Wu Qi: When you talk about the situation of class mobility and universal feelings about life, I think most readers can empathize, but they still lack the tools or the framework to understand them. In the context of the late 1990s or early 2000s, there was a discussion about left and right, and both sides had specific ideas in their description of China and the reasons for this description. For example, the left argued that the problem had to do with the huge capitalist system, while the right talked about the corruption of power itself. But now, a big problem is that, first, this antagonism is gradually disappearing, and second, perhaps because it is disappearing, public discourse itself is also disappearing, and not responding to everyone’s true experiences and feelings, so there is a prevailing sense of not knowing what to do. On the one hand, everybody feels like their lives are really changing, sometimes in positive ways, but at the same time, they feel like it’s not enough. They don’t know how to understand it, and they don’t know what to resist, so they decide not to worry about it too much and just get on with life, with is after all fairly comfortable.

Xiang Biao: You’re right. There are times when things are going well, and yet the anxiety does not really go away. The pressure from work, from your mortgage, from your kids’ education is still there, and you feel like you have to work hard, but everyone feels like this pressure is nobody’s fault, and they just keep pushing. I completely agree with your analysis, and in the intellectual scene in China today, there are still debates over specific issues, but the big divisions that once existed are no longer there, which forces us to look for a new discourse to describe today’s situation.

Today, the question of lifestyle is as important as capital and state power. It is really difficult at the present moment to state clearly what the relationship between capital and labor is, or the relationship between the state and citizens, or even your relationship with yourself, because everything is blended together in your lifestyle. If we try to look at things from the perspective of class or labor it is hard to see things accurately, and it’s better to look at lifestyle or entertainment. And when we do this kind of cultural analysis, we can’t do like we used to and treat culture as a variable. The reason why we need cultural analysis is in fact because we want to foreground those whom we are analyzing, by which I mean the ordinary people, and especially young people, as leading thinking subjects.

Wu Qi: The viewpoints that come out of your research on these subjects are quite vivid, with implicit value judgments, but the judgments are not expressed as commentary, and instead emerge from careful attention to detail. How did you go about thinking about them? Was it that from the outset you did not focus on viewpoints or where your feelings were taking you, and just went ahead with your description, or had you already internalized the kind of intellectual concerns that we criticized earlier on so that they surfaced later on in the description?

Xiang Biao: Objectively speaking, I think it was the latter. I have been programmed, too, and have definitely been influenced by intellectual trends. When I am looking at a specific problem, my two most important interests are probably, first, I want to see the inner contradictions. Nothing develops totally smoothly, and there are always opposing forces pushing in different directions, and you have to understand who won and who lost. Second, I like to paint the overall picture, and I feel like valuable work should draw a map for the reader, and provide a sense of direction.

For example, I have recently been thinking about “logistical power.” Mobility is an important part of social change in China. In the past, most of China’s social organization was based on immobility. People did not change jobs, they did not move, and all material resources were allocated by the plan. After reform and opening, beginning in the villages, people started to move around, things started to move around, and so in the early 1990s, Sun Liping pointed out that the “free movement of resources” and a “free space for activities” had become basic elements in China’s social change. The basic understanding at the time was that power used to be sustained by immobility, and now that the free space for movement had grown, the things that power could control directly would diminish. So at the time, Sun Liping’s prediction was that people would increasingly obtain life resources and development opportunities from an autonomous “society,” a civil society would gradually emerge, and the power of the state would weaken. But what do we see now? Mobility is absolutely increasing, but state power is clearly stronger as well. So something I want to understand is how this big picture evolved. The idea behind “logistical power” is that at present a kind of power based on logistics is being created, a kind of power that does not try to control mobility, but instead takes mobility as its foundation.

The idea of the “normalized entanglements” gets at something similar. Daily life in China is increasingly normalized. It used to be a real pain to buy a train ticket, and there were scalpers and all that, but that’s gone now. And things are cleaner and more orderly than they used to be, but this sense of order has not brought people a sense of calm, and instead, their feelings of insecurity have increased. How do we explain this contradiction?

Raising these questions is perhaps related to intellectuals’ concerns, and if it is, then I admit that it is a limitation. Not that having a concern is a limitation, but it means that my thought has been programmed, and always goes in a certain direction. Readers may think that this is simply a matter of having a consistent problématique, but I don’t aim for consistency, and to my mind, it is more a matter of a lack of imagination or a lack of understanding of the richness of practice.

Wu Qi: If we set aside the historical role of intellectuals and talk specifically about some of their qualities or concerns, do you see anything there that is positive and should not be abandoned? Some people see these concerns as common sense that should be protected, or as moral principles, which should be a beacon, leading us forward. Although you describe the consistency of intellectuals as a limitation, on the other hand, it is natural to want to be consistent. Is there something here that we should keep or maybe even learn from?

Xiang Biao: What is the most important intellectual temperament or trait? As a profession, or as a group, intellectuals may disappear someday, as everyone can become an intellectual. At that point, what distinguishes an intellectual from everyone else? To my mind, it is the capacity to reflect. This capacity is a new thing because the goal of traditional intellectuals was not to reflect on things, but instead to explain or interpret things that were already known, providing everyone with a kind of order and worldview. The idea of reflecting was popularized by the Frankfurt School, which itself is quite modern, and what they said was that people don’t need intellectuals to interpret the order of the world—what we need instead is for people to criticize that basic world order. This is badly needed. Because nowadays the basic mission every day for most people is just to get through that day, and once that mission is completed, they still have to keep moving forward. The meaning of reflection is that I want to stop myself, hold myself back, and not keep moving forward in the same direction. I want to think about why I’m doing what I’m doing today and wonder whether I can’t do it in some other way.

Actually, what intellectuals give us is just a lifestyle. Everyone has their lifestyle: Daoists live like Daoists, and financial directors live like financial directors. The main point of an intellectual’s lifestyle is analysis and reflection. Reflecting means asking questions, why are things this way and why can’t they be that way. The questions must be asked with a certain logic, based on comparisons that come out of observing reality. This is not necessarily driven by a sense of responsibility for other people, or a sense of community responsibility, but is a self-reflection, or a reflection on things at hand. In fact the community tradition is much stronger in non-intellectual circles. Peasants and workers, including people working in offices, have a strong sense of community even if their level of knowledge is relatively low because they are working together in the same physical space. Intellectuals are quite selfish, with a strong sense of individuality, but this historical limitation may make an intellectual lifestyle more appropriate for young people in the present era since individualism is quite a strong trend among young people as well.

We have talked about intellectuals a lot today, but I have never understood the role I play in these terms, and have never seen this book as something to be read by intellectuals. But intellectual discourse in China remains strong. For example, the discourse surrounding the spiritual independence of universities sometimes tends toward the worship of Western universities, which is not necessarily a good way to think. Western universities are more independent than ours, but we have to ask how they maintain this independence in daily practice. It has less to do with spirit than with method. On the other hand, it would not be hard to be independent in China, but the problem is that senior professors want to become officials, and once you are an official you have resources, and once you have resources you don’t want to give up your position, and that means you are no longer independent. But it is possible as an ordinary scholar to be independent, as long as you don’t rebel and don’t become an official. There is no need to make such a fuss about it.

Wu Qi: You have mentioned many times that the work of scholarship should be transformed to become a tool to help people understand problems. This includes your expectations of non-fiction writing and your hope that it can move into different realms, but I am always skeptical, or pessimistic. Most of what I see now is that people still live and pursue the original kind of academic life and the benefits it brings, they like living in an ivory tower and pronouncing on the state of the world, and few people have made a fundamental shift. What is your view? Has anyone responded to your call?

Xiang Biao: This is all pretty new. I think the strategy is simply to get started and then see how things go. Documentary drama, non-fiction writing, and migrant workers’ literature are all new possibilities. For example, the 2000 play, Che Guevara, was no great artistic achievement, but this is not the way to look at it, because it had a great capacity to mobilize people, and was kind of an invitation. I think it would be possible to add more scholarly depth to that invitation. The academic system is not going to change overnight, and scholars have to publish and do all the stuff they have to do, but in their free time, they could still experiment in this way, working with artists and writers. For example, Internet novels can be commercialized, but anthropologists could get in there and ask some questions, or ask for contributions from the public to reflect on particular points. This may generate new discussions and make people think.

Wu Qi: This touches on a much larger question of the social position of scholars and even the social sciences as a whole, and may be part of a major shift in the humanities. Do you still emphasize the role of individual action in accomplishing this transformation?

Xiang Biao: You have to start with the individual. If you are always just calling on people to do something without showing them a sample of what you are talking about, people won’t listen, so you have to start on a small scale. I think I’m more Wenzhou + Oxford, and that I’m not so Beida. Wenzhou people make lighters, and Oxford has its tradition of empiricism, in the eyes of which any kind of big talk is immediately suspect and everything is subject to empirical proof, with the emphasis on materiality, on how things work. Wenzhou people make lighters to sell them, and to sell them you have to show them to people. These are important characteristics of anthropology. I have always believed that there are many ways to illustrate a theory. You have tightly structured, deductive theories, but you also have theories that draw pictures. Ethnography is the latter, built up stroke by stroke through the accumulation of countless details, like a huge fresco, which cannot be reduced to a conclusion. It's all about common sense, but what is interesting is to figure out what details stack up behind common sense. This is also the source of my optimism, that young people want to read texts that reveal such details, which is a perfectly reasonable request, which anthropologists should help to meet.