Wu Qi: I first wanted to ask why you are interested in the interview format. In China, it is not too common, and most scholars are not used to expressing themselves through interviews. In part, this is because interviews don’t count on their CVs, and with the decline in mass media in the past few years, there are even fewer quality interviews with scholars.

Xiang Biao: For me, it is a learning process to set my ideas in order in Chinese. What is really important is that in an interview setting we won’t use scholarly language, which means that what we talk about will be more down to earth. So this will not be “fake language,” and will also be things that I’ve already thought through. You can only talk clearly about things you have already thought through. Thinking clearly through muddled ideas and communicating them in the straight language is a major achievement. So for me, an interview is a process of personal growth.

Even more important is that it is interactive. An interview will allow me to communicate with today’s young people. This is very important because in this way I can hear what they have to say and see some changes as they are occurring. Not all changes are huge revolutionary changes, but every moment of our lives might mark a historical turning point, which means they are latent with possibility. Understood in this way, grasping these turning points becomes an important issue.

My sense is that students and young people are looking for tools to help them think and explore. This is something they care a lot about, and the tools they need today are not like the tools we used in the past. In the past, it was enough to have the tools to understand the functioning of the economy, the redistribution of social resources, and city planning. These were the classical tools of empirical research and policy research. Such tools, in the hands of experts, were one of the principal means by which we pushed change forward. But today’s society is different because of social media and platform economies. In addition, the educational level of young people is much higher, and what we need now are tools that will help everyone to reflect. Such tools are not external, like a computer or a smartphone that someone can give you; these tools need to be inside your brain, so that you can manage problems and move forward. You will also transform these tools, or abandon them for something else if they prove not to work. As a social scientist, I feel that my work is to be an incubator of such tools. There is nothing I can give you, and can only inspire you or perhaps wake you up. We need to change the old model where the expert tells the people what to do.

Wu Qi: On the theme of interactivity, I hope that in the interview we can combine the story of your life experiences with your academic work so that we can understand how you have gotten to where you are, and what the links between your life experiences and your scholarship are. From another angle, I may bring in my own questions, including doubts and uncertainties encountered in my work life, and especially things I have observed in the young people around me. In this context, I might mention the example of Professor Dai Jinhua*Footnote 1 (b. 1959), whose courses I took at university and who influenced me a great deal. Later on, when working in media I had a chance to interview her, at which point I began to understand the distance between concepts discussed in the classroom and real social practice, as well as the urgent need to close this distance. I remember Professor Dai having said that her generation is to blame for a lot of today’s problems.

Xiang Biao: What do you mean by “they are to blame”?

Wu Qi: My understanding of her meaning was: how did those ideas, that looked to be correct, wind up being so problematic when put into practice? Was it that our work was unsatisfactory? Or that other people’s work was more satisfactory than ours? In fact, what needs to be done is, to sum up some practical wisdom, which would be a bigger help to today’s youth than reassessing the older generation’s intellectual work. So I am curious as well as to how the lives of my professors and senior academics came to be, how much of what they did was the product of an era or an environment, and how much was the result of their individual qualities, and which parts of these experiences can be shared and learned from. This might help us to make a closer connection to our readers, and does not seem to be too far-fetched.

Xiang Biao: You absolutely have to bring in your own experience, otherwise everything else will seem superficial. Understanding the world necessarily comes through our own heartfelt experiences. One of our problems today is that intellectuals are not plugged into reality, and cannot explain things in concrete terms that reflect their actual existence, and instead express themselves in terms that are inorganic and intangible. If you ask me a question and I respond directly, then this is a great opportunity, in my view. Of course, there is a limitation, which is that I am still fairly young. I might look back on life differently 20 or 25 years from now, but now I might not be able to tell what impact my youth and adolescence have had on my life. Although I’m willing to think about it, I am not at a point where I am naturally reflecting on my life. So I think we should aim for an interview based on ideas and reflections on the current state of affairs, interspersed with some of my personal experiences, in other words, an intellectual interview with a concrete person. I really hope that it winds up being a dialogue aimed at young people, so we will need for you to ask questions from their perspective.

Wu Qi: Then maybe we should start by talking about your own youth, and if we run into topics we need to discuss, we will take them up in turn.

Xiang Biao: We can start with specific questions or with my personal experience, and then edit later if we need to.

Wu Qi: Fine. In any event, the conversation may be a long process.