2. Self-as-Method,

Beijing Interview, March 2018, Setting the Stage

Wu Qi: I first wanted to ask why you are interested in the interview format. In China, it is not too common, and most scholars are not used to expressing themselves through interviews. In part, this is because interviews don’t count on their CVs, and with the decline in mass media in the past few years, there are even fewer quality interviews with scholars.

Xiang Biao: For me, it is a learning process to set my ideas in order in the Chinese language. What is really important is that in an interview setting we won’t use scholarly language, which means that what we talk about will be more down to earth. So, this will not be “fake language,” and will also be things that I’ve already thought through. You can only talk clearly about things you have already thought through. Thinking clearly through muddled ideas and communicating them in the straight language is a major achievement. So, for me, an interview is a process of personal growth.

Even more important is that it is interactive. An interview will allow me to communicate with today’s young people. This is very important because in this way I can hear what they have to say and see some changes as they are occurring. Not all changes are huge revolutionary changes, but every moment of our lives might mark a historical turning point, which means they are latent with possibility. Understood in this way, grasping these turning points becomes an important issue.

My sense is that students and young people are looking for tools to help them think and explore. This is something they care a lot about, and the tools they need today are not like the tools we used in the past. In the past, it was enough to have the tools to understand the functioning of the economy, the redistribution of social resources, and city planning. These were the classical tools of empirical research and policy research. Such tools, in the hands of experts, were one of the principal means by which we pushed change forward. But today’s society is different because of social media and platform economies. (Delivery services, on-line buying, etc.) In addition, the educational level of young people is much higher, and what we need now are tools that will help everyone to reflect. Such tools are not external, like a computer or a smartphone that someone can give you; these tools need to be inside your brain, so that you can manage problems and move forward. You will also transform these tools, or abandon them for something else if they prove not to work. As a social scientist, I feel that my work is to be an incubator of such tools. There is nothing I can give you, and can only inspire you or perhaps wake you up. We need to change the old model where the expert tells the people what to do.

Wu Qi: On the theme of interactivity, I hope that in the interview we can combine the story of your life experiences with your academic work so that we can understand how you have gotten to where you are, and what the links between your life experiences and your scholarship are. From another angle, I may bring in my own questions, including doubts and uncertainties encountered in my work life, and especially things I have observed in the young people around me. In this context, I might mention the example of Professor Dai Jinhua*1 (b. 1959), whose courses I took at university and who influenced me a great deal. Later on, when working in media I had a chance to interview her, at which point I began to understand the distance between concepts discussed in the classroom and real social practice, as well as the urgent need to close this distance. I remember Professor Dai having said that her generation is to blame for a lot of today’s problems.

Xiang Biao: What do you mean by “they are to blame”?

Wu Qi: My understanding of her meaning was: how did those ideas, that looked to be correct, wind up being so problematic when put into practice? Was it that our work was unsatisfactory? Or that other people’s work was more satisfactory than ours? In fact, what needs to be done is, to sum up some practical wisdom, which would be a bigger help to today’s youth than reassessing the older generation’s intellectual work. So, I am curious as well as to how the lives of my professors and senior academics came to be, how much of what they did was the product of an era or an environment, and how much was the result of their individual qualities, and which parts of these experiences can be shared and learned from. This might help us to make a closer connection to our readers, and does not seem to be too far-fetched.

1 Translator’s note: Dai Jinhua is professor of comparative literature at Beijing University and a well-known cultural critic. Some of her work is available in English translation.

Xiang Biao: You absolutely have to bring in your own experience, otherwise everything else will seem superficial. Understanding the world necessarily comes through our own heartfelt experiences. One of our problems today is that intellectuals are not plugged into reality, and cannot explain things in concrete terms that reflect their actual existence, and instead express themselves in terms that are inorganic and intangible. If you ask me a question and I respond directly, then this is a great opportunity, in my view. Of course, there is a limitation, which is that I am still fairly young. I might look back on life differently 20 or 25 years from now, but for now I might not be able to tell what impact my youth and adolescence have had on my life. Although I’m willing to think about it, I am not at a point where I am naturally reflecting on my life. So, I think we should aim for an interview based on ideas and reflections on the current state of affairs, interspersed with some of my personal experiences, in other words, an intellectual interview with a concrete person. I really hope that it winds up being a dialogue aimed at young people, so we will need for you to ask questions from their perspective.

Wu Qi: Then maybe we should start by talking about your own youth, and if we run into topics we need to discuss, we will take them up in turn.

Xiang Biao: We can start with specific questions or with my personal experience, and then edit later if we need to.

Wu Qi: Fine. In any event, the conversation may be a long process.

A Childhood Picture

Wu Qi: We don’t know that much about your personal story. In one of your articles in Chinese, “Responses and Reflections—How We Narrate the Present and Grasp History: With Further Thoughts about the Public Role of Anthropology,” you talked about growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. You mentioned that “the urgent demands of students at the time were for individual freedom, social autonomy, political democracy, and economic openness, and the original socialist system was seen as a historical burden to be abandoned.” What did you think about when you were young, or when you were a child?

Xiang Biao: I used to think my youth was completely boring, but when I look back on it now, there were some things that were interesting. Wenzhou in the early 1980s had embraced commercialization pretty thoroughly, but my family was a bit different. We lived in the dormitory of the middle school where my mother taught. The dorm was a converted classroom building. In the beginning, three families shared a kitchen and later on it was two families. The kitchen was about ten square meters, and there was a slogan on the wall that said “Seize Revolution, Increase Production,” as well as pictures of Mao. When I was little, I would always ask my mother what it meant to “seize revolution,” because to me, the word “seize” (zhua*) meant to “catch” bad guys. How could you “catch” revolution, since it was a good thing? I wondered about this for a long time.

Before I started going to school, I spent most of my time at my grandfather’s house. My grandfather was an unusual character. His father was one of the first to be sent by the Qing government to study in Japan, selected through national exams. He probably went to Japan in the 1890s, with people like Shen Honglie* (1882–1969), who later became the governor of Zhejiang under the Guomindang. My great-grandfather studied in a naval academy in Japan, and after he came back, he worked in the navy of a Beiyang militarist*1 in Shanghai. He abandoned his family in Wenzhou (Yueqing county), married again in Shanghai, and started smoking opium. After the establishment of the People’s Republic, he was labeled a reactionary and fell into poverty, after which he returned home to Yueqing. My grandfather was a product of this ruined landlord family, and this background mattered a lot. He later became a worker in a factory run by a relative of his, and in the 1950s, after this factory was converted into a joint public–private enterprise, he became a mid-level manager in this collective. He and his father were quite distant; we would say now that they didn’t have many feelings for one another. But he was proud of his father, believing that he was a “somebody.” So, my grandfather had the aura of a fallen aristocrat. He was not at all like his neighbors. He liked to comment on things and people, and tended to frame events with concepts and opinions, assigning things meaning and value. His relationship to the new society was also complex, neither simply rejecting it nor praising it. He had his own views and a sense of distance that suited him. My grandfather influenced me a lot, because I grew up with him from a very young age.

But the house where I stayed with my grandfather—and this has to do with his “fallen family” background—was in a really low-class area, basically inhabited by dock-workers, who were unloading grain onto wooden carts that they pulled themselves. The woman next door was a prostitute. Our houses were like huts, nailed together out of wooden planks, with huge cracks between them. The kids who were bigger than I was would climb up the wall to watch the prostitute between the cracks, because she and her clients made a lot of noise. I didn’t really know what it was all about, but once the neighbors started arguing I would hear all about it.

1 Translator’s note: The Beiyang government was the internationally recognized government of China between 1912 and 1927. After the death of Yuan Shikai*, however, the power of the Beiyang government disintegrated, and China came to be dominated by regional warlords, or militarists.

There were fights all the time, where somebody would be accused of stealing electricity, or stealing water. There were also neighbors who worked in factories, and I could tell there was a difference between them and the ones that worked on the docks. I remember one family clearly, because all the young people admired one of the daughters, who was maybe 10 years older than I was and got a job at a canning plant through connections. On New Year’s and holidays, she could bring home canned goods, and we were all envious.

So, when I was little, I lived among three different worlds. One was that run-down district; another was the world of the fallen nobility of my grandfather; and finally, after I started going to school, there was the school where my parents lived, and where I heard more “orthodox” speech. Every morning at breakfast my father made me listen to the news broadcast from the central government, followed by the radio program “A New Song Every Week”. I learned a lot of official expressions and developed an interest in reciting things. These three social environments were different, which may have helped me to understand differences in life. Of course, I more or less identified myself with the intellectual world, because my parents were intellectuals, and what’s more, at that time intellectuals were an important topic. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, editorials in the People’s Daily talked about “respecting knowledge and talent,” and stressed that “science and technology are the number one productive forces.” This is what we called “the springtime of science.” Our neighbors in the school dormitory talked all day long about implementing the state policy on improving intellectuals’ living standards and political status.

What is interesting is, at that time, people in all the three surroundings had a strong political consciousness. I have vivid memory of my neighbors praising one of Chen Yun’s2* talks in the 1980s, in which he said that “without industry there is no wealth; without agriculture there is no stability; without commerce there is no dynamism.” In fact, my neighbors had nothing at all to do with agriculture, but they were concerned about it. Where my grandfather lived, when one family was eating, the neighbors would come over and crowd around the table and see what you ate. People’s conversations were also about politics, involving comments on the current situation, with judgements about political figures.

2 Translator’s note: Chen Yun (1905–1995) was an important figure in the Chinese Communist Party and worked together with Deng Xiaoping to implement the policies of reform and opening.

An important topic was the price of food. Every day people watched one another buying food, and would always ask how much you paid, and complain about how much the prices had gone up. A major change at the time was that we started to have free markets for agricultural products, which meant that people were always asking whether you bought that fish at the state market or the private market. Prices were better at the government market, but you had to stand in line a long time. At the private market, vendors could sell goods for the price they wanted to, so things were more expensive, but there was more variety. I found people were very ambivalent about market economy. Later on, I learned that it is fairly rare for ordinary people to pay so much attention to politics elsewhere in the world. For example, I found out that Japanese people don’t talk politics at the dinner table, that it is considered uncivilized behavior. I thought this is really strange, and asked my Japanese wife why. She said that talking politics might get in the way of friendships. Everyone’s political views are different, so the wife might not know who the husband voted for, or the father might not know who his son voted for.

Wu Qi: Which people and which events had the most influence on you when you were a child?

Xiang Biao: One of my uncles was really smart, and his observations about the things around him were very sensitive and accurate. If you ever do fieldwork, you will learn that in any village, there is always someone who can explain the local situation very clearly. This is not easy. If we talk to young people, and have them sit down and explain their group, their school, how the system functions and what the basic power structure and guiding ideas are, what everyone’s motivation is, how many different groups they are divided into—most people can’t do this. This is in fact a really important sort of training. Everyone should be interested in their own little world, and consciously explain their life in their own terms, as a sort of independent narrative. You don’t necessarily have to think deeply about it, narrative is enough.

My uncle had a big influence on me, because he had a vision of what was happening around him. For example, when making New Year’s cakes, he could explain the whole thing systematically, from dissolving the sugar in the water, to adding the rice flour, to cooking and waiting for it to cool, tracing out the principles involved and the connection of one thing to another, forming an overall vision. The idea of “vision” is important. The word for “theory” in Latin means “vision,” which suggests that coming up with a theory is the same as coming up with a vision of the world. I once wrote an article in English entitled “Theory as Vision,” in which I argued that theory is not a judgement, but instead an accurate picture of reality, which can also give rise to another vision of a possible future. Early socialist art was like this, in that what they painted was not a mechanical reflection of the world, but instead an exact reflection of the world. What does “exact” mean? It means you have accurately grasped the future direction something will take. The difference between “mechanical” and “exact” is huge; “mechanical” is taking a photograph, but “exact” means that not only have you understood what the thing is now, but also what it may become. So “vision” has two meanings: one is a description of the present, and the other extends to a possible future.

The older brother of this uncle also had a certain influence on me. He tested into university in 1958 or 1959, but the university rejected him because my grandfather had been branded as a rightist. Later on, in 1967 or 1968, he actively participated in all sorts of social movements, and even if he avoided being labeled as one of the “three types of people”— rebels, factionalists, and destructive elements—he got into a lot of trouble at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and as a result could not work for the government. He told me one day all of a sudden, when I was still in elementary school, that the Cultural Revolution was not completely wrong. He said, look at those cadres. Even in the 1960s they were already riding around in cars, wearing leather shoes, getting fatter every day. Mao said that it won’t do for things to continue like this. A mass movement is the only solution.

This made a deep impression on me because, before this, I had heard a lot of politically correct talk saying that the Cultural Revolution was bad, but here was my uncle, who had suffered so much and stayed silent for so long, finally having his say about the Cultural Revolution. Even today it touches me in many ways. We should not judge the Cultural Revolution simply to have been either right or wrong. For this uncle who had lived through that experience, the Cultural Revolution was a classic tragedy, if we understand tragedy in terms of its ancient Greek meaning, as a potentially sublime thing that not only fails, but also creates a huge destructive force. In this case behind the tragedy is an internal contradiction: a socialist revolution must constantly foment mass movements to prevent bureaucratization, because we can’t let the people’s representatives get fatter and fatter and ride around in cars, but how precisely should we prevent this? We still don’t have the right answer to this question. But if you look at things this way, you wind up with a new understanding of history.

Wu Qi: When you heard about these politicized people and events at the time, what concrete effect did it have on the shaping of your personality?

Xiang Biao: I was lucky to be able to hear such viewpoints when I was young. The environment of my youth perhaps made me into a social researcher with a “gentry (xiangshen*) disposition.”3 What do I mean by “gentry disposition?” First, the gentry don’t like modern intellectuals. Because everyone in my family said that being an intellectual was a good job, I always thought that it was natural that I would turn out to be an intellectual, but I don’t really like Enlightenment-style intellectuals.4 When I was in high school in the 1980s, I started to read different books, but I wasn’t too interested in the Toward the Future*5 sort of books, like China on the Edge*6 or the television program “River Elegy.”7 When River Elegy came out I was already in my second year of high school, and could understand it with no problem. It did move me a lot and I thought it deserved to be taken seriously, but at the same time I felt a strong sense of distance from it, and I didn’t like its preachiness, its exaggerated style, its rush to judgement.8

3 Translator’s note: See discussion in the introduction.

4 Translator’s note: “Enlightenment-style intellectuals” refers to intellectuals who participated in China’s “second Enlightenment” in the 1980s (the first Enlightenment was during the May Fourth period). See discussion in the introduction.

5 Translator’s note: “Toward the Future” was a well-known translation series edited by Jin Guantao* and Liu Qingfeng*, focused on science and modernization. There were many such efforts in the 1980s, as Chinese intellectuals sought to reestablish contact with the outside world after the relative isolation of the Maoist period.

6 Translator’s note: Written by futurologist He Bochuan* (b. 1962), China on the Edge offered a critical view of China’s future and provoked great controversy when it was published in 1989. An English translation exists.

7 Translator’s note: “River Elegy” was a six-part television documentary that aired in China in 1988. Its depiction of Chinese traditional culture was extremely negative, which provoked considerable discussion and condemnation.

8 Translator’s note: The tone of “River Elegy” is extremely didactic, and the narrative style reminds me of U.S. government propaganda films produced during World War II, the kind of short film that would be played in movie theaters. Parts of River Elegy are available on YouTube, for example at

t=1300s.

Second, gentry scholars are also not exactly like researchers, even if research is part of what they do. A very important thing that the gentry do is to become extremely familiar with their village and develop a narrative about it based on their familiarity. The narrative is an internal narrative. What do I mean by internal? I mean that it can clearly convey the flavor of the system in which those different people live, explain the system as a sum of the accumulation of the people and the things that constitute it over time, without abstract deductions. This means that the language the gentry scholar uses is basically the language of the place, the language the actors themselves use to describe their lives.

Such internal narratives are an important reason explaining how our traditional Confucian culture could sustain such an extensive imperial state system. When we look at the local gazetteers*9 produced in the past, the image we find of the empire in these gazetteers is very different from the vision we entertain today. They don’t say that Beijing is better than us, that we are marginal, that we belong to the empire. In their imagination, the basic principles of the empire, which are Confucian ethical principles, have been internalized by every individual and every place, no matter where they may be. Which means that every “place” has its empire—or is its own empire—even if there is no emperor in that place. The relationships the gazetteers imagined between localities and the center were not hierarchical relationships of superior and inferior, but instead were like the moon shining on ten thousand lakes, so that each lake had its own moon, which is what everyone relied on to build a sense of commonality. When a member of the gentry left his hometown to serve in the capital, this was not necessarily something to celebrate too much, because his hometown was the anchor of his sense of meaning. To finish first in the imperial examinations and serve as prime minister was a great thing, of course, but family members often stayed in the successful gentry member’s hometown, and once he was no longer an official, he went home. This is why some people say that one of the first signs of China’s modernization was when retired officials stopped returning home after they retired. This meant that the circular relationship between the city and the villages had been broken. Not to go back to the village after retirement illustrates what kind of changes modernity wrought in the relationship between China’s center and peripheries, between China’s cities and villages, and between intellectuals and ordinary people (most of whom were farmers).

9 Translator’s note: Local gazetteers were locally produced presentations of a county, prefecture, or province, covering various aspects of history, geography, economy, famous local families, etc. In the local areas, most of the intellectuals did not go elsewhere to serve as officials, but instead became local gentry, living in harmony with their small universe. They neither needed nor desired outside recognition, and whether the outside world noticed them, whether the things they wrote circulated in that outside world, was not particularly important to them. What was important was to have a clear understanding of their own corner of the world. This meant that they paid close attention to the details of daily life, like quarrels, marriages, funerals, relations between parents and children, appreciating the deep meanings behind these things.

But the gentry were also different from the modern researchers I just mentioned. Modern scholars have been trained to do research, and anthropologists, for example, also have to pay attention to details, but the point of the local gentry’s observation is to arrive at a vision, to carve out a narrative, a narrative that reflects reality in a way local people will understand. So, on the one hand you can say that it is very meticulous, very empirical, but at the same time it pays a lot of attention to overall structure.

In addition, local gentry make ethical judgements. They judge whether something is good or bad. Researchers don’t do this. They have to be value-neutral and just look at the facts. But the gentry are not like moralists either, in that the gentry do not make their ethical judgements on standards drawn from books. Their ethical judgements have to measure up to the practical ideals of the common people. In the ethical judgements of the Confucian gentry, one important consideration is harmony. The point is not whether you as an individual were right or wrong, but rather what you did is or is not in harmony with other people. Thus, an overview of the entire situation is very important. In this way you understand how the world is put together, and you understand how political and economic relations matter. Look at the old people. They understand the village— how much money the villagers earn, how much they pay in taxes, how much they should give in gifts—the old folks can tell you down to the penny. At the same time these details are put together through meaning, such as what kind of person or thing is worthy of respect, what kind of thing is beyond the pale; all of this is stitched together through meaning. The gentry are empirical, because they have to be able to describe the life of the villagers, but they also pay a lot of attention to meaning, and their thinking has a clear ethical bent. I’m not saying that this is the work I do, but this is my basic interest and orientation: how I feel about what is interesting, what theories or explanations are interesting, has a lot to do with this gentry disposition.

Wu Qi: When you bring up the gentry, I immediately think of Fei Xiaotong* (1910–2005).10 Can we say that what you are talking about is an extension of his scholarly tradition?

Xiang Biao: I never thought about carrying forward a scholarly tradition. It’s true that we talk about “tradition” at Beida,11 but it’s not all that serious, and it wasn’t until I got to Britain that I understood how seriously the British take tradition. For me, individually, it has never occurred to me to define an intellectual by way of a tradition. But I think Fei Xiaotong was a fascinating scholar. I can easily understand his gentry disposition. His grasp of society was also a vision beginning from the inside and working out, avoiding external judgements, and the portrait he painted was one that was meaningful to people inside, and had a certain ethical grounding. Fei’s concept of the “differential mode of association”12 is a good example.

10 Translator’s note: Fei Xiaotong, who completed his Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1938, is seen as the founder of modern sociology in China. Several of his most important works are available in English translation.

11 Translator’s note: “Beida,” short for Beijing Daxue, is how virtually all Chinese people refer to Peking University in conversation.

12 Translator’s note: According to the sociologist Gary Hamilton, who translated Fei’s “From the Soil”, Fei claims that, in Western societies, individuals form organizations, whereby each organizations has its own boundaries defining who is part of the organization and who is not, and the relation of each individual to the organization is the same. All members in an organization are equivalent. He calls this an ‘organizational mode of association’ (tuantigeju*).

In China, on the contrary, each individual is claimed to be surrounded by a series of concentric circles, produced by one’s own social influence. Each web of social relations has a self as its center. Each circle spreading out from the center becomes more distant and at the same time more insignificant. Everyone’s circles are interrelated, and one touches different circles at different times and places. On different occasions, one’s own social network comes into contact with someone else’s. He calls this mode of organization a ‘differential mode of association’ (chaxugeju*).

A practical consequence of this difference in social networking is that, in the West, people struggle for their rights, while in China, people seek connections in higher places and do things for the sake of friendship. Another consequence is that, in China, private selfishness is justified by moving toward the state: both public officials and private persons use the same conception of the social order to define the context of their action. This is different from a Western society, in which public and private rights and obligations belong to a different ‘organization’ and are divided distinctly. A ‘differential mode of association’ does not allow for individual rights to be an issue at all, and social morality makes sense only in terms of the personal connections.

13 Translator’s note: Liang Shuming was a professor at Peking University and a leading intellectual during the Republican period, probably best known for his influential volume Eastern and Western Cultures and their Philosophies (1921). Liang was also active in the “rural reconstruction movement” which sought to rebuild China’s countryside.

Most people now use it as descriptive device. To my mind, the concept itself doesn’t mean much, because “differential mode of association” is nothing more than an empirical translation of traditional Chinese ethical philosophy. I also wonder how generalizable it is—✓when did the “differential mode of association” become a universal phenomenon in Chinese society?? Things could not always have been that way; it must have been the ✓product of a certain set of land relationships, agricultural methods, economic developments, or political changes. ✓How did the “differential mode” evolve in history? ✓Are there regional variations? None of this is clear, so the “differential mode of association” became an ideal type. ✓And because it is an ideal type, everybody can apply it to all sorts of different empirical data.

Here’s how I understand it. When Fei Xiaotong proposed the idea of a “differential mode of association,” he was in fact responding to a critical political debate at the time, which was the question of whether party politics could work in China. Fei was like Liang Shuming* (1893– 1988),13 both of whom thought that party politics would not work in China. Fei thought that party politics requires a certain cultural basis, what he called community or group associations, by which he meant the same kind of people joining together on the basis of shared political ideas, which would lead to the formation of groups, and then ideologies, in which the relationships of the people in the groups would be equal, after which democratic elections would choose the leaders of political parties.

Fei believed that the Chinese people were unable to form political parties in the modern sense, and his idea of “differential modes of association” was in fact a response to those advocating the democratic system. Understood in this sense, Fei’s idea has a specific meaning in the context of these debates. But people pay absolutely no attention to this now, and use the concept as a sort of mechanical description of Chinese social relations. Fei Xiaotong was an ambitious man, his observations were a reply to a certain political question, or an ethical question, which is not the same thing as the specialized, technically oriented research. If we want to make proper use of his theoretical innovations, we have to return to the background that produced them, and understand the problems he was trying to solve.

My gentry disposition may have something to do with my grandfather’s sense of being content with being alone as a “fallen noble.” This is why I have always been suspicious of intellectuals. A little distance, a little suspicion can be pretty important, otherwise when you go to university it’s easy to get caught up in other people’s discourses.

Wu Qi: If the seeds of suspicion were planted when you were young, given your university education and all your subsequent training, have the suspicions gone away?

Xiang Biao: I think they are stronger than ever, but there was a time, especially right after I finished my Ph.D., when I thought that the sense of distance was created by my own lack of ability, because I didn’t understand what other people were saying and had a hard time fitting in. I felt inadequate, like I needed to catch up, which created a lot of pressure. I struggled for a long time. Looking back on it now, when I’m more comfortable and things are going well, I think it was my sense of distance that got me here.

The 1980s Culture Craze

Wu Qi: What did you spend most of your time on in high school? What books did you read?

Xiang Biao: High school was a pretty important time for me, and I’d like to give a shout out to my school, Wenzhou High School. It was only after I got to Peking University that I learned that high schools in many places go from 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning all the way to 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, with self-study at school in the evenings, but at my school, everything was over by 3:00 or 4:00, and there was no such thing as self-study at school at night. After school was over, we would watch movies or go shopping. We had a lot of free time and the pressure of exams was not too bad. It might be that at that time the salaries of the high school teachers were not linked to the percentage of students that went on to university, so they just gave normal classes and did not get carried away. At the time, there were all kinds of clubs for students with different interests, like the literature society, the drama club, the computer club, the biology club… I was an active participant in arts festivals.

Translator’s note: The 1980s were marked by a series of “crazes” or “enthusiasms” generally interpreted as responses to the regimentation and extreme politicization of Chinese life during the Mao era. The “culture craze” reflected a preoccupation with both Western and Chinese cultures, topics that were newly available in the relatively liberal post-Mao era, after having been more or less taboo between 1949 and 1976.

My time in high school also coincided with the final part of the Culture Craze. One thing that had a fairly big impact on me was the magazine the Wenhui Monthly*, put out by the Shanghai Writers’ Association*. I read every issue from cover to cover, and I remember clearly that the address of the editor’s office was 149 Yuanmingyuan Road in Shanghai. My favorite was long-form reportage. Long-form reportage was a major thing for Chinese literature and for the Chinese revolution. This kind of writing has a number of important characteristics. ✓One is that it focuses on life at the grassroots level, ✓another is that it is direct, and yet another is that ✓it goes deep. This is true beginning with Xia Yan’s* 1935 piece on “Indentured Workers*,”1 and continuing through Jia Lusheng* and Gao Jianguo’s* 1988 Drifting with the Beggars’ Gang*…2

Another magazine I read all the time was Appreciation of Masterpieces*, which was literary criticism. Every issue was really thick and it was hopelessly overwritten and pretentious, extremely abstract, but I thought it was fun, although I’m not sure what influence it had on me. I also read some things on “thought enlightenment,”3 and ran across some discussions on the young Marx’s “alienation,”4 which talked about social development from the angle of “human liberation” instead of from perspectives of political economy, which I liked a lot.

1 Translator’s note: Xia Yan (1900–1995) is considered the founder of reportage literature in China. “Indentured Workers” explores the life of workers in various factories in Shanghai in the 1930s and the various forms of exploitation they suffered.

2 Translator’s note: These authors spent several months living with groups of beggars in several Chinese cities to compose this work.

3 Translator’s note: A group of Chinese intellectuals called for a ‘new Enlightenment’ (xin qimeng*) in the late 1980s. The magazine New Enlightenment, launched in October 1988, was representative of this trend. Just like the “old” Enlightenment of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 that denounced traditional Chinese culture, the new Enlightenment aimed to radically rethink socialist system and ideology.

4 Translator’s note: “Alienation” was a theme much discussed in the early 1980s, as intellectuals both inside the Party and out sought to understand how something like the Cultural Revolution could have occurred. In the Marxist context, “alienation” means that something has fundamentally changed its nature, becoming a source of oppression. Those in favor of the idea were attempting to rescue Marxism by returning to Marx’s original “humanism.” The Party ultimately rejected this approach.

Another big thing that happened in my family in the 1980s was that for Teachers Day in 1986, the Wenzhou bureau of education gave the school where my father worked a ration coupon for a color television set. Everybody drew lots for it, and my father won. At the time, you couldn’t buy a color television even if you had the money. My parents didn’t have much money and thought about not using the coupon. One of our relatives said that giving it away would be like giving your luck to other people, so they borrowed some money and bought the television. This shows that when people are trying to talk themselves into something, they will use abstract ideas or principles, like the idea of not letting good luck go. In 1984, my family bought an electric fan, which was our second electric appliance. The first was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, which I think we had even before I was born.

Wu Qi: Why do you remember those details so clearly?

Xiang Biao: They were a really big deal. When you got home, the fan was on the table blowing air on you, and it could even oscillate. The kind of happiness this gave you in the summer was revolutionary.

Wu Qi: Were the 1980s also the moment of your individual enlightenment?

Xiang Biao: The period between the ages of 16 and 18 was crucial. I started to read, and to give critical speeches at school. I also did my first “fieldwork” during the 1980s, thanks again to my high school.

In the first year of high school, our politics teacher took us to Yueqing county for a fieldwork trip. Now it’s Liushi Township in Yueqing city, one of the pioneering places in terms of the production of electrical appliances in China, as well as my mother’s hometown. We went to a factory to hear the manager give a report, but the students were goofing around, and the manager got mad, and said to them in dialect “how can I talk with you making so much noise?!” I was the only one listening, and I felt for the manager. We were staying in a guest house, and I noticed that the person at the front desk was always building circuit boards. I asked her where the circuit boards came from, and she said that they were contracted out from private companies run by relatives of hers. Then I asked her how much she made for each circuit board, and found out that she made more doing that than from her wages at the guest house, but that it wasn’t a stable income. I asked a few more questions until I understood things clearly, and then wrote a little something about it, saying that private enterprises, working through family connections, were spreading economic opportunity throughout the entire village. At the time, there was a debate in society over the question of whether the private economy would lead to economic polarization. On the basis of this example, I made the speculative conclusion that there would be no polarization, because the opportunity to make money would be distributed among everyone’s relatives, spreading wealth throughout the region. I was proud of my little report. In fact, that observation had an impact later on when I was doing my research on Zhejiang village.5 It allowed me to see that a small enterprise is a network and not an organization. In other words, an enterprise is first a kinship organization or a social organization, and is an economic organization only in a secondary sense.

I was never all that attracted to the intellectual enlightenment of the 1980s, and later I liked it less and less. It might be a question of style. I remember clearly that the actor Zhang Jiasheng’s* (b. 1935) narration of “River Elegy,” the tone of which put me off, and there was also the last half of the journalist Qian Gang’s* (b. 1953) reportage on “The Great Tangshan Earthquake”6 that was broadcast on the radio, which I didn’t like either. It was like some kind of religious language like they were praying for all of humanity. Life in Wenzhou was completely different. When I was in high school, my mother was teaching math in a different middle school. One of her students got into university, and the parents invited everyone for a banquet. And somebody had the nerve to say to the student, to his face, “What’s the point of going to university these days?” The student felt a little awkward and unhappy. Wenzhou is a pragmatic place, without much time for pretention. If going to university can’t bring you tangible benefits, then there is no point of going to university no matter how nice it sounds.

Wu Qi: It looks like Wenzhou High School was quite special. Did it always have this kind of tradition? Or was it the result of reform and opening?

5 Translator’s note: See the discussion in the introduction.

6 Translator’s note: The Tangshan earthquake struck Tangshan, Hebei on July 28, 1976, causing massive destruction and the loss of at least 242,000 lives.

Xiang Biao: Wenzhou High School is relatively old. It was established by a member of the local gentry, Sun Yirang* (1848–1908), who had done research on oracle bones. Well-known Republican period writers like Zhu Ziqing* (1898–1948) and Zheng Zhenduo* (1898–1958) both taught there. During the chaos of the Republican period (1911–1949), when Beijing was a mess and Shanghai was a place for the foreigners and the rich, a lot of literary types wound up in Zhejiang. In the old days, the high school was the pinnacle of local education, and was rooted in the local environment. Now high schools are basically feeders, sending students to Beijing and Shanghai to study, and even local universities have their eyes fixed on the world outside of China, so the atmosphere is completely different from what it was when it was set up by local gentry. In the early period, the high school even played an important role in the revolution. I didn’t know whether this had to with its history, all I knew was that Wenzhou High School was a key school, and my teachers were all relatively mature and it seemed that they had been transferred from elsewhere. They had all lived through the Cultural Revolution, and took education seriously, but there was no notion of any target to make sure a certain number of students went on to university, like what high schools are doing now.

Maybe the reason that the pretentious tone came to be mainstream within the cultural world, despite its distance from real life, is due to the fact that schools became such strange, inorganic places. There is something worth discussing here, which is how we evaluate the 1980s. The feelings that inspired the elevated tone with which everyone spoke in the 1980s might still have a considerable impact. We are always saying that China needs its own social thought, its own discourse; where does this come from? The development of American social science has a lot to do with 1968, which is when new theories began to emerge, aiming to confront social problems. France was even more like this. The student movement was an empty revolution but it changed everything, and their tone was quite elevated as well, but they remained connected to actual life, and produced a good number of theorists. This intellectual production did not come from the social scientists themselves, but from their links to philosophers and artists. And there were many enterprises and technical people allied with them, so that they could bring things to life and create a new atmosphere.

China in the 1980s looked like America or France in the 1960s, in that it was a period of awakening and questioning. So, I would have thought that the 1980s was bound to produce a good number of impressive people because all of the resources were there to stimulate thinking. The students involved in the demonstrations in 1989 had had an uninterrupted education when they were young, went to Peking University, and then lived through many things in the eye of the storm of history. Later on, in the wake of the suppression, some of these people went to the United States and France, with generous scholarships, and saw how things were in the West. But to my mind, none of these people came up with interesting ideas. Of course, they should not be blamed for that; they were after all investing their youths and their lives into their ideals. But their experience gives us something to think about: why did these people not come up with ideas? From my perspective, it seems to me that when your emotional tone is pitched too high, it is easy to go to extremes. This shows that I have been influenced a fair bit by the scholar Wang Hui*7 (b. 1959), when he said that the reason that neoliberal reforms were so easily introduced into China in the 1990s was that the 1980s had left no resources to help us to reflect on social contradictions. Everyone felt like Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour,8 with its “Eastern Wind, that Brings the Promise of Spring,” was like a revolution, that by letting go and promoting freedom, every problem would be solved, but they didn’t know enough about concrete problems like inequality and social justice. Intellectuals at the time did not truly look into the hardships of the common people, or social contradictions. They looked up at abstractions instead of down at practical problems.

Wu Qi: What you said about the different situations in various countries after the social movements is interesting. In every society, even where there was no thorough-going revolution, social movements still brought about transformative changes in many places. We have talked a fair bit about the role of intellectuals prior to and during social movements, but we have talked less about how they work after a large social movement is over. I wonder if you could compare a bit more concretely what happened in China with what happened in the United States, France, or other countries?

Xiang Biao: The problem in the United States at the time was very real. The whole movement had a direct focus: people didn’t want to go to war in Vietnam and began rethinking the nature of the state.

7 Translator’s note: Wang Hui is one of contemporary China’s most prominent public intellectuals, and a leading member of China’s New Left, which seeks in various ways to insist on the continuing importance of socialism to China and the world.

8 Translator’s note: Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour marked the moment that China relaunched it’s policies of reform and opening, after a period of repression and hesitation in the wake of the suppression of the Tian’anmen protests in 1989. Deng’s talk was first publicized in Shenzhen Special Zone News* on March 26, 1992, with the title “The Eastern Wind Brings the Promise of Spring”. The report was then widely reprinted across China.

This was not merely a job for intellectuals but had a strong mass component as well. Things were more abstract in France. There, things were basically about the desire for freedom, but this was enough for young people and had long-lasting impacts on art and music. Later on, Foucault also said that 1968 was not antigovernmental, but rather was opposing a certain way of thinking. There were true feelings behind this; the French felt that the kind of regimented life forced on them by the bureaucratic and market system was meaningless. Sartre’s existentialism as well as Foucault’s theories of power were closely related to the mood of the time.

The experience of Chinese intellectuals was also clear. Having lived through the 1960s and the 1970s, intellectuals wanted freedom, felt that human nature had been distorted and that they should embrace universal values like the rest of the world. But the experience of the intellectuals was far from that of the grassroots people in China. I think intellectuals may have made a mistake when they equated the people’s distaste for official corruption and inflation at the time with a dislike of the socialist system itself. People at the grassroots level of course wanted stable prices and hated corruption, but they weren’t talking about individual freedom.

Scholars from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s should be closer to us, and I hope to be able to study them some day. The way Yugoslavia turned out is a tragedy, for which the West is largely responsible. The current narrative is that the disintegration of the country was inevitable because it had always been composed of different ethnic groups, held together only by the Soviet Union. Which leads me to ask: at the time, those different ethnic groups were living in a country with one of the highest welfare standards in the world, a high standard of living, and flourishing art and culture; is this not a goal we should all strive for? If everyone lets go of their so-called cultural and ethnic differences in favor of a common good life, is this not a good thing?

One thing that I admire Western scholars for is their self-reflection. The strongest critics of Western society come from within the West, and we relied on Western literature to understand what happened during the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The US government and German banks had a lot to do with it, by encouraging certain people to split off first, and then the Yugoslavian military was not strong enough to fight back, and a series of economic problems followed, including serious inflation— just like Venezuela today—so that if you made the slightest error, your adversaries cut you to pieces. I haven’t been to any part of the former Yugoslavia, but from what I’ve read in Western media, the situation is not good. I know that several formerly socialist East European countries are among the handful of countries in the world that are implementing a fixed tax system, which means that whether you earn one hundred dollars a month or 20,000 dollars a month, you pay the same rate of tax, while most places in the world use a progressive tax system. This is a kind of extreme neoliberalism that even the West dares not put into practice.

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