Wu Qi: We have talked a good bit about your public talks and your interviews in the media, which might be seen as the more social side of your work, which was part of our original intention, but on reflection, it seems like we have talked less about your research activities. Is there a relationship between the two?

Xiang Biao: We haven’t talked all that much about my research because the topics I am working on are rather specific. For example, in my work on overseas labor placement agencies, I’m looking at how governments, international organizations, and NGOs regulate labor mobility, in terms of recruitment and other practices. The central issue here is the relationship between bureaucracy and the market. Labor migration is now basically treated as a transaction in the market, but this market is absolutely not a typical, flat market, but is instead hierarchical and structured like an administrative system. We generally think of market and bureaucracy as being opposites, but marketization itself quickly leads to hierarchy. Why is this? On the one hand, the market has its own internal momentum, because to maximize profits, it relies on monopoly and control of upstream resources. A second reason is that, at present, governments and international organizations are increasingly emphasizing the protection of human rights and orderly mobility, and they have created many regulations in this sense. This in turn increases the legitimacy of certain commercial intermediaries, because they have the ability to process the paperwork properly, creating the impression that they are respecting the regulations and protecting workers, or at least avoiding unfortunate incidents. After they master this process, they use this ability to protect their position in the market and seize excess profits. Completing paperwork for migrants becomes their main source of profits, instead of actual recruitment and the daily work of labor management. They farm out the recruitment tasks to smaller companies, who may engage in any number of practices that are more or less legal.

To take another example, social reproduction is closely related to student mobility, because now, learning English and studying abroad are no longer simply something to add to your CV, but are meant to fundamentally change you as a person and how you live your life. Parents in China are no longer thinking that they want their children to get a foreign degree so as to get a good job, and instead, they are thinking that education in China goes against human nature and takes away a child’s natural sense of happiness, so studying abroad is about protecting their basic human nature. This is not a simple question of ideas about education, this ultimately is a question of how society reproduces itself.

For a while, I was thinking about studying the Muslims from China’s northwest who go to the southeast coast to work as Arabic-Chinese interpreters. Some of them used to be troubled youth who dropped out of school in the northwest and got into a lot of fights. Their parents were worried that they would get in trouble, so they sent them to madrasas attached to the mosques, where they learned a little Arabic, and then suddenly in the 2000s they had the opportunity to work as translators. I wanted to see how this group understands religion, how they see China, and how, concretely, they fit into Chinese market practices within a global commercial economy in places like Yiwu, in Zhejiang, or Tianhe, in Guangzhou. Fundamentally this is about diversity in China. We know that diversity objectively exists in today’s China, but government discourse consistently has a hard time recognizing diversity and is incapable of handling it properly. I spent a long time in preparation and wrote a few things, but now I have basically set it aside.

Ethnic self-rule under socialist conditions comes with a particular politics, which I call transcendent politics. The idea of ethnic self-determination exists within the tradition of European socialism, and Lenin especially emphasized ethnic self-determination and especially cultural autonomy. I read a historical document that said that Lenin was influenced by the friend of his father, a missionary with the Russian Orthodox church, who insisted that missionary work had to be done in the native language of the people one seeks to convert and that you cannot use Latin or Russian. This is also the common practice of Protestant missionaries. William Soothill, who later taught in Oxford, translated the Bible into the Wenzhou dialect. Across from where my office is now is Wycliffe Hall, which is associated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics and Wycliffe Bible Translators, which translates the Bible into many different languages. So missionaries became the first quasi-anthropologists, with a deep understanding of local cultures. Why this emphasis on local languages? The friend of Lenin’s father explained that the only way to truly communicate with God is through your own language. If you have to learn Russian, Latin, or English, you will never get close to God. You have to talk to God in the same language you use when you argue every day, the same language you use to talk to your wife and kids. The emphasis on diversity here has a relationship to transcendence, in the sense that since we have a common future and common ideals, the fact that we are diverse now is nothing to fear, and instead is interesting and to be cherished. Lenin’s view of ethnic self-determination was the same idea, that since everyone was working toward Communism, differences in language or lifestyle were not insurmountable. If everyone established Communism using the language and lifestyle that is the most intimate to them, and conversely Communism was realized in different places with different local characters, would this not be great?

Today, many people understand Lenin’s position on ethnic self-determination as being simply a utilitarian matter, and argue that Lenin hoped that ethnic minorities would rise up and overthrow the Tsar and destroy the Tsarist system. But it was not so simple. On this front, China handled this quite well in the 1950s, and Han cadres in minority areas had to learn Uighur and Tibetan. But once we lost the transcendent ideal, things changed, which means that we are trying to solve the problem by relying solely on material interests and redistribution.

Wu Qi: That’s very interesting research, which in terms of content is related to migration and in terms of its problématique is clearly related to a concern for China. Extending things a bit further, it is not surprising that you have talked about the Hong Kong problem as well.

Xiang Biao: At one point, there were lots of dyed-in-the-wool Communist supporters in Hong Kong, like Szeto Wah*,Footnote 1 who organized the teachers’ union. It was all a matter of ideals. When you have clear political ideals, many people will disagree, but some will agree and follow. Where the trouble came from later on, in my opinion, was something deeper, which was that everything got commercialized, and Hong Kong was not ruled by Hong Kong people, but by the government and rich merchants. Power is delegated to rich people who rule according to their personal interests. This can’t work, even in a deeply commercialized place like Hong Kong. My understanding of diversity is different from how it is used as a descriptive term. For me, it is not a simple matter of the existence of different cultures and different personal identities but instead means avoiding a situation in which life is dominated by one-sided financial or profit concerns. So diversity is against homogeneity, against the idea that one homogenous logic comes to dominate public affairs. At present Hong Kong is ruled by authoritarianism and money, the carrot and the stick, both of which have been pushed to extremes. Why is this? Because we have no transcendent common ideals, and there is no social space left. I am not celebrating diversity in a Western sense, arguing that diversity is necessarily good. This isn’t the point of my argument. My argument is that once things are homogenous it can be rather dangerous.

Wu Qi: You talked about the sourcebook that you’re putting together with Wang Hui and the discussions you have organized for that. Can you tell us a bit about where the project is now?

Xiang Biao: In this reader, we are hoping to explore social debates in modern and contemporary China. We chose ten large topics, which are related to everyone’s lives, such as the debate on the idea that women should abandon their jobs and return to their families. This debate started in the 1920s and 1930s and went through a number of twists and turns, and recently someone on the CPPCC brought up the idea again, arguing that it would benefit the stability of employment and the family. We looked at these debates together and over time, trying to see how the arguments developed.

The question of divorce is another one. The author Yu Luojin* (b. 1946) asked for a divorce because she had no feelings for her husband, which was a big deal in 1980, when divorce was only granted to partners of counter-revolutionaries. Later on, the Beijing municipal court approved her request. Now, however, the Supreme People’s Court has passed the “Interpretation of the Marriage Law, version 3,” which allows for considerable discussion of how to divorce, how to divide property held before divorce, and how to individualize property, all of which will help the courts make clear rulings on property questions, which means that divorce will be easier than before. The law basically states that divorce is possible at any time. For example, if a couple has been married twenty years, and the woman earns less than the man but has contributed much more time and effort in the home, this will not count at the moment of divorce, and all that will count is the property you recorded in the marriage contract. One part of the reasoning behind the new ruling is cases where a woman marries a rich man and then quickly divorces him, asking for half of their common property, and the law wants to protect the rich man. It is fairly clear whose voice the law is listening to.

In addition, beginning in 1994, the sociologist Zheng Yefu (b. 1950)* and the economist Fan Gang (b. 1953)* had a debate on “car civilization,” in other words, whether China should develop the car industry, which later included discussions of whether to raise the fuel tax, and various questions relating to road and car issues, ultimately becoming a debate on environmental issues, and now there is a debate on global warming. So we will put all of these debates together, and translate the original materials into English for international readers. We have not paid enough overall attention to these kinds of social debates, and in the past focused more on debates concerning the political line, theory, or policy.

Wu Qi: Will you and Wang add your own explanations or analyses?

Xiang Biao: There will be editorial notes, but not full articles. It is basically a reader, meant to focus on the social side of things. So this reflects the opinion of those who participated in the debates, not solely those who make policy and the experts, but citizens as well, who have their own viewpoints and their own life experiences. We looked through magazines like Banyuetan* from the 1970s and 1980s, which printed a lot of readers’ letters, and sometimes organized discussions around the themes raised in the letters, and what is interesting is that they identified the status of the writer, such as student, housewife, soldier, worker, peasant. More recently, however, the only voices that join in the discussion are those of urban, well-educated people, and even on social media, we don’t hear much from workers. We hope to do a Chinese version later on because a lot of the material should be quite fresh to today’s readers in China. The participation and the representativeness of the earlier period are quite different from what we see on social media today, however open we think we are. Of course, that participation was not simple and direct, nor was it spontaneous, and the discussions were organized and directed. This touches on the question of what constitutes leadership. What kind of leadership you are exercising depends on what questions you raise, and how you organize discussions? Not allowing discussion is not exercising leadership power.