Wu Qi: You said something that struck me as quite important, which was your reference to a “loss of common ideals,” in relation to what we were saying about China and history before. Where did you get this concept? Does it come from a particular context? What do you specifically mean by it?

Xiang Biao: It is basically about Hong Kong. A few years ago, I got bored with case studies and instead started to pay attention to problems in the world, feeling like I ought to have a basic grasp on important issues. In fact, I was re-educating myself. The 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China had gone much more smoothly than many of us had imagined it would. This was because there had been shared ideals around building a strong socialist country. There were a small number of Hong Kong people who clearly identified with this, such as the teachers union,  and there was also a small number of people who resolutely opposed this, but there was room for debate. Later on, however, everything came to be about money and power, and the common ideals disappeared. Everything became a question of opportunism, and the merchants supported the government in order to cash in. So now there was no narrative and no explanation for anything. So who are the people going to genuinely support? This question merits further reflection as well because, when we first started talking about the market economy and making universities more professional and less bureaucratic, running universities like a company, we thought that we didn’t have to rely on common ideals in order to work together. But what happened now is unexpected. I was thinking about this in the context of my project on Northeast China, how market relations came to be transformed into power relations. Although labor placement is meant to be a purely economic matter, everyone is doing their best to transform profit relationships into hierarchical relationships, which is the only way to better protect commercial interests. This is a result of the loss of common ideals.

Wu Qi: This question is directly linked to another, the even bigger question, which is how we in China understand ourselves today, today being the product of our past common ideals, but how do we finally understand it? Is it different than in the past?

Xiang Biao: There is something really strange here. We seem to be saying now that we want to get back to our common ideals—“don’t forget your original intentions”Footnote 1—and that’s fine. But this takes us back to what we were talking about before, which is that all of politics is constructed, and relies on countless small universes and countless intermediate processes. If these intermediate processes are still rooted in the usual rigid power structures, then the effort of bringing back ideals at the top may simply become exaggerated performances at the grassroots level. For the past twenty years or so low-level officials have had it easy. They can do whatever they want to, as long as they don’t make a mistake. They make sure to protect each other’s interests, so you can be a little corrupt and I can be a little corrupt. This level of corruption cannot continue. I support the idea that it is time to re-politicize certain things. But clearly, some people think this only means coming up with slogans, and some people are even using these slogans as weapons, which frightens people at the mid- and grassroots levels. When people are afraid, they can react with extraordinary measures in an attempt to protect themselves. They do not reform themselves rationally, or reconstruct their ideals, but rather knowing that they have already betrayed their ideals, they have to resort to any available means to protect themselves, to the point of trying to silence other people. So, things are complicated now. Some people understand politicization in an abstract sense and act out of emotion. They are not thinking about the living situation of ordinary people. They are not acting like local gentry.

Wu Qi: Thinking about the Chinese political situation, if we look again at how ordinary people in China are more and more seeking to prove themselves to the world, then the question becomes even more interesting, in the sense that it looks both reasonable and dangerous. How do you see China and the Chinese people in terms of their self-expectations?

Xiang Biao: We should be thankful to the world for their expectations of China because these expectations express the world’s maturity. Many in the West are truly hoping that China will do something and make a contribution, especially in terms of green energy or fighting climate change. Many developing countries also have similar expectations, which is a reaction to the unreasonable power relations in today’s world. But mainstream opinion in China today is not talking about doing something different, but about becoming number one, and many basic ways of thinking are similar to what we see in the United States, which to my mind has something to do with our loss of common ideals. When was China most respected in the world? In the 1950s and the 1960s, during the nation-building period. Beginning with the Bandong Conference in 1955, through Mao’s creation of the theory of the three worlds in 1974, China had a huge influence internationally and sparked a lot of international discussion and debate.

But the idea of proving oneself is a paradox. If you have to prove yourself, this means you don’t have a self, which in turn means that you prove your existence through preexisting standards and markers, through other people’s thinking, which means pleasing other people and debasing yourself. For an individual it means asking for recognition, means doing things to be seen, not to be happy. All of this starts from a feeling of insecurity and lack of self-worth. The rise of militarism in Japan was to prove that the Japanese were not inferior to Europe. So you’re right: proving yourself can be dangerous.