Wu Qi: We don’t know that much about your personal story. In one of your articles in Chinese, “Responses and Reflections—How We Narrate the Present and Grasp History: With Further Thoughts about the Public Role of Anthropology,” you talked about growing up in the 1980s and the 1990s. You mentioned that “the urgent demands of students at the time were for individual freedom, social autonomy, political democracy, and economic openness, and the original socialist system was seen as a historical burden to be abandoned.” What did you think about when you were young, or when you were a child?

Xiang Biao: I used to think my youth was completely boring, but when I look back on it now, there were some things that were interesting. Wenzhou in the early 1980s had embraced commercialization pretty thoroughly, but my family was a bit different. We lived in the dormitory of the middle school where my mother taught. The dorm was a converted classroom building. In the beginning, three families shared a kitchen and later on it was two families. The kitchen was about ten square meters, and there was a slogan on the wall that said “Seize Revolution, Increase Production,” as well as pictures of Mao. When I was little I would always ask my mother what it meant to “seize revolution,” because to me, the word “seize” (zhua*) meant to “catch” bad guys. How could you “catch” revolution, since it was a good thing? I wondered about this for a long time.

Before I started going to school, I spent most of my time at my grandfather’s house. My grandfather was an unusual character. His father was one of the first to be sent by the Qing government to study in Japan, selected through national exams. He probably went to Japan in the 1890s, with people like Shen Honglie* (1882–1969), who later became the governor of Zhejiang under the Guomindang. My great-grandfather studied in a naval academy in Japan, and after he came back he worked in the navy of a Beiyang militarist*Footnote 1 in Shanghai. He abandoned his family in Wenzhou (Yueqing county), married again in Shanghai, and started smoking opium. After the establishment of the People’s Republic he was labeled a reactionary and fell into poverty, after which he returned home to Yueqing. My grandfather was a product of this ruined landlord family, and this background mattered a lot. He later became a worker in a factory run by a relative of his, and in the 1950s, after this factory was converted into a joint public–private enterprise, he became a mid-level manager in this collective. He and his father were quite distant; we would say now that they didn’t have many feelings for one another. But he was proud of his father, believing that he was a “somebody.” So my grandfather had the aura of a fallen aristocrat. He was not at all like his neighbors. He liked to comment on things and people, and tended to frame events with concepts and opinions, assigning things meaning and value. His relationship to the new society was also complex, neither simply rejecting it nor praising it. He had his own views and a sense of distance that suited him. My grandfather influenced me a lot, because I grew up with him from a very young age.

But the house where I stayed with my grandfather—and this has to do with his “fallen family” background—was in a really low-class area, basically inhabited by dock-workers, who were unloading grain onto wooden carts that they pulled themselves. The woman next door was a prostitute. Our houses were like huts, nailed together out of wooden planks, with huge cracks between them. The kids who were bigger than I was would climb up the wall to watch the prostitute between the cracks, because she and her clients made a lot of noise. I didn’t really know what it was all about, but once the neighbors started arguing I would hear all about it. There were fights all the time, where somebody would be accused of stealing electricity, or stealing water. There were also neighbors who worked in factories, and I could tell there was a difference between them and the ones that worked on the docks. I remember one family clearly, because all the young people admired one of the daughters, who was maybe 10 years older than I was and got a job at a canning plant through connections. On New Year’s and holidays she could bring home canned goods, and we were all envious.

So when I was little I lived among three different worlds. One was that run-down district; another was the world of the fallen nobility of my grandfather; and finally, after I started going to school, there was the school where my parents lived, and where I heard more “orthodox” speech. Every morning at breakfast my father made me listen to the news broadcast from the central government, followed by the radio program “A New Song Every Week”. I learned a lot of official expressions and developed an interest in reciting things. These three social environments were different, which may have helped me to understand differences in life. Of course, I more or less identified myself with the intellectual world, because my parents were intellectuals, and what’s more, at that time intellectuals were an important topic. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, editorials in the People’s Daily talked about “respecting knowledge and talent,” and stressed that “science and technology are the number one productive forces.” This is what we called “the springtime of science.” Our neighbors in the school dormitory talked all day long about implementing the state policy on improving intellectuals’ living standards and political status.

What is interesting is, at that time, people in all the three surroundings had a strong political consciousness. I have vivid memory of my neighbors praising one of Chen Yun’sFootnote 2* talks in the 1980s, in which he said that “without industry there is no wealth; without agriculture there is no stability; without commerce there is no dynamism.” In fact, my neighbors had nothing at all to do with agriculture, but they were concerned about it. Where my grandfather lived, when one family was eating, the neighbors would come over and crowd around the table and see what you ate. People’s conversations were also about politics, involving comments on the current situation, with judgements about political figures.

An important topic was the price of food. Every day people watched one another buying food, and would always ask how much you paid and complain about how much the prices had gone up. A major change at the time was that we started to have free markets for agricultural products, which meant that people were always asking whether you bought that fish at the state market or the private market. Prices were better at the government market, but you had to stand in line a long time. At the private market, vendors could sell goods for the price they wanted to, so things were more expensive, but there was more variety. I found people were very ambivalent about market economy. Later on I learned that it is fairly rare for ordinary people to pay so much attention to politics elsewhere in the world. For example I found out that Japanese people don’t talk politics at the dinner table, that it is considered uncivilized behavior. I thought this is really strange, and asked my Japanese wife why. She said that talking politics might get in the way of friendships. Everyone’s political views are different, so the wife might not know who the husband voted for, or the father might not know who his son voted for.

Wu Qi: Which people and which events had the most influence on you when you were a child?

Xiang Biao: One of my uncles was really smart, and his observations about the things around him were very sensitive and accurate. If you ever do fieldwork you will learn that in any village, there is always someone who can explain the local situation very clearly. This is not easy. If we talk to young people, and have them sit down and explain their group, their school, how the system functions and what the basic power structure and guiding ideas are, what everyone’s motivation is, how many different groups they are divided into—most people can’t do this. This is in fact a really important sort of training. Everyone should be interested in their own little world, and consciously explain their life in their own terms, as a sort of independent narrative. You don’t necessarily have to think deeply about it, narrative is enough.

My uncle had a big influence on me, because he had a vision of what was happening around him. For example, when making New Year’s cakes, he could explain the whole thing systematically, from dissolving the sugar in the water, to adding the rice flour, to cooking and waiting for it to cool, tracing out the principles involved and the connection of one thing to another, forming an overall vision. The idea of “vision” is important. The word for “theory” in Latin means “vision,” which suggests that coming up with a theory is the same as coming up with a vision of the world. I once wrote an article in English entitled “Theory as Vision,” in which I argued that theory is not a judgement, but instead an accurate picture of reality, which can also give rise to another vision of a possible future. Early socialist art was like this, in that what they painted was not a mechanical reflection of the world, but instead an exact reflection of the world. What does “exact” mean? It means you have accurately grasped the future direction something will take. The difference between “mechanical” and “exact” is huge; “mechanical” is taking a photograph, but “exact” means that not only have you understood what the thing is now, but also what it may become. So “vision” has two meanings: one is a description of the present, and the other extends to a possible future.

The older brother of this uncle also had a certain influence on me. He tested into university in 1958 or 1959, but the university rejected him because my grandfather had been branded as a rightist. Later on, in 1967 or 1968, he actively participated in all sorts of social movements, and even if he avoided being labeled as one of the “three types of people”—rebels, factionalists, and destructive elements—he got into a lot of trouble at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and as a result could not work for the government. He told me one day all of a sudden, when I was still in elementary school, that the Cultural Revolution was not completely wrong. He said, look at those cadres. Even in the 1960s they were already riding around in cars, wearing leather shoes, getting fatter every day. Mao said that it won’t do for things to continue like that. A mass movement is the only solution.

This made a deep impression on me because, before this, I had heard a lot of politically correct talk saying that the Cultural Revolution was bad, but here was my uncle, who had suffered so much and stayed silent for so long, finally having his say about the Cultural Revolution. Even today it touches me in many ways. We should not judge the Cultural Revolution simply to have been either right or wrong. For this uncle who had lived through that experience, the Cultural Revolution was a classic tragedy, if we understand tragedy in terms of its ancient Greek meaning, as a potentially sublime thing that not only fails, but also creates a huge destructive force. In this case behind the tragedy is an internal contradiction: a socialist revolution must constantly foment mass movements to prevent bureaucratization, because we can’t let the people’s representatives get fatter and fatter and ride around in cars, but how precisely should we prevent this? We still don’t have the right answer to this question. But if you look at things this way, you wind up with a new understanding of history.

Wu Qi: When you heard about these politicized people and events at the time, what concrete effect did it have on the shaping of your personality?

Xiang Biao: I was lucky to be able to hear such viewpoints when I was young. The environment of my youth perhaps made me into a social researcher with a “gentry (xiangshen*) disposition.”Footnote 3 What do I mean by “gentry disposition?” First, the gentry don’t like modern intellectuals. Because everyone in my family said that being an intellectual was a good job, I always thought that it was natural that I would turn out to be an intellectual, but I don’t really like Enlightenment-style intellectuals.Footnote 4 When I was in high school in the 1980s, I started to read different books, but I wasn’t too interested in the Toward the Future*Footnote 5 sort of books, like China on the Edge*Footnote 6 or the television program “River Elegy.”Footnote 7 When River Elegy came out I was already in my second year of high school, and could understand it with no problem. It did move me a lot and I thought it deserved to be taken seriously, but at the same time I felt a strong sense of distance from it, and I didn’t like its preachiness, its exaggerated style, its rush to judgement.Footnote 8

Second, gentry scholars are also not exactly like researchers, even if research is part of what they do. A very important thing that the gentry do is to become extremely familiar with their village and develop a narrative about it based on their familiarity. The narrative is an internal narrative. What do I mean by internal? I mean that it can clearly convey the flavor of the system in which those different people live, explain the system as a sum of the accumulation of the people and the things that constitute it over time, without abstract deductions. This means that the language the gentry scholar uses is basically the language of the place, the language the actors themselves use to describe their lives.

Such internal narratives are an important reason explaining how our traditional Confucian culture could sustain such an extensive imperial state system. When we look at the local gazetteers*Footnote 9 produced in the past, the image we find of the empire in these gazetteers is very different from the vision we entertain today. They don’t say that Beijing is better than us, that we are marginal, that we belong to the empire. In their imagination, the basic principles of the empire, which are Confucian ethical principles, have been internalized by every individual and every place, no matter where they may be. Which means that every “place” has its empire—or is its own empire—even if there is no emperor in that place. The relationships the gazetteers imagined between localities and the center were not hierarchical relationships of superior and inferior, but instead were like the moon shining on ten thousand lakes, so that each lake had its own moon, which is what everyone relied on to build a sense of commonality. When a member of the gentry left his hometown to serve in the capital, this was not necessarily something to celebrate too much, because his hometown was the anchor of his sense of meaning. To finish first in the imperial examinations and serve as prime minister was a great thing, of course, but family members often stayed in the successful gentry member’s hometown, and once he was no longer an official, he went home. This is why some people say that one of the first signs of China’s modernization was when retired officials stopped returning home after they retired. This meant that the circular relationship between the city and the villages had been broken. Not to go back to the village after retirement illustrates what kind of changes modernity wrought in the relationship between China’s center and peripheries, between China’s cities and villages, and between intellectuals and ordinary people (most of whom were farmers).

In the local areas, most of the intellectuals did not go elsewhere to serve as officials, but instead became local gentry, living in harmony with their small universe. They neither needed nor desired outside recognition, and whether the outside world noticed them, whether the things they wrote circulated in that outside world, was not particularly important to them. What was important was to have a clear understanding of their own corner of the world. This meant that they paid close attention to the details of daily life, like quarrels, marriages, funerals, relations between parents and children, appreciating the deep meanings behind these things.

But the gentry were also different from the modern researchers I just mentioned. Modern scholars have been trained to do research, and anthropologists, for example, also have to pay attention to details, but the point of the local gentry’s observation is to arrive at a vision, to carve out a narrative, a narrative that reflects reality in a way local people will understand. So on the one hand you can say that it is very meticulous, very empirical, but at the same time it pays a lot of attention to overall structure.

In addition, local gentry make ethical judgements. They judge whether something is good or bad. Researchers don’t do this. They have to be value-neutral and just look at the facts. But the gentry are not like moralists either, in that the gentry do not make their ethical judgements on standards drawn from books. Their ethical judgements have to measure up to the practical ideals of the common people. In the ethical judgements of the Confucian gentry, one important consideration is harmony. The point is not whether you as an individual were right or wrong, but rather what you did is or is not in harmony with other people. Thus an overview of the entire situation is very important. In this way you understand how the world is put together, and you understand how political and economic relations matter. Look at the old people. They understand the village—how much money the villagers earn, how much they pay in taxes, how much they should give in gifts—the old folks can tell you down to the penny. At the same time these details are put together through meaning, such as what kind of person or thing is worthy of respect, what kind of thing is beyond the pale; all of this is stitched together through meaning. The gentry are empirical, because they have to be able to describe the life of the villagers, but they also pay a lot of attention to meaning, and their thinking has a clear ethical bent. I’m not saying that this is the work I do, but this is my basic interest and orientation: how I feel about what is interesting, what theories or explanations are interesting, has a lot to do with this gentry disposition.

Wu Qi: When you bring up the gentry, I immediately think of Fei Xiaotong* (1910–2005).Footnote 10 Can we say that what you are talking about is an extension of his scholarly tradition?

Xiang Biao: I never thought about carrying forward a scholarly tradition. It’s true that we talk about “tradition” at Beida,Footnote 11 but it’s not all that serious, and it wasn’t until I got to Britain that I understood how seriously the British take tradition. For me, individually, it has never occurred to me to define an intellectual by way of a tradition. But I think Fei Xiaotong was a fascinating scholar. I can easily understand his gentry disposition. His grasp of society was also a vision beginning from the inside and working out, avoiding external judgements, and the portrait he painted was one that was meaningful to people inside, and had a certain ethical grounding.

Fei’s concept of the “differential mode of association”Footnote 12 is a good example. Most people now use it as descriptive device. To my mind, the concept itself doesn’t mean much, because “differential mode of association” is nothing more than an empirical translation of traditional Chinese ethical philosophy. I also wonder how generalizable it is—when did the “differential mode of association” become a universal phenomenon in Chinese society? Things could not always have been that way; it must have been the product of a certain set of land relationships, agricultural methods, economic developments, or political changes. How did the “differential mode” evolve in history? Are there regional variations? None of this is clear, so the “differential mode of association” became an ideal type. And because it is an ideal type, everybody can apply it to all sorts of different empirical data.

Here’s how I understand it. When Fei Xiaotong proposed the idea of a “differential mode of association,” he was in fact responding to a critical political debate at the time, which was the question of whether party politics could work in China. Fei was like Liang Shuming* (1893–1988),Footnote 13 both of whom thought that party politics would not work in China. Fei thought that party politics requires a certain cultural basis, what he called community or group associations, by which he meant the same kind of people joining together on the basis of shared political ideas, which would lead to the formation of groups, and then ideologies, in which the relationships of the people in the groups would be equal, after which democratic elections would choose the leaders of political parties. Fei believed that the Chinese people were unable to form political parties in the modern sense, and his idea of “differential modes of association” was in fact a response to those advocating the democratic system. Understood in this sense, Fei’s idea has a specific meaning in the context of these debates. But people pay absolutely no attention to this now, and use the concept as a sort of mechanical description of Chinese social relations. Fei Xiaotong was an ambitious man, his observations were a reply to a certain political question, or an ethical question, which is not the same thing as the specialized, technically oriented research. If we want to make proper use of his theoretical innovations, we have to return to the background that produced them, and understand the problems he was trying to solve.

My gentry disposition may have something to do with my grandfather’s sense of being content with being alone as a “fallen noble.” This is why I have always been suspicious of intellectuals. A little distance, a little suspicion can be pretty important, otherwise when you go to university it’s easy to get caught up in other people’s discourses.

Wu Qi: If the seeds of suspicion were planted when you were young, given your university education and all your subsequent training, have the suspicions gone away?

Xiang Biao: I think they are stronger than ever, but there was a time, especially right after I finished my Ph.D., when I thought that the sense of distance was created by my own lack of ability, because I didn’t understand what other people were saying and had a hard time fitting in. I felt inadequate, like I needed to catch up, which created a lot of pressure. I struggled for a long time. Looking back on it now, when I’m more comfortable and things are going well, I think it was my sense of distance that got me here.