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.
It is healthier, he suggested, to seek meaning and understanding from others and use that to understand ourselves better.
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”.
“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.
“But as an academic, it is not terrifying if you can describe it – that’s how you analyse and manage it.”
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.
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 – uncertain youth in a powerful, assertive country; disillusionment despite huge advancement – and his job, he says, is to unpack what is driving it.
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”.
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