Wu Qi: Our past life experience sometimes merely has a random influence on us, and it is hard to identify any one-on-one correspondence. But when you get to university, you should be entering a more orderly, clear-headed period. You already mentioned your sense of distance and distrust. Did this continue while you were at Beida? If so, how did it manifest itself? Did you feel like you didn’t fit in with your classmates?

Xiang Biao: At Beida, I was careful in how I dealt with other people, so I did not feel like I was being excluded in my daily life, but the feeling of distance was still there. At Beida, you have students who are 18 or 19 years old, all of whom are excellent students who have come from different places, and most of them are interested in seeking recognition and approval, especially from officials, but I remember thinking that I did not understand why they thought that was important. Of course, there were quite a few people we called “loners,” but I wasn’t one of them either, because I worked hard at my studies, and was involved in activities and clubs. I talked a lot and did not mind the limelight. Others saw me as someone who was ambitious, who had a goal, different from those who were just enjoying their life.

The military training of the 1990 Beida Freshman class for a year at Shijiazhuang was a formative experience.Footnote 1 Although I didn’t realize it at first, talking with upper-level students later on I came to understand that it had a great influence on us. In my case, it had two particular impacts. One was that I realized that a rigidly hierarchical system warps your personality. Kids who are 17 or 18 years old generally look for friends and have all sorts of innocent ideas, but when they are in a hierarchical situation, everyone is constantly thinking about self-preservation, how to ingratiate yourself with the squad commander, or the assistant squad commander, or even the cook. In fact, the stakes were not all that high, and if you didn’t suck up to people there was no real danger, so it was a kind of supra-rational calculation. There were also horizontal relationships as well, because we were classmates, after all, and once we got back to campus, everyone became good friends. But the overall feeling was that vertical relations were in control, and the feeling of oppression was acute.

Later on, when I was in Britain I met all sorts of people, including some retired military, and learned that in British colonial history, the links between military service, education, and social status were quite close, which is also true in China. In the twentieth century, wars completely upended the social hierarchy in many places. People say that Japan modernized itself on the basis of the ruins of the war, and that it was a miracle, but you can think about it from another perspective, which was that because of the war, landlords had to contribute their land and their sons had to join the army, and once the war was over everything was in ruins, which meant that people were all equal, and soldiers returning home after the war had to be properly taken care of, no matter what their prewar status had been. This fostered the growth of universal education and welfare. When I went to visit my wife’s ancestral home in Onomichi, I remarked to her that the location of the house was perfect, with an elementary school on one side and a high school on the other. In fact, the land on which the huge campuses of these schools are situated originally belonged to her family. Her grandfather had pneumonia and could not join the army, so he contributed land to the state, keeping only a parcel for himself to live on. Modernization only happens when everyone pitches in, thus this was different from the militaristic modernization of the Meiji era and was more democratic.

Britain is also like this, in that if the war had not broken the power of the upper class, the act of parliament establishing the National Health Service would never have passed, nor would we have seen the socialist-leaning society like that of 1968. Of course, I do not mean to valorize war, but if old structures are not destroyed, new ones do not grow. This process is also influenced by the army. Physical education is very important in the British educational system, and even more so in the United States. A British veteran told me that the most important thing they learned in physical training at school—training modeled on what they did in the army—was how to protect their teammates. They said that when you enter the battlefield in groups of five or six, life and death are intimately linked, and only if group members protect one another will they survive, so they have to coordinate their actions and create an emotional pact to live or die together. This is the only way to survive in war, so they try to instill this ethos every day. This is even more important in the aristocratic tradition, and they believe this is an important part of the elite character, that they understand how to take care of one another and build a spirit of teamwork.

This is completely different from my personal experience with military training. This has to do with an important political issue, which is that the character and the role of the army can be completely different. When we went to the military camp for our first year at university, the Chinese army was no longer at war, and its principal role was training, so it had lost its original positive military tradition, becoming a mechanical organization in which obedience was all that mattered. So the first thing I noticed at the camp was how frightening the hierarchy was. After I got back to Beida, I wasn’t so eager to receive the approval of any system. Second, the entire experience of military training made us all extremely calculating. For instance, we were very careful how we spent our time. Our professors were quite surprised by this and said that students who had gone through military training all got up early and went to the library without wasting time, and there were many fewer “loners” than there once were. In fact, this has to do with hierarchy.

Why is it that after the collapse of communism, Eastern European societies became so coldly utilitarian, so oriented toward money? Their market economies were not like those of mature market economies. Take Germany as an example, one of the most long-standing capitalist economies. Germany has long practiced a “social market economy” model, which emphasizes competition and the spirit of individual entrepreneurship, while at the same time also emphasizing state intervention in the market order and the welfare system. Alongside this there also exists a deeply Christian tradition with clear ideas about how to treat other people in the marketplace, how to act when you fail, what kind of success is praiseworthy, and what kind of success is shameful. What followed the collapse of communism was naked capitalism, a capitalism that only cared about success and failure, and made no distinction between praiseworthy successes and shameful successes. Judgment was completely focused on the bottom line so that in the case of success achieved through shameful means, you could be even more boastful than if you had succeeded in normal ways because it shows you are clever and daring. When the right reemerged in Hungary and Romania, it was a reaction to this kind of utilitarian market economy. An important reason for all of this is that in the original centralized, extremely hierarchical system, there was no space for people to probe fundamental questions related to their life experiences because all resources were distributed from top to bottom. I realized while in military training that if I got on well with my platoon commander and my company commander, then I was all set in material terms for the next week, which meant that we were constantly worried about how to please them, which in turn made us anxious.

The hierarchical system truly did destroy a more innocent understanding of self. The early period of reform in China was not like this. Early reform in China started in the villages when the commune system was still playing a positive role. There were still collective feelings attached to town and village enterprises; everybody wanted to make money, but it wasn’t that pronounced yet. But after reform started in the cities, social contradictions multiplied, and the utilitarianism that emerged from the original hierarchical work unit system looked a lot like what we see in Eastern Europe.

This had quite an impact on my mood when I was 17 or 18. As you said, a lot of things happen at random, and having a year’s “seasoning” as a random experience became something that was hard to get rid of. Even if you want to let go of it, it takes a lot of effort.

Truly, not letting go is a problem for me, a huge obstacle in my research. If you don’t let up, then you don’t let your mind wander, which can wind up limiting your creativity. I have this problem when I do fieldwork. I don’t relax and goof around, and am not good at blending in with everyone else, which is something I would like to improve about myself. Of course, this has to do with how I was raised, because I was always with my grandfather, and did not often play with children my own age. This was because the children my own age in his neighborhood were children of dock workers. I remember that if the neighbors gave me something to eat, he would pretend to be polite and accept it, but then would not let me eat it because he said it wasn’t clean. He could be two-faced: very polite to strangers while he perhaps actually looked down on them, and this had an effect on me as well. When I wanted to go to play at someone’s house, my grandfather said no, and told me that it might cause trouble for them, because even though they said I was welcome this might not be what they were really thinking. This kind of suspiciousness cast quite a shadow on me, which has lasted to this day. My wife and I are completely different. Her personality is the type that thinks that if other people see that she’s happy, then they’ll be happy too, so when she wants to do something, she just does it. I always think about the negative consequences first.

Wu Qi: At the time did you ever think about trying to change your personality?

Xiang Biao: I didn’t realize it while I was at the university. I discovered it while doing field research.

Wu Qi: Usually when you’re at the university, everyone is in a hurry to decide what kind of person they are going to become because there is no one clear path forward. Especially after I got to Beida, my feeling was that it was even more confusing, because there were all kinds of classmates, some who were ace students and bookworms, some were gamers, some were into the arts, and some were into student politics or clubs. But in your memory, it seems as if you were set on becoming an intellectual, and you didn’t need to choose. Maybe this is because your parents were both teachers? Or was this a common thing when you were at university?

Xiang Biao: I think this was more or less natural for me, and academic work was exactly what I wanted to do. My parents didn’t really understand my choice of major. I did not go through the university examination but had guaranteed admission,Footnote 2 which meant that I could choose any subject as my major without worrying about whether the subject is too popular and whether my score is high enough. My first choice was political science, but my parents said “absolutely not”—anything but politics. Their recommendations were first, economics, and second, law because they thought I was a good speaker since I gave a lot of talks in high school. I said these two majors were boring because everything was already decided and you just had to apply the rules, a view that was of course very superficial. At the time, everything interesting that I read had to do with politics, but when I talked about it with my high school classmates, they all said that politics is dirty and wondered if I could be like that. So I finally chose sociology. At the time I had surely heard Fei Xiaotong’s name, but I did not know his research. After I got to Beida, I didn’t pay that much attention to what other people were doing, because I knew what I wanted to do.

Wu Qi: What were your main anxieties at the time?

Xiang Biao: I really didn’t like the courses in the sociology department. After I started my first-year classes, I wrote my mother a letter, and told her that the courses had absolutely nothing to do with real life. There was one new course called “social work,” which was full of concepts from Hong Kong, and I found it really boring. My mother wrote back, and I still remember it, saying that when she was young, China followed the Soviet Union in everything, and now we were following the West in everything, and this was a problem. Reading her letter gave me a theoretical framework with which to criticize the curriculum at the time.

I spent a weekend—two nights—under the light of my own table lamp (I have a good head for money. I brought 600 RMB with me when I first came to Beijing, but did not take any more of my family’s money later on, and instead relied on writing essays or various other things to make money, so I was relatively well-off and bought my own lamp), and wrote a lengthy letter entitled “A Number of Suggestions Regarding the Design of the Curriculum,” which I then gave to Wang Sibin* (b. 1949), the Department Chair. I told him that my intention was not to say that the department should reform things in the way I suggested, but that it might serve as a reference point to shine a light on certain problems. Professor Wang got all excited, and in a departmental meeting talked about the multi-page letter he had received from a student and had all the faculty members read it. They thought it was great that there were students thinking like this. This encouraged me a lot. If they had criticized me at that point, I might have been less confident later on. That was the first time I wrote up what was bothering me about what was going on. This spirit seems to be less prevalent now, which is really too bad.

Wu Qi: What were your principal complaints in the letter about how the professors were teaching?

Xiang Biao: All Beida professors are excellent. When we started university, the first group of young professors whose education had not been affected by the Cultural Revolution had just finished their degrees, and they gave the first-year classes. Professors from the Educated Youth generationFootnote 3 like Wang Hansheng* (1952–2015) and Sun Liping* (b. 1953) basically dealt with graduate students and did not have much contact with us. The professors who taught the other undergraduate courses were teachers who were bookish and had little understanding of society, and my feeling was that they were not interested in what was happening in society.

There was something else that surprised me. Later on, when I went to do fieldwork outside of Beijing in the 2000s, I would usually first seek out professors from a local university and talk with them about the local situation, because they had written articles about it. But when I started to talk with them, I discovered that aside from reproducing what they read in the news, they did not really know what was happening around them. I thought this very strange. You live here every day, so how can you not know? But they weren’t interested in this, and their articles on the subject were very empty, and contained no concrete observations. I eventually learned that if you want to find professors in China who are familiar with the local situation, you’ll find them in the bigger, better, older schools in Beijing and Shanghai. Teachers in most local schools have little interest in what is going on around them, and just copy whatever they read in academic journals in the hopes of being part of that discourse system. They agree that it is a huge problem, but they are still not interested, so you can see how serious the disconnect is. This means that academic language is often completely meaningless.

At the time some Beida professors were also like this, and I thought their teaching was lifeless, that they were just repeating what was in the textbook. I talked about it with an upperclassman, and he said we should find a weak spot, meaning that we should boycott the class of a problematic but meek teacher first, which is what we did. There was one professor who was getting on in years, who could barely give his class, and only two or three students showed up for each lecture. He was not confident with the students and was probably upset to see that they did not come, but there was nothing he could do about it. So, I just stopped going altogether. We could do this thanks to Beida, because at the time they did not take attendance and there were no tests, and in a lot of classes you just wrote an essay at the end. After sophomore year, I was serious about learning academic English, because I thought it was practical, and I also went to economics class, but the rest of the time I spent on my Zhejiang Village research, as well as on clubs and activities.

See, when people like me talk about youth, it is really easy to get caught up in memories and nostalgia. The importance of youth is not in our remembering our own experiences, but rather in using the perspective of today’s young people to ask hard questions of ourselves. “Passing judgment” on ourselves is the only way to get at something real, and the only real way to think about our past experience. Movies like “Youth”Footnote 4 are not terribly important in my view. Remembering your youth like that idealizes and romanticizes your experience, making it into something very pure, although we do not seem to be pure now. We should not judge solely on the basis of purity.

Wu Qi: The fact that you could boycott classes back then means that the entire atmosphere was quite relaxed.

Xiang Biao: The fact that things were relaxed has an important context. As I already mentioned, we started university in 1990 and spent the first year at a military academy in Shijiazhuang. When we got to Beida in 1991, the whole political atmosphere was ambiguous and uncertain. For example, despite the long and rich history of public lectures at Beida, the only public lecture for the entering class was an “English for Reading” lecture given by the professor who had written the textbook for fourth-year English. The class was given in a big lecture hall. It was freezing cold, and everyone went in their military overcoats. At the time, no one dared say anything, and everyone studied to get ahead, but it was not a happy year.

In 1992, I remember the morning distinctly, I came out of Dorm 28 at 7:00 a.m. to the sound of the loudspeakers addressing the entire campus, as the news broadcast from China National Radio accompanied us on our way to breakfast, and the woman announcer was reciting “The Eastern Wind Brings the Promise of Spring,” which was the report from the Shenzhen Special Zone News concerning the speech Deng Xiaoping made on his Southern Tour announcing the return to reform and opening. The central authorities had not allowed this to be reported, but once it was, things changed at the top, and they started promoting the story.Footnote 5 I remember it vividly because “The Eastern Wind Brings the Promise of Spring” was a line that I had never heard before. Overnight, the atmosphere changed completely.

What is interesting is that there started to be a lot more public lectures given, and many were about marketing strategy. In 1991, there were already students who decided to plunge into the market to make money, but this exploded in 1992 when people started to think that the market economy would become the norm. All sorts of cultural activities got rolling again, including, for example, another wave of “national studies.”*Footnote 6 I was active, and as president of the sociology club, I asked people to give public lectures, and everybody was all excited. There was a lot of space, and the professors didn’t pay much attention to us. The university also started to make money. The Beida Party Secretary started to build the Beida Resource Building, as well as the Resource Group for Beida as a whole.Footnote 7 “Resource” is one of the first concepts I learned at Beida. What does it mean? It means that with the privatization of the market economy, the things we originally needed to survive are now transformed into potential assets that can appreciate in value. You have to assert your hold on resources, and possess a clear title to them. Beida used to be a school that organized its daily activities, but now they discovered that the school had resources, with which they could run classes and build buildings. This was the beginning of a big transformation, the “resourcification” of the university. I find the idea of “resource” rather intriguing, and I was not at all critical at the outset, and in fact all of us thought that it was a good thing. I found it stimulating in a theoretical sense as well, because I could use this perspective to observe how people deployed resources in their daily lives. Wenzhou people grow up thinking of resource deployment, so I was perhaps more sensitive to it.

Wu Qi: Your father kept a record of the essays you wrote in school. But there was no Internet at the time, so we can’t find most of them. What kind of things did you write when you were at university?

Xiang Biao: The first essay I wrote at Beida was called “The Third Mr.” When I first got to Beida, an upper-class student in sociology was putting together a newspaper and invited the new students to write something. I always liked to show off, so I wrote the piece. Everyone had always said that the May Fourth spirit at Beida was basically about “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,”Footnote 8 but I said that there was a third figure, called “Mr. Morality,” or “Mr. New Morality.” I thought the moral question was critical too, and should not be forgotten. In part, I was repeating what other people were saying at the time, emphasizing how technical and institutional changes led to cultural changes. At the same time, I also wanted to stress that morality should not be like a hat that we put on, overshadowing our lives from above. For today’s morality, we need to hold the hat in our hands and take a good look at it. We can’t see the hat on our head, even if we can feel it, but we don’t know its shape or its color, and in the same way, if we don’t know where our morality comes from, and simply follow it unthinkingly, then we are just following along blindly. It is immoral to ask other people to respect that kind of morality. The idea of “Mr. Morality” is to say that morality should be a matter of choice, based on individual freedom. I surely read about this somewhere; it might have been left over from my “culture craze” readings during high school. And I truly felt that morality should be the result of empirical observation and analysis and not just lazy dogmatism. Being anti-dogma, anti-system, anti-intellectual, anti-elite also impacts on the language you use to write, which we can talk about later.

When Marx talked about the question of theft—actually Proudhon said something similar even earlier—Marx asked why it was seen as immoral. First, private property is the precondition for theft’s being immoral, because in the absence of private property the question would not exist. In Marx’s analysis, picking up or pulling off branches from trees in a forest was seen as theft because the land belongs to the manor, which means that the trees belong to the manor as well, as well as the leaves and branches that fall from the trees—there is no end to this. There is a historical evolution concerning the conditions under which theft was labeled as immoral. Another example is the relationship between family and corruption, which also requires us to carry out an empirical analysis of morality. Why is it that everyone thinks we can be more forgiving of corruption if it is done for the sake of one’s children? At the same time, when we expose cases of official corruption, our focus is often on sexual relations, and we pay scant attention to the nature of the corruption, how the system facilitated the corruption, or what concrete consequences the corruption produced. Morality is multi-dimensional, so why do we accord one dimension more weight than another? When the President of Peking University knelt before his aging mother, and the pictures of the event went viral,Footnote 9 the effect on young people was really bad, because his actions suddenly confronted them with an unnatural, mysterious kind of morality, not only giving them no choice, but taking away their basic feelings about what is moral and what is not. I think that when I wrote that essay I was talking about the new morality proposed during the May Fourth period, which was meant to be the product of rational reflection and individual freedom. Morality without choice is immoral, and morality that is forced on you is even worse because when I force my morality on you, it means that I am thoroughly denying your humanity at an implicit level and that if you don’t accept my morality, then in my eyes you are not a person.