), people are less likely to share with strangers accounts of misbehaviour and wrongdoing. Barriers between outsiders and insiders are said to be removed with the help of intermediaries, such as friends of the insiders (Cui 2015). The key message from the literature is that an ‘insider’ identity with guanxi is important to access informants and conduct fruitful interviews. However, what I wish to emphasise is that the insider–outsider binary is never absolute. An outsider can become an insider and an insider can become an outsider, with one’s identity changing in different spaces and times as well as depending on the views of the spectators (Ergun and Erdemir 2010; Paechter 2013; Wilkinson and Kitzinger 2013).
This essay discusses the challenges I faced when interviewing officials in post-Covid China, even though I was doing fieldwork in my own hometown. I want to use my experience to show how doing fieldwork in post-pandemic China is, as Harlan (2019: 117) notes, ‘sensitive but possible and important’.
Entering the Field with Guanxi after the Pandemic
Guanxi remains an important way of facilitating fieldwork in China and is critical to gaining access to government officials (Li et al. 2023; Tan et al. 2023; Tu 2014). As a local resident, I used the guanxi of one of my relatives to gain access to my initial target interviewees. This relative works inside the government and has friends in the department in which I wanted to conduct interviews, so he effectively became the gatekeeper for my research. All my interviewees knew me as his relative who was doing a PhD. However, post pandemic, rising geopolitical tensions have escalated existing suspicions about potentially hostile overseas institutions (Rizvi 2023). This can be a source of distrust even for people with insider connections such as myself, as I discuss below.
My first interview was not very successful. With the help of my gatekeeper, I made an appointment with my interviewee, a river chief (that is, a secretary of the subdistrict government), explaining to him on the phone that my research was related to the implementation of the river chief system at the local level and asking for his consent to be interviewed. I later met him and another official in a meeting room. The first question they asked me was: ‘Which danwei [work unit] are you from?’ After learning that I was from an overseas university, they showed caution and confusion, asking me why I was researching China if I worked for a foreign academic institution. The second official even asked why I had chosen a foreign university.
After I presented them with my questions, the river chief said to me: ‘It is good to meet you and the questions are interesting. I would invite my colleague here to answer them because I don’t want any misunderstanding. My son also studied abroad: how’s your experience there?’ My interview then became a casual chat and I failed to return to my questions about local policy implementation. During this chat, on one hand, I was trying to take advantage of my local identity to ‘break the ice’ and build trust by sharing common local stories; on the other, the officials were emphasising my identity as an overseas student by constantly reminding me to ‘be careful about the information you collect from us’, while shirking all my questions. I felt uncomfortable as I did not understand how my learning experience overseas could have become a reason for distrust.
I eventually started my ‘interview’ with the official, who discussed the river chief implementation process but did not directly answer any of my questions. When I mentioned some studies on various implementation challenges done by a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of Water Resources, he told me: ‘You’re just a student, so you don’t know; some of the experts and researchers are the “Stinking Old Ninth” [臭老九], they only know one aspect of the issue but don’t know the general picture.’ The ‘Stinking Old Ninth’ is a euphemism used during the Cultural Revolution to describe intellectuals (Howard and Smith 2020). When I asked the official whether he could explain the role of each department within the river chief system (RCS), his response was: ‘I can send a document which contains the responsibility of each department in the RCS, but I can only send it to his [my relative’s] phone on the government communication system.’ This was an ‘easier’ way than showing me internal documents directly as there would be a username as a watermark on the system and they did not want their names on the system. Here was a clear boundary between insider and outsider, as insiders understood the consequences of sharing information with unauthorised outsiders. Giving me the information on my relative’s phone (with his name on the watermark) could minimise these risks.
The other interview that was telling was one to which my gatekeeper accompanied me. The interviewee was a senior official from the county-level Water Resources Bureau, and he was accompanied by two officials from the local river chief office. During the interview, my gatekeeper introduced me as a PhD student from a domestic university (where I was part of a visiting program) and no further questions about my background were asked. Unlike the previous interview, I was able to ask what I wanted and at the end the official even gave me his WeChat ID and said that I should not hesitate to contact him if I had any further questions. The two other officials present gave me some supplementary information and shared non-sensitive materials.
Power and Trust in Data Collection
Interviewing officials in China at their workplace presents a challenging power dynamic between the researcher and interviewees. For one, the workplace can provide interviewees with a dominant position in the interview. In my first interview experience, the encounter was dominated by the interviewees, with multiple barriers to information-sharing. The researcher’s identity is both ‘given’ and ‘formed’ by the interviewees—a dynamic that can affect trust-building. Even though I stated that I was not only a researcher from an overseas university but also a local resident born in the area, they regarded me primarily as a student, looking down at me as junior to them and poorly informed. Paradoxically, by conforming to this identity they created for me, I was able to collect data. Rather than being seen as part of the ‘Stinking Old Ninth’, as a student, I was allowed to remain and keep the communication going. Even when I made mistakes—for instance, asking questions that they saw as stupid—this did not impair the data-collection process. However, this identity remained complicated by my overseas connection (which at times exceeded my capital as a local with good guanxi) and by the physical and digital barriers between insiders and outsiders. In instances where interviewees did not dominate, I occupied a complex position as part-insider. For instance, in my second interview, the staff in the office considered me an insider who ‘worked’ for my gatekeeper. Through this process of ‘subjectivation’ (Wang 2024), I had to conform to, or be coopted into, the norms of government.
Conformity plays a key role in moving from outsider to insider status when interviewing officials. My first interview challenged my previously optimistic views of guanxi and revealed how complex interviewing officials in China can be. Guanxi does, to some extent, facilitate the research in terms of finding participants but may not be the ‘panacea’ that ultimately shapes trust and power dynamics in interviews. As noted by Slater (2022), uncomfortable experiences can generate new connections, which in my case meant that conforming to power relations and accepting the identities given to me by my interviewees allowed me to form a relationship with my informants.
To conclude, doing fieldwork in China and interviewing officials are deeply challenging in the post-pandemic context, but feasible if you have the right guanxi; however, trust-building with officials in the field cannot depend on guanxi alone. The officials in the middle rank of the government structure—that is, at the township and county levels—are important sources of information as they are the key actors in local policy implementation. They are also hard to access most of the time. Guanxi might not always support access, and one’s insider–outsider status must be constantly negotiated. Conformity becomes an important and alternative way to effectively communicate with these key informants and continue to gain insights into the nature of local governance and politics in China.
Conclusion
Through these three short reflective accounts of our fieldwork journeys in post-Covid China, we present three different experiences that offer new insights into how to reboot qualitative fieldwork in China after the pandemic. Zac’s experience shows the complex dynamics at play between insider and outsider within a Chinese university, and how understanding of ‘insiderness’ varies between different outsiders. Mengyao’s case reveals how gender becomes an unexpected challenge during fieldwork in rural China under the masculine gaze and how conformity could be an effective strategy to navigate the situation. Yuzong’s experience indicates that being local and having guanxi—two conditions that are known to facilitate fieldwork in China—may not always work well when it comes to interviewing government officials and emphasises the importance of conforming to interviewees’ expectations in terms of identity. All the discomforts and challenges we discussed aim to highlight the fact that China-based fieldwork is challenging not only for foreign researchers but also for domestic scholars. Ultimately, as noted by Pillow (2003), there is no transcendent and cosy endpoint for qualitative research, just the ‘uncomfortable realities of doing engaged qualitative research’. The ‘messy’ examples we provide bear this out.
Featured Image: Switches, @designwallah (CC), Flickr.com
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