8. Self-as-Method,
Universities Should Look for the Exceptional
Wu Qi: To continue our discussion of community, perhaps we can be a bit more concrete. What sort of expectations should we have of universities today? What should universities be doing?
Xiang Biao: Universities function differently in different eras. In China, we have entered a period where material conditions are pretty good and the education level is quite high in urban areas, so “social reproduction” is becoming increasingly important. As we discussed before, many problems will not be resolved through economic redistribution alone, which by itself will not address “people’s diverse needs for material, spiritual and cultural life”,1 which is very real. Given this, what kind of people our universities should be turning out is an important question.
Wu Qi: Are there any historical examples of university education that comes close to what you are envisioning?
Xiang Biao: Not really. Universities in the 1960s were exceptions, naturally, in Europe and in the United States, and places like Oxford always had all sorts of strange people, but this has to do with their aristocratic background. Aristocrats can be exceptional if they want to. Some radical left-wing people came from the most privileged families, and they read a lot and turned their backs on their roots, making sacrifices for the life of the mind.
1 Translator’s note: The quotation is from Xi Jinping’s Work Report to the Nineteenth Party Congress.
In China, after the founding of the PRC, we experimented with open- door schooling,2 with the abolition of the examination system, and with worker-peasant-soldier schools, which were all good ideas. At the end of the 1970s, we restored the college entrance exam. How should we understand this? Looking back now at 40 years of reform and opening, we all seem to see the restoration of the entrance exam as something completely natural, as if society had restored its basic rationality and returned to normal. But who’s “normal” was this? For 90% of the peasants, whether the exam system was abolished or not made little difference, but the resumption of the exam system immediately reunited former bureaucrats and urban intellectuals. It was actually a new alliance between the Party and the elites in the socialist system of that era.
Wu Qi: The examples you give, the 1960s, etc., all seem to have been in the process of confronting a certain opponent with which they are dissatisfied, they are criticizing and challenging it. Is it our expectation that it is only under such circumstances that universities will be mobilized to create new thinking?
Xiang Biao: This is not quite the same thing as the “exception” we have been talking about. If we are talking about a consensus that has come together in the face of a formidable enemy, like in Japan at Tokyo University in the 1960s, when the slogan was “down with imperialism, dissolve Tokyo University,” and when male students faced the US Embassy when they took a piss, this was a historical exception, but this cannot last long, and this experience has limited direct reference value for us. When faced with a strong common enemy, everyone wants to resist, which has been necessary at certain moments in history, but this comes with its own problems, including oversimplification, which puts even more limits on intellectual creativity.
The exceptions I am talking about are more individual. Universities themselves may not be exceptions, but universities should allow and encourage everyone to look for exceptions. Universities are moderate places, not angry places. In today’s generally moderate climate, if everyone looks for the exceptional when we do not have a common enemy, it might take us even deeper. We ourselves might be the enemy, which means that we will have to think a bit harder. We will need to pay closer attention to people around us and think about their life carefully. Two years ago, students at Beida did a study of people who work on campus, and the support staff, in order to understand more about what their life is like, and the result attracted some public attention. This is something that university students should do. This might not necessarily be looking for the exceptional, but it is already a couple of steps outside of the mainstream, and already has achieved good results.
2 Translator’s note: Open-door schooling (kaimen banxue) was a Cultural Revolution - period initiative to break through the elitist, institutionalized educational system and bring schooling closer to the people.
Wu Qi: Is this kind of exception also the source of Beida’s sense of its own centrality, which it has had since the May Fourth movement? Is it the same thing that you criticized about intellectuals and the elite?
Xiang Biao: Beida thinks it is leading history forward, that when they are opposing something, they are pushing history forward, in the right direction. So Beida thinks the essence of its action is not opposition, but progress, which is different from resistance. Resistance is something that the weak do, like peasants who try to pay fewer taxes and live their lives without outside interference, but Beida is all about heroism, progress, and shaking things up. From a scholarly perspective, resistance should be linked with doubt or skepticism, but Beida isn’t like this, and always insists that it is right, and at the center of the action. At particular moments in history, such as the May Fourth period of the 1980s, it made sense, but this attitude gets dangerous after a while. I worry about Beida’s self-confidence, it’s feeling that it has a firm grasp on history and truth.
Wu Qi: What are your feelings about the Chinese scholarly world? I feel sort of pessimistic and powerless about the current state of culture, education, and art, and sometimes I have a hard time with the general silence and inaction, which is probably one of the reasons why we wanted to do this interview.
Xiang Biao: It’s true that in general there is not that much interesting stuff going on. To tell the truth, scholarly progress in China has been slower than I thought it would be. I thought that given all the changes and all the interesting things that people were talking about, something would come of it, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of analysis, which is quite strange.
Problematizing Individual Experience
Wu Qi: Since you published Zhejiang Village and Global “Body Shopping,” the Chinese world hasn’t seen any more books from you, but at the same time we can read any number of specialized articles on theory or methodology. Does this represent some kind of change in your scholarly trajectory?
Xiang Biao: In a certain sense, Singapore marked an endpoint, because I finished my book Global “Body Shopping” there. But from another perspective, Singapore marked the starting point of a new period, when I started to feel like scholarship should be like singing or dancing. After I left Singapore to return to Oxford, I started my project on Northeast China, which meant rebuilding links to China. But I felt like it wasn’t interesting enough just to do another case study, and I needed to go think about something bigger. The topic of my China research at the time was “intermediaries in labor export,” which did not strike me as deep enough. What allowed me to transition was a series of articles I wrote in Chinese. There was “The World, Scholarship, and the Self,” which in fact was a summing up of various things. Then there was “Looking for a New World—Changes in How Modern and Contemporary China Understand ‘the World,’” in which I was also looking to find my own place. I started doing research and giving talks in China. One talk I gave at Zhongshan University* was “How Ordinary People Understand the State.” They all had to do with discussions of the world, the state, and globalization. These questions were not directly related to my earlier work, but I noticed some of them while doing my earlier research. I learned an important lesson while working on Zhejiang Village. While I and my university friends went there to set up the social work team, trying to help the people in the village to protect and organize themselves, so that their lives outside the state system would be better, they were hoping to establish relations with the state through us at Beida, so as to better fit into the system.
Later on, when I was working on international migrant labor, or the activities of intermediaries, or filing petitions, or other questions, I gradually came to have new ideas about this lesson, and wanted to tackle it at a deeper level, but then found that I did not have the theoretical resources. I also realized that these big questions had been addressed historically in many interesting ways, which I knew nothing about. Partly in order to catch up in this regard, with Wang Hui and some other people I started to work on a reader called Debating China. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and I still don’t know when it will be done, but I’m proud of it, and I learned a great deal while doing it.
Had I not experienced this transition, I might not have written my essays on Hong Kong, or on young people, which were of a different style from my previous work. And without those essays, we might not be talking to one another here. In the past, other people may have felt that I was a good scholar, but that I wasn’t someone addressing important public issues. Actually, I like this kind of issue, which is connected to my Beida experience, so when I wrote those essays I felt at ease and happy. Now the challenge is how to deepen my thinking and link everything up with my research agenda. Because these more theoretical things are all over the place and quite ambitious and require a lot of imagination, it is really hard to test them, and you need data from a great many sources. As an individual scholar, there is no way to resolve this in the short term, because once your thinking has extended in many directions, the material you look at is all spread out, too, and any one source may yield any number of conclusions, so you often need more sources to confirm or supplement what you’ve done, all of which means that it is hard to know what step to take next in your research life. I am constantly exploring, and have written many drafts for many projects, which I then set aside. For instance, I signed a book contract for the Northeast China project in 2008, so it’s been ten years and I haven’t been able to finish it. I’m sort of at a loss as to how to improve.
At the same time, I have started writing commentaries as a way of sustaining my thinking. For example, I am now writing a piece on Beijing’s “cleanup” of migrants in 2017, which is hard to do, because I need a lot of information that is not easy to get. Also, because it is topical and I want to get it out on time, and because the process of the cleanup was itself complicated. Writing something with which you are satisfied on this kind of topic is very difficult, it’s scary.
For the past few months, I’ve been working along three lines. One is looking at some specific questions, which are half-scholarly and half-public. ✓I’m writing the preface to the Chinese translation of Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which is a commentary and expresses some of my own ideas on the matter. This line of work does not add all that much, it mainly applies what I know already, and is fairly easy to do. ✓The second is to follow up on the question of the migrant population cleanup in Beijing. Since 2001, and especially after the abolition of the forced custody and repatriation system in 2003, policy toward the migrant population became relatively loose, even if there was no basic breakthrough on the question of household registration. So how could there be such a big change at the end of 2017? Was the 2017 cleanup the same as those before 2003? I think they are different, and that what we are seeing now is a new use of power, but it is hard to explain this clearly. This is an issue that I was not prepared for, but once the incident occurred, I felt like someone should take a look at it. ✓The third area is my big topics, such as work on migrant populations and especially on infrastructural power; there is also social reproduction-driven labor migration, because social reproduction has become a driving force in today’s economy; and then there is the issue of religion and ethnicity.
So, the first group of projects is quite visible, but they are sideline projects and not really a burden. The second group of projects is important because they represent the work that an intellectual should be doing. The main problem is that I’m having a hard time making progress with the third group of projects. If I didn’t have the second and third group of projects, then the first group would become scattered, and I would start repeating myself. I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I had not foreseen things being quite so difficult.
This is a matter of your basic skill level. By basic skills, I mean the capacity to link big themes with concrete data and push things continually forward. I feel like I still have a lot of work to do on this front. In the past what I did was explain something clearly on the basis of concrete data, or write commentaries on some fuzzy, big issues, but if you really want to integrate everything and produce a truly accurate explanation of a problem, I feel that none of my work has done that yet. I’m currently looking at Western social science research, to see if they have any techniques that lead in this direction. Right now, I’m at a loss to know how to cultivate this kind of technique. All of this is related to your individual personality and to what kind of education in the humanities you had. For instance, exposure to religion can cultivate a particular kind of temperament and can make you more sensitive to how other people understand life, death, and misfortune. I find that some anthropologists with religious feelings do interesting work because they look at these aspects very carefully.
Wu Qi: Which authors and which books achieved the sort of standard you are talking about?
Xiang Biao: There are a lot of classics in anthropology. The author that influenced me the most was probably Paul Willis. His Learning to Labor has already been translated into Chinese.
Wu Qi: When you talk about difficulties with your transition, it is in fact an example of problematizing individual experience. When you were doing your post-doc at Singapore, you surely did not think about explaining anything on the basis of your individual experience. Is it possible that personal experience can be some kind of bridge, or at least a medium for asking questions when dealing with the need to connect concrete data to larger issues?
Xiang Biao: That’s a great way to put it. In my case, the origin of problematizing my individual experience was dissatisfaction with myself. I felt like I couldn’t achieve any depth no matter what I did, and that it wasn’t interesting. So, I started to complain and blamed the system, my parents, and my youth. This began the process of problematizing. The individual experience itself is not all that important, but problematizing individual experience is an important method. We want to understand the world, not ourselves, and the question now is from what angle we should understand the world and understand ourselves. So, problematizing our individual experiences is a concrete start in our effort to understand the world. If I am dissatisfied with myself, and take a look at my experience of growing up, I will be looking at my relationship with the world, wondering how other people can see things that I have been unable to, which ultimately brings me increasingly in touch with a concrete world.
Your individual experience is not a natural occurrence, but is part of a certain environment, with its own history, origin, and limitations. Problematizing it does not mean making it into something negative, or getting rid of it, but is instead a better way to embrace it. When I problematized my weak points, I came to understand how I got here, and how to live with my limitations. This is the opposite of loving yourself because you are looking outward, objectifying your experience. This is a good psychological exercise, and once you have problematized your individual experience you can be calm. Not that you will have seen through things, quite the opposite—what you understand is that life is complicated and ever-changing. Here’s my place in this world, which often makes me unhappy, but I come to terms with the facts, “accept my fate but do not accept defeat.” Having to struggle is not the problem. Struggle is a part of life, and if I have to choose between struggling and not struggling, I will definitely choose to struggle.
Wu Qi: When we first started this interview, you were worried about talking too much about your individual life, but over the course of our conversation, it looks like you discovered that taking yourself as a subject, or problematizing your individual experience, might indeed be effective.
Xiang Biao: At the outset, I truly had not thought about this, but as we talked it occurred to me that it was a good way to discuss certain questions. Beginning with personal experience, then proceeding to bigger questions, and how to bring the two together, this is problematizing. Experience itself becomes something you need to explain. In the beginning, we were talking more about ideas and how to intervene in society, and I thought that individual experience was just a background factor, but it turns out to be a basic source material of thinking. As to how precisely to problematize it, you need to know a lot of things, like what the educational system was like when you went to primary school, what the social and economic conditions were—you have to have this historical knowledge; you also need some comparative observations about how other classmates did and how they have grown up. So individual experience is an entry point, to which you have to add a fair bit of knowledge to fill it out and reach larger issues. Any style of thinking that gets to the bottom of things is linked and connected to other things. What does “connected” mean? We have said this word many times. “Connect” means to return to practice, because practice is always connected! How do you get back to practice? Practice is so fluid and relentless, and grasping it is not easy. Personal experience is the starting point to start learning to grasp praxis.
New Research
Wu Qi: We have talked a good bit about your public talks and your interviews in the media, which might be seen as the more social side of your work, which was part of our original intention, but on reflection, it seems like we have talked less about your research activities. Is there a relationship between the two?
Xiang Biao: We haven’t talked all that much about my research because the topics I am working on are rather specific. For example, in my work on overseas labor placement agencies, I’m looking at how governments, international organizations, and NGOs regulate labor mobility, in terms of recruitment and other practices. The central issue here is the relationship between bureaucracy and the market. Labor migration is now basically treated as a transaction in the market, but this market is absolutely not a typical flat market, but is instead hierarchical and structured like an administrative system. We generally think of market and bureaucracy as being opposites, but marketization itself quickly leads to hierarchy. Why is this? On the one hand, the market has its own internal momentum, because to maximize profits, it relies on monopoly and control of upstream resources. A second reason is that, at present, governments and international organizations are increasingly emphasizing the protection of human rights and orderly mobility, and they have created many regulations in this sense. This in turn increases the legitimacy of certain commercial intermediaries, because they have the ability to process the paperwork properly, creating the impression that they are respecting the regulations and protecting workers, or at least avoiding unfortunate incidents. After they master this process, they use this ability to protect their position in the market and seize excess profits. Completing paper-work for migrants becomes their main source of profits, instead of actual recruitment and the daily work of labor management. They farm out the recruitment tasks to smaller companies, who may engage in any number of practices that are more or less legal.
To take another example, social reproduction is closely related to student mobility, because now, learning English and studying abroad are no longer simply something to add to your CV, but are meant to fundamentally change you as a person and how you live your life. Parents in China are no longer thinking that they want their children to get a foreign degree so as to get a good job, and instead, they are thinking that education in China goes against human nature and takes away a child’s natural sense of happiness, so studying abroad is about protecting their basic human nature. This is not a simple question of ideas about education, this ultimately is a question of how society reproduces itself.
For a while, I was thinking about studying the Muslims from China’s northwest who go to the southeast coast to work as Arabic-Chinese interpreters. Some of them used to be troubled youth who dropped out of school in the northwest and got into a lot of fights. Their parents were worried that they would get in trouble, so they sent them to madrasas attached to the mosques, where they learned a little Arabic, and then suddenly in the 2000s they had the opportunity to work as translators. I wanted to see how this group understands religion, how they see China, and how, concretely, they fit into Chinese market practices within a global commercial economy in places like Yiwu, in Zhejiang, or Tianhe, in Guangzhou. Fundamentally this is about diversity in China. We know that diversity objectively exists in today’s China, but government discourse consistently has a hard time recognizing diversity and is incapable of handling it properly. I spent a long time in preparation and wrote a few things, but now I have basically set it aside.
Ethnic self-rule under socialist conditions comes with a particular politics, which I call transcendent politics. The idea of ethnic self-determination exists within the tradition of European socialism, and Lenin especially emphasized ethnic self-determination and especially cultural autonomy. I read a historical document that said that Lenin was influenced by the friend of his father, a missionary with the Russian Orthodox church, who insisted that missionary work had to be done in the native language of the people one seeks to convert and that you cannot use Latin or Russian. This is also the common practice of Protestant missionaries. William Soothill, who later taught in Oxford, translated the Bible into the Wenzhou dialect. Across from where my office is now is Wycliffe Hall, which is associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators, which translates the Bible into many different languages. So, missionaries became the first quasi-anthropologists, with a deep understanding of local cultures. Why this emphasis on local languages? The friend of Lenin’s father explained that the only way to truly communicate with God is through your own language. If you have to learn Russian, Latin, or English, you will never get close to God. You have to talk to God in the same language you use when you argue every day, the same language you use to talk to your wife and kids.
The emphasis on diversity here has a relationship to transcendence, in the sense that since we have a common future and common ideals, the fact that we are diverse now is nothing to fear, and instead is interesting and to be cherished. Lenin’s view of ethnic self-determination was the same idea, that since everyone was working toward Communism, differences in language or lifestyle were not insurmountable. If everyone established Communism using the language and lifestyle that is the most intimate to them, and conversely Communism was realized in different places with different local characters, would this not be great?
Today, many people understand Lenin’s position on ethnic self-determination as being simply a utilitarian matter, and argue that Lenin hoped that ethnic minorities would rise up and overthrow the Tsar and destroy the Tsarist system. But it was not so simple. On this front, China handled this quite well in the 1950s, and Han cadres in minority areas had to learn Uighur and Tibetan. But once we lost the transcendent ideal, things changed, which means that we are trying to solve the problem by relying solely on material interests and redistribution.
Wu Qi: That’s very interesting research, which in terms of content is related to migration and in terms of its problématique is clearly related to a concern for China. Extending things a bit further, it is not surprising that you have talked about the Hong Kong problem as well.
Xiang Biao: At one point, there were lots of dyed-in-the-wool Communist supporters in Hong Kong, like Szeto Wah*,1 who organized the teachers’ union. It was all a matter of ideals. When you have clear political ideals, many people will disagree, but some will agree and follow. Where the trouble came from later on, in my opinion, was something deeper, which was that everything got commercialized, and Hong Kong was not ruled by Hong Kong people, but by the government and rich merchants. Power is delegated to rich people who rule according to their personal interests. This can’t work, even in a deeply commercialized place like Hong Kong. My understanding of diversity is different from how it is used as a descriptive term. For me, it is not a simple matter of the existence of different cultures and different personal identities but instead means avoiding a situation in which life is dominated by one-sided financial or profit concerns. So, diversity is against homogeneity, against the idea that one homogenous logic comes to dominate public affairs. At present Hong Kong is ruled by authoritarianism and money, the carrot and the stick, both of which have been pushed to extremes. Why is this? Because we have no transcendent common ideals, and there is no social space left. I am not celebrating diversity in a Western sense, arguing that diversity is necessarily good. This isn’t the point of my argument. My argument is that once things are homogenous it can be rather dangerous.
Wu Qi: You talked about the sourcebook that you’re putting together with Wang Hui and the discussions you have organized for that. Can you tell us a bit about where the project is now?
Xiang Biao: In this reader, we are hoping to explore social debates in modern and contemporary China. We chose ten large topics, which are related to everyone’s lives, such as the debate on the idea that women should abandon their jobs and return to their families. This debate started in the 1920s and 1930s and went through a number of twists and turns, and recently someone on the CPPCC brought up the idea again, arguing that it would benefit the stability of employment and the family. We looked at these debates together and over time, trying to see how the arguments developed.
1 Translator’s note: Szeto Wah (1931–2011) was a leftist political activist in Hong Kong throughout his life, organizing teacher’s unions and ultimately spearheading Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
The question of divorce is another one. The author Yu Luojin* (b. 1946) asked for a divorce because she had no feelings for her husband, which was a big deal in 1980, when divorce was only granted to partners of counter-revolutionaries. Later on, the Beijing municipal court approved her request. Now, however, the Supreme People’s Court has passed the “Interpretation of the Marriage Law, version 3,” which allows for considerable discussion of how to divorce, how to divide property held before divorce, and how to individualize property, all of which will help the courts make clear rulings on property questions, which means that divorce will be easier than before. The law basically states that divorce is possible at any time. For example, if a couple has been married twenty years, and the woman earns less than the man but has contributed much more time and effort in the home, this will not count at the moment of divorce, and all that will count is the property you recorded in the marriage contract. One part of the reasoning behind the new ruling is cases where a woman marries a rich man and then quickly divorces him, asking for half of their common property, and the law wants to protect the rich man. It is fairly clear whose voice the law is listening to.
In addition, beginning in 1994, the sociologist Zheng Yefu (b. 1950)* and the economist Fan Gang (b. 1953)* had a debate on “car civilization,” in other words, whether China should develop the car industry, which later included discussions of whether to raise the fuel tax, and various questions relating to road and car issues, ultimately becoming a debate on environmental issues, and now there is a debate on global warming. So, we will put all of these debates together, and translate the original materials into English for international readers. We have not paid enough overall attention to these kinds of social debates, and in the past focused more on debates concerning the political line, theory, or policy.
Wu Qi: Will you and Wang add your own explanations or analyses?
Xiang Biao: There will be editorial notes, but not full articles. It is basically a reader, meant to focus on the social side of things. So, this reflects the opinion of those who participated in the debates, not solely those who make policy and the experts, but citizens as well, who have their own viewpoints and their own life experiences. We looked through magazines like Banyuetan* from the 1970s and 1980s, which printed a lot of readers’ letters, and sometimes organized discussions around the themes raised in the letters, and what is interesting is that they identified the status of the writer, such as student, housewife, soldier, worker, peasant. More recently, however, the only voices that join in the discussion are those of urban, well-educated people, and even on social media, we don’t hear much from workers. We hope to do a Chinese version later on because a lot of the material should be quite fresh to today’s readers in China. The participation and the representativeness of the earlier period are quite different from what we see on social media today, however open we think we are. Of course, that participation was not simple and direct, nor was it spontaneous, and the discussions were organized and directed. This touches on the question of what constitutes leadership. What kind of leadership you are exercising depends on what questions you raise, and how you organize discussions? Not allowing discussion is not exercising leadership power.
Common Ideals
Wu Qi: You said something that struck me as quite important, which was your reference to a “loss of common ideals,” in relation to what we were saying about China and history before. Where did you get this concept? Does it come from a particular context? What do you specifically mean by it?
Xiang Biao: It is basically about Hong Kong. A few years ago, I got bored with case studies and instead started to pay attention to problems in the world, feeling like I ought to have a basic grasp on important issues. In fact, I was re-educating myself. The 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China had gone much more smoothly than many of us had imagined it would. This was because there had been shared ideals around building a strong socialist country. There were a small number of Hong Kong people who clearly identified with this, such as the teacher’s union, and there was also a small number of people who resolutely opposed this, but there was room for debate. Later on, however, everything came to be about money and power, and the common ideals disappeared. Everything became a question of opportunism, and the merchants supported the government in order to cash in. So now there was no narrative and no explanation for anything. So, who are the people going to genuinely support? This question merits further reflection as well because, when we first started talking about the market economy and making universities more professional and less bureaucratic, running universities like a company, we thought that we didn’t have to rely on common ideals in order to work together. But what happened now is unexpected. I was thinking about this in the context of my project on Northeast China, how market relations came to be transformed into power relations. Although labor placement is meant to be a purely economic matter, everyone is doing their best to transform profit relationships into hierarchical relationships, which is the only way to better protect commercial interests. This is a result of the loss of common ideals.
Wu Qi: This question is directly linked to another, the even bigger question, which is how we in China understand ourselves today, today being the product of our past common ideals, but how do we finally understand it? Is it different than in the past?
Xiang Biao: There is something really strange here. We seem to be saying now that we want to get back to our common ideals—“don’t forget your original intentions”1 —and that’s fine. But this takes us back to what we were talking about before, which is that all of politics is constructed, and relies on countless small universes and countless intermediate processes. If these intermediate processes are still rooted in the usual rigid power structures, then the effort of bringing back ideals at the top may simply become exaggerated performances at the grassroots level. For the past twenty years or so low-level officials have had it easy. They can do whatever they want to, as long as they don’t make a mistake. They make sure to protect each other’s interests, so you can be a little corrupt and I can be a little corrupt. This level of corruption cannot continue. I support the idea that it is time to re-politicize certain things. But clearly, some people think this only means coming up with slogans, and some people are even using these slogans as weapons, which frightens people at the mid - and grassroots levels. When people are afraid, they can react with extraordinary measures in an attempt to protect themselves. They do not reform themselves rationally, or reconstruct their ideals, but rather knowing that they have already betrayed their ideals, they have to resort to any available means to protect themselves, to the point of trying to silence other people. So, things are complicated now. Some people understand politicization in an abstract sense and act out of emotion. They are not thinking about the living situation of ordinary people. They are not acting like local gentry.
1 Translator’s note: The idea of “not forgetting one’s ‘original intention’” is an oft- repeated propaganda point in China, which recycles what was originally Confucian language to try to remind people of the original goals of communism.
Wu Qi: Thinking about the Chinese political situation, if we look again at how ordinary people in China are more and more seeking to prove themselves to the world, then the question becomes even more interesting, in the sense that it looks both reasonable and dangerous. How do you see China and the Chinese people in terms of their self-expectations?
Xiang Biao: We should be thankful to the world for their expectations of China because these expectations express the world’s maturity. Many in the West are truly hoping that China will do something and make a contribution, especially in terms of green energy or fighting climate change. Many developing countries also have similar expectations, which is a reaction to the unreasonable power relations in today’s world. But mainstream opinion in China today is not talking about doing something different, but about becoming number one, and many basic ways of thinking are similar to what we see in the United States, which to my mind has something to do with our loss of common ideals. When was China most respected in the world? In the 1950s and the 1960s, during the nation-building period. Beginning with the Bandong Conference in 1955, through Mao’s creation of the theory of the three worlds in 1974, China had a huge influence internationally and sparked a lot of international discussion and debate.
But the idea of proving oneself is a paradox. If you have to prove yourself, this means you don’t have a self, which in turn means that you prove your existence through preexisting standards and markers, through other people’s thinking, which means pleasing other people and debasing yourself. For an individual it means asking for recognition, means doing things to be seen, not to be happy. All of this starts from a feeling of insecurity and lack of self-worth. The rise of militarism in Japan was to prove that the Japanese were not inferior to Europe. So, you’re right: proving yourself can be dangerous.
Local Gentry as Method
Wu Qi: The idea of the gentry is perhaps one concept that threads our conversation together, which may also be one of your particularities, so let’s talk about it a little bit more. Today’s social structure is no longer like the rural society of the past, and indeed there have been profound changes. Are local gentry still possible?
Xiang Biao: As an attitude, the gentry can exist. The local gentry never really fit in with the larger system, and there was always a certain distance. Their foothold was in their small universe, but they could communicate with and outflank the system, or make use of the system. They had their own understanding of the system. From this perspective, it is entirely possible for the gentry to exist today, but anyone who wants to be a member of the gentry must first understand their own little world and have a firm grasp on the system as well. The difference is that in the past, the gentry lived and acted in the world of the rural villages, and was very clear on their material origins, while this question of material origins is quite different now, and we need to understand it in a new way. Today’s small worlds are not self-sufficient, but instead are constructed, and have no material boundaries. Precisely because they are constructed, the principles behind the construction are a crucial matter, and when you construct your own little world, you have to define it, and decide what you will do in it, what the principles are, what ends you are serving.
Wu Qi: In modern society, people are divided among all sorts of specialized institutions, such as companies, schools, bookstores, shops, etc., and most of these organizations have leaders. Can we understand these leaders as latent gentry?
Xiang Biao: The key point may be how much those leaders are hoping to be promoted to higher levels, and how much being an official is important to them. The gentry have to be a part of their world, their people, and to represent these people. They don’t look for promotions. The gentry has to fully understand the demands and interests of these people and has to express these demands in a language that the official system can understand, that will have an impact on the system, and to which the system will have to react. In this sense, the gentry of the artistic world and the gentry from villages would have no trouble sitting down for a chat, because they share many strategies. The next question is whether the gentry are the same as civil society, NGOs, and activists. My feeling is that they are not too alike. The gentry don’t have a priori, preset goals, and their goal is not to engage in social movements. The important thing is that they represent a group of people, and what they do is continually convey their situation, so the gentry are a kind of representative, whose role is to analyze, understand, and represent; they are shapers of discourse, and also makers of local rules.
Wu Qi: It sounds like representatives to the People’s Congresses in our political system.
Xiang Biao: This was the original idea, to replace the gentry with the representatives of the People’s Congresses, but the issue is complicated. Many people argue that the modern state-building project at the beginning of the twentieth century led local bullies who served state interests to replace community-oriented gentry, or resource-grabbing, selfish gentry to replace what was originally a more cultured gentry. The people’s representatives are meant to be the local representatives of the grassroots populations, and if we can make the system of popular assemblies work properly, then we will have modernized the gentry. The people’s representatives should discuss policy from the perspective of the small worlds of which they are a part. But contemporary representatives are divided by profession and redistributed to fill quotas, and they wind up being quite distant from those they are meant to represent, so the organic quality of representation is lost.
Wu Qi: What’s the difference between the gentry and public intellectuals as presented in popular discourse in China at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
Xiang Biao: I think the difference is pretty big. In my view, one important thing about establishment intellectuals is that they want to articulate universal principles and see themselves as critics. The gentry are moderate and are not concerned with criticism based on universal principles. Their point of view is rooted in the local world, and they have no sense of moral superiority over the system. An important part of the gentry’s job is protecting the well water or responding when someone’s chickens are stolen. Relying solely on principles won’t do—you have to figure out what it means that someone stole someone else’s chickens right before Spring Festival. This is different from today’s public intellectuals. In continental Europe, especially France, there are what they call public intellectuals. Their thinking can be idealistic, sometimes radical, and revolutionary. It is quite different from Britain. Britain does not have this kind of prescribed role for intellectuals, although of course there are countless commentators in newspapers, and thus a lot of organic voices, but no opinion leader emerges to shock people with his ideas. Instead, it is rather conservative, so when Fei Xiaotong came to Britain he felt right at home, with his Yangzi Valley gentry temperament, which was quite similar to that of his British counterparts.
Wu Qi: Since the gentry temperament is itself moderate, is it more likely to produce social reform rather than radical social movements?
Xiang Biao: Probably. But the idea that because gentry are conservative, we don’t need revolutions, or revolutions are always bad, is wrong-headed. We have a lot of people who talk about revolution today, but they cannot explain why revolution is not happening even when the system is illegitimate. The gentry would be better at explaining things like what the people are thinking, what their relationship with the system is, and how they are getting by. So, if we had a few more gentry-style intellectuals, this would not slow the progress of society. They cannot hold society back and would have a more comprehensive, accurate grasp on things. In non-revolutionary times, they are good at pushing changes forward, but when revolution becomes necessary, this means that there has been a rupture between the gentry and the system. So, we can’t take the gentry as a specific social group, but rather as representing a research perspective, or a method.
Wu Qi: Can you explain a bit more what “taking the gentry as method” might mean?
Xiang Biao: First, I am not talking here about the gentry as an existing group that we find in the population, but rather as individual temperament, or a way of thinking. Is your first reaction to get angry or to be curious? Do you make an effort to describe things clearly in a moderate, or even humorous, way, or do you rush to judgment? It is in this sense that I like how the gentry comport themselves, by observing life from the inside out. For example, having received a Western education, I know that peasants are wrong to prefer sons to daughters, but you can’t simply dismiss their feelings, and instead have to understand how their lives are set up, knowing what you can change, and what you allow to evolve on its own.
Second, whether we could really recreate the gentry as an actual social group or a social force, strikes me as quite doubtful. Of course, it is not completely impossible, and “local” doesn’t have to refer only to villages; any place has people who like to observe and who have good memories in ways that recall the gentry. But in theory, we still have to slowly move toward a system of political parties, organizing social life through professional groups, rather than relying on the moral order and imperial order maintained by the gentry.
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