Wu Qi: At present, the most common mood among Chinese youth on the Internet is “melancholy.” Material conditions are better and kids have more freedom and their own hobbies and are starting to have fun, but the result is that they all lapse into a universal funk as if nothing had any meaning, and they can’t see how life will change.

Xiang Biao: Since the overall economy is still growing, it can sustain everybody for another 10 or 20 years, so people born in the 1970s and the 1980s will be okay, but this road will certainly come to an end someday. Fun means the ability to feel interest and excitement in a thing in its own right, without the need for some outside “return on investment” to stimulate you. Art and math are good examples, for which people probably have natural affinities. Our education, both in the family and at school, forcefully compels us to think about this “return on investment,” and ensures that you never structure your career around a personal interest.

Wu Qi: Good times on the economic front are perhaps not completely over, and many of these “sad” young people are still enjoying themselves, even if subjectively they are not feeling it. For example, the household registration systemFootnote 1 is slowly become less of a constraint, as global and national mobility increases, and people are no longer choosing to live only in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, with more choosing second and third-tier cities, or even going back to their villages. These are all concrete elements that suggest things are changing for the better.

Xiang Biao: We need alternate sources of life meaning. To give you an example, my niece studies painting, and I took her to a lesson where the teacher talked to her about painting, telling her that painting should be beautiful, and if she were painting the portrait of someone who had an ugly hand, she should put that hand behind the person’s back so that people couldn’t see it. This can be an entertaining way to talk to a child, but if art is understood as merely something that is visually beautiful, kids may get bored with it pretty quickly, because, in this sense, beauty is formal and not something you can seek out. The true power of art is to produce a kind of visual reaction that makes you think. In this sense, art provokes thought, which is a better angle from which to understand it because it leaves more room for fun and lots of room for the curiosity of the children. If you faithfully paint that ugly hand and render it full of life, then it might really move people.

This brings us back to our original question. The rule in studying or in trying to understand society is that all of this has to have a relationship with yourself, otherwise your art is just about making something beautiful, so you’re just performing a service, and trying to please people. We should turn it around and think not about trying to please people, but about having fun ourselves. Even in a simple service industry, say you’re working in a restaurant, if you really pay attention, you can find something fun, you can be like a writer observing how people are different, how they act at the service counter, how you interact with them…If we give workers a lot of autonomy and space and allow them to feel that they are not just a mechanical piece of something but instead a member of society interacting with other people, they can wind up being quite innovative.

Now everyone is talking about how artificial intelligence is creating “surplus people.” I have a research topic on people in Northeast China without a work unit or stable employment, whose relationship to the system is distant. There will be more and more of such people, and what their role will be is a global challenge. In fact, the relationship between economics and politics may experience a huge change, in that people may not need to spend too much time doing material work to make a living. We may be able to survive without much labor input, and economic activity in a person’s social life may become less and less important. When that happens, we will have to reimagine everything. There is the idea of Basic Income, for example, the notion that every citizen receives a certain amount of money every month whether they work or not. In an extreme case, if artificial intelligence becomes greatly developed, with most work becoming automated, then the remaining question will be that of redistribution. This will not happen in China overnight, but we still need to engage our imagination. If earning money to fill your stomach is not your main goal, then what is the meaning of your life, and what is your relationship to society?

The important thing is to get back to a focus on people. In the 1980s we debated whether the human being was the starting point of Marxism. This question is even more important now. In the lives of everyday people, China’s years of reform have meant a process of transformation in the meaning of life. We spend years studying hard, passing exams, finding a good job, buying a house—in this process meaning has been externalized. Finally, we need to stop this and focus on people again. The same is true for the government. In the past, all questions were economic questions, and as long as the economy was developing, it seemed like we could fix anything. But look at today’s problems—ethnic minority relations, relations with Hong Kong, youth issues—none of these can be solved through economic development, and in any event, economic development is not limitless. We are not going to wind up with everyone flying his own private plane, so again it is more and more urgent to focus on people. I am not talking about some abstract humanistic spirit, but instead about what kind of relationship should exist among people. This is closely related to the economy, and brings us back to questions about the distribution of material resources and how to harmonize social relations, and will not necessarily be built on a foundation of productive labor.