Wu Qi: To continue our discussion of community, perhaps we can be a bit more concrete. What sort of expectations should we have of universities today? What should universities be doing?

Xiang Biao: Universities function differently in different eras. In China, we have entered a period where material conditions are pretty good and the education level is quite high in urban areas, so “social reproduction” is becoming increasingly important. As we discussed before, many problems will not be resolved through economic redistribution alone, which by itself will not address “people’s diverse needs for material, spiritual and cultural life”,Footnote 1 which is very real. Given this, what kind of people our universities should be turning out is an important question.

Wu Qi: Are there any historical examples of university education that comes close to what you are envisioning?

Xiang Biao: Not really. Universities in the 1960s were exceptions, naturally, in Europe and in the United States, and places like Oxford always had all sorts of strange people, but this has to do with their aristocratic background. Aristocrats can be exceptional if they want to. Some radical left-wing people came from the most privileged families, and they read a lot and turned their backs on their roots, making sacrifices for the life of the mind.

In China, after the founding of the PRC, we experimented with open-door schooling,Footnote 2 with the abolition of the examination system, and with worker-peasant-soldier schools, which were all good ideas. At the end of the 1970s, we restored the college entrance exam. How should we understand this? Looking back now at 40 years of reform and opening, we all seem to see the restoration of the entrance exam as something completely natural, as if society had restored its basic rationality and returned to normal. But whose “normal” was this? For 90% of the peasants, whether the exam system was abolished or not made little difference, but the resumption of the exam system immediately reunited former bureaucrats and urban intellectuals. It was actually a new alliance between the Party and the elites in the socialist system of that era.

Wu Qi: The examples you give, the 1960s, etc., all seem to have been in the process of confronting a certain opponent with which they are dissatisfied, they are criticizing and challenging it. Is it our expectation that it is only under such circumstances that universities will be mobilized to create new thinking?

Xiang Biao: This is not quite the same thing as the “exception” we have been talking about. If we are talking about a consensus that has come together in the face of a formidable enemy, like in Japan at Tokyo University in the 1960s, when the slogan was “down with imperialism, dissolve Tokyo University,” and when male students faced the US Embassy when they took a piss, this was a historical exception, but this cannot last long, and this experience has limited direct reference value for us. When faced with a strong common enemy, everyone wants to resist, which has been necessary at certain moments in history, but this comes with its own problems, including oversimplification, which puts even more limits on intellectual creativity.

The exceptions I am talking about are more individual. Universities themselves may not be exceptions, but universities should allow and encourage everyone to look for exceptions. Universities are moderate places, not angry places. In today’s generally moderate climate, if everyone looks for the exceptional when we do not have a common enemy, it might take us even deeper. We ourselves might be the enemy, which means that we will have to think a bit harder. We will need to pay closer attention to people around us and think about their life carefully. Two years ago, students at Beida did a study of people who work on campus, and the support staff, in order to understand more about what their life is like, and the result attracted some public attention. This is something that university students should do. This might not necessarily be looking for the exceptional, but it is already a couple of steps outside of the mainstream, and already has achieved good results.

Wu Qi: Is this kind of exception also the source of Beida’s sense of its own centrality, which it has had since the May Fourth movement? Is it the same thing that you criticized about intellectuals and the elite?

Xiang Biao: Beida thinks it is leading history forward, that when they are opposing something they are pushing history forward, in the right direction. So Beida thinks the essence of its action is not opposition, but progress, which is different from resistance. Resistance is something that the weak do, like peasants who try to pay fewer taxes and live their lives without outside interference, but Beida is all about heroism, progress, and shaking things up. From a scholarly perspective, resistance should be linked with doubt or skepticism, but Beida isn’t like this, and always insists that it is right, and at the center of the action. At particular moments in history, such as the May Fourth period of the 1980s, it made sense, but this attitude gets dangerous after a while. I worry about Beida’s self-confidence, it’s feeling that it has a firm grasp on history and truth.

Wu Qi: What are your feelings about the Chinese scholarly world? I feel sort of pessimistic and powerless about the current state of culture, education, and art, and sometimes I have a hard time with the general silence and inaction, which is probably one of the reasons why we wanted to do this interview.

Xiang Biao: It’s true that in general there is not that much interesting stuff going on. To tell the truth, scholarly progress in China has been slower than I thought it would be. I thought that given all the changes and all the interesting things that people were talking about, something would come of it, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of analysis, which is quite strange.