9. Self-as-Method,

Wenzhou Interview, December 2018, Setting the Stage

Xiang Biao: Coming back to Wenzhou this time inspired me with a lot of thoughts and feelings. On this trip, I went from Oxford to Beijing and then from Beijing to Wenzhou, and the three worlds are very different. Oxford is quiet and the rhythm is slow. Beijing is fast and busy, with a sort of forthrightness about the business at hand, like you have to make decisions very quickly and move on to the next thing. Here in Wenzhou, I’m meeting up with classmates from high school, which is a completely different kind of setting. But at the same time, academic language describes all three of these places in the same way, in the sense that we basically call them all “neoliberal.” The three places are linked together but also remain completely different. I’m confused, too, because it’s not only that the language does not describe the real world, but that an increasingly homogeneous language is increasingly unable to represent a fragmented world. Everyone appears to be the same in terms of how they think, how they express their feelings, and what symbols they use, even while they are widely different in terms of income, standard, and quality of living, so it is hard to tell whether these lifestyles really are the same. I don’t know how to explain this theoretically. This is a serious problem for the social sciences.

Wu Qi: You travel a lot between these three places. Is this the first time you have felt this on coming back to visit?

Xiang Biao: Yes. When I was talking with some radical or near-radical students in Beijing they told me two things. The first was that when they went to help some of the migrant workers who had been “cleaned up” in 2017, they found huge gaps between themselves and the migrants, in terms of the workers’ understanding of family relations, their needs at the time, and what the students could offer them or in terms of discourse. The second was that aside from the fact that they had not gone to university and did not have a diploma, the workers were basically no different from them. They talk the same way and watch the same shows. Everyone lives on their cellphone, whether it’s Huawei, Xiaomi, or Apple. Both of these observations ring true.

There is something that really surprises me, which is that there are some young people who are much more radical than I expected. This sends a message, which is that the condition of “suspension” can lead to two outcomes. One is anxiety because when everyone is constantly busy and running around, certain basic ideas of life can become very conservative, as we see in the so-called new familyism, Chinese-style forced marriages, the idea that you have to have children, you have to buy a house…This is all linked to this homogeneity. Because you “suspended” yourself from the present, in the rush toward an elusive future, the life you’re living now cannot take on meaning. It’s sort of like fundamentalism, where home and family become the only things that sustain you. The flip side of this new conservatism is radicalism, where you feel that because diverse and contradictory things are hard to understand or value, you feel like revolutionary, comprehensive, earth-shaking changes are needed, and everything else is illusory, false, and oppressive. The idea of “suspension” explains why the Chinese economy grows so fast, why everyone pursues the same goal, all struggling for themselves, working like crazy to make money, which produces these two latent problems. What help do you think Chinese intellectuals can offer to these students?

Wu Qi: Practically speaking, in today’s climate, my feeling is that no teacher is courageous enough to help them. Before the students went to try to help the migrant workers, teachers at the school tried to talk them out of it. The teachers simply repeated the same language, they made no effort to understand why the students wanted to do what they did. But there’s nothing for them outside of school either, no work unit, no system, they didn’t know who to ask for help except to talk to their peers. They weren’t looking for someone to save them but would have welcomed some insight into the situation, or some shared experience, but we intellectuals don’t have any concrete experience, and can only share our common sense, or our own judgment of the situation, or at the least we can offer a little comfort. So, all of this is quite hard for them.

Xiang Biao: This is a real challenge, and something society needs to respond to.

Wu Qi: Let’s talk a bit more about the specifics of your research. We talked about this a bit before just to flesh things out without focusing on it, but now it seems to me that the preoccupations and motivations behind your research are in and of themselves the direct responses of one scholar to social conditions, and perhaps even more urgent and direct than our chats about your life at Beida and in Oxford and Singapore. They directly reveal how we should raise questions and concerns, and how we should solve problems. For this reason, I think your empirical research should also become an additional thread in our discussion, and I thought we might delve into it now.

Xiang Biao: Good idea. Scholarship is a kind of intervention, and I’m a living person who wants to express my own thoughts about life in this world. By “intervention” I mean that what we write should touch our readers’ souls, and stimulate their thinking, all of which we’ve talked about before. The point of art is not to create a beautiful, harmonious world, but rather to enable you to face what is ugly.

“Accept your fate without accepting defeat” makes the same point. The most direct reason why we are anxious is that we lack a clear understanding of today’s world, and wind up feeling that we are always in the wrong place. This is why I pay attention to non-fiction writing. To me, it is a kind of emphasis on “authenticity” in an aesthetic sense, that is to say, the real has its own beauty even if it appears in an unpleasant guise. In the 2010s, young people started to have the confidence to value things they felt were real. Before, people derived meanings from grand, fabricated, abstract expressions, because they felt that real things didn’t have meaning in and of themselves, and could only be understood by shining the light of grand narrative on them. Now young people are saying that we don’t have to make judgments, nor do we have to start from lofty principles. We can just talk about our experience, which can be random, but as long as it’s real it has meaning. This kind of breezy self-confidence is relatively new and has to do with young people’s educational level and urban lifestyle. This is not a solution in and of itself and is mixed together with all sorts of anxieties, but it provides a solid foundation for people to advance in their thinking.

Wu Qi: Let me push back a little here. Every time you start to praise non-fiction I feel a certain doubt, maybe because part of my work is in this field. On the one hand, I agree that the lives of today’s youth are more immersed in reality than in the past few generations, but I can’t help but wonder how “authentic” that “reality” is. Are they really curious? Are they in pursuit of real things? It is also possible that every generation of young people is the same, in the sense that they are easily aroused and want to participate, but without getting in too deep and doing something concrete. All they do is ask questions. To speak more specifically about media and cultural circles, everyone has been directly influenced by the intellectual culture of the 1980s and 1990s and feels called upon to make grand gestures, and a good deal of their pain and anxiety comes from their self-expectation in this sense. But as time moves forward, they come to see more clearly that these gestures are useless and have no real impact on things. They are weak and even laughable. To me, we are living in a moment when young people realize the historical burden they are bearing. Intellectual leaders have left the scene, leaving us without norms or guidance, and everybody now talks about concrete plans instead of abstract issues, so that some older intellectuals are now pointing their fingers at young people, saying that what the youth are doing is wrong, which only increases their spirit of rebellion. It’s as if different generations of intellectuals don’t know how to communicate, and wind up blaming one another, losing confidence in one another, and both seeing the worst in one another. I don’t know whether this judgment holds for other professions, but for university students and people working in cultural industries, it is pretty obvious and widespread.

Xiang Biao: This is quite a deep issue, thanks for your insights. “Truth” and “honesty” contain three dimensions: what is “true,” what is “honest,” and what is “real.” The youth you are talking about dare to express themselves honestly, and their feelings about their own experience are also direct. They will not easily suppress these feelings, so there is an honest self there. Looking carefully at language can sometimes help us think through things. For example, when we say “true” (zhen)* or “real” (shi)* and “fake” (xu)* or “false” (jia )*, we used to use “fake” rather than “false.” Because to say something is false, you first have to know what is true, but in the past, because of propaganda and grand discourses, we could not tell true from false, so we sort of vaguely referred to all the formal expressions as “fake.” Now everyone has turned against “fake.” These days we might fabricate things, and when necessary resort to tricks, but we won’t be “fake” with people, using big and empty words without saying what we want. Sometimes we are fed up with “political correctness,” not because it is wrong or false, but because it sounds “fake and empty,” and does not allow people to express themselves directly. To my mind, having an honest self, even if it is somewhat reduced, is much better than having a lofty, if empty, self.

Yet after becoming honest, it seems like they have not reflected further on reality. This means that they are not entirely clear on the distinction between what is “true,” that is, principles that you cannot feel directly but need nonetheless to defend and pursue, and what is “real,” that is, what their hearts tell them based on their life experience. As you said, young people’s rebellion against their elders and their dislike of political correctness are both honest, but does this honesty represent a better understanding of our current lives? Does it express a new understanding of our historical experience? Not necessarily. The populism that everyone is experiencing all over the world can to a great extent be understood as a rupture between what is “honest” and what is “true.” Many people who voted for Trump are good, honest people. What are we to do? As a scholar, my thought is that the tools we have for thinking and expressing ourselves are not diverse enough. Bourgeois political correctness and universal values pretty much monopolize the public conversation, becoming the only way to express “truth.” Now everyone is starting from a posture of “honesty,” and is slowly coming to express their experience. If we keep going this way, then we can keep the honesty that approaches the truth, and let slide the kind of “gotcha” honesty fueling anti-political correctness, and maybe then we can slowly link honesty with important issues. This is something I hope for.

Social Reproduction

Wu Qi: To return to our main topic. Why, today, are you researching, and especially focusing on, social reproduction? Is this an idea that you discovered while working on migration, which put it on your radar, or is it something more recent?

Xiang Biao: This is recent. My past research focused on material production, value transfers, and structural analyses of socioeconomic inequality and institutional arrangements. While in Global “Body Shopping” I did talk about dowries and marriage, the experiences I examined are not particularly rich. The “social reproduction” I talked about in the book viewed people as a factor in production. I talked about how they invest in education, in IT training, and then how graduates moved away to large cities, looking for high-paying jobs that would allow them to pay off their investment in education. In this sense, I treated human production as a process of material production. But Vani said something to me that I found quite profound. She said that parents do not raise their children just to work in IT. Parents invest in education also because they have a sense of duty and love. Sometimes there is no plan, they don’t know why they are doing what they are doing, maybe to honor their ancestors, but no matter what the reason is, it is not simply that they raise their children in order for them to work in IT service jobs. There are a lot of intermediary steps, and I overlooked them. I slowly came to focus on the importance of human lives. In fact, it had something to do with age, as I eventually came to feel that I could not move readers with that kind of stiff academic language. We can do all the structural analyses we want to, but when we are living our lives, they do not seem so structured. So, this was the first thing.

Second, in terms of educating the young generation and taking care of the elderly generation, I noticed certain global changes and realized that “social reproduction” was becoming more and more important. “Social reproduction” is not the same as “human production.” “Human production” refers to how all people are trained to become an important element in production, related to such concepts as “human capital,” while “social reproduction” refers to how people reproduce themselves—they are the goal.

In the history of humanity, the vast majority of our labor is spent on “social reproduction,” gathering wild fruits, hunting, plowing, and planting. The goal is not to accumulate profit, nor to make a killing, but simply to sustain ourselves. Once we’re a bit richer, then the level at which we sustain ourselves goes up as well, and we indulge in a bit more ritual and leave a bit more sacrificial meat for the ancestors. So, this is the general cycle, and it is a cycle that has been broken by modernity. Modernity is closely linked to capitalism, and the point of human activities is not to sustain ourselves, but rather to make a killing. This is the structural transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society. People found themselves further and further away from the center, and economic activity was basically about the movement of capital. Past economic activity had been part of social activities and was there to serve the people, but modern economic life broke away from that. Indeed, not only did it break away, it came to be the most important force molding social relations, and under these circumstances, “social reproduction” came to be ignored.

In addition, if you look at basic trends in world population mobility, the economic position of Asia and China is rising, which is in contradiction with Asia’s and China’s position in international migration, because economic growth has not been accompanied by a decline in outward population flows, nor has there been any obvious increase in the number of foreigners migrating to China. So, increases in people’s income levels and ease of lifestyle strangely led to an unprecedented increase in desires to go abroad—to study abroad, to go to the United States to give birth, to emigrate as “investor migrants” by buying government bonds or assets in the host country. How do we explain this?

Another thing we should look at is changes in capitalism itself. Who are the big players now? Big platforms are making the most money now. The second biggest player has to do with services like education, medical treatment, and entertainment that have to do with “human reproduction.” The third major player might be mining and agriculture, which are called primary industries. In comparison, manufacturing, the industry that drove classical capitalism, is in decline. But manufacturing is on the rise in Asia and China because they are the world’s factories. If we look at human mobility, the original developed countries remain the center of the businesses linked to “social reproduction,” and these include education, medical care, and various kinds of knowledge production, as well as lifestyle trends. If we put the changes in capitalism together with the population flows I talked about earlier, it would seem that we have our explanation: why is it that as Chinese people are getting rich, they want to leave as soon as they make money? An important reason is that immigration is not about making money, but rather about “social reproduction,” about a more stable and more predictable future, about better education for your children, cleaner air, and more green space. Now, having lived through my own personal changes, and having linked “social reproduction” with global politics and economics, and at the same time having observed immigration flows, and analyzed the source of profits within capitalism, I would like to remind everyone of something: Asia’s rise and China’s rise are only one part of the whole picture, and “social reproduction” is a more important part.

Wu Qi: When you talk about changes in the life of an individual, what specifically are you talking about? What have advances in this kind of research managed to accomplish?

Xiang Biao: I’ll give you a recent example. I have a relative whose child is in middle school, and the parents are wondering whether they should send her abroad for high school, basically because the pressure in China’s educational system is too intense, which is having bad effects on children’s health. Even some children whose grades are very good take a nap in the evening, and then get up at three in the morning to do their homework. Because of long-term stress, their immune systems are compromised, and children break out in rashes that do not go away. For my relatives, sending their child abroad for high school is a matter of “saving her life.”

When we look at the history of Chinese studying abroad after reform and opening, we can divide it into three basic periods. The first was from 1976 to 1992. At the time, most students were sent by the state, and tended to be older and to study science and technology, doing M.A.’s and especially Ph.D.’s. Doing an undergraduate degree abroad was unheard of. The overseas students had a strong value orientation, which was to go to the West to learn advanced technologies, ideas, systems, and management methods, all of which serve as models for a future China.

The second period was from the 1990s until quite recently, and students were no longer sent by the state. These students went as individuals, were younger, and studied any number of disciplines, but to my mind, the most important change was that they no longer had a definite value orientation. There were two changes here: first, they did not necessarily return to China, and were not necessarily studying for reasons of patriotism; and second, they no longer thought that the West represented the future or served as a model. So, both the idea of serving the country and the idea of universal values began to waver, and students became more utilitarian and pragmatic. Recently things have become even more clear. No one believes any more that the American system is the model, but when you ask them why they want to go there, they say “of course we want to go! They have clear air, and green spaces, and work can be fun.” This is what led me to think about the issue of “social reproduction,” which in fact is an important political question. It does not look political at first glance, but politics grows out of it.

In addition, what I call the “Pacific paradox” also touches on changes in individual lives occurring with international mobility, which is something I got interested in early on. In the latter part of the 1990s, and especially after 2000, many people moved to the left politically after going abroad, which was a fairly widespread phenomenon. At the outset, this happened especially with people doing Ph.D.’s in the humanities, people as Wang Shaoguang* (b. 1953) and Gan Yang (b. 1953), two well-known scholars who identified with the New Left. This went against the expectations of people of my generation, so I started thinking about the phenomenon of studying abroad and its impact on social life.

What is the “Pacific paradox?” Sino-American relations at the time were closer than ever in terms of social and economic interactions, but at the same time in terms of political ideology there was an unprecedented rupture. Now it’s all clear. Lots of young Chinese went to America to study and came to feel that America represented no ultimate values, and instead felt that the Chinese system was quite good. But they still wanted to stay in the States, and all they talked about was the immigration lottery, which might give them a green card. When we watched “River Elegy” in 1989, rushing into the Pacific Ocean meant rushing into the future, and we all felt that intellectuals would certainly Westernize, but now things had suddenly reversed themselves. These were our initial expectations because we felt that through ever closer contacts, we would understand the West and its logic ever better, which would lead us to embrace it. But looking at things now, while we got closer in terms of lifestyle, political antagonisms grew as well. This is the Pacific paradox.

This paradox also has to do with the emptying out of public spaces. The state became the only unit of collective imagination, and outside of the state, communities like neighborhoods and school friends have all withered away, and nothing is left but the two extremes: the world and the individual self. When something happened all of a sudden, and people needed a collective in which to ground their identity, all they could do was turn toward the state. Of course, the state also produced a lot of discourse that helped this along, making your embrace of the state seem natural. This produces a type of nationalism that is not based on nostalgia or imagination grounded in a romantic view of history, tradition, or civilization, but rather in an understanding of power relations in the world. In other words, it is a geopolitical nationalism. This kind of nationalism says, if the big players act like this, then we have to act like this too. Everything is a struggle over power and interests so the world becomes a battleground where countries fight over power.

Wu Qi: In your subsequent work on studying abroad, did you discover anything new, or learn anything more about mobility or social reproduction? Can you talk about some specific examples?

Xiang Biao: I can talk about the “ritual economy” a bit. While I was in Singapore, the Asian Development Bank sought me out. In 2004, they had a general idea that they should be not just a funding agency but also a knowledge agency, meaning that they would not only stimulate development through investment but would also promote high-end policy research and engage in intellectual aid. One of the topics they thought up was whether they could get Asian immigrants to come back, or if they could be induced to help their home countries develop even if they did not come back. Because I felt somewhat lonely writing my book, I was eager for some practical engagement, so I agreed to work on the topic. I was responsible for the Chinese case, and cooperated with the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, and studied the policies the Chinese government had put in place to try to induce Chinese students who had studied abroad to come back.

First, what was immediately obvious was that the government was not in fact, encouraging people to come back permanently, and instead emphasized short-term visits to China, or even doing service to China without returning. There is a huge difference between “coming back to serve China” and “serving China without coming back.” In 2001, authorities came up with the “dumbbell model,” with one end of the weight inside China and one outside. At the time I thought this policy was innovative because they were promoting transnational thinking as a way to help China develop. Transnational and international are not the same thing. “International” refers to the links between two countries, and international trade, which is coordinated and controlled by sovereign nations, remains international no matter how big it gets. The relationship between a US company and a Chinese company is subject to the laws and policies of these two countries. “Transnational” refers to a space, or a set of activities, that transcends the realm controlled by sovereign countries. For example, Wenzhou people doing business in Europe have a relationship with Wenzhou, and with several countries, and are beyond the control of any one sovereign nation.

But I also found a paradox in the government’s initiatives to try to get students to come back and set up a company. On the one hand, all of these projects put a lot of emphasis on economic rationality, saying how much the government would invest, that the students were coming back to promote economic development, and that the whole thing was a win–win. On the other hand, there was a pronounced ritual element in how they actually did this, how they gave out the money, and how they told the students what the government wanted them to do. For example, if all they wanted was economic cooperation, then they would simply talk about the project and that would be it. So why bring all the participants together and hold a big meeting and a “signing ceremony?” These are big meetings and a lot of money goes down the drain. The event itself is highly ritualized, very emotional, and ideological, using language like “motherland,” “love”, and “sacrifice” in the speeches.

So, I call these initiatives “ritual economy” since it combines the two. This concept has at least two meanings. The first is that the state invests a lot of money in this ritual, which means there exists a concrete “ritual economy.” Second, what really makes the ritual convincing is the economist logic, namely that everyone is working for their own economic interests, and only economically win–win relations are realistic and sustainable. So, the ritual celebrates and reinforces such economic thinking We can also flip this over, and talk about an economic ritual instead of a ritual economy. This is about how the state uses rituals to redefine its relationships with the world. The state essentializes and ritualizes economic rationality. It says that the Chinese government is solely concerned about the economy and about development, which means that it is progressive and pragmatic and that elites from all walks of life should support it. The function of ritual is to make this focus on the economy seem natural, so that it truly enters into your subconscious, and is not something you think about. So, no matter what your political attitude is, the economic ritual ropes everyone in.

Later on, at Oxford I had a lot of contact with Chinese students, and I noticed something interesting, which was another paradox, which is the existence of intermediaries. In theory, such intermediaries need not exist. Universities are eager to attract foreign students, they put their regulations and application procedures on their websites, and explain everything very clearly. Those who are applying are all educated, and their friends and classmates are all studying abroad. There is no information asymmetry.

So why do you need intermediaries? First, the universities have their reasons. For example, National University of Singapore prefers to hire intermediaries to recruit students, because these intermediaries can handle a large number of applications, know the basic procedures of the college entrance examination in China or India and the situation of high schools, and can act as a filter to ensure that the school recruits the best students. From the students’ perspective, the role of the intermediary is in fact to help analyze the future employment situation, helping to decide where returns will be the highest in their particular case, and what school and major they should choose. So, on the one hand, intermediaries promote global student mobility, and at the same time they are also shaping and maintaining a certain hierarchical relationship—what kind of universities recruit what kinds of students, what kind of investment gets what kind of return. The reason that university rankings have become so important is that they give some information on return on investment. So here, the intermediaries are not dealing with problems of information asymmetry, or bringing supply and demand together and creating a market, but are instead structuring the market.

Here we see the relationship between studying abroad and social differentiation. Studying abroad transnationalizes the process of social differentiation. When the competition over differentiation reaches a peak within a country, then it spills over to the outside. If you can’t make it in China, then you try your luck abroad. In spatial terms, things move from domestic to international, and in terms of capital, the change is from financial resources to cultural or symbolic capital. The role of cultural or symbolic capital in sustaining financial or economic capital across generations is critical. This is how inequality gets locked in.

Wu Qi: I haven’t read much of this research in China, and you haven’t talked all that much about it. Will you talk about it in academic papers or at conferences?

Xiang Biao: I don’t know yet. This might wind up being a collective project, where I invite specialists from different fields to join in. It will need robust conceptualization so that we can see if what we learned from student mobility can be applied to migration related to health care and tourism. We need to relate the detailed information to basic questions such as those about values and hierarchy, then we will see whether it can be applied to other cases.

Wu Qi: I see from your explanation that in your research you regard mobility related to “social reproduction” as an overall trend, under which different case studies converge. This is not like Zhejiang Village where one case study opened up a different topic. So, what you are doing now, in terms of its difficulty and approach, appears to mark a new period of your work. What first caught your interest and pushed you in this direction?

Xiang Biao: I think it probably has something to do with my time in Singapore. I had a lot of colleagues in Singapore who were working on foreign domestic care workers. The commoditization of care was a big topic at the time, which touched on gender issues because most domestic workers were female. There is also the issue about the relation between public and private, because these workers were not coming into an organized enterprise, but instead someone’s private space, working in someone else’s home. So, a lot of research examined domestic workers’ individual experiences. But my feeling was that the global mobility of care workers represented a broader process of economic reorganization. Now everyone is aware of immaterial labor, such as IT, design, service, etc. Maybe we could put all this together to see whether there is something bigger behind it.

Transnational marriage is another example. In relatively developed countries, including China, “leftover women” are “high-status women,” women with Ph.D.’s, female white-collar workers or even female entrepreneurs, while “leftover men” are “low-status men.” Low-status men in cities marry women from rural villages, and low-status men in villages marry women from underdeveloped countries. For example, Japanese men marry Chinese women, South Korean men marry Vietnamese women, and Chinese men are now marrying Burmese and Vietnamese women. What existing research has focused on is what we call the commoditization of transnational marriage. People are worried that a human relationship as basic as marriage has become something that could be bought and sold. There are intermediaries who organize groups of men to go overseas to select brides, and the women line up to be chosen by their future husbands. A lot of people feel that this is hard to accept.

But I wanted to ask the opposite question, which was, if getting married is so hard, then why not stay single? Why is marriage so important that we have commoditized it? Maybe commoditization fetishizes marriage instead of degrading it. Behind transnational marriage is a conviction that marriage is so important that one cannot question it. Transnational marriage is an important process of social reproduction, and it reproduces not only individuals but also nations. According to conservatives, only if people get married and have children will we have the next generation, and only in this way will civilization be carried forward. So, there is always this kind of dialectic behind transnational mobility and social reproduction. Mobility, accelerated mobility, does not only stimulate changes but can also consolidate existing inequalities and norms.

The Paradox of Class Mobility

Wu Qi: You talked about examples of transnational mobility like studying abroad or marriage, which for the most part is about horizontal mobility, but you also mentioned various vertical processes like social differentiation, class, and equality, which are in a dialectical relationship with horizontal mobility. Can you unpack this dialectical relationship a bit, and explain in concrete terms how this makes things worse, particularly in the specific context of China? In other words, is vertical class mobility something you are concerned with?

Xiang Biao: The relationship between horizontal spatial mobility and vertical hierarchies is probably more complicated than the way we usually depict it. In the early period of reform and opening, the system was already hierarchical; there were those inside the system and those outside the system, and there were differences between officials, cadres, peasants, etc., there is no doubt about all this. But for the vast majority of people, the resources they possessed were more or less equal, and there was a strong sense of equality. With reform and opening, social differentiation increased, and there are four points that stand out.

First is that, for the moment, most people have experienced upward mobility, because the overall size of the economy is still expanding. We can also divide this process into two stages. One is straightforward upward mobility, which came with the agricultural reforms from the 1980s through the mid-1990s. During this period, everyone’s standard of living moved directly upward, and the reforms received a lot of popular support. Second, the period from the 1990s down to the present, which the sociologist Sun Liping described as a “fracturing,” where a gap appeared between those who have money and those who don’t. But people were generally okay with that, as everyone’s life was still improving. A couple of new growth engines, like Internet technology and the service industry, developed rapidly, and everyone had the feeling that a rising tide lifts all boats. For example, when Didi, China’s Uber, and bicycle-sharing services first came on the market, they spent a lot of money to win over consumers, and the common people had the happy feeling of “following along.”

The second point that stands out is that China’s social differentiation is a participatory competition involving everyone. This is related to the legacy of the early period of socialism. At the beginning of reform and opening, everyone had more or less the same resources, and reform and opening was inclusive, which meant that a billion people were pushed into market competition at more or less the same time. Everyone felt that they had the right to benefit in this process, and all tried to stay a step ahead of their neighbor and were afraid of being left behind, which created a strong mentality of not wanting to miss the bus. Every opportunity that slipped by might well be the last opportunity. This kind of mass participatory differentiation is unlike the rigid hierarchy we find in India, nor is it like what modern Western scholarship focuses on as the main problems of the day: exclusion, expulsion, marginalization, and direct oppression. Chinese people don’t have this feeling. They feel like they have to run fast, but if they fall behind, it is their responsibility. They don’t feel that they have been excluded. In some ways, it might have been healthier if they had been excluded, because this might have produced a new sense of self, which would come with a new set of actions. People might resist, or they might carve out a new path. But precisely because they feel like they are still in the game, and can still keep playing, they actively participate, and this is the second point.

Third, vertical differentiation is tied together with horizontal mobility. Once the masses participate in competitive mobility, some strive for international mobility in order to gain extra advantages. Those at the top send their capital abroad to preserve their position; those in the middle and at the bottom, like peasants, may go to Singapore or Japan for work; the urban middle classes send their children abroad to study.

We already talked about the fourth point, which is that this differentiation is not reflected in how we talk, or in cultural matters. Although we all know that there are inequalities between the rich and the poor, everyone nonetheless watches the same entertainment and speaks the same way.

Only when people have different ways of expressing themselves and different lifestyles does the meaning of inequality come into focus, at which point it is easier to come up with remedies or means to resist. Britain is like this. The British working class has a strong identity and does not want to hang around with intellectuals. Some people say they are shooting themselves in the foot, and keeping their children from ascending to the middle class. But because they have a clear understanding of their own distinctive lifestyle and develop their own artistic expression, they have the strength to contest the higher class, and they often hold their own and protect their interests through public policy. This is an interesting strategy: I want to protect myself, which does not mean that I want to surpass you, but rather test myself against you. Of course, such a strategy has limited effectiveness in practice now, largely because of globalization and the emergence of a global elite, which means that the working class has a hard time identifying its enemy, and at the same time the economic production and foundation of the working class are too diminished.

Wu Qi: Are all of these characteristics related to the timing of reform and opening? Because the most important developed countries have entered a new stage in the development of capitalism, which some scholars call late capitalism, while China remains in the primary stage of socialism, and at the same time, the explosion in technology and entertainment has been global and has spread throughout the world rapidly, creating the overlapping complexity of vertical and horizontal mobility. Do you feel like this is unique to China? In other words, is this something new in history?

Xiang Biao: I’m not sure whether this is something new in history. But what has happened in China, where a huge population is trying to change its destiny, is not something that happens often. The global perspective you mentioned is important. In terms of technology, information, and entertainment, we truly have entered the age of the global village; in terms of the economy and the distribution of wealth, the world is a battlefield; in terms of politics and ideology, it’s fragmented and antagonistic. We might see this as an extension of the “Pacific paradox.”

Wu Qi: You mentioned in your lecture at Tsinghua that there is a gap between China’s rise as an economic fact and as social consciousness. Can we understand this gap by looking at the idea of “social reproduction?”

Xiang Biao: We might say that China’s economic growth was truly an expression of materialism because we basically relied on material production to realize rapid growth, and the price we paid for that was that we paid little attention to “social reproduction.” I’ll give you an example. I met a taxi driver who works two shifts, and I asked him if he wasn’t tired, and how his health was. He said: “Health? Health comes later.” Here we see the price paid by ignoring “social reproduction” and pursuing high-speed growth. Many people tell me I’m too idealistic, and that if people were not pushing for rapid growth, then the material needs of young people would not be met, and there would be lots of unemployment, lots of poverty, and many more problems. This seems truer than it is. Given the overall economic production of present-day China, if we were to carry out a thorough redistribution, we could solve all of these problems, because we have enough for everyone to live well. But now it is like we have chosen our path, and have to grow faster and become stronger, precisely because we have no desire to go through some radical redistribution. But if we want those who are doing well, to do still better, and at the same time pull up those who are trailing behind, this is really quite difficult, and at some future point, we might have to take the path of redistribution.

This in turn relates to the idea of “possession.” “This is money that I have made with my own two hands, so how dare you redistribute it?!” Here, anthropology has something to say. We talked about the collective life we knew when we were young. At that time, the idea of possession was quite weak and people understood the need to share. The idea of “possession” slowly flourished during reform and opening, when everyone became preoccupied with personal gains and losses. At present, “possession” has become an important life goal, something that is worth studying, because the idea is not particularly strong in the Chinese tradition. The most important resource surely used to be the land, and land rights were divided into surface and subsoil rights, land ownership changed hands a lot, most of the time the landlords did not own that much land, wealth only lasted for three generations which meant it alternated among various families, and lineages had ritual fields set aside to help the poor. In the expression we now use for “possession”— zhanyou*—there is a certain antagonism between zhan, which means seizing or occupying, and “you”, which means to have and to use. If you live in your house, you “have it”; if you buy a lot of houses and charge expensive rent and make a lot of money, then you have “seized” it. “You” is legitimate and zhan is frowned upon, but the two are now mixed up.

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