Wu Qi: You mentioned non-fiction writing before, as well as your interest in reading reportage literature when you were young. The directness and the willingness to discuss issues found in that type of writing had an important impact on you, and a fairly positive one. And it is true that recently, young people have become interested in non-fiction writing, a lot of it online, as in the case of Fan Yusu, whom we have already mentioned. But I have noticed some changes in this recent wave of writing, even if the directness is still there. It may be nothing more than changes in style, or in language, a desire to express themselves in more modern terms, but the richness, the punch of it is slipping away. There is a tendency to tell one person’s story completely from their perspective, without explaining why they chose that story, which is worth talking about. Or they might talk about some collective event, and weave together eight or ten distinct pieces of information, the way journalists do, presenting everything as objective facts that cannot be disputed. You mentioned a kind of gravity when you talked about the gentry’s concern for the future, for ethical judgments, but this is completely absent in today’s non-fiction writing, and in fact, largely absent from much of contemporary society.

Xiang Biao: This is interesting, and I would like to add a bit from my perspective. If you include your own vision in writing, it will add a sense of gravity, but even more importantly, it will give the text a soul, so that it is no longer a mechanical exercise, but something informed by vision and soul. Vision and soul will also help to determine what weight to give to various aspects of your work. In the example you just mentioned, it would be very difficult to write out the perspectives of eight people, and it would be even more difficult to put them in one text. How about giving it a soul? One way of doing this is to consciously explain the positions of these eight people; the eight individuals represent eight positions. A certain position is closer to the heart of the matter, another is more peripheral, and so on. We should give them different weighted values. The weighting is not a matter of a theoretical judgment but is instead an empirical assessment—it’s descriptive. Social science is primarily about description. Describing things clearly is the greatest contribution. Because what the world needs you to do is to provide clear descriptions of complex things.

We should also add technique to the mix because it really matters—things are done through techniques. These days people talk about the materiality of knowledge, saying that craftsmanship is interesting. This is good. We should emphasize craftsmanship, emphasize concrete, material, and clear observations of our surroundings. We should not jump into lofty abstraction too quickly.

Wu Qi: I wonder if you could be a bit more specific about the idea of weighted value, or maybe give an example to illustrate it? Because an issue has many aspects, there is judgment involved in deciding which aspect is most important. So how do you decide when you are assigning weighted values?

Xiang Biao: Of course, this will be influenced by the author’s value judgments, but for me, the ideal situation is to use empirical observation. Take the example of peasants who deposit complaint petitions.Footnote 1 Do they do this because they are angry that village land has been occupied, or are they thinking that if they make some noise, the problem will be resolved quickly, or maybe they know that once they file the petition the county will give them some money, or is it a way to bargain over the amount of money? It may be that there are several factors, but we will use empirical observation to assign different weights, and figure out if finally, it is a moral political action or a utilitarian calculation. Another example. The Beijing government is now (2018) closing down wholesale markets in Zhejiang Village, and the process of how the government will compensate individual stall-owners in the markets is extremely complex. We won’t be able to give a clear account unless we know how to weigh the different aspects of the process. Local governments received money from the central authorities to compensate those merchants whose stalls would be removed. Merchant representatives negotiated with the local government as they suspected that the local government did not pass on the compensations from the center in its entirety. This was meant to be a grassroots, democratic process. But what happened was that once someone was elected as a representative, they would tell the government that for a certain amount of money, they would help keep other merchants from making trouble. And when the merchants found out about this, they tried to prevent the representative from playing this kind of trick. How do you understand this representative? Was he always like this? Or did he become this way in the course of negotiations, or was somebody putting pressure on him? When I talk about weighted variables, I mean that you have to pay attention to the complexity, and then separate the principal from the secondary contradictions. You don’t deduce this from a set of principles, but instead from paying attention to these concrete details. You basically develop this ability through experience, gradually learning how to do it.

Wu Qi: A little while ago you said that the problem with anthropology is easy to explain, but if we consider knowledge production in general, problems are still there. For example, journalists usually talk about interview techniques and the spatial arrangement of their texts, just like professors talk about how to publish their papers and measure their impact. It’s a matter of techniques and practice. However, if our discussions stay at this level, we are a long way away from the original purpose of these professions. We may wind up with technically skilled journalists or scholars, but what will they have discovered? What problems will they have solved? It seems to me that there are fewer discussions within these occupations about ideas and values, and that the general public is not interested in those technical discussions.

Xiang Biao: This finally has a lot to do with what you are concerned with. But what caused the loss of concern may be the lack of robust means to specify what the concern is. The question is how to produce concrete outputs driven by concerns, for which technical issues are important—the two aren’t mutually exclusive. I feel like one of the negative inheritances of the 1980s was the people’s concerns were blown out of proportion, while they did not take methodology seriously. Then the concerns became empty. Gentry naturally know how to solve this problem, because their interests and their concerns are focused on something close at hand.

Sometimes you have to let go when you specify your concerns. I think you should combine your concerns with a sense of curiosity, and with a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguities. You cannot allow yourself to think that anything with contradictions or ambiguities is less good, because life is full of them, so you need to be excited about ambiguities. Large concerns of course are part of lofty ideals, but in practice, you often have to put ideals aside and explore the reasons for the existence of what is not ideal. You must pursue your concerns step by step, so I always stress operationalization. The online news portal HK01 once interviewed me, and the title they gave the interview was “The Anthropologist who Makes Cigarette Lighters,” because I’m from Wenzhou, which is known for making cigarette lighters. For people in Wenzhou, the most important thing is to produce something. The basic idea is that all of your theories and thinking should be connected to “making something.” When you make something, you are limited by all kinds of material conditions, and our agency and freedom are limited. So what we can do is let the given material forces play a bigger role. For example, a group of Wenzhou peasants made money at the end of the 1970s by making meal tickets. They knew the college entrance exam was going to be restored, so they started making plastic meal tickets.Footnote 2 When they started, raw materials were a big challenge as they were expensive. They got leftover bits of plastic from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Shanghai. The SOEs were simply throwing these away, but they were perfect for making meal tickets. All this could lead to deep theoretical analysis as this touches on the relations between SOEs and market exchange, between SOEs and rural industry, and the question of mixed property ownership, etc. But these theoretical meanings became visible only in the process of “doing.” You won’t be able to see these subtle, but at the same time quite important, facts if you stick to your concerns and do not make open-ended observations.

Wu Qi: If we extend this idea of “doing,” does it mean something for anthropology? Or more broadly, for contemporary intellectuals and their attitude toward society, or for their work methods?

Xiang Biao: I think it should. One of the most important changes in China now, especially after the expansion of college enrollment in the late 1990s, is that with the increase in family investment in education, and the changes in information technology and social media, the distinction between intellectuals and non-intellectuals has become blurred among young people. The boundary between doing and thinking is almost gone. This is a really good thing, and we should break down the distinction as much as possible, because everyone is an intellectual.

In light of this, what should people like us do? Since other people don’t have the time to organize information systematically, we should put information together to form a picture of reality. Another important thing is to seek out hope and capacity in what other people are doing. Social change after all is a social process, moved by social forces, and one of the few things intellectuals can do is to mobilize people. Mobilization means that the strength is with other people, and all you are doing is helping them to realize the strength that they have, which means bringing latent hope and capacity to the surface. In the language of the Communist Party, this is called “guiding” work. Its assumption is that the ability, the hope, and the future already exist in society, but you have to dig for them. This means that looking for contradictions and searching for capacity are one and the same thing. Seeing contradictions means understanding both sides of an issue, and the conflict between these two sides is what drives change.

For many thoughtful young people who are not professional intellectuals, their own doing is the subject of their thinking. They should think through their relation to society, which I summarized somewhere as “accepting fate without giving up.”* Since Sartre, we have all understood that existence precedes essence, which means that your nature is not fixed, and your actions decide what kind of person you are. No one is born a woman; you become a woman through social processes. Looking at life this way is liberating. But the problem with the current situation is that everyone feels they are completely free to do anything. They want to get famous, have a family, make money, pursuing all of this through their freedom. They overlook an important question, which is “Who are you?” Everyone has their history, their family background, and their educational experience. The entire social order accords everyone a place, which is difficult to change, and you need to understand clearly who you are. “Accepting fate” means understanding who you are in terms of your history and your place in the social structure. Women are molded into becoming women by social processes before they know it, and it is no simple matter to reverse it. The social and historical forces that are molding you are much stronger than any individual effort. A child from a poor family can become rich, but simply rejecting your fate as a poor person will not solve the problem, and in fact, we know that this kind of thinking leads to many psychological and social problems. So the key is to grasp clearly where you are in society, understanding why it is still so hard to be a woman or to be poor. Then, how should you be a woman? How should you be poor? How do you keep pushing back against the forces of society and history without throwing in the towel? China’s LGBT community has set a good example. They know that their lives will not be easy, but they have embraced that life. They are not praying for their lives to change but instead continuing to fight and push back against the ways things are.