Yan Yunxiang

Yunxiang Yan is a Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA. He is known for his field work studies in Xiajia Village, Heilongjiang Province, which locates in the northeastern part of China.

Significant views Yan's 2003 Private Life Under Socialism is an influential anthropology text which addresses the development of the individual as a central social category in rural and community life in China, tying these changes to broader structural forces of individualization during the country's rapid modernization process. Private Life Under Socialism traces China's macro-structural forces of individualization to the May Fourth Movement.

In media Yunxiang Yan is also a featured subject, together with Tianjian Shi and Emily Wu, in Chris Billing's 2005 documentary Up to the Mountain, Down to the Village. From 1968 onwards more than 17 million high school students and young adults were sent "up to the mountain, down to the village" (上山下乡 shang shan, xia xiang) to "learn from the peasants." In the documentary three of those youngsters revisit the remote villages to which they were sent thirty years ago.

Career landmarks Publications The Flow of Gifts. Stanford: University Press, 1996 Private Life under Socialism. Stanford University Press, 2003 The Individualization of Chinese Society. Oxford & NY: Berg, 2009

Awards 2010: The Guggenheim Fellowship of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation