Wu Qi: In what specific ways has Wang Hui influenced you? Which scholars have had the most influence on you?

Xiang Biao: In terms of specific questions, such as how to view the 1980s, as well as in terms of broader significance, Wang Hui’s perspective and his new way of thinking were a source of inspiration for me. He is a scholar with a firm and distinct viewpoint, and this viewpoint is not a simple posture or some kind of label. He is open-minded in his analysis, and he makes no judgments based on preconceptions. In addition, he particularly emphasizes getting inside of history and has a very sensitive and lively way of entering into a dialogue with history. So watching how he works and how he thinks has been enlightenment for me.

Prasenjit DuaraFootnote 1 also had a fairly big influence on me. Duara first got interested in China because of the story of the early Chinese revolutionary Peng Pai* (1896–1929), and wondered why someone from a landlord background could betray his own class, return home, divide the land, and carry out land reform. Actually, Duara’s first degree was in business, he was raised in a fairly well-off family, has loved music all his life, and became interested in intellectual questions after he had quite a bit of life exposure. It took time. His journey is something that we can learn from.

A third person that influenced me a lot is Vani, my friend from Singapore. She is a lot older than I am, she’s in her sixties and has no proper job. She used to be the editor of a journal, and helped to edit my Zhejiang Village book as well as Global “Body Shopping.” Her greatest help and inspiration to me was to help me to see how ideas and knowledge can be so lively. She is not a specialized scholar, but has a keen interest in geography, plants, pharmaceutical knowledge, as well as philosophy and art, and has a lot to say about current political and economic issues. Her views always come naturally and hit the mark, and are full of critical curiosity about the world. She constantly alerted me that there are different angles from which to look at things. She is quite a unique person. She abandoned all material pursuits, and the joy she takes in life and her appreciation of art allowed me to see the importance of art.

Wu Qi: Tell me about the importance of art.

Xiang Biao: I was lucky enough to study painting when I was young, so I have a bit of grounding in that, but I know nothing about music, which is a shortcoming, and it is something that is hard to learn once you are an adult. Music is probably linked to mathematics, because both transcend culture and language, which is why people like the German philosopher Schopenhauer (1788–1860) felt that music embodies the internal structure of the mind of humanity. Why is it that everyone feels that certain music is harmonious, like Chopin’s piano concertos, if it is not a question of the internal structure of the human mind? Musical training can be quite important to mental and psychological health. The writer Eva Hoffman (b. 1945) studied piano as a child, and she argues that piano was very valuable in learning about accuracy, because there is no way to hide even the slightest error when playing piano, and if the rhythm is even slightly off nothing works. This is like math. Yet a foundation of rigor and precision provides a great deal of space for improvisation and can lead to mental relaxation. This is a kind of beauty that is beyond language. I put a lot of stress on accuracy and rigor, which are important to social science, creative writing, and non-fiction writing, and in the absence of accurate techniques, it is hard to produce anything that is artistic or creative. Everything is produced little by little, so we need to pay attention to the material process of production.

“Material” includes what space you are in, what tea you drink, and what kind of paper you use. I think it was the historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) who said that things that look really big, like global, long-distance commerce, are in fact made up of small links. Zheng He’s* (1371–1433) voyagesFootnote 2 were the same thing so that China’s travel to East Africa did not involve an abstract China and an abstract Africa; the ships involved had to visit a lot of shores, proceeding one step at a time, so you have to look at the entire material process. If you think about it this way, it’s a fairly good way to work and a good attitude toward life.

Art is somewhat similar to the legal system, and the way lawyers work. When I was a kid I found the whole lawyer thing really strange. If it is clear that the guy is guilty, why do we need a lawyer to defend him? But the idea of a “defense” is really important, in the sense that we have to assume that we do not know what happened, and through the process of “defense” the truth comes out, and we may discover that our initial conclusions were wrong! Scholarship is the same. You can’t rely on intuition to make judgments, but have to prove your points, and show how you reached your conclusions. Often it is the case that the clearer the conclusion, the harder it is to prove, but once you have proven it, then you’ve made a big contribution. For example, how do you prove that one plus one equals two? Why do you need to prove it? But once you’ve proven it and illustrated the process involved, it will have an influence on lots of basic theory.

Of course, I don’t want to overemphasize procedural justice, because I have discovered, in the process of doing fieldwork, that procedural justice can be used and even manipulated by people with legal resources, but I accept it as a basic concept. Only if you accept the result because of the process can you establish a substantive relationship with the result, even if you still have doubts. Research and life are also like this, always processes of open dialogue. Research means participating in a dialogue, changing the form of the dialogue, raising new questions in the course of the dialogue—this process itself is the most important.

Wu Qi: You mentioned a lot of left-wing scholars and ideas, but in your previous interviews and arguments, my impression is that you did not use the term “left-wing” explicitly. Maybe this has to do with the way in which you express yourself, in that you don’t talk a lot about your own viewpoint. Is it that you have not had the chance to do so, or that you prefer not to make that kind of statement?

Xiang Biao: First, I feel like there is no need to talk about a general left-wing standpoint. I have never felt the need, nor had the ability, to position myself on a broad intellectual spectrum. What I’m good at is getting into an issue concretely, finding a window, and seeing contradictions. So in my view, how you think has to do with specific questions and with your object of study. The way I work is to look at contradictions in the thing itself, the type of contradictions that affect actors but which the actors can’t explain to themselves sufficiently. This is how I try to engage myself.

Wu Qi: When you are trying to understand or when you are getting into the problem, sometimes you can’t help having to choose the perspective or standpoint of one side or the other, or you may unconsciously identify with a particular side. What do you do in situations like that?

Xiang Biao: If it’s a conflict between the weak and the strong, obviously everyone sympathizes with the weak. Because my specialty is fieldwork and social analysis, where a key concept is “relationships,” what I emphasize is not that the weak deserve protection. What is more important is why the weak are weak, which obviously is the same question as why the strong are strong, which has to be the result of a historical process. As a citizen or as a person, in my conclusions, I take the side of the weak, but in fact, what I spend most of my time on is not taking sides. For example, the weak may have a lot of flaws—I say this not to criticize them—these are limitations imposed on them by history, which need to be fully understood too.

Wu Qi: Then what about the critical nature of research?

Xiang Biao: The Frankfurt School was obviously important; it shows that a central element of critical theory is not to explain things away. It’s the opposite—when people think there is no problem, theory, by explaining things, allows people to discover that there are problems here, and the idea is to explain more and more of them. Of course, you want to explain complex things in simple ways, so that everyone can understand. There is no point in making things more and more complicated, but at the same time, you also want to explain the internal contradictions and latent problems in a situation that at first seemed to be unproblematic, illustrating things that don’t make sense. Here, “criticism” does not mean calling out a group for having done something wrong, in the sense of moral responsibility; instead, you are challenging our current state of knowledge. The “knowledge” that we carry around in our heads is necessarily mainstream knowledge, which means that we need to be self-critical as well.

Wu Qi: When I was in university, I was very influenced by critical theory, an influence that affected a lot of my later choices, but more recently I have started to feel like the voices of the older generation of critical intellectuals is starting to lose touch with younger groups. It’s like this generation of young people does not want to get too close to that world, or maybe doesn’t know how. Here maybe there is a need for critical theory to be self-critical.

Xiang Biao: Can you be a bit more specific about what the problem is? Are they concerned about other things, or are they choosing different approaches?

Wu Qi: I think it has to do with what they are concerned about. For example, when academics talk about something that happened in Latin America or the Middle East, young people think, “Why do they care about Latin America? That has nothing to do with me personally.” So they don’t see the point. When I interviewed Professor Dai Jinhua, she mentioned that she was giving up on communicating with young people, because she discovered a huge fissure between her and them in the sense that their individualism has become too pronounced, to the point that they cannot develop empathy for other people, and see them only as tools to be used. My view is not quite so extreme, but I do feel that the framework has changed, and that people around me don’t talk about other people or about ideas like equality and fairness, or that it is no longer natural to talk about such things. People talk about love, but more and more this means their love life, and things like family feelings are becoming a relic or a burden from the premodern period.

Xiang Biao: This is something I would like to know more about, meaning what it is that young people are thinking about these days. First, self-perceptions and public consciousness are linked. Sometimes the link is not clear, and you have to look for it. Let’s take the example of the idea of a “loser,”Footnote 3 which is a negative self perception, and is completely based in the ideology of equality. The loser says, “I’m a failure, which makes me a loser, but it’s not that I’m incompetent, and instead that society treats me unfairly. So I accept what I am, but I make fun of society.” So behind any definition, an individual gives himself there is always a public consciousness involved. There may be positive energy in this, and I want to find the positive energy.

We really cannot discuss equality or love in an abstract sense, because they are concrete, and you have to start with a particular lived experience. There have to be principles involved in love, but if you just talk about the principles in the absence of the concrete situation it quickly gets meaningless. Recently, the Sichuan Daily published an article by an invited commentator who is worried that there are too many “leftover women,”Footnote 4 and urged them not to be too picky or too romantic, otherwise they will never find a partner, and the BBC included the article in their international news. At the same time, people in the marriage market are very calculating. This is shocking for people of my age. We never thought about such things when we were dating in university. Young people today think love is something sublime, and they are eager to throw themselves into it, but they feel lost in reality, because they are concerned with this or that practical issue. So love becomes fragile, like a beautiful glass ball that can break anytime. If we can offer some language that will help them to grasp the complexity of their lives and see the contradictions clearly, such analyses can enter into their lives and perhaps be of some help.

For example, Plato says that love allows you to return to your original human state. This original self was made up of two parts that combined to constitute a personality. The two parts later split, and love allows you to find the other half. This sounds very romantic, but it is consistent with much anthropological thinking. Modern individualism believes that life starts with the individual, after which comes groups and society, but Durkheim and Mauss believe that this is a limited Western view and that many societies elsewhere in the world do not think this way at all. First, there are totems, and symbols of the group that define the group as a whole, and only after the group is defined is the individual acknowledged. Individual consciousness comes from group consciousness, which means that group consciousness is the prerequisite for individual consciousness and not its result. When Australian aboriginal groups count cattle, they don’t count them one by one. The meaning of “one” is one group of cattle, one tribe, and an individual within a tribe is a small “one.” Plato’s concept of love also suggests that the self was always incomplete, and needs to join with other subjects.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) also gave us an interesting tool. He argues that love is making an accidental occurrence into something sustainable, which makes love into a daily job. In the beginning, it may have been love at first sight, but you have to nourish that initial flame. This leads you into issues of daily life, and mortgages, and how to take care of aging parents, all of which has to do with political economy and society, and are thoroughly public. So from here, you can start to branch out and talk about your relationship with other groups.

You truly cannot force people to discuss social issues. If you suddenly try to discuss things with young people that they are not yet aware of, they have every reason to be annoyed. Are young people really not interested in important issues? The enthusiasm for the play Che GuevaraFootnote 5 in 2000 vividly reflected young people’s need for a new discourse, a new social imaginary. But the problem is that a lot of the dialogue and discussion in the play was problematic. For example, in the play they said that post-modernism and feminism were reactionary Western things. The problem is not that they misunderstood feminism, but rather that this kind of abstract side-taking when engaging in criticism is problematic. If you want to talk about oppression, then what is the longest-lasting, most universal oppression humankind has known? Gender-based oppression. In a dialogue with the audience, the playwright Huang Jisu* (b. 1955) said “since we’re talking about Che Guevara, who cares if you are a man or a woman!” Everyone applauded. The audience was moved by the abstract idea of “oppression,” without considering that in reality, oppression always occurs in specific forms, including gender-based oppression, age-based oppression…

The other day I heard an interesting example: in some Indian villages, poor people can dig wells, and rich people can also dig wells, so on the surface, it looks like there is no oppression, but there is an unspoken rule that rich people can dig wells twice as deep as poor people. So in times of drought, all of the underground water goes to the rich people, and poor people only have water when water is already abundant. Details concerning the depth of the wells are important, and only when we have done the research to figure out what myths or superstitions implanted these details and given them meaning will we understand what oppression is.

There are lots of stories like this, for example, in Wenzhou, before the revolution, one particular body of fishermen were a special group, and could not inter-marry with the peasants, except in cases when the peasants were extremely poor. Women from the group of fishermen wore clothes that had to be buttoned in a different way from what was normal, so that everyone could see, even from far away, that she was a member of an underclass. That’s how extreme things were. So we have to talk about concrete things like that, and figure out why divisions were so absolute in that kind of society, to the point of intentionally including clothing and hairstyles. Even if it is something quite distant from us, once you get the details right, I believe that everyone, both young and old, will enjoy listening to it, because now it is a story. The fiery language eventually cools off, but these kinds of concrete stories lodge themselves in people’s brains and slowly change the way people feel about life.