Xiang Biao: Coming back to Wenzhou this time inspired me with a lot of thoughts and feelings. On this trip, I went from Oxford to Beijing and then from Beijing to Wenzhou, and the three worlds are very different. Oxford is quiet and the rhythm is slow. Beijing is fast and busy, with a sort of forthrightness about the business at hand, like you have to make decisions very quickly and move on to the next thing. Here in Wenzhou, I’m meeting up with classmates from high school, which is a completely different kind of setting. But at the same time, academic language describes all three of these places in the same way, in the sense that we basically call them all “neoliberal.” The three places are linked together but also remain completely different. I’m confused, too, because it’s not only that the language does not describe the real world, but that an increasingly homogeneous language is increasingly unable to represent a fragmented world. Everyone appears to be the same in terms of how they think, how they express their feelings, and what symbols they use, even while they are widely different in terms of income, standard, and quality of living, so it is hard to tell whether these lifestyles really are the same. I don’t know how to explain this theoretically. This is a serious problem for the social sciences.

Wu Qi: You travel a lot between these three places. Is this the first time you have felt this on coming back to visit?

Xiang Biao: Yes. When I was talking with some radical or near-radical students in Beijing they told me two things. The first was that when they went to help some of the migrant workers who had been “cleaned up” in 2017, they found huge gaps between themselves and the migrants, in terms of the workers’ understanding of family relations, their needs at the time, and what the students could offer them or in terms of discourse. The second was that aside from the fact that they had not gone to university and did not have a diploma, the workers were basically no different from them. They talk the same way and watch the same shows. Everyone lives on their cellphone, whether it’s Huawei, Xiaomi, or Apple. Both of these observations ring true.

There is something that really surprises me, which is that there are some young people who are much more radical than I expected. This sends a message, which is that the condition of “suspension” can lead to two outcomes. One is anxiety because when everyone is constantly busy and running around, certain basic ideas of life can become very conservative, as we see in the so-called new familyism, Chinese-style forced marriages, the idea that you have to have children, you have to buy a house…This is all linked to this homogeneity. Because you “suspended” yourself from the present in the rush toward an elusive future, the life you’re living now cannot take on meaning. It’s sort of like fundamentalism, where home and family become the only things that sustain you. The flip side of this new conservatism is radicalism, where you feel that because diverse and contradictory things are hard to understand or value, you feel like revolutionary, comprehensive, earth-shaking changes are needed, and everything else is illusory, false, and oppressive. The idea of “suspension” explains why the Chinese economy grows so fast, why everyone pursues the same goal, all struggling for themselves, working like crazy to make money, which produces these two latent problems. What help do you think Chinese intellectuals can offer to these students?

Wu Qi: Practically speaking, in today’s climate, my feeling is that no teacher is courageous enough to help them. Before the students went to try to help the migrant workers, teachers at the school tried to talk them out of it. The teachers simply repeated the same language, they made no effort to understand why the students wanted to do what they did. But there’s nothing for them outside of school either, no work unit, no system, they didn’t know who to ask for help except to talk to their peers. They weren’t looking for someone to save them but would have welcomed some insight into the situation, or some shared experience, but we intellectuals don’t have any concrete experience, and can only share our common sense or our own judgment of the situation, or at the least, we can offer a little comfort. So all of this is quite hard for them.

Xiang Biao: This is a real challenge, and something society needs to respond to.

Wu Qi: Let’s talk a bit more about the specifics of your research. We talked about this a bit before just to flesh things out without focusing on it, but now it seems to me that the preoccupations and motivations behind your research are in and of themselves the direct responses of one scholar to social conditions, and perhaps even more urgent and direct than our chats about your life at Beida and in Oxford and Singapore. They directly reveal how we should raise questions and concerns, and how we should solve problems. For this reason, I think your empirical research should also become an additional thread in our discussion, and I thought we might delve into it now.

Xiang Biao: Good idea. Scholarship is a kind of intervention, and I’m a living person who wants to express my own thoughts about life in this world. By “intervention” I mean that what we write should touch our readers’ souls, and stimulate their thinking, all of which we’ve talked about before. The point of art is not to create a beautiful, harmonious world, but rather to enable you to face what is ugly.

“Accept your fate without accepting defeat” makes the same point. The most direct reason why we are anxious is that we lack a clear understanding of today’s world, and wind up feeling that we are always in the wrong place. This is why I pay attention to non-fiction writing. To me, it is a kind of emphasis on “authenticity” in an aesthetic sense, that is to say, the real has its own beauty even if it appears in an unpleasant guise. In the 2010s, young people started to have the confidence to value things they felt were real. Before, people derived meanings from grand, fabricated, abstract expressions, because they felt that real things didn’t have meaning in and of themselves, and could only be understood by shining the light of grand narrative on them. Now young people are saying that we don’t have to make judgments, nor do we have to start from lofty principles. We can just talk about our experience, which can be random, but as long as it’s real it has meaning. This kind of breezy self-confidence is relatively new and has to do with young people’s educational level and urban lifestyle. This is not a solution in and of itself and is mixed together with all sorts of anxieties, but it provides a solid foundation for people to advance in their thinking.

Wu Qi: Let me push back a little here. Every time you start to praise non-fiction I feel a certain doubt, maybe because part of my work is in this field. On the one hand, I agree that the lives of today’s youth are more immersed in reality than in the past few generations, but I can’t help but wonder how “authentic” that “reality” is. Are they really curious? Are they in pursuit of real things? It is also possible that every generation of young people is the same, in the sense that they are easily aroused and want to participate, but without getting in too deep and doing something concrete. All they do is ask questions. To speak more specifically about media and cultural circles, everyone has been directly influenced by the intellectual culture of the 1980s and 1990s and feels called upon to make grand gestures, and a good deal of their pain and anxiety comes from their self-expectation in this sense. But as time moves forward, they come to see more clearly that these gestures are useless and have no real impact on things. They are weak and even laughable. To me, we are living in a moment when young people realize the historical burden they are bearing. Intellectual leaders have left the scene, leaving us without norms or guidance, and everybody now talks about concrete plans instead of abstract issues, so that some older intellectuals are now pointing their fingers at young people, saying that what the youth are doing is wrong, which only increases their spirit of rebellion. It’s as if different generations of intellectuals don’t know how to communicate, and wind up blaming one another, losing confidence in one another, and both seeing the worst in one another. I don’t know whether this judgment holds for other professions, but for university students and people working in cultural industries, it is pretty obvious and widespread.

Xiang Biao: This is quite a deep issue, thanks for your insights. “Truth” and “honesty” contain three dimensions: what is “true,” what is “honest,” and what is “real.” The youth you are talking about dare to express themselves honestly, and their feelings about their own experience are also direct. They will not easily suppress these feelings, so there is an honest self there. Looking carefully at language can sometimes help us think through things. For example, when we say “true” (zhen)* or “real” (shi)* and “fake” (xu)* or “false” (jia)*, we used to use “fake” rather than “false.” Because to say something is false, you first have to know what is true, but in the past, because of propaganda and grand discourses, we could not tell true from false, so we sort of vaguely referred to all the formal expressions as “fake.” Now everyone has turned against “fake.” These days we might fabricate things, and when necessary resort to tricks, but we won’t be “fake” with people, using big and empty words without saying what we want. Sometimes we are fed up with “political correctness,” not because it is wrong or false, but because it sounds “fake and empty,” and does not allow people to express themselves directly. To my mind, having an honest self, even if it is somewhat reduced, is much better than having a lofty, if empty, self.

Yet after becoming honest, it seems like they have not reflected further on reality. This means that they are not entirely clear on the distinction between what is “true,” that is, principles that you cannot feel directly but need nonetheless to defend and pursue, and what is “real,” that is, what their hearts tell them based on their life experience. As you said, young people’s rebellion against their elders and their dislike of political correctness are both honest, but does this honesty represent a better understanding of our current lives? Does it express a new understanding of our historical experience? Not necessarily. The populism that everyone is experiencing all over the world can to a great extent be understood as a rupture between what is “honest” and what is “true.” Many people who voted for Trump are good, honest people. What are we to do? As a scholar, my thought is that the tools we have for thinking and expressing ourselves are not diverse enough. Bourgeois political correctness and universal values pretty much monopolize the public conversation, becoming the only way to express “truth.” Now everyone is starting from a posture of “honesty,” and is slowly coming to express their experience. If we keep going this way, then we can keep the honesty that approaches the truth, and let slide the kind of “gotcha” honesty fueling anti-political correctness, and maybe then we can slowly link honesty with important issues. This is something I hope for.