Yan Yunxiang


Yunxiang Yan is a Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He is known for his field work studies in Xiajia Village, Heilongjiang Province, which locates in the northeastern part of China.

Significant views

Yan's 2003 Private Life Under Socialism is an influential anthropology text which addresses the development of the individual as a central social category in rural and community life in China, tying these changes to broader structural forces of individualization during the country's rapid modernization process. Private Life Under Socialism traces China's macro-structural forces of individualization to the May Fourth Movement. The text focuses on changes occurring after the establishment of the People's Republic of China, particularly during the first two decades of Reform and Opening Up. The text addresses decline of family hierarchies and extended family ties, decline in collectivist ideologies, and the development of smaller, child-centered families and new forms of intergenerational solidarity.
Yan noticed fewer violations of China's One-Child policy among rural populations in the 1990s who were historically resistant. He believes this change is because these rural parents, having grown up with birth planning, placed a higher value on material comforts and individual happiness compared to earlier generations.

In media

Yunxiang Yan is also a featured subject, together with Tianjian Shi and Emily Wu, in Chris Billing's 2005 documentary . From 1968 onwards more than 17 million high school students and young adults were sent "up to the mountain, down to the village" to "learn from the peasants." In the documentary three of those youngsters revisit the remote villages to which they were sent thirty years ago.

Career landmarks

Publications

The Flow of Gifts. Stanford: University Press, 1996Private Life under Socialism. Stanford University Press, 2003The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford & NY: Berg, 2009

Awards