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I am often skeptical of arguments about China that rely heavily on personal experience. The author may explicitly acknowledge that their experience is limited without appropriately treating their arguments with rigor beforehand. This acknowledgment may thus sit beside conclusions about the values, behaviors, and functions of Chinese society without meaningfully constraining any of them.
Different speakers may each have peers with similar experiences that corroborate their claims, or repeated experiences that solidify their firsthand evidence. We may believe one or another speaker is more perceptive, well-informed, or more willing to acknowledge facts contrary to their beliefs. However, the critical question is how far these accounts support the conclusions being drawn.
I will address here how we should evaluate firsthand accounts, including when people offer conflicting accounts.
The Mistake of Universalizing Personal ExperienceHappy two-year anniversary to this tweet by culture critic Rayne Fisher-Quann.
When people use personal experiences to support arguments about a locale, collective, or institution, one must best establish which conditions each person has encountered and how widely those conditions apply. An experience tells us something happens, reveals how an institution works, or challenges a claim about what never happens, etc.. Claiming that this experience describes a broader population requires a further argument about how widespread it is, which conditions produce it, and whether the people we encountered were especially likely to experience it.[1]
Having lived experience indeed provides substantial tacit and nonpublic knowledge, but proximity, salience, attention, and memory all affect the sample of observations. This knowledge may be most directly applicable to a narrow environment whose relationship to the broader population remains unclear.
The same problem can arise in impressions of the US. Suppose an international student’s acquaintances are co