Bureaucracy and distributed vulnerability at a Chinese research institute: beyond the faculty perspective on audit cultures

Bureaucracy and audit are an increasingly pervasive fact of scientific and academic life. In this article, I examine this bureaucracy through the perspectives of non-faculty staff at a Chinese research institute: the Institute for Farms and Forests (IFF). I build upon the lament of a staff member called Tao that inflexible bureaucracy is the consequence of civil servants’ determination to evade vulnerability. Bringing Tao and her colleagues’ analyses into conversation with the anthropology of gift exchange, I show how a literature that has long informed anthropological analyses of informal bureaucratic back doors provides an equally rich set of resources for understanding bureaucracy's formal, document-mediated front door. Most especially, I draw upon the anthropology of gifts to illuminate the anxieties and vulnerabilities that shape and are shaped by bureaucratic practice. This approach can help us to understand Chinese bureaucracy in an era of increasing wariness towards informal social connections (guanxi). It can also help us to explore what might be at stake for the non-faculty colleagues who – despite their indispensable roles – we seldom consider in conversations about academic audit cultures.