Society, et al

I’m working on my Master’s dissertation with my academic advisor to get it published (hopefully) soon. Don’t want to jinx myself like I have with everything involving post-M.Ed academics, but it’s good and it’s already getting bites from a respected journal. In our lit review we’ve been going over the origins of civil society and the West and in China. The academic world is one of nuance, but a blog is a world of bombast. I want to say here what I can’t say there. In fact, I’ll just quote Peter Hessler.

Well I can’t do that because I don’t have the transcript, but I’ll just tell you what he said during an NPR interview about his new book “China Road.” A listener called and asked what the social life was like for the millions of young migrants pouring into the new boomtowns of China. Hessler responded that the first thing you notice in these cities is the lack of institutions. There is no church, no volunteer groups, no libraries with reading groups, no coffee shops with a subculture hanging around them. It’s really just the Party and the businesses and millions of individual people and (sometimes) their families. Strong social groups would form at workplaces and would outlast that particular job, but there weren’t many friendships being formed outside that because of the aforementioned lack of institutions.