The Nearby (附近 / fujin)
The nearby (Chinese fujin 附近) is anthropologist Xiang Biao’s name for a scope of seeing: the lived space between the self and the abstract globe, where one regularly encounters concretely different people — the cleaner, the grocer, the security guard, the delivery worker, the people whose land your building sits on. Xiang’s claim in the 2021 Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art paper is that urban China’s public has become simultaneously preoccupied with the very near (the self, its projects and anxieties) and the very far (imagined global stakes — “should China lead the world?”, “is Western democracy superior?”), while neglecting the space in between — and that this neglect is part of why public discourse polarizes: people can no longer see how the social world is concretely constituted through interconnected differences.^[2021 — Xiang Biao The Nearby
The nearby is not nostalgia for village life, and not “community” in the communitarian sense. It is an epistemic category first: a way of perceiving that brings different positions into one view, so that grand ideology gets tested against the specific, adjacent real. Xiang’s prescription is a “First Mile Movement” — a deliberate inversion of logistics’ “last mile.” The last mile is the state and capital “sinking down” to render local space transparent, legible, and extractable (smart lockers, takeaway delivery, “Daily Life Scenes” as monetizable data); the first mile is citizens reaching out to construct their nearby as a socially rich scope of seeing.^[2021 — Xiang Biao The Nearby
Where the concept came from
Xiang (b. 1972, co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) built his career on the ethnography of migrant worlds — “Zhejiang Village” in 1990s Beijing, then Indian tech labor in Australia, then Chinese labor migration to Japan/Korea/Singapore. The nearby grew out of his turn toward public-intellectual work in Self as Method (2020) — a book-length set of interviews urging readers to start from the thinking self, situate it concretely, and recover agency through grounded engagement with the world one actually inhabits. The concept entered Chinese mass media around 2020, in part as a diagnosis of smartphone life: immediate contact with the faraway (headlines, games, VR) paired with amnesia about the person who delivers the food.^[2024 — Ownby Xiang Biao Student Protests Nearby
The mechanism: formalization, not eviction
One of the paper’s sharper claims is that the nearby in urban China was destroyed not primarily by eviction but by formalization — formal property rights and top-down planning. Xiang’s own childhood courtyard went eerily quiet not when people were displaced but when property rights were returned to previous owners in the mid-1980s: relations between neighbors changed overnight once every interaction became implicitly a negotiation between a landlord and a tenant. “Faced with the laws and documents that formally define property rights, the languages of attachment, nostalgia, neighbourhood relations, the cool air, the sound of the river – the nearby – all appear too feeble to be effective.”^[2021 — Xiang Biao The Nearby This is a specific, contestable causal story — and it rhymes hard with the moral-economy-price-tag argument that a fixed reference frame (there, the price tag; here, the formal property relation) displaces an older moral economy of negotiated attachment.
Nathan’s engagement (2026-08-21)
Nathan read the paper end-to-end and left eighteen highlights with running marginalia, most of it resisting the argument while taking it seriously. The thread of his objections:
- On “researchers, artists, designers and activists [cultivating] residents’ ability”: ‘In other words, “we will educate the poor, ignorant masses.”’ — the vanguardist reading.
- On capital reshaping local space via delivery and smart-community services: he concedes the collective-action problem but insists the demand is real — ‘these kinds of delivery services bring benefits to people that outweigh their losses… “you need to give up the thing you like” has no legs. Solutions can only come from finding something that is either better, or provides equivalent affordances without the negative externalities.’ (Same shape as his climate politics.)
- On property rights debasing other claims of belonging: ‘It feels like this guy would totally be a NIMBY…’ — and on the courtyard nostalgia: ‘This whole essay is motivated by rose-colored glasses!’
- On the claim that attention to the nearby would have made public discussion less divisive: ‘I’m not sure I believe this. All of these concerns were active here in the US, but the divisiveness remained.’
His Reader document note generalizes the pushback into a thesis of his own: “The demand that we care about everyone we meet represents not a solution, but a profound failure of our institutions… I pay taxes to not care. That’s the actual social contract — governance as outsourced caring.” If an injustice has risen to the level where he has to personally care about it, that is itself evidence of institutional inadequacy. (He allows that some level of institutional failure is optimal from a resource-allocation view — but it should be diffuse and uncommon.) This is the impartial-spectator problem inverted: where Adam Smith’s sympathy needs the nearby as its raw material (fellow-feeling is imagination working on people you can actually see), Nathan’s rejoinder is that a well-functioning society should minimize the number of things that require your sympathy, so sympathy can be spent where it does the most good. The tension between those two positions is the live one.
Why it matters here
The nearby is a useful lens for several wiki threads that otherwise look unrelated:
- data-center-backlash — the anti-datacenter fight is in part a nearby-fight: a concrete local thing (a physical plant, water, power lines, a changed landscape) becomes the nameable target for a grievance that is actually about abstract inequality. Xiang’s framework predicts the politics would attach to the visible local object rather than the diffuse global cause — which is exactly what Stokes and Sun observed. Nathan’s “this guy would totally be a NIMBY” note cuts both ways: the nearby is where NIMBYism lives, and also where genuine attachment lives; the framework doesn’t cleanly separate them.
- abundance-agenda — the abundance diagnosis is that we made it too hard to build; the nearby diagnosis is that building destroyed the scope through which people understood their world. Winslett’s shared-sacrifice tension is a nearby-shaped objection to a far-shaped policy program.
- political-anger-emotions-policy-views — Stantcheva’s ACTORC loop (the category that comes to mind directs the politics) is the far-mode Xiang describes: anger organized around abstract national categories. The nearby is the proposed counter-scope.
- scientific-idea-diffusion-decline — Berkes & Gaetani’s finding that accessible language bridges distant audiences while diluting comprehension for nearby peers is the same near/far tradeoff in epistemic form.
Criticisms and open questions
- The paper is explicitly programmatic (“no systematic data… the nearby cannot be discussed by theoretical deduction”) — Nathan’s note (“Wait, so what are you even talking about then?”) is fair. The concept is a provocation and a scope, not a measured effect.
- The nostalgia objection is live: the courtyard idyll is reconstructed from memory, and the claim that pre-formalization neighbors lived in richer mutual attention is hard to falsify.
- The China–US transfer is unclear. Nathan’s skepticism — that US divisiveness persisted despite active local concern — is an empirical challenge the paper doesn’t answer.
- Whether the nearby is a scope (a way of seeing, recoverable by attention) or a structure (a material arrangement, recoverable only by changing property/logistics) is left ambiguous — and the two readings imply very different politics.