In Singapore, Xiang spoke of the recognition young people seek in today’s China, where they often look to systems for approval – from competitive exams to secure jobs – and how that approval becomes a measure of self-worth, which can be exhausting and damaging. <\/p>\n
It is healthier, he suggested, to seek meaning and understanding from others and use that to understand ourselves better.<\/p>\n
These are hardly quick fixes. But in a country where discontent can be politically sensitive and heavily censored, he is a rare public figure who addresses what he calls the “pain point of the times”.<\/p>\n
“Everyone knows where the issue is, but they are reluctant to look at it. Sometimes it is too painful to look at, or they don’t have a way,” he tells the BBC over tea in Singapore.<\/p>\n
“But as an academic, it is not terrifying if you can describe it \u2013 that’s how you analyse and manage it.”<\/p>\n
He now lives in Germany, where he is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and studies social change in China and other parts of Asia.<\/p>\n
Xiang believes Chinese society is at a “turning point”, where people are searching for meaning while making sense of rapid social and economic change. He sees contradictions \u2013 uncertain youth in a powerful, assertive country; disillusionment despite huge advancement \u2013 and his job, he says, is to unpack what is driving it.<\/p>\n
China’s leader Xi Jinping has acknowledged it too: he said the “principal contradiction” was “between the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life and unbalanced and inadequate development”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Singapore, Xiang spoke of the recognition young people seek in today’s China, where they often look to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[134,554,555,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-613422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}