"Like tenderloin in a cow": Memoirs of former Communist Party of Burma insurgents in today's China

At an international conference at a Chinese university in 2011, I sat next to a sixtyish year-old man who could not understand English, but was eager to follow foreign speakers’ presentations. He asked me to translate. Looking more like a businessman or retired official than an academic, this man, Shi Anda, turned out to be a so-called “grassroots scholar” (minjian xuezhe); a term applied to the growing number of individuals in China trying to assert themselves as researchers outside the university and academic institutional system.

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