Wu Qi: You place a lot of emphasis on “empathetic scholarship.” In fact, in daily life and in academic research we often try to understand others across different positions, but the results sometimes leave people frustrated, and some people finally even declare that understanding is impossible. What are your views?

Xiang Biao: I would say the opposite. Understanding is natural, and not difficult, although we often consciously or unconsciously refuse to understand. The key is how to avoid refusing to understand. Think about it—don’t we often feel that when we’re with friends it is easy to arrive at an understanding, but with those that are closest to us, such as our parents, understanding is harder? This makes me think: do they really not understand? Do they really not know what you are thinking? My feeling is that of course they know, and it is not that they don’t understand, in fact they are completely capable of understanding, but they simply refuse. Typical examples are decisions concerning sexual orientation and marriage. She wants to marry him or he wants to marry her—what’s not to understand? But for property considerations, or what the neighbors will think, or for reasons touching their own position in society, they refuse to understand something that is in fact very easy to understand. Understanding is a part of everyone’s basic nature, and as a psychological mechanism is not difficult at all, and if you say something is hard to understand, it is in fact a question of position, in other words, whether you are willing to put yourself in the other’s place. There are many situations in which people refuse to do this because there are personal interests at stake.

In this sense, I feel like academic research is not hard to do. In “empathetic scholarship,” you don’t necessarily have to draw out your research subject’s psychological mechanisms like a psychoanalyst would. Everything is a question of position—you have to describe the social position in which they find themselves and describe the set of relationships and the particular world in which they are, at which point everyone will naturally understand. In this sense, understanding is merely shared subjectivity. Understanding must be based on sufficient knowledge, which is in turn based on empirical investigation. If I really want to understand you, then a casual chat is not enough, because I have no idea where your feelings come from, so I have to understand your world. This kind of investigation is the first step to true understanding. The mission of research is to understand something through finding something out, and on the basis of this understanding, constructing an explanation, so that after having understood, you know how the larger world is put together, only after which can you begin to answer certain questions. But I have reservations about interpretation. Interpretation means giving meanings to material. In empirical research, I pay more attention to understanding and explanation.

Wu Qi: To be even more specific, in the research process, can you completely understand what you are studying through interviews and observation? Maybe we can use your own research as an example. How do you break through that barrier? For example how do you deal with a situation where someone’s words and deeds don’t match up?

Xiang Biao: In terms of traditional anthropology, this question is fairly easy to answer, because we used to work mainly on people who did not have their own written language. Since they did not have written history, and much of what they said sounded strange and irrational, so our only useful method was observation. Today, however, words and deeds not matching up is not a problem to break through but rather, as I would put it, a “fact to be embraced.” Society is built out of a lot of words and deeds that don’t match up. What we want to observe is precisely in what way they don’t match up, and not say that in so doing they are trying to fool us. Sometimes they may be fooling themselves. This happens a lot, for instance, people who gamble or take drugs and would like to quit but can’t, so often their words and deeds do not match up, which is true for corrupt officials as well. You cannot argue that his “words” are completely fake, nor his “actions” premeditated—both words and deeds must be seen as part of his behavior.

To give an example, I am currently working on a notorious instance of “urban renewal” in Beijing in November 2017,Footnote 1 where there are many examples of conflicts between words and deeds. The Beijing government said they were protecting the migrants’ safety when evicting them from makeshift housing, but the migrants were left homeless. The government also decided that, following the demolition of the unsafe buildings, the areas must not be used for commercial redevelopment but should instead be used for building public facilities such as parks. They said that all of this was for the benefit of ordinary people. Was the government simply lying? The key is to analyze specific contradictions, to identify the exact discrepancies between words and actions. The fact that the government talked a lot about safety, means that the government is invested in this language, and we in turn can use this language to push for change. At the same time, we need to see where things went wrong in implementation, and gaps between words and deeds could be the starting points in thinking about what changes are feasible. My preliminary analysis is that the key to understanding the eviction campaign is not entirely that government and urban society discriminate and exclude migrants—which is the view of most people. Contradictions are also found within the government, between different departments, and at different levels, in terms of the use of public land. The cleanup by the central government was in large part a cleanup of local governments’ practice of commercializing land use, including the military’s practice of renting out space under their control for commercial benefits. These practices provided migrants with temporary accommodations but created other problems such as overcrowding and unsafe living conditions. If you look carefully at how the campaigns evolved over months, first in Shanghai and then in Beijing, you will see that it did not happen suddenly at all. It was a struggle to centralize power over land use, a struggle that started some time ago. There is no doubt that migrants were victims of the crackdown, but appealing to humanitarian concerns is not sufficient. The questions become: is such power centralization sustainable? How will such centralization affect the migrants in the long run?

Wu Qi: Usually the way we—or the media—deal with problems like that is through anger. Their internal contradictions make us angry, they are clearly using state violence to do things that are wrong, which they then cover up with high-sounding language. So we quickly take a stance against them, and draw a line in the sand. Later on we might discover that this antagonism has made the problem more difficult to solve.

Xiang Biao: So my point is that you have to get inside of all of this and understand the origin of the internal contradictions, and why in those circumstances they would resort of that kind of high-sounding discourse.

Wu Qi: In your view, what kind of social actions can this kind of academic understanding and explanation serve to guide? Or does it need to guide a social movement?

Xiang Biao: It is fairly clear to me that while I do not want to completely dismiss the possibility of social action, still, this is not something that we can plan. I feel that my work is basically intellectual work, and consists of providing tools that help everyone see and think. Especially in today’s situation, individuals and young people must themselves decide to take action, and it is not up to us to provide some kind of plan of attack, which is true of all heated social movements. Lenin said that “we are the vanguard,” who awaken the masses when they are not yet awakened. But in most situations, the people act first. My feeling is that youth today should not be too precipitous about taking action. More important is that their own daily lives, choices, and orientations need to take on their own voice.

Wu Qi: Talking about voice, two concrete voices occur to me. One is the voice of Lu Xun, whom you have already mentioned, which continues to serve as a direct stimulus among today’s youth via the Internet. Another voice is that of the author Fan Yusu*,Footnote 2 a voice that, like others, emerges out of society. Voices like hers can quickly evoke a lot of empathy. How do you see these two voices? Is there any relationship between these voices and the academic work you already mentioned where you break through barriers and establish dialogues?

Xiang Biao: I don’t see much similarity. What I said was that we need to dig out the voices of young people, I meant that we need to refine the wisdom displayed by young people in their everyday lives and allow it to become a voice. Lu Xun’s voice is clearly an encouragement and an inspiration that comes from outside of our lives, a resource that can be absorbed into our lives.

Fan Yusu’s voice is also important and makes me think of our earlier discussion of centers and margins. Fan Yusu’s essays are outstanding and allow everyone to grasp the life experience of people who pass unnoticed, and the more we have of this kind of thing the better. But from another perspective, the fact that Fan’s writings evoke empathy has a lot to do with the relationship between the center and the margins—this is my personal reading, I have no proof of this. When I read her writing and the commentary it produced, what I find the most moving is that Fan was always such a talented girl—she memorized the 300 Tang poems when she was little and read The Dream of the Red Chamber*, and can write things like what she wrote, but she nonetheless wound up in a horrible situation. Most people’s concern for her is not for her working life as an ordinary person, but they feel instead like she should have been at the center and instead wound up on the margins, so there’s something tragic about her story. Most urban youth, when they read Fan Yusu’s writings, do not see an actual life with its pain and struggle, a life that is neither tragic nor comic. Instead, looking from the center, they see a congenial figure at the margin who is full of desire for the center, and in which there are elements of tragedy, thus reinforcing their self-positioning in the center. The words that appear most often in the comments on her writings are “fate” and “refusing to accept fate.”

Wu Qi: If we place too much emphasis on “empathy” is it easy to wind up with the view that “if it exists there must be a reason for it?”.

Xiang Biao: No. When you see someone who is narrow, violent, someone who even commits crimes and kills people, one view is that this is a bad person, a demon, who was born like this and has always been like this. Another way to look at is to ask: how did they turn out like this? What childhood experience or current life situation might their character be related to? This necessarily leads us to think about the social context, as well as about the person’s internal state, their emotional life. This kind of understanding does not mean arguing that we can accept people who are narrow and violent. But it is only through understanding that we finally see what social problem needs to be addressed: you can’t just kill people right away, you have to think about communicating even with “bad” people, otherwise, our only choice with criminals is to let them go or to eliminate them. There is no hope of changing them through education. At the same time, if we understand, we naturally wind up seeing parts of ourselves in the other and might wonder if we are becoming narrow and impatient.

Wu Qi: So when we talk about “depth” in the social sciences, what do we actually mean?

Xiang Biao: “Depth” is always relative; the true reference points are different insights, and the key is the relationship between different insights. “Depth” means accurately grasping reality, and at the same time developing a new, critical understanding of existing insights. This does not mean simplistically overturning other people’s understandings, because other people have their own take on things, especially since many points of view have existed for years, and people see value in them, which means that there is something there. So a deep understanding means not only an accurate grasp of the thing you are studying but also an understanding of where previous understandings came up short, which tells you what method to employ when you move on to study something else. “Depth” implies a weighty inter-subjectivity, involving the object of your research, other people, and power relations, so it is a networked ecology, and it requires that you place yourself within the system of knowledge production, which is the only way to achieve depth. Depth is not a matter of deduction. It is ecological, plural, and requires penetration.

Wu Qi: There is another word—we say that people “see through” something. To my mind, this idea seems to suggest that if I have understood something clearly enough then I wind up not caring about it, which means I either embrace it completely or I decide it is meaningless. From my perspective—or maybe it’s my age—I cannot completely accept this feeling because I want to believe that things can change. How do you see this?

Xiang Biao: That kind of “seeing through” doesn’t really hold water. If it did, then the world could not change, and history would be static. In fact, the world is constantly changing, so how do people who have “seen through” everything explain that? The idea that everything is random and inexplicable goes against history. Depth comes from a networked structure of knowledge, and the cynical defeatist can return to their own little world where they buy their food and cook their dinner and pay attention to nothing else. “Seeing through” is a passive solution, one that seeks to maintain life with minimum engagement, but the person who lives this way is no longer thinking. This turns the living network of life into a dead end.