Wu Qi: Continuing the conversation we started in Beijing, there are many issues we still need to unpack. I was recently reading Politics and Letters, the New Left Review’s interview with the writer Raymond Williams (1921–1988), which is divided up quite neatly. There are parts where he only talks about his parents and his family life, in which he simply narrates what happened, and there are parts where he talks only about his work, but that sort of style doesn’t really fit our conversation. This is not quite how you operate, because you often jump from talking about your personal life to more academic questions, and to me this approach is important in and of itself. For example, last time when you were talking about Wenzhou, the question of the local gentry came up, and when you were talking about your time at Beida, you talked about your evolution as a person, so that both personal and scholarly aspects had their place in the dialogue. This interview is meant to supplement the first one, delving more deeply into some of the major themes that already came up, so I thought I would go back to the first interview instead of seeking out new topics. This may mean that we jump around a bit from question to question instead of following the course of your life as we did last time. Is this all right with you?

Xiang Biao: That’s great. It can make the book seem more like a multi-act play, which I think can be more effective, because the final impression it delivers will not be a straight flight toward a recognized destination, and more like a superposition of images. This way people can see the links between different experiences, and more readily grasp the questions or themes, which can spark discussion. If this sort of convergence winds up being one of the main features of the book, that would please me a lot. How to problematize personal experience, or how to go from experience to a scholarly question, is already an issue in itself. We can add to what we talked about last time. I mean, there is already a fair bit of material, so we can choose what we found to be worthwhile or interesting and problematize it a bit more so that the theory stands out more clearly.

Social science should help people observe the world, or navigate the world, through analysis. It is not like the natural sciences, which solve problems by discovering the laws of nature. In fact, social science is sort of the reverse of that, in that it tells you that in fact there are no definite rules, and instead everything depends on how you understand the world, how you decide to take action. You may have a big picture of how the world works, but there is nothing you would call a law. So social science uses a scientific attitude to sift through the evidence, collect materials, and see things clearly, but ultimately what it does is give you the tools you need to create a new reality or to change reality. So social science first has to do with you, and only later with society.

Wu Qi: Recently, young people really feel the need for help and guidance from older generations, but our teachers, and the older generations in general, seem to be slowly retiring from public discourse, it is getting harder and harder for young people to find organizers, mediators, protectors, and leaders even in the small worlds of academics and culture.

Xiang Biao: My counsel is not to look for iconic leadership. Leaders who know how to mobilize, excite, and encourage people to move forward are quickly transformed into icons or symbols, after which they are easily used by other people, because once you become a symbol you are a material thing, like money. We have to resist this transformation into things and symbols, and insist that leadership be a process, a kind of practice.

This has to do with the overall system. As you just said, leadership can mean protection, but this can be dangerous. If you look at leadership in universities now, it is true that they are protecting their subordinates, but this is also how they obtain resources. The university leaders are intermediaries between the system and university scholars. This is very different from what I meant by intellectual intermediaries. Intellectual intermediaries work between scholars, and between scholars and the population in general, and blend different ideas together to shape public discussions. These are intermediaries in a horizontal sense, not vertical. So we should not expect leaders to protect us, nor should we expect the system to protect us. What is most important is to be able to form a community of our own. In China, whether or not you can get something done depends on how determined you are, and if you have this kind of small-scale unity, you can be enough of a pest to succeed. You should not expect any one person to shield you from problems; everyone should confront difficulties together.

Our society has a strong tendency to turn people into icons and symbols—this big university, that famous person—many people get lost in this. Young people should have the courage to ask: “What is this for?” “What is good about this university, and what does that mean to me?” Whether a person is famous or not, first check out what he says. An icon relies on everyone’s support, and once the support disappears, so does the icon. Our education has filled our minds with icons and symbols, and to move past this, we need to ask obvious questions and speak in a natural voice. This may take time.