Looking for gaps in sociology in the midst of upheaval

Around the Shenzhen Longhuasan and human resources market, there are more than a dozen large and small human resources companies, and a group of "three and big gods" wander in this area. Photo/Courtesy of respondents

Looking for gaps in sociology in the midst of upheaval

Reporter/Li Jing

Published in China News Weekly on December 20, 2021

Spread the folded blanket and shake it, and the dust immediately flew in the oblique sunlight, and an indescribable smell was enough to make people think: I don't know how many people have covered and not washed... Moldy black bed frames, slimy mats, whining fans, wet sweat on everyone and noisy video sounds in mobile phones create a contradictory picture mixed with uneasiness, hopelessness, but inexplicable self-consistency.

In the alleys of urban villages around the Sanhe Human Labor Market in Shenzhen, in order to use the fully participatory observation method to conduct fieldwork on the "Sanhe youth", Lin Kaixuan, a 2019 master's student of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, under the guidance of Tian Feng, a researcher at the Institute of Social Development Strategy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, lived in the "hanging force" bed in the mouth of the "Sanhe youth". Such a bed costs 15 yuan a night, and the room of less than 30 square meters has 4 bunk beds and a simple bed made of several large stools.

Previously, due to the rumors on the Internet, the media and the public often looked for the extremes of this group with a curious eye. After half a year of investigation, Tian Feng and his student Lin Kaixuan tried to break free from the theoretical shackles as much as possible, without presuppositions, and to restore the real living situation of the "Sanhe Youth" in a white painting technique. Take a peek at the urbanization problem under the drastic changes in Chinese society.

In July 2020, "Don't You Have a Return: Sanhe Youth Survey" was published, this research does not have any scientific research funds, the publication process has also been tried, this is the first research report on "Sanhe Youth", and perhaps it will be the only one. With many rectifications, the signboard of the human market such as "Sanhe" has been removed, and the "Three Harmony Gods" have disappeared. In the process of fieldwork and writing books, the younger generation of sociologists began to show a more relevant sense of concern, but also faced their own choices and confusion.

From the "Three Great Gods" to the Three Harmonies Youth

I don't know when it began, a group of young people known as "Three And Big Gods" appeared in The Shenzhen Longhua Sanhe Human Resources Market. They look for a day-end job here, play for three days a day, and wander around the three and the surrounding areas to "eat and wait for death". The "big gods" are a joke about them challenging the "limits of human existence" and living at a very low income.

Tian Feng first heard about "Sanwa Daijin" in the winter of 2016 at a dinner party with friends. When he got home, he immediately turned on the computer to search the Internet, and the living conditions of this group of people made him feel unacceptable, "as if they lived in a different world from us." But as a sociological researcher, he could not accept this subjective assumption, so he began to search for news about the "Three Great Gods" from time to time, and consciously preserved it, often thinking that one day he could do research on the Three Harmonies and youth groups. Tian Feng, who was born in 1979, always thought that if he was a teenager younger, he might be able to go deep into these three young people and see what was going on with them. It wasn't until the arrival of student Lin Kaixuan in 2017 that he began to find a way to penetrate deep into the group of young people.

At the end of 2017, the teachers and students came to Sanhe together, and they found that the situation of Sanhe youth was not as exaggerated as written in the "Three And Great God" Tieba, but the overall state was similar to the description of Tieba. After discussion, they decided that Lin Kaixuan would go deep into the bureau and integrate and experience from the perspective of insiders, while Tian Feng stood on the outside, observing, studying and grasping the direction.

Before Lin Kaixuan left for Sanhe for the second time, Tian Feng first found some sociological classics, the most helpful of which was "Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong: The Fringe of the Center of the World" by the American anthropologist McGallden. Following the model of this book, Tian Feng formulated a framework for observation and research. These include the function of Sanhe as an urban village in Shenzhen, the specific ecological environment including production, consumption, entertainment, and maintenance of life, as well as the roles played by representative figures and various groups of people. This is basically a picture frame, Lin Kaixuan "lurks" into the sanhe, and then fills in the frame according to his own observations.

Tian Feng could only "tear down the east wall to make up for the west wall" from other projects to provide Lin Kaixuan with sufficient living expenses. However, on the first day of really settling in Sanhe, Lin Kaixuan found that in order to truly understand, integrate and study Sanhe youth, he must become one of them. After that, Lin Kaixuan ate and lived with the "Three and Youth" every day, lived in a bed of 15 yuan, a "coffin room" of 20 yuan a night, a single room of 30 yuan a night, and slept on the street with cardboard. Lin Kaixuan recalled to China News Weekly that the difficulty lies in the self-transformation at the beginning, not only to psychologically accept everything that is faced, but also to accept Sanhe youth, which is not only not exclusive, but a behavioral identity and psychological identity.

At the beginning, chatting with some young people, they were always perfunctory in the giggle chat content, they thought that Lin Kaixuan did not "hang up". "Hanging force" in Sanhe is a complex, most frequently used but the most frequent word, rich in meaning, usually describing a state of bad luck, the highest can be death, after the gradual reduction can be described as because of the crime by the police to take away or no money to eat, accommodation. Cheap things can also be preceded by this adjective, such as hanging forced water (2 yuan a large bottle), hanging forced noodles (the simplest noodles, there are a few pieces of green vegetables, 5 yuan a bowl), hanging forced bed.

Until one time, Lin Kaixuan deliberately did not take a bath and wash his hair for a long time like Sanhe Youth, and was ridiculed by Sanhe Youth: "How many days have you not changed your clothes, and your body has a smell, are you hanging up?" Only then did he feel, "It is not that I have accepted Sanhe Youth, but that Sanhe Youth has accepted me." Lin Kaixuan said. After that, Lin Kaixuan established a friendship with some Sanhe youths, sitting with them everywhere, leaning against the wall to chat, listening to them talk about their past, and he found that these Sanhe youths were also willing to find someone who listened to their life stories attentively. At night, Lin Kaixuan restored the identity of a young scholar, recorded and sorted out the information collected during the day, communicated with Tian Feng on WeChat, and adjusted the work plan at any time according to the actual situation.

At the beginning, Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan divided several areas into three areas according to function, and after a period of field observation, Lin Kaixuan found that this functional area division was useless, in addition to the relative independence of the human resources market, sanhe's other functional areas were all mixed together, for example, the second floor is a hotel, and the first floor is an Internet café.

The biggest adjustment they made was their understanding of the object of their research. In the early days, it was rumored on the Internet that Sanhe had a group of "big gods" that challenged the bottom line of human survival, and Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan wanted to find such "big gods" and dig them up as typical objects. After a long period of fully participatory observation, they found that the so-called "big gods" were in some ways an exaggeration of internet rumors, or that this was just a phased way of life. The hanging state is short-lived and fluid, and once there is a little money, the hanging state will disappear, and most young people still remain relatively normal. Therefore, they adjusted the object of study from the "Three Harmonies Great Gods" to the Three Harmonies Youth.

Lie flat on the originator

Sanhe Youth can be said to be the originator of "lying flat learning". Their composition is complex, mainly relying on the three and human resources market. Most people also have some expectations for society, work and life, and in the three-party game with recruitment enterprises and market intermediaries, they have experienced large and small setbacks such as job failures, heavy labor, meager income, documents cheating, gambling failures, etc., and have fallen into a vicious circle of disappointment, laziness and sinking. At the same time, Sanwa's life seems particularly enjoyable.

Tian Feng, who has studied social stratification and migrant workers for many years, observed that many cities have urban villages, including Beijing, but urban villages in other cities are more like a place to sleep. Sanhe is different, the daily work is endless, the food and accommodation are incomparably cheap, and enough entertainment can be found to form a complete self-circulating ecosystem. More importantly, mental atrophy becomes an atmosphere here, without the pressure of peers, so that the lost youth can not find motivation. In the face of great loss and the strong temptation of Sanhe's life, Sanhe youth naturally chose the latter. And once they enter Sanhe, it is like falling into a huge quagmire, and the young people who have just entered Sanhe will be ashamed and resistant at first, and soon they will give up the struggle and let themselves sink. Tian Feng told China News Weekly.

In the era of economic take-off, urban villages in Chinese cities have always been the focus of sociologists' research. Tian Feng's mentor, Li Peilin, was one of the first scholars after the reconstruction of sociology, and in 2003, he wrote the book "The End of the Village: The Story of Yangcheng Village" based on a survey of urban villages in Guangzhou, analyzing the changes in the lives and careers of local farmers and migrant workers in the process of urbanization. More than a decade later, Sanhe is still similar to the urban villages that Li Peilin saw in Guangzhou, but the two generations of migrant workers who were the subjects of their research have already had obvious generational differences.

Even with fieldwork and framework analysis, Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan still said that it is impossible to count the exact size and source of Sanhe youth, but only to find out that Sanhe youth come from all over the country, and a considerable part of them are from first-generation migrant worker families. The "post-90s" and "post-00s" do not need to bear the pressure of family support, but also want to gain the respect of others, and advocate freedom, and cannot stand the assembly line. Therefore, in the face of the same problems of labor rights and interests being infringed upon, such as low wages, prolonged working hours, reduced labor security, and deteriorated labor environment, they no longer swallow their voices like their parents, but in the absence of skills and means, "post-90s" and "post-00s" migrant workers have chosen a new mode of resistance - "mixed eating and waiting for death" in the metropolis. In Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan's research, Sanhe youth often said that the reason for not wanting to work was that they did not want to be exploited, withheld, and discriminated against.

After half a year of participatory observation and research, Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan collected 300,000 to 400,000 words of information. Tian Feng had thought about converting the materials into pure academic papers, but if that were the case, he could only retain 10,000 or 20,000 words in the end, which was a pity. Eventually, they removed the repetitive redundancy and compiled all the first-hand field notes into a book.

At the beginning of 2019, Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan finished writing, and the manuscript was finally published in August 2020 after going to multiple publishing houses and deleting tens of thousands of words. In the month of the book's publication, Tian Feng and Lin Kaixuan went to Shenzhen again. After several rectifications, the Sanhe market has changed greatly. Internet cafes and small shops are gone, and the intermediaries of Zhao Rijie are distributed to the surrounding parks. According to Shenzhen media reports, Shenzhen carried out the last round of rectification and clearance of Sanhe in 2021, and the signboard of Sanhe human resources has been demolished, and the large and small intermediaries nearby have also been cleaned up, and no intermediaries are allowed to take the signboard to recruit workers. The young people who had gathered here had tried to find ways to shift their positions to the nearby job markets in Guangzhou, Huizhou and other surrounding areas.

White depicts social phenomena in a moment of fleeting light

Tian Feng admits that his and Lin Kaixuan's work may not be the best study, but he believes that it is the most lacking research in the process of drastic social change in China. In other words, the idea of this study comes largely from the existing sociology's neglect of social facts.

Sociology is a discipline imported from the West, so far, the research framework, theoretical framework and academic evaluation system of Chinese sociology are derived from the West, and this mature system has enabled sociology to be rapidly rebuilt and developed in China to a certain extent, but it is inevitable that there will be some disconnects with China's social reality.

In this context, some social phenomena in China are difficult to find an accurate reference system in classical sociological theory, and it is difficult to judge clearly and thoroughly in the short term. Tian Feng believes that if the research model of finding the ideal causal relationship on the crutch of theory is not very suitable, it is better to abandon all kinds of shackles and use the analysis method of white drawing research to open the situation.

Since the reform and opening up, the great changes in Chinese society that have lasted for more than 40 years are also incomparable to Western society. Lu Yuan, a teacher in the Department of Sociology at the School of Sociology of Nanjing University, said in an interview with China News Weekly that now, Japanese and Western sociological research has been subdivided into very small pieces, because they have basically completed the changes in urbanization and modernization, whether the system or social changes are relatively small; but China is still in the midst of great changes, China's strange social phenomena emerge in an endless stream, many scholars want to study, but may not study for a few months, the situation will change or there are new things. The rapid and complex changes in Chinese society are a great challenge and test for sociology.

In Tian Feng's view, today's Chinese society requires scholars to respond quickly to social problems like journalists. Otherwise, the gap between the development of the whole scholarship and the actual needs may become larger and larger, and Chinese society is under the fleeting changes, and many social phenomena have disappeared before they can be studied in depth. At this time, the study of white drawing based on social facts helps researchers grasp the moment when social phenomena are fleeting, which is an exploration that young and middle-aged scholars should try to make.

However, the Western academic evaluation system currently used in China has not yet responded to whether scholars pay attention to current social issues, and the evaluation criteria refer more to how many papers scholars have published.

In 2012, Tian Feng was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in the United States and met the famous sociologist Zhou Xueguang, who had shifted from quantitative research to fieldwork at that time. Talking about the change in methodology and academic style, Zhou Xueguang told him that when he was young, he had the pressure of evaluating titles, doing quantitative research only needed to study data, no need to go out to run, the speed of publishing papers was very fast, and at this age, he had to do something that he felt more interesting and contributed to the whole society. These words had a great impact on Tian Feng, and in 2017, after all the job titles were evaluated, Tian Feng launched a study of Sanhe youth.

During a visit to the United States, Tian Feng found that Western papers often began in the 19th century, and almost every topic had a rich historical investigation record, which was generally lacking in domestic sociological research. He is in favor of those pure academic macroscopic constructions, but he feels that the current issues and small groups should also be paid attention to, which shoot is only recorded first, as a data left for future generations, perhaps in another thirty or fifty years, these white-painted materials will be precious.