This isn’t to say relationships and introductions aren’t important, but rather that we (as foreigners interested in China) place far too much emphasis on the exoticism of guanxi, a concept that would otherwise simply be called social capital. Within the China context sociologists seem to have caught on – but in the business community this type of exoticism is used as a shield – why bother learning the language and cultural norms when you’ve convinced yourself it’s necessary that you need an “in” to accomplish anything?

* Disclaimer: if I was doing anything more serious than random recorded interviews with low level officials, migrants, and business people, I might not be rely primarily on self-introductions. Social connections are obviously more important when institutional connections are not as strong – though in a way though this gives you more leeway to navigate on purely a social level without involving legal or authoritative channels. For example, it’s possible to wander into a construction site here and talk to people; in the U.S. one would need all sorts of liability releases to even set foot on the premises.  This isn’t to say that one system is necessarily better, but rather to point out that by making homogenous assumptions about things that seem to be different it’s possible to easily ignore the myriad aspects in which they are similar.

Well, turns out it doesn’t really work, and that rule of law is still developing. This may seem obvious; let’s remember that I’m both young and naive. The past month has been spent establishing contacts, finding spots to return to (for verbal interviews), and trying to assess the feasibility of gathering information about different aspects of migration and growth, broadly between: 1) development of institutions (labor disputes, primarily over garnished wages or industrial accidents); 2) rural land reform (as it encourages even more urbanization); and 3) impacts of population movements on ’soft’ infrastructure in cities (schools, hospitals, legal system). 

I’ll probably focus on the third for the time – it will afford a strong reason to volunteer at a migrant school. This has myriad benefits: not only can I fulfill my dream of being like Edward James Olmos*; I need to strengthen the warm and fuzzy portion of the resume now that they’re in charge. Furthermore, English is my only real skill, and I’ve heard it could make the difference for some migrants between a job as a laborer and a service person; so there’s a definite chance of some realized benefit.

Actually it’s just that it seems the most feasible. Legal issues are tricky; and it would be exhausting to get a large interview sample. The interviews I’ve been conducting thus far often touch on legal disputes; and the story is usually the same. The other thing I’ve been noticing is that it’s fairly easy to get descriptions about rural reforms from people already here. You hear something like this quite often:

Well, I’m renting my land illegally right now. I’m not quite sure what the reforms mean. You know people have been doing this for years, I don’t know what’s different. It doesn’t provide that much money – if it did, do you think I’d be be <insert awful sounding menial task> here?

It also happens that there’s dozens of other (much more qualified / intelligent) white people researching land reform in China. It’s a very crunchy topic. Number of westerners researching or advocating solutions to primary education policy in China? Zero, as far as I know.

So, land reform going to be ancillary insofar as it is intimately linked with urbanization. Instead I’m going to focus on reforms that might allow cities to deal with the increases in population resulting from urbanization. I don’t expect to find anything substantial (“do this, and it will solve all your problems”) but rather hope to learn something new and interesting about how these changes might impact the future. 

Anything else I should consider? Also; anyone know where to find English teaching material… Like vocab words and lessons? I’ll be needing those soon. Also suggestions for names of students – like Megatron and Led Zeppelin. Quality names.