Wu Qi: It seems to me that the experiences you had growing up and your concrete suggestions are sort of mutually reaffirming. In other words, clearly understanding yourself can be a tool or weapon for thinking about questions outside yourself. Could we understand it that way?

Xiang Biao: Once you put it this way, I think pretty much everyone would agree. The key is how you arrive at an understanding, how you reach a harmony between your historical limitations and your current ambitions. Someone who can do this well is a true hero. A true hero is not someone who changes the world, but who changes every day of their life. What is too bad is that, with modernity, the “margins” and the “center” have become antagonistic. Chinese people have such strong feelings about the center that they feel that life at the margins is not worth living, which is something that is really worrisome. Power and resources are way too centralized. People often say that the “second generation of the CCP founders” is usually not corrupt, because they grew up in relative comfort and never had to worry about money. I think there is something to this, and when we look around us or read the papers, it looks like a lot of cases of massive corruption were committed by persons originally from the bottom of society—which is true in academics as well—because it is easier for people who started out at the bottom of society to go too far, and this is because they were too conscious about their “marginal” status. They don’t accept their fate and will use any means to get from the margins to the center. And when they get to the center they feel like they can completely abandon all those principles about how to be a human being that they learned at the margins.

Marginal people’s desires to get to the center can be strong, which mobilizes them but also distorts them along the way. And once they have arrived at the center, many people become thoroughly corrupt, because they never really had a clear idea of who they were. The whole point of their existence had been to get to the center, and once they got there they abandoned the people and the places that raised them and their relationships with those around them, becoming someone without principles. Life principles are not sustained through abstract notions, but instead through specific social relations; of course, this is Confucianism, but it is surely true. If you are unclear about your relations with the people around you and the world in which you live, you can easily become an opportunist, and other people become mere tools at your disposal. The scholarly world is like this, and it is completely obvious in the world of officialdom. Business is the same. An employee of a company, or a student, does his utmost to get to the provincial capital, to get to Beijing, and once he is no longer “grounded,” he has no place, no agency, and can be completely instrumentalized. Thus it is dangerous when the center is too strong.

The strength of the center in Chinese history basically relied on local interiorizations of this center, in which every place felt that it was itself a small center. Then everything was bound together on a symbolic level, so that on the one hand there was an idea of the “great unity,”*Footnote 1 but at the same time people did not feel that they had to kill themselves to get to the top because their lives were meaningless. In fact, there were many peripheries that the center paid little attention to; local areas had a lot of autonomy, and relations between the center and the margins were flexible and open. By contrast, the cultural meaning of “local” has now been completely emptied out, and “local museums” and “local tourism” do not speak to local people. It is important to repair this relationship between center and peripheries.

Wu Qi: We’ve gone from individual stories to the biggest possible questions! When you look at China’s entire modern experience, when do you feel like this reshaping of the center–peripheries relationship started? With nation-building? After that, we started to build a new sense of centrality, right?

Xiang Biao: It indeed started with building a modern nation-state. One reason that building a modern nation-state was so difficult, and gave way immediately to warlords and civil war during the Republican period, was because the process destroyed the original balance between the center and the peripheries. The symbolic centrality of the Qing dynasty was abolished, the regions no longer obeyed, and various provinces demanded their independence. Of course, the idea that each province has autonomy was a mainstream choice in early drafts of the constitution, which was grounded in federalism. From a longer term perspective, what we call the debate between feudalism and centralization always existed in China, and when Fei Xiaotong later on argued that the best solution for China was local self-rule, this had to do with his notion of the “differential mode of association.”

Here we are again with the “differential mode of association,” which is not a simple empirical idea, but rather a structure, a sort of political vision or arrangement. Political arrangements are of course greatly affected by wars, like the Northern Expedition* (1926–1928) or the Civil War (1945–1949). The Japanese invasion (1937–1945) was a decisive event, and is one reason that China ultimately achieved unity. During the anti-Japanese War, the CCP got organized and the sense of nationalism came to be shared as never before. The question you raise is a good one: how should we understand the “center” that emerged from state-building? It is not just a single center, but a number of layered centers, in a regional hierarchy.

This was also related to the planned economy at the time and to the system of grain purchase and redistribution. Redistribution meant first centralizing all resources, after which redistribution would occur, which required a center supported by multiple layers. With the reform and opening there was an important new slogan—“strengthen horizontal relationships.” What this meant at the time was that the provinces could trade freely with one another, which would strengthen the flow of commodities and the function of markets without going through the center. In the beginning, selling Sichuan pigs to Guangdong markets was like a war, and the Sichuan government sent people to the provincial borders to stop it. The farmers of course wanted to sell their pigs in Guangdong because prices were higher, but authorities in Sichuan thought that this would make the price of pork go up in Sichuan, so they blocked the sale. There were a lot of wars like that at the time. In addition to the pig war, there was the coal war, the silk cocoon war, the cotton war, etc.

Today, despite the high volume of commodity exchange, the idea of the center has not changed, which is intriguing. How we make life at the margins interesting is to a great degree a question of cultural construction and ideology. If local writers started to write about local culture, this might eventually work. But what they are doing today, which is using so-called “root culture”* to try to get people to stay in rural areas, will not work, because today’s China is a country that is well-connected internally and even to the world at large. So if we want to develop rural culture, it cannot be an isolated, closed rural culture, but instead, a rural consciousness inscribed in the world, in regions throughout China. Local writers will need a keen sense of vision in order to describe their position within these larger structures.

That makes me think of Fukuoka, in Japan, which does not define itself in terms of its relationship to Tokyo, but rather positions itself in terms of its connections with Korea, China, and especially Qingdao, in Shandong, seeing itself as an East Asian crossroads. Guangxi, a province in south China, also positions itself as a gateway to Southeast Asia, and it has many daily interactions with mainland Southeast Asia. This had already taken on cultural meaning so that Guangxi people feel like what they do every day is interesting, and they are not always thinking that there’s no future here for their children, that they’ll have to go to Beijing.

Scholars have a huge responsibility in this, and they should not talk only about great national issues, but rather should try to achieve clarity in concrete smaller issues. China today needs thousands, tens of thousands of local gentry, and if they could tap into their potential and systematically give voice to local identities, this would mean something. These local voices should focus on their own diversity, which could build a solid foundation for lasting stability in China, because lasting stability in a country like China cannot be like one iron plate, but has to be a flexible organism, like a chain bridge, where if one side is weighed down, the other moves up. We need to break through the current emphasis on over-centralization, only after which can we arrive at some sort of integration of local social and cultural autonomy with the unity the central authorities prize. In the absence of the cultural autonomy of local society, everybody winds up elbowing their way to the center, which is in fact quite dangerous.

Wu Qi: Even if you don’t see yourself as being part of a scholarly tradition, in terms of this specific question and viewpoint, and especially your views of “peripheries” and “center,” are you not part of the same genealogy as Fei Xiaotong?

Xiang Biao: That’s an interesting question. I would say we’re part of the same genealogy because my appreciation of the importance of local regions was largely inspired by him. He made foundational contributions to empirical research on China, explaining how China’s unity worked. Unity for Fei did not mean a rigid structure. But the situation is different now because as a great power, we really do need a strong center, in part in order to redistribute resources. For example, Shanghai and Tibet should have a relationship of mutual assistance. So while I champion cultural and social autonomy, in terms of the economy, we need one unified market, in terms of resources, we need the strength of government administration to carry out necessary redistribution, and there are things like the army, and taxes, which have to be managed from the center. The second change is globalization. The local autonomy that I am talking about cannot be achieved by closing the door to the outside world. Instead, every local place has to become a small center, a crossroads, like an acupuncture point that is connected to the rest of the body, to use an analogy.

Wu Qi: That makes me think of this idea of “Chinese consciousness,” which people are talking more and more about. It seems like this was an official slogan that turned into a real question. As China becomes increasingly involved in globalization, maybe Chinese scholars should not only try to explain things from their part of the world but should also talk about China’s relationship to the system of globalization. There are even some people who argue that this should be a new responsibility, or a new preoccupation, for Chinese scholars. What do you think?

Xiang Biao: I of course agree. Looking at things from a macro perspective and a contemporary perspective, it is true that the world is talking more and more about China, but from the perspective of the twentieth century, the current era is not the most important era of China’s impact on the world. The most important era of the twentieth century was in fact the 1960s and 1970s. The Egyptian economist Samir Amin (1931–2018) notes in his memoirs that when the People’s Liberation Army liberated Beijing in 1949, his 18-year-old self felt that the world had entered a new age. When the Chinese writer Hu Feng* (1902–1985) published his poem “Time is Beginning” in the People’s Daily as part of the celebration of the founding of the People’s Republic, people all thought the poem was fantastic, but who knew that a young Egyptian was thinking the same thing? In the 1950s, Stalin died in 1953, and then there was the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union CPSU in 1956, and then the dispute between the CCP and the CPSU. This was the heart of the 1960s and had a huge impact on young intellectuals throughout the world. The question at the time was that socialism in practice was getting more and more bureaucratized, becoming more or less like capitalism, so everyone felt that the thinking behind the Cultural Revolution was anti-bureaucratic and that it would truly spread to the villages. The British artist John Berger (1926–2007) published a photo album, A Fortunate Man, where he talked about a British physician who wanted to devote himself to marginal regions and wound up dying in China, where he had gone in hopes of serving as a barefoot doctor. China’s impact on the world then was greater than it is now. Have we really come up with a clear path toward the future or proposed some great ideal?

Things are different now, and China’s engagement with the world is not based on ideas, but on commerce. Every year, 8% of the Chinese population goes abroad to travel, study, or do business. One Belt-One RoadFootnote 2 is surely important. And the size of our economy means that one day China’s currency, the Renminbi, will become a world currency. China’s current rise, including things like Alibaba,Footnote 3 is due to the size of China’s population. This is interesting too. We used to think that our big population was a burden, while now it’s a bonus. For things like electronic commerce, online payment systems, and the platform economy, our greatest advantage is that we have a lot of people. In this light, I don’t feel like China’s rise has anything all that special about it.

But you also brought up the identity of Chinese scholars, which to me is a huge, complicated question. And this makes me think of what we talked about before, which is the difference between my daily activities and my intellectual concerns. There are always tensions between my teaching, my students’ expectations of me on the one hand, and my own experiences of growing up and the things I am concerned about on the other. My participation in British politics is nonexistent, because I know little about the history, and how the current issues became issues. As for my engagement with China, I also feel a certain distance, an estrangement. This is quite painful, and means that my life is not quite complete. But there are good things about it too because the tension brings me fresh perspectives. So what I should be doing now is creating a new transnational life world, but to date, this has not been entirely successful. The lack of success has something to do with my lack of confidence in the past few years, and a lack of clarity about my place in the world. If I’m not clear about that place, then I need recognition from the mainstream as compensation, which comes to feel like an obligation, which then becomes a worry.

Whether Chinese scholars can make significant contributions to the world is not something we can plan for. The most important thing scholars should do is to make clear what questions they are concerned about, and what their positions are. I used to endorse the idea of a “Chinese scholarship” or a “China school” but now I think it is something that can’t be planned for. An important reason for this is that China’s rise occurred in an environment of globalization, which means that it’s quite far-fetched to try to make universal statements on the basis of China’s uniqueness. It would be better for China to explain her own problems clearly.

Wu Qi: We can talk in generalities about “China” and a unique version of “Chinese social sciences,” but in fact everyone starts out from a different place, and here we have at least two traditions: one is that of traditional China with its image of tianxia*Footnote 4 which seeks inspiration from past ideas; another is the tradition of Red China. Many scholars follow those paths in trying to come up with a new understanding of China and the world. What is the relationship between those traditions? When you talk about the relationship between the center and the margins, this in fact is a perspective that comes from a deep place in history, and when you talk about the Cultural Revolution, you are also looking for a connection between history and the masses. Why is it that these two narratives are coming together in today’s twenty-first century? And how are they coming together? If we say that we should understand who we are, and what China is from the perspective of history, then what in fact is our life experience, and what after all is the narrative of a modern state? It seems like we have no consensus on this. And given that, if we want to talk about our own little individual narratives, we run up against the same problem…Is our everyday life finally related to China’s narrative, and if so, what is the relationship? How do we start to answer these questions?

Xiang Biao: A lot of people have tried to work on this, like Gan Yang* (b. 1953) in his Uniting the Three Traditions.*Footnote 5 In addition to traditional civilization and the modern socialist revolution, there’s also the dichotomy between pre-reform (1949–1978) and post-reform (after 1978), and many ruptures, and how to connect all these together is a question for history and philosophy. We first need to ask what questions we are concerned about today, and then focus on the kind of China narrative we want to use to explain our dilemma. To over-generalize, some people use the experience of Red China to reflect on the current situation, while others use premodern China, but neither of them has much to do with the idea of “China.” Both of these kinds of people are essentially saying they don’t like how we are doing things now, and suggesting that we look at how we did things in the 1960s, or look at how we did things in the sixteenth century. It is a comparison that transcends time and space. But what you are asking is whether we could construct a consistent, fairly stable China narrative that would have an interpretive power in the current situation, that could serve as a reference. I think this is of course possible, because looking at things from the historical record, China’s borders haven’t changed much and the population is largely what it has been. But from the perspective of how we do things, my instinctive response is that I don’t see the need to build this kind of narrative of continuity.

To put it simply, if you talk about politics in Britain—Britain is also quite a mess. It’s not like France; Britain set up its centralized power quite late, and even now the centralized power is not that strong. There is still no written constitution, yet it was tremendously powerful as a world empire. It seems to me like they did not feel the need for a coherent historical narrative. Despite the lack of this narrative, it in practice distilled a certain number of principles that cohered fairly well. China is sort of the reverse of this, in that its continuity is actually quite weak, and there have been many ruptures, but every new dynasty wrote the history of the previous dynasty, so that in historiographical terms there is a lot of continuity, which in turn created a strong coherence at the level of consciousness—that we are “Chinese people,” that “China” is a thing. But in actual life, there have been huge ruptures. As for Britain’s national consciousness, it is quite strong among the elite, but for the middle class it is all very fuzzy, and they don’t care about what “Britishness” is.

Too much emphasis on historical continuity may obscure certain things. I recall that when I first arrived at Oxford, Jessica Rawson (b. 1943)—Dean of Merton College, Oxford’s oldest, and former director of the Oriental Section of the British Museum—asked me what I worked on, and I told her population migration. She is an archeologist and works on Western Zhou bronzes, and she told me that migration has a long history. I told her I wasn’t interested in history, to which she replied, “if you don’t know history, how do you interpret the present?” People at Oxford were surprised when I said things like that, because for traditional disciplines, history is very important, and in fact, everything starts with history. I still remember our discussion. I was trying to be clever and came up with a metaphor, which was the difference between movies and theater. Theater takes place on a stage, with simple trappings, limited in space and time, where the performance and the dialogue transpire. Movies have no limits, they can take five years to shoot, after which it is edited down to two hours. You can shoot anything in the world and integrate many historical narratives. But because theater is a world unto itself that comes with many restrictions, its depth and its impact on the audience are greater. But if you insert history into the drama, it becomes an ordinary narrative. Novels and poems can be compared in the same way. Poems are tightly constrained in form, but this may give poetry more impact. Rawson would surely disagree, and I was clearly in the minority.

From an epistemological or a methodological perspective I was probably on thin ice, but in terms of instinctive reactions, I also tend to think that if you pay too much attention to history you wind up explaining away too many contradictions. Sometimes if you focus on a particular moment, it can sharpen your thinking. This may not be widely accepted in academics, or it might be a question of two different approaches: the long gaze of history can indeed show us where the problems came from, but the explanation might not inspire much new thinking. Maybe if you confront the problem in a more limited, dramatic way, without focusing too much on the long-term historical aspects, the problem stands out more intensely, which might help us think things through.

Putting together a comprehensive historical narrative is what traditional historians do. But if you really want to get into history, it is clear that you have to start from the present and grasp today’s problems. You start from these problems and trace them back to earlier problems, which is the only way to truly enter into history and shape a historical viewpoint. If this is how I approach history, then I don’t necessarily need a continuous, stable historical narrative of “China,” I can live with the ruptures. For example, Hainan’s problems may be more like those of Malaysia or Thailand, because they had a lot of historical connections, so even if they are not the same society now, and were not historically either, nevertheless, the development of social space in these three places is not at all how we define it in current administrative terms. So I don’t worry too much if there is a stable “China narrative,” and my feeling is things are more interesting without one, that its absence allows us to see more things.

If you want to construct a unified narrative, then philosophically you have to assume that “China” exists as a given unit, but from the perspective of comparative anthropology, or sociology, or social science in general, “China” is just what people practice. Objectively speaking there will be some real connections among the practices that took place in the place where China is today, but do these connections form a basis from which to analyze other things? This is hard to say. Looking at it open-mindedly, we could say that how China changes is in the hands of the next generation, and that it is not up to us to think for them or draw up blueprints for them. If fact, today’s Chinese people are not at all like Chinese in the Qing period, which does not strike me as being a problem.

When I use historical materials, I don’t put too much emphasis on any necessary continuity. From a certain perspective, history is like a foreign society. I could use the example of ancient China, or contemporary India, or Britain to imagine the future. I am Chinese, which is nothing to be particularly proud of. I was born into that culture, in the same way that I am from Wenzhou, and that I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a mid-sized town in the south. This is fate, which I have to embrace completely and work through. In this sense, my personal identity is clear. People nowadays tend to imply something else when talking about personal identity, as if you have to protect a set of values and respect certain behavioral norms, or inherit a certain cultural attitude, but for me, I see no such cause–effect relationship in identity.

Wu Qi: To make a connection with what you mentioned before about blockages that you experienced in your scholarly work, I was wondering whether the solution to the blockage was in fact returning to Chinese questions.

Xiang Biao: Yes, you could put it that way, but it might be less returning to Chinese questions, and more to my personal status as a marginal person, a return to the question of who I am. It was a question of thinking clearly about what, finally, I could do, and what my relationship with the world is. I think everyone in the world faces this question and should try to work through the question of who they are. Otherwise, the same crisis will always come up.