The Genesis of Self as Method

Xiang Biao’s*Footnote 1 Self as Method is an unusual book. It was published in China in 2020 by Dandu, a newish publishing house that promises to “unite a new generation of authors and readers through text, audio, video, and multimedia platforms.”Footnote 2 The project originated with Dandu editor Luo Danni*, based on her observation that many Chinese people appear not to be very happy as “China’s century” dawns. At first glance, this may seem strange because, after a century and a half of humiliation, crisis, and struggle, China in the early twenty-first century seems poised to reestablish its historical position as a (if not the) center of the world. Reform and opening have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those who initially conceived the policies, and China in 2020 is vastly richer and more powerful than China in 1980.

Yet despite China’s rise, many Chinese people, and particularly Chinese young people—while patriotic and proud of China’s rise—are anxious and dissatisfied, at least with their individual lives and life chances. If the policy of reform and opening has transformed the Chinese economy, it has also brought intense competitiveness, sky-rocketing real estate prices, long work days and weeks, and seemingly endless stress. Particularly in China’s mega-cities like Beijing and Shanghai, young people often feel like they are running in place—and running hard—as China’s period of high-speed growth threatens to sputter out.

Luo Danni recruited Dandu journalist Wu Qi* to work on the project, and decided to address this issue in a volume that targets younger readers, which surely made good sense. In addition to their economic anxieties, young people in China might be forgiven for feeling somewhat lost in general. Change in China has been blindingly rapid over the past few decades, to the point that Chinese authors often speak of generational groups of as few as five years (i.e., the “1995–2000 generation”). This might be an exaggeration, but it is nonetheless true that while in 1980 there were almost no private phones in China, today everyone lives on their smart phone; while in 1980, everyone rode their identical Flying Pigeon bicycle (if they could get one) to and from work or school, now they take a Didi* (China’s Uber) to…the airport and hence the world (at least in pre-pandemic times).

Of course many of these changes are broadly positive and have enriched the lives of Chinese youths. Other changes, however, have impoverished their lives in perhaps equal measure. China’s one-child policy, implemented between roughly 1980 and 2015, drastically reduced the size of Chinese families, particularly the extended families that have long been part of China’s social fabric. One wonders what percentage of today’s Chinese young people have no cousins at all, to say nothing of brothers and sisters. The demands of work have taken many parents out of the home, while still others have become “helicopter parents,” singularly focused on their only child. Schools have become places of intense competition, driven by a culture of testing and achievement.

How are young people meant to think about their lives, and where are they to turn for counsel and wisdom? A Chinese twenty-something might well live her non-work life through fan culture and online reality shows which her parents probably don’t “get,” to say nothing of her grandparents. Many teachers are run ragged by their own busy lives, and at school have to teach the “doctrine of success” to motivate students to keep their noses to the grindstone.

These are some of the concerns Luo and Wu hoped to address in the book they imagined. Their initial thought was to seek out several Chinese intellectuals and solicit contributions from them, a format that might have produced interesting ideas without necessarily connecting with Chinese young people (a Western editor surely would have been tempted to find a celebrity to address the issue). Ultimately, the project turned into a series of three long interviews with Xiang Biao, who at the time was a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University in Britain, one of a growing number of younger Chinese scholars who have built academic careers outside of China, something that is well respected in China. Given the strictures on what can be safely said in print in China, the book could not strike a tone of “So we finally made it—now what?” or “We’re rich, but life still sucks,” which might have been the American approach. Still, over the course of some 250 pages, Xiang does indeed speak to these and other concerns in a way that is both direct and indirect, personal and professional, conversational and pedagogical. Part autobiography, part how-to guide (“self as method” is meant to be prescriptive), and part intellectual manifesto, the volume is nothing if not ambitious.

This is clearly a noble cause, and one of the unusual things about it is that it worked (unlike most noble causes, at least in my experience). To date, the book has sold some 175,000 copies, which are not best-seller numbers in China’s huge market, but still amazing for a book where an anthropology professor speaks at length to a journalist about “self as method.” In addition, Douban—the rough Chinese equivalent of Amazon for books—named Self as Method the most influential book of the year for 2020, and the book has received almost 20,000 online comments on the Douban site, with many young readers enthusiastically recommending it to others. In July of 2021, Dandu organized an online celebration of the one-year anniversary of the book’s publication, and some 100,000 people participated. The authors also set up an email address and invited letters from readers, and received nearly 200. In other words, the book struck a nerve and sparked a dialogue.

I discovered Self as Method as part of a research project on Chinese establishment intellectuals in which I have been engaged over the past decade or so.Footnote 3 In my project, I define Chinese establishment intellectuals as those who publish (mostly) in China and in Chinese, and who play by the rules of the game as prescribed by the Party-State, without being propagandists for the regime. Establishment intellectuals are not fully “independent,” in the sense that there are many things that cannot be openly discussed in China, but neither are they completely mute or subservient, and honest debate over important issues occurs frequently. A central finding of my project is thus that a “republic of letters” exists in China, even if there are red zones that must be avoided and discretion is often the better part of valor.

Like youth angst, this intellectual world is also the result of reform and opening. Over the course of the past forty years, scholarly exchanges with the West, translation efforts (into Chinese), massive investments in the Chinese university system, and the spread of the Internet have produced at least two generations of Chinese intellectuals who can rival their peers anywhere on the planet in terms of cosmopolitanism, sophistication, and general knowledge about China and the world. In addition, prior to the Xi Jinping era, China’s intellectual world since reform and opening had been in general relatively free and open, although there are certainly numerous glaring exceptions to that general statement. What this means is that establishment intellectuals in China do many of the things establishment intellectuals do anywhere: they attempt to sway public opinion, influence state policy, and convince one another on issues that matter.

At a certain point in my research, I realized that virtually every Chinese establishment intellectual I was reading was male, of Han ethnicity, and approaching retirement age, which meant that he was born between 1955 and 1965. This cohort had direct or indirect experience with the Cultural Revolution*, and came of age intellectually and professionally during the 1980s, China’s most “liberal” period in recent history, which often meant that their basic political orientation was broadly “Western.” But if they are retiring, they are presumably being replaced by younger intellectuals whose different life experiences surely have produced different worldviews, even if the older generation continues to dominate the journals and books I was consulting for my project. Hence I made a conscious decision to broaden my research and read something other than the Chinese equivalents of David Brooks or David Frum.

Xiang Biao (or Biao Xiang—Xiang is his family name, which comes first in the Chinese-speaking world), born in 1972, came to my attention in part as a result of this decision. I translated his 2021 essay on “The Theory of ‘Concentrated Mobility’ and the ‘Gyro-Economy:’ Understanding Social Change in China through SARS and the Coronavirus”Footnote 4 because I found it compelling, lucid, and unique in its approach to explaining the coronavirus. Some months later, I happened onto a reference to the book Self as Method while reading a text penned by another Chinese anthropologist, ordered the book on Amazon, and, after spending some time with it, got in touch with Xiang to see if he was interested in an English-language translation of the book. He agreed, and here we are.

The remainder of this introduction will attempt to do three things: briefly describe Xiang Biao’s scholarship prior to Self as Method, which is not itself “scholarly,” but nonetheless builds on his life as an academic; discuss some of the recurring themes in Self as Method that may be somewhat challenging for the Western reader (particularly if this reader is not a China specialist); and finally, offer a summary of Xiang Biao’s book both on its own terms and in the context of the broader Chinese intellectual environment I study.

Xiang Biao’s Research

Xiang Biao became well-known as a scholar at a much younger age than most of us do (if we ever do), and for a particular set of reasons. He entered Peking University* in 1990, the year after the student demonstrations that led to the Tiananmen Massacre. These demonstrations had originated at Peking University, and Chinese authorities both on and off campus remained on high alert for many months after the summer of 1989, anxious to avoid further instability. Such fears led to some extraordinary measures. For example, Xiang and his fellow entering freshman did not attend classes on campus for their first year, but instead at a military camp in Shijiazhuang, a city some 300 kilometers south of Beijing, where discipline was ensured by the People’s Liberation Army. The remaining four years of university returned to “normal” in the sense that they took place on the Peking University campus, but Xiang found much classroom instruction rote and uninteresting. Professors, many of whom had been traumatized by the events of 1989 as well, often preferred the security of the textbook to genuine intellectual give-and-take.

Xiang’s eventual response to this trying situation was to stop going to class and to find a project to engage his mind and his energies, something I surely could not have done as an undergraduate in the United States in the late 1970s (Xiang says that, at the time, professors did not really know what to do with their classes, and were eager to help students find alternatives). The project was an investigation of Zhejiang Village, a community of migrant workers from Xiang’s home province of Zhejiang who had settled—illegally—in the southern outskirts of Beijing, hoping to make and sell clothing in China’s “privatizing” economy.

This may require a bit of explanation. China’s policy of reform and opening began at the tail end of the 1970s, but until the 1990s, many of the most significant reforms occurred in the rural areas, where the “responsibility system”—in which individual peasant households signed contracts with government representatives that allowed the peasants to retain their surpluses as their own profits—replaced the communes, which had been set up during the Great Leap Forward*. In other words, most if not all of the structures of collectivized agricultural production disappeared, and peasants quickly evolved into independent farmers and entrepreneurs.

Rural reform was undoubtedly a complex process, involving the restructuring of basic relationships between state and society, the rebuilding of markets, and the change of laws regarding small businesses, but the prospect of reforming the urban economy and state-owned enterprises was even more daunting. True, China had introduced Special Economic Zones in some coastal regions during the 1980s in the hopes of enticing Western firms and their technology to come to China, but this was small potatoes compared to the challenge of moving from the fixed prices and targets of the central plan to the ever-changing signals of the market. In addition, Party leaders soon realized that “market efficiency” and “profitability” would inevitably expose the flaws of China’s danwei* (work unit) system, in which large enterprises and organizations were largely unconcerned with either efficiency or profitability, and instead focused a significant portion of their attention on providing housing and an array of social services to their employees. How to convert such entities to something that would pass the test of the simplest Western/capitalist accounting standards was a riddle, and Party leaders hesitated, fearing the consequences of bankruptcies and layoffs.

The collapse and fall of the former Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991 convinced Chinese leaders of the urgency of a broader reform program. If their erstwhile “big brother” could wither and die practically overnight, what guarantee was there that the same thing could not happen to China, whose centrally planned economy had been built in imitation of the Soviet model? Hence the 1990s marked the beginning of serious efforts to develop “socialism with Chinese characteristics” in the sense of finding a way to move aggressively toward the market and to compete on the world stage.

China’s leaders remained committed to managing the process, however. Convinced that most Chinese peasants and workers lacked the suzhi* (personal qualities) necessary to figure things out on their own, the Party hoped to “plan” the transition to the market. While this is an understandable reflex, given how “shock therapy” was working out in much of the Eastern bloc at the time, many Chinese at the poorer end of the social order were impatient to try their own hand at the market experiment. This included both peasants for whom the “responsibility system” had not been a life-saver, as well as workers stuck in low-paying jobs or laid off in the process of reform.

Zhejiang Village was one result of this impatience. Zhejiang people had long been known for their entrepreneurship and their willingness to migrate. The “Wenzhou model” of economic development, which builds on bottom-up local initiatives and family-run enterprises, testifies to the former; the fact that the first important wave of Chinese immigration to Europe during the reform and opening period was made up of Wenzhou people testifies to the latter. Zhejiang Village in south Beijing grew out of the same impulse to go where the money is and turn a profit.

In China, however, despite the formal governmental commitment to reform, setting up a migrant “village” in a part of China in which you did not personally reside ran up against a host of regulations and policies designed to control population movement and administer the planned economy. Two examples will suffice to suggest the size of the challenge the Zhejiang migrants faced: the household registration system (hukou*), which operates like an internal passport system, was designed to keep people—mainly rural people—from moving away from their place of birth by linking the distribution of rationed goods to the place designated on their hukou; urban planning throughout China was similarly linked to household registration, and planners managed their cities (water supply, housing supply, traffic regulation, etc.) solely on the basis of the number of legal urban residents they believed to be living in their city. That Zhejiang Village eventually swelled to the size of 100,000 suggests the nature of the confrontation between the migrant workers and government authorities.

In Xiang’s ethnography of Zhejiang Village, he contrasts the pragmatism, flexibility, and creativity of the migrants with the rigidity and lack of imagination of government authorities. A small community of Zhejiang migrants had begun to take shape in Beijing as early as 1984, driven by experiences of desperation during the Cultural Revolution rather than by the policy of reform and opening. Between 1984 and 1986, the migrants “got a foot in the door” by renting counter space in state-owned stores to sell their clothes, and renting houses from local residents. A breakthrough occurred between 1988 and 1992 when the Wenzhou migrants learned to make leather jackets which they marketed not only in China but also in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, building on a larger network of other “Zhejiang villages” elsewhere in China and the world. Consequently, Zhejiang Village in Beijing became a hub for the circulation of capital, labor, and raw materials for Zhejiang migrant traders throughout China.

As the community grew in size and economic power, relationships with municipal authorities grew more complex. Beijing officials made some efforts to accommodate and engage with the migrants, but had difficulty “thinking outside the box” and often remained tied to rigid thinking that confined economic activities to recognized administrative boundaries based on fixed locations, a world view that the Zhejiang migrants were destroying through their own activities. Everything came to a head in 1995 (the last year of Xiang Biao’s study), when the Beijing government launched a large-scale cleanup campaign in which some 2000 “shock troops” were directed to destroy the residential compounds the residents of Zhejiang Village had constructed. The migrants fled in the face of force majeure, but returned within a few months, and Zhejiang Village continued to grow.

Xiang’s second book, based on his Oxford doctoral dissertation, was similarly concerned with economic migrants. Global “Body Shopping:” An Indian Labor System in the Industrial Technology Industry (Princeton 2007) was an ethnographic study of “body shopping,” which refers to the complex processes by which Indian IT workers are integrated in various ways into the needs of the world’s largest IT firms, which at the time were mostly American. The “body shops” (or “consultancies”) are enterprises, often small and informal, found mainly in India but also abroad wherever there are sufficient numbers of Indian IT workers, which serve as middlemen between the individual workers and the HR divisions of the large companies, taking care of paperwork, visas, housing, and other similar issues. The middlemen seek to “market” their client-workers to the foreign firms on a regular basis, but take on particular utility in moments of peak demand, such as at the end of the twentieth century, when fears of a Y2K incident created a sudden, intense need for manpower. Xiang happened to be doing his research during the run-up to Y2K, and hence focuses on it in his book, but lesser events of a similar nature happen frequently when companies roll-out new products or have to fix bugs in programs just released.

Xiang’s focus was on the effects of this globalized process on the IT workers and their families. For workers, body shopping meant frequent, unpredictable dislocations, uncertain living conditions, and exposure to considerable risk (temporary workers the world over have problems getting their rights respected, and these Indian IT workers were no exception). Workers were willing to accept uncertainty and risk, because if everything worked out, they might wind up employed in the US for years, perhaps even striking gold by acquiring US citizenship, but less desirable outcomes were surely possible as well, and indeed occurred with greater frequency.

For families in India, the existence of global body shopping was seen as a way up and out of poverty, and thus structured many family decisions in terms of the education they sought out for their sons (most IT workers were men in the period Xiang studied). Body shopping thus played an important role in building the Indian “brand” in the high tech world. In addition, the phenomenon also had major effects on something as personal as marriages by significantly increasing the amounts of dowry that families of women of marriageable age offered to the IT workers. The dowries were parts of family strategies hoping to capitalize on greater life chances body shoppers promised to IT workers. Of course these dowries and their marriages were subject to the same uncertainties that characterized the body shopping system as a whole.

In both of these pioneering studies, Xiang’s focus is on the effectiveness and limitations of the agency possessed by economic migrants facing the larger structures of the Chinese state, in the first study, and the globalized IT world in the second. Xiang’s point is not to glorify or lionize this agency, but instead to highlight its creative potential in seeking solutions to real world problems, even as he notes where and how larger structures or rent-seeking middlemen channel or obstruct that potential. As an ethnographer, Xiang looks at individuals as well as structures, and occasionally savors an individual “victory,” but his point is not to celebrate the triumph of the “crafty peasant” over the larger system, because these systems of course have their own “agency.” His method—and there is more method than theory in much of his work—is to understand how complex systems function, and then to explore the potential of individual agency within this system. At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves, I might point out that this might well be an appealing strategy for autonomous young people in China trying to actualize their agency in the People’s Republic. Indeed, Self as Method might well be read as a reflection on potential individual agency in a complex, platform-driven, globalized world.

Xiang Biao’s subsequent work has focused more broadly on problems of mobility and order, particularly in Asia. This emphasis began with a 2004 project involving field research on unskilled labor outmigration from northeast China to Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. The main finding of the project was that migration is subject to increasingly intense mediation, by multiple actors but particularly by commercial brokers. In other words, workers are moved, rather than moving independently, across international borders. This creates a form of labor migration Xiang calls “labor transplant,” a kind of strictly controlled, point-to-point mobility, which is accomplished through a combination of government regulation and commercial facilitation.

A similar practice is “return migration,” which is widely practiced in Asia. By managing migration (i.e., making it point-to-point, tied to specific employment opportunities and needs) and making it temporary, by assuring the migrants’ return to their home country at the end of their contract, Asian countries accommodate increasing transnational mobility into the nation-state framework of governance, an approach that helps avoid the political tensions generated in the United States, where certain companies or even industries are sustained through illegal migration, with capital turning a blind eye until populist tensions result in intermittent government interventions often designed to score political points, generally at the expense of the migrants.

Xiang Biao has paid particular attention to how mobility and order have evolved in China over the course of reform and opening. Until reform and opening, China was of course a country characterized by extremely limited mobility, as suggested in the above discussion of the household registration system, whose express purpose was to keep people in their assigned places. This stance changed importantly but informally during reform and opening, as migrant labor left China’s villages to work in factories or on construction sites, but the system was exploitative, unstable, and often abusive (and in many ways quite similar to the situation with illegal migrants in the United States) because migrant workers had few if any rights, and were viewed as temporary workers who would eventually leave the cities and indeed could be evicted at the whims of municipal authorities.

Over the past decade or two, this half-hearted embrace of mobility has been replaced by a very different attitude on the part of China’s authorities, who have come to see mobility as a source of stability rather than instability. Restrictions on migrant labor have generally eased, although there remains work to be done and such workers are as often instrumentalized by the forces of Chinese state capitalism as they are “liberated” to do what they wish. But beyond the issue of migrant labor, the muscle of China’s supply chains and logistics industry—to say nothing of its delivery and ride-sharing services—is grounded in mobility. Rather than creating the industries or the jobs that can keep China’s economy growing, the Party-State instead increasingly creates the conditions that allow people to attempt to solve their own employment issues, and mobility is one of the most important of these conditions.

Of course, much of this mobility is linked to China’s rapidly expanding platform economies (Taobao, Meituan, Didi) and their algorithms, which means that mobility is tied to the dubious “freedoms” of what we tend to call the gig economy. China’s government currently seems to be trying to strike a balance between supporting the platforms—because they create lots of jobs, however precarious—and intervening fitfully to correct the worst abuses on the platforms practice. For the moment, platforms and the mobility they facilitate seem to function as a force producing more order than disorder. In part, this is because many Chinese workers have embraced the logic of hard work and precarity, working very hard in what ultimately can be dead-end jobs in the hopes of saving up enough money to start a business. Their thinking is: “Make the money and move on. It’s not worth it to fight the bosses or the government.”

Xiang Biao’s current research takes aim at these platforms which, in China and elsewhere, rival governments in terms of their impact on the lives and thoughts of all of us. His ultimate goal is to open people’s eyes to the myriad ways in which the platforms “manage” our lives, in the hopes of exploring and awakening the potential agency that still exists at the individual and social level.

Interview Themes in Self as Method

Self as Method is a set of three interviews conducted in March, August, and December of 2018, in Beijing, Oxford, and Wenzhou, respectively, although putting the book together took considerably more time, both before and after the interviews took place. The first interview starts out being biographical and chronological, and the first four chapters cover Xiang’s youth, his experience of the 1980s, his experience at Peking University, and his research on Zhejiang Village. But because Xiang is an expansive talker who is sometimes uncomfortable talking about himself, and because the book is meant to address themes broader than Xiang’s experience or research, the interviews often swerve off into areas inspired by his life or his work, and the book becomes increasingly thematic as it proceeds, although it circles back to moments in Xiang’s biography—such as his time in Singapore as a postdoctoral student. Some of themes may strike Western readers as a bit opaque, and instead of littering the text with multiple explanatory notes, I thought it might be helpful to address them in a more general way here.Footnote 5

One major theme, or image, that occurs repeatedly throughout the book is that of the “gentry,” or a “gentry disposition.” In China, as in many other countries, the word “gentry” refers to the upper-middle classes (but not necessarily the ruling elite), but in China’s case, the gentry is also connected to Confucianism and Confucian scholars. This is because, beginning in the Song dynasty (960–1279), virtually all members of China’s civil service were selected through the Confucian examination system, which continued to function (except for the brief Mongol interlude between 1271 and 1368) until its abolition in 1905. To most Western ears, the term “civil servant” lacks panache; we think of faceless bureaucrats or the people who deliver our mail. In China, by contrast, those who passed the examinations to become civil servants were envied and respected, in part because of the difficulty of the process. It took years of patient study and required the memorization of a large number of classical texts and commentaries, in addition to the ability to write highly structured but persuasive essays.

The examinations were held—usually every three years—at three levels: local (the starting point for all candidates was their native place), provincial, and in the capital. To be employed as a civil servant, it was necessary to succeed at least at the provincial level, if not higher. Local examinations served only to select the most talented for the higher-level examinations, but anyone who passed the local examinations was nonetheless recognized as a “scholar” and received certain privileges and a great deal of respect. This was even true to a lesser extent for those who tried and failed at the local level. The respect for scholars was such that merchant families with the means to do so would encourage at least some of their sons to try their hand at the examinations, a way of “diversifying their portfolio.”

When we talk about China’s “gentry,” we are generally talking about these local scholars, those whose efforts did not propel them into the ranks of the civil servants posted throughout the empire, but who instead stayed in their native places to become “natural leaders” if they possessed the necessary personal qualities. Such leadership was necessary because government presence at the local level was generally quite thin; for all intents and purposes, government stopped at the county level, while the majority of Chinese lived in villages. In addition, county magistrates were always “outsiders” (an anti-corruption measure), and their mandates were quite short (three years—another anti-corruption measure). Often, they knew little about the area they were meant to govern, and in many cases would not have been able to understand the local dialect.

To a large degree, then, the local gentry were what made traditional China work. Any country magistrate worth his salt consulted them on a regular basis, because they were the link between him and the population he was attempting to govern. Moreover, in the absence of police or law courts at the local level, the gentry played a major role in dispute resolution and community management. This obviously required an intimate knowledge of local affairs, an engaged commitment to community “harmony,” and the ability to solve problems through persuasion and the use of personal relations—although of course some local gentry were members of powerful families who could impose their will by force if necessary.

When Xiang Biao talks about his “gentry disposition,” he is talking about this kind of groundedness in a community, be it local or global (social media makes this possible), and a personal concern for the well-being of that community. The brief description above of Xiang’s research illustrates his posture as a “gentry scholar.” He spent years in Zhejiang Village, less as a “neutral observer” and more as an embedded ethnographer who implicated himself in the community to the point of helping them to solve concrete problems and disputes. When working on “body shopping,” Xiang shared the homes and meals of the Indian high tech workers in Australia and India. “Theory” plays a part in Xiang’s research, but his goal is not to make a contribution to a theoretical abstraction, but rather to use theory to cast light on the community he is observing and the problems they are facing. The gentry are part of the community they “study,” and thus care about the welfare of that community in human terms.

What Xiang Biao means by “gentry disposition” comes into clearer focus when we look at three other themes that appear in Self as Method: the 1980s, Peking University, and centers and peripheries.

As a decade, the 1980s has a particular resonance in China, representing a somewhat giddy interlude between the end of the Cultural Revolution (Mao* died in 1976, but it took a couple of years for Deng Xiaoping* to turn the Party-State in a different direction) and the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Despite this somber ending, the 1980s were certainly the most open, liberal period in the history of the PRC. Foreign tourists came in, followed by foreign radio and television. Chinese students began to study abroad. Intellectually, the 1980s were a period of great experimentation, resulting in what was known as the “culture craze,” or a “second enlightenment” (the first having occurred during the New Culture Movement of the late 1910s and early 1920s) in which China’s intellectuals debated once again the meaning of China and tradition, the West and modernity, in the hopes of locating a cultural autonomy that would move China forward.

If it is possible to feel nostalgia for someone else’s past, the West is nostalgic for China’s 1980s—as are certain Chinese, of course. It was widely believed at the time that China had abandoned communism and was moving toward some kind of democracy, or perhaps democratic socialism. Given everything that has transpired since, Western China-watchers tend to see the 1980s as a missed opportunity, and the Chinese intellectuals who cut their teeth during the decade tend to see it as their “glory days.”

Xiang Biao was a teenager for much of the decade of the 1980s, and remembers the excitement of the “culture craze” largely through some of its most mediatized moments, such as the television series River Elegy,* which aired in the weeks preceding the Tiananmen Massacre. Xiang hated the tone of River Elegy, which pontificated on the contrast between the “blue oceans” of the mobile West and the “yellow soil” of a stagnant China in a voice that reminds me of the war propaganda reels shown in American theaters during World War II. For Xiang, the “culture craze” came to symbolize a flight to abstraction or a chain of endless empty speech bubbles. Intellectuals spent their time posturing and debating rather than problem-solving or checking in with the people. He insists that that there were genuine debates between reformers and their opponents within the government and within the Party, and that real change was a true possibility. Had intellectuals acted like local gentry instead of talking heads, the situation might not have reached the extreme that pushed the Party to take action against the demonstrators. This is of course no apology for the violence, but in Xiang’s eyes, if the 1980s were a “missed opportunity,” this is the opportunity that was missed.

Xiang Biao’s discussion of Peking University points to another element of his gentry disposition. He was a student at the university in March of 1992 when the news of Deng Xiaoping’s “Southern Tour” was broadcast over the university loudspeakers. This was the moment when Deng gave his full backing to economic reform and began to move China out of the conservative, repressive posture it had occupied since Tiananmen and toward thorough-going marketization. From Xiang’s perspective as a student and later a professor, this also marked the moment when Peking University—as well as other universities—began to transform themselves into “players” in the fast-growing economy, turning campus buildings and assets into “resources” that could be “leveraged” for money and power.

The process started slowly, but anyone who spent time in a Chinese university before the 1990s (as I did, having lived in both Nanjing and Beijing in the 1980s) recognizes the immense transformation that has taken place, both in terms of infrastructure and amenities and of the relationship between the university and the economy.

Xiang Biao fully understands the logic of this transformation and appreciates its positive aspects, but at the same time mourns the passing of an older Peking University identity that saw the students as intimately linked to the state of the nation. This vision involves memories that go back at least to the May Fourth Movement of 1919, when Beida* students led the protests against the betrayal of China—by members of her own government—at the Versailles Conference, and continue through the actions that marked the end of the Maoist era (wreath-laying on the occasion of the death of Zhou Enlai*, for example), or the protests that led to the Tiananmen Massacre. In this perspective, Beida represents the throbbing heart of the idealism of the young, of their engagement with the destiny of the nation and perhaps the world.

After thirty years as a “resource,” however, Beida has become just another revolving door linking money, politics, and academia, a Chinese version of Harvard’s Kennedy School, a center of elite production and reproduction, the throbbing heart of which is the stock market. Qian Liqun*, a retired Beida literature professor, once remarked that schools like Beida are currently producing “exquisite egotists,” “who are sophisticated, worldly, thoughtful, good at playing a role, good at fitting in, and even better at using the system to pursue their own goals. By exquisite egotists, I mean egotists who have been skillfully dressed up or even disguised.”Footnote 6 Of course, this does not describe all Beida students, but it does capture the ethos of the age to a certain extent, and this ethos has little to do with the “gentry disposition.”

A related theme, also explored in Self as Method, is the contrast Xiang draws between centers and peripheries, by which he means the centripetal force exerted by China’s major cities as centers of wealth, power, modernity, and hence status. He cites scholars who argue that the true decline of China’s traditional order began in the early twentieth century when the gentry no longer returned to their home towns after retirement, but remained instead in the big cities. The Mao era, with its household registration system and planned economy, slowed this process, but it has resumed with a vengeance under reform and opening, so that anyone with any ambition sets their sights on Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen. This not only contributes to the stifling sense of crowded competition that defines life in China’s mega-cities; it also drains China’s regions of talent and meaning—to say nothing of China’s rural areas. Of course, this imbalance is not unique to China; similar trends in America (“coastal elites vs. the forgotten hinterland”) are often cited to explain the rise of populism and the success of Donald Trump. But Xiang imagines a sense of “groundedness” that would not be a source of resentment or reaction, but instead a healthy engagement with community.

The Meaning of Self as Method

Self as Method is ultimately a kind of manifesto. It is addressed to young citizens of China—and the world—and it calls on them to examine their “selves,” not as consumers, not as profit-maximizing individualists, and not as part of a particular political or social movement. What Xiang Biao calls for is a kind of intellectual activism, grounded in the idea that in our global, wired universe, most people have the resources to understand their position in the various worlds they occupy, and on the basis of that understanding, to activate their agency to solve problems, thus making life better for individuals and communities. Because he is a scholar, Xiang’s particular means of activating his agency involves the tools of social science, which is a way of producing knowledge that might help others activate their agency, but he does not view scholarly agency and knowledge production as superior to the achievements of the entrepreneurs of Zhejiang Village, to take one example. There are of course structures and forces that limit and channel our agency in ways that we have no choice but to acknowledge, but agency is always an exploration of the possible, and not a pie-in-the-sky search for escape or transcendence.

There is a kind of can-do optimism behind this vision, which in part is surely based on China’s recent experience. In the West, we constantly bemoan the fact that the policy of “engagement” with China in recent decades did not produce the liberal, democratic China we were hoping for. The idea, of course, was that market forces would create wealth, which would produce a middle class, which would create civil society and pluralism, all of which would eventually produce a democratic China. It is true that China’s government remains Leninist and authoritarian, and that our prediction was wrong on that front, but this overlooks the fact that much of what the West foresaw for a “capitalist” China—outside of the political realm—did indeed come to pass. China’s transformation over the past forty years has been nothing short of remarkable, and the material improvements in the lives of most Chinese are beyond question.

None of this is an apology for the many serious problems that remain in China, but it should not be hard to understand the immense pride that many Chinese people feel in reflecting on what their country has accomplished in the past few decades. Intellectuals like Xiang Biao are thoroughly aware of the shortcomings of China’s government—and some may indeed feel that China accomplished this transformation in spite of the Leninist state rather than because of it—but it is not hard to understand that even Chinese liberals who would prefer that China respect human rights and the rule of law remain nonetheless appreciative of what China has managed to pull off, not only in terms of GDP growth and poverty reduction, but also in terms of education, urbanization, and technological innovation, developments in which have changed the very texture of life in China for many.

Self as Method is a call to China’s youth to build on the potential that China has created by starting with their “selves,” their individual lives and thinking brains. At many points in the book, Xiang notes that the distinctions between intellectuals and non-intellectuals—in China or in any technologically advanced society—have largely disappeared, because everyone has access to a universe of knowledge on their cell phone. Of course, the dangers of the digitized world, notably fake news and information bubbles, are much on our minds of late—and with good reason—but we should not discount the way in which increased knowledge and connectivity could enhance agency, should we make the choice to imbue this agency with a “gentry disposition.”

It might be objected that this is a “manifesto without politics” and an “agency without public engagement,” which I think is largely true. There is no fruitful way for Chinese young people to craft a politics of direct resistance, however tired they may be of some aspects of Chinese political discourse and practice. There are similar frustrations with politics in the West, even if greater freedom of speech allows us to make more noise, which sometimes works. But Chinese people have displayed considerable energy and creativity as they have transformed their lives over the past few decades, which suggests that there is often, if not always, a way to employ one’s agency to improve conditions for the self and for the community, and the first step is an intellectual understanding of the potential of that agency within the constraints imposed by all social and political systems. The fact that 175,000 people bought Self as Method surely suggests that optimism and faith continue to exist in China, whatever the challenges Chinese people face. In that sense, Self as Method calls not for an abandonment of politics, but a redefinition of politics.

A Word on the English-Language Edition of Self as Method

My goal in translating Xiang Biao’s Self as Method was to make it readable, even to readers who are not China specialists. I also wanted to convey the flavor of what was generally a very lively conversation. Consequently I sought first to understand the meaning of Wu Qi’s questions and Xiang Biao’s answers, and to find English-language equivalents of those questions and answers. In other words, I did not aim for a literal translation, but instead tried to think of how we would say the same or similar things in English. Xiang Biao read and corrected the translation, so we can vouch for its accuracy.

In the course of translating and checking the translation, we also did a certain amount of editing, correcting errors or imprecisions that we found in the original version. Occasionally, we removed passages that seemed repetitive or which, on reflection, required too much explanation. We generally resisted the temptation to update topical references unless such updates were very simple. None of these changes are indicated in the English-language translation; we felt that filling the text with brackets and parentheses would be an unnecessary distraction and that most readers would not be particularly concerned about minor editing issues.

We opted not to include Chinese characters in the text, but include a Chinese-language glossary of the names and terms appearing in the volume. All of these are marked with an asterisk on their first appearance in the text.