Dan Wang: belief

Transcript context

…We agree on this too. Okay, very good. It is an extensively centralized view that he likes to criticize. It’s a systematic view of human society. I think that, by far, James C. Scott’s very best work is The Art of Not Being Governed, in which he did extensive fieldwork in Yunnan, as well as the broader zone of southwest China and southeast Asia, which is heavily mountainous, an area that is larger than Western Europe. Zomia is an academic term he borrowed from French academic Pierre Clastres. It is this major zone where people decided to hide out from the state, whether this was the Burmese state, the Tibetan state, and overwhelmingly, the Han Chinese state. These people practiced escape agriculture, planting cassava, which is underground, or potatoes, as well as maize, which can grow in higher elevation. Rather than planting grains like rice, or wheat, they have stronger oral cultures, so that they have greater ethnic malleability. I think reading through all of that made me appreciate my status as twice an outsider. First, as someone from southwest China, which is an economic backwater even today, hiding out from the state, hiding away from the imperial gaze, from Beijing, as well as the excessive commercialism of Shanghai, I am much more skeptical of Beijing’s power than I think someone who would just celebrate the grandeur. You’re a regional thinker, as I am.…

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