Wu Qi: What did you spend most of your time on in high school? What books did you read?

Xiang Biao: High school was a pretty important time for me, and I’d like to give a shout out to my school, Wenzhou High School. It was only after I got to Peking University that I learned that high schools in many places go from 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning all the way to 4:00 or 5:00 in the afternoon, with self-study at school in the evenings, but at my school, everything was over by 3:00 or 4:00, and there was no such thing as self-study at school at night. After school was over, we would watch movies or go shopping. We had a lot of free time and the pressure of exams was not too bad. It might be that at that time the salaries of the high school teachers were not linked to the percentage of students that went on to university, so they just gave normal classes and did not get carried away. At the time, there were all kinds of clubs for students with different interests, like the literature society, the drama club, the computer club, the biology club… I was an active participant in arts festivals.

My time in high school also coincided with the final part of the Culture Craze. One thing that had a fairly big impact on me was the magazine the Wenhui Monthly*, put out by the Shanghai Writers’ Association*. I read every issue from cover to cover, and I remember clearly that the address of the editor’s office was 149 Yuanmingyuan Road in Shanghai. My favorite was long-form reportage. Long-form reportage was a major thing for Chinese literature and for the Chinese revolution. This kind of writing has a number of important characteristics. One is that it focuses on life at the grassroots level, another is that it is direct, and yet another is that it goes deep. This is true beginning with Xia Yan’s* 1935 piece on “Indentured Workers*,”Footnote 1 and continuing through Jia Lusheng* and Gao Jianguo’s* 1988 Drifting with the Beggars’ Gang*…Footnote 2

Another magazine I read all the time was Appreciation of Masterpieces*, which was literary criticism. Every issue was really thick and it was hopelessly overwritten and pretentious, extremely abstract, but I thought it was fun, although I’m not sure what influence it had on me. I also read some things on “thought enlightenment,”Footnote 3 and ran across some discussions on the young Marx’s “alienation,”Footnote 4 which talked about social development from the angle of “human liberation” instead of from perspectives of political economy, which I liked a lot.

Another big thing that happened in my family in the 1980s was that for Teachers Day in 1986, the Wenzhou bureau of education gave the school where my father worked a ration coupon for a color television set. Everybody drew lots for it, and my father won. At the time, you couldn’t buy a color television even if you had the money. My parents didn’t have much money at the time and thought about not using the coupon. One of our relatives said that giving it away would be like giving your luck to other people, so they borrowed some money and bought the television. This shows that when people are trying to talk themselves into something, they will use abstract ideas or principles, like the idea of not letting good luck go. In 1984, my family bought an electric fan, which was our second electric appliance. The first was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, which I think we had even before I was born.

Wu Qi: Why do you remember those details so clearly?

Xiang Biao: They were a really big deal. When you got home, the fan was on the table blowing air on you, and it could even oscillate. The kind of happiness this gave you in the summer was revolutionary.

Wu Qi: Were the 1980s also the moment of your individual enlightenment?

Xiang Biao: The period between the ages of 16 and 18 was crucial. I started to read, and to give critical speeches at school. I also did my first “fieldwork” during the 1980s, thanks again to my high school.

In the first year of high school, our politics teacher took us to Yueqing county for a fieldwork trip. Now it’s Liushi Township in Yueqing city, one of the pioneering places in terms of the production of electrical appliances in China, as well as my mother’s hometown. We went to a factory to hear the manager give a report, but the students were goofing around, and the manager got mad, and said to them in dialect “how can I talk with you making so much noise?!” I was the only one listening, and I felt for the manager. We were staying in a guest house, and I noticed that the person at the front desk was always building circuit boards. I asked her where the circuit boards came from, and she said that they were contracted out from private companies run by relatives of hers. Then I asked her how much she made for each circuit board, and found out that she made more doing that than from her wages at the guest house, but that it wasn’t a stable income. I asked a few more questions until I understood things clearly, and then wrote a little something about it, saying that private enterprises, working through family connections, were spreading economic opportunity throughout the entire village. At the time, there was a debate in society over the question of whether the private economy would lead to economic polarization. On the basis of this example, I made the speculative conclusion that there would be no polarization, because the opportunity to make money would be distributed among everyone’s relatives, spreading wealth throughout the region. I was proud of my little report. In fact, that observation had an impact later on when I was doing my research on Zhejiang village.Footnote 5 It allowed me to see that a small enterprise is a network and not an organization. In other words, an enterprise is first a kinship organization or a social organization, and is an economic organization only in a secondary sense.

I was never all that attracted to the intellectual enlightenment of the 1980s, and later I liked it less and less. It might be a question of style. I remember clearly that the actor Zhang Jiasheng’s* (b. 1935) narration of “River Elegy,” the tone of which put me off, and there was also the last half of the journalist Qian Gang’s* (b. 1953) reportage on “The Great Tangshan Earthquake”Footnote 6 that was broadcast on the radio, which I didn’t like either. It was like some kind of religious language like they were praying for all of humanity. Life in Wenzhou was completely different. When I was in high school, my mother was teaching math in a different middle school. One of her students got into university, and the parents invited everyone for a banquet. And somebody had the nerve to say to the student, to his face, “What’s the point of going to university these days?” The student felt a little awkward and unhappy. Wenzhou is a pragmatic place, without much time for pretention. If going to university can’t bring you tangible benefits, then there is no point of going to university no matter how nice it sounds.

Wu Qi: It looks like Wenzhou High School was quite special. Did it always have this kind of tradition? Or was it the result of reform and opening?

Xiang Biao: Wenzhou High School is relatively old. It was established by a member of the local gentry, Sun Yirang* (1848–1908), who had done research on oracle bones. Well-known Republican period writers like Zhu Ziqing* (1898–1948) and Zheng Zhenduo* (1898–1958) both taught there. During the chaos of the Republican period (1911–1949), when Beijing was a mess and Shanghai was a place for the foreigners and the rich, a lot of literary types wound up in Zhejiang. In the old days, the high school was the pinnacle of local education, and was rooted in the local environment. Now high schools are basically feeders, sending students to Beijing and Shanghai to study, and even local universities have their eyes fixed on the world outside of China, so the atmosphere is completely different from what it was when it was set up by local gentry. In the early period, the high school even played an important role in the revolution. I didn’t know whether this had to with its history, all I knew was that Wenzhou High School was a key school, and my teachers were all relatively mature and it seemed that they had been transferred from elsewhere. They had all lived through the Cultural Revolution, and took education seriously, but there was no notion of any target to make sure a certain number of students went on to university, like what high schools are doing now.

Maybe the reason that the pretentious tone came to be mainstream within the cultural world, despite its distance from real life, is due to the fact that schools became such strange, inorganic places. There is something worth discussing here, which is how we evaluate the 1980s. The feelings that inspired the elevated tone with which everyone spoke in the 1980s might still have a considerable impact. We are always saying that China needs its own social thought, its own discourse; where does this come from? The development of American social science has a lot to do with 1968, which is when new theories began to emerge, aiming to confront social problems. France was even more like this. The student movement was an empty revolution but it changed everything, and their tone was quite elevated as well, but they remained connected to actual life, and produced a good number of theorists. This intellectual production did not come from the social scientists themselves, but from their links to philosophers and artists. And there were many enterprises and technical people allied with them, so that they could bring things to life and create a new atmosphere.

China in the 1980s looked like America or France in the 1960s, in that it was a period of awakening and questioning. So I would have thought that the 1980s was bound to produce a good number of impressive people because all of the resources were there to stimulate thinking. The students involved in the demonstrations in 1989 had had an uninterrupted education when they were young, went to Peking University, and then lived through many things in the eye of the storm of history. Later on, in the wake of the suppression, some of these people went to the United States and France, with generous scholarships, and saw how things were in the West. But to my mind, none of these people came up with interesting ideas. Of course, they should not be blamed for that; they were after all investing their youths and their lives into their ideals. But their experience gives us something to think about: why did these people not come up with ideas? From my perspective, it seems to me that when your emotional tone is pitched too high, it is easy to go to extremes. This shows that I have been influenced a fair bit by the scholar Wang Hui*Footnote 7 (b. 1959), when he said that the reason that neoliberal reforms were so easily introduced into China in the 1990s was that the 1980s had left no resources to help us to reflect on social contradictions. Everyone felt like Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour,Footnote 8 with its “Eastern Wind that Brings the Promise of Spring,” was like a revolution, that by letting go and promoting freedom, every problem would be solved, but they didn’t know enough about concrete problems like inequality and social justice. Intellectuals at the time did not truly look into the hardships of the common people, or social contradictions. They looked up at abstractions instead of down at practical problems.

Wu Qi: What you said about the different situations in various countries after the social movements is interesting. In every society, even where there was no thorough-going revolution, social movements still brought about transformative changes in many places. We have talked a fair bit about the role of intellectuals prior to and during social movements, but we have talked less about how they work after a large social movement is over. I wonder if you could compare a bit more concretely what happened in China with what happened in the United States, France, or other countries?

Xiang Biao: The problem in the United States at the time was very real. The whole movement had a direct focus: people didn’t want to go to war in Vietnam and began rethinking the nature of the state. This was not merely a job for intellectuals but had a strong mass component as well. Things were more abstract in France. There, things were basically about the desire for freedom, but this was enough for young people and had long-lasting impacts on art and music. Later on, Foucault also said that 1968 was not anti-government, but rather was opposing a certain way of thinking. There were true feelings behind this; the French felt that the kind of regimented life forced on them by the bureaucratic and market system was meaningless. Sartre’s existentialism as well as Foucault’s theories of power were closely related to the mood of the time.

The experience of Chinese intellectuals was also clear. Having lived through the 1960s and the 1970s, intellectuals wanted freedom, felt that human nature had been distorted and that they should embrace universal values like the rest of the world. But the experience of the intellectuals was far from that of the grassroots people in China. I think intellectuals may have made a mistake when they equated the people’s distaste for official corruption and inflation at the time with a dislike of the socialist system itself. People at the grassroots level of course wanted stable prices and hated corruption, but they weren’t talking about individual freedom.

Scholars from Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s should be closer to us, and I hope to be able to study them some day. The way Yugoslavia turned out is a tragedy, for which the West is largely responsible. The current narrative is that the disintegration of the country was inevitable because it had always been composed of different ethnic groups, held together only by the Soviet Union. Which leads me to ask: at the time, those different ethnic groups were living in a country with one of the highest welfare standards in the world, a high standard of living, and flourishing art and culture; is this not a goal we should strive for? If everyone lets go of their so-called cultural and ethnic differences in favor of a common good life, is this not a good thing?

One thing that I admire Western scholars for is their self-reflection. The strongest critics of Western society come from within the West, and we relied on Western literature to understand what happened during the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The US government and German banks had a lot to do with it, by encouraging certain people to split off first, and then the Yugoslavian military was not strong enough to fight back, and a series of economic problems followed, including serious inflation—just like Venezuela today—so that if you made the slightest error, your adversaries cut you to pieces. I haven’t been to any part of the former Yugoslavia, but from what I’ve read in Western media, the situation is not good. I know that several formerly socialist East European countries are among the handful of countries in the world that are implementing a fixed tax system, which means that whether you earn one hundred dollars a month or 20,000 dollars a month, you pay the same tax, while most places in the world use a progressive tax system. This is a kind of extreme neoliberalism that even the West dares not put into practice.