Among the most distinctive features of Chinese Communist Party governance is the frequent deployment of work teams to conduct campaigns, implement policies and troubleshoot crises. An underappreciated aspect of work-team operations from Land Reform to the present has been the active participation of educated intellectuals as key intermediaries between central leaders and grassroots society. Serving in effect as “missionaries” of the Party, intellectual work-team members function as trained “ritual specialists” in carrying out their appointed mission. Although work teams are often not the most efficient or effective means of governance, the impact of work-team experience on team members themselves is consequential. Employing quasi-religious practices designed to promote the ideological incorporation of intellectuals, work teams have helped to forestall the emergence in China of an alienated class of dissidents like those whose criticisms eroded the legitimacy of Communist regimes elsewhere in the world.

While Chinese academic excellence is gaining increasing international recognition, plagiarism, corruption, nepotism and other negative practices are reportedly rampant in academia in China. Many point the finger at fundamental flaws within the tizhi, the highly structured Chinese socio-political system. I propose re-examining Chinese academia and its practices by applying and expanding Pierre Bourdieu's notion of field as this framework helps to identify the predicament of the “deep water” in which Chinese scholars and institutes find themselves. The four fields I outline – ideological, quasi-official, fame–profit and guanxi fields – spotlight academic practices with “Chinese characteristics.” I elaborate on my own experiences and reflections as both an insider and outsider to these practices, a position which I refer to as a third-eye perspective. I argue that despite the constraints of the “deep water,” the field-oriented angle of investigation reveals that the depths and types of “deep water” vary from one institute to another and also that the internally generated ongoing initiatives promise a step-by-step transformation in Chinese academia. To provoke further thought, I contend that the Chinese case is both a non-exception and alternative to the Western (and other) practices. In so doing, I call for a balanced perspective to re-examine Chinese academic ecology.