Cultural and social scientists are occasionally accused of being armchair scholars who try to explain the world from their own desks or from archives. For Gunter Schubert, such an approach is not an option. The sinologist from Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen regularly visits China – even as we interview him for this portrait. „One must develop the professional philosophy that it is impossible to do without regular contact with the region, with the country, with the society on-site. Fundamentally, it depends on networks and contacts how access to the field is. That is certainly the biggest difficulty in China,“ says Schubert.