Xiang Biao, Excerpts from Self as Method
Xiang Biao, Self as Method [1]
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
Introduction
Self as Method is a unique book, in which Wu Qi, a young journalist from China, engages in three extensive interviews with Xiang Biao, a 48 year-old social anthropologist who was born and educated in China and now teaches at Oxford University and at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. The themes discussed cover Xiang’s life as a child and a student, as well as his experiences as a researcher and his reflections about how to think about China, the world, globalization, and many other issues. The book is made possible because Xiang is something of an “academic celebrity” in China (and because both Xiang and Wu graduated from Peking University, which has considerable cachet).
Published in Chinese in 2020, the book has already sold more than 130,000 copies in China and was named 2020’s “most impactful book,” and has been particularly appreciated by undergraduate and graduate students in China—to whom the book is largely addressed. Despite everything we read about the cynicism and materialism of Chinese youth, the reception of Self as Method clearly demonstrates that many continue to search for a guide that can help them navigate the intellectual, spiritual, and professional challenges they face in a rapidly changing world, and that many remain idealistic.
Self as Method essentially tells Chinese youth to think for themselves and through their own experiences in making sense of the contradictions around them, and demonstrates how one scholar did so. The book also wishes to urge readers to think what it means to be a reflexive Chinese citizen in today’s world, in relation to all the changes in China and in the world. To be clear, Self as Method is not a how-to/self-help book, nor does it play overmuch on Xiang’s celebrity, although both of these elements are skillfully knitted into the interviews. The book in fact is the rarest of things: an intellectual conversation that manages to be interesting and enjoyable.
I am currently translating Xiang’s book in hopes of publishing an English-language volume later this year. Here I include two chapters that deal with Xiang’s time at Beijing University—Beida for short—in the early 1990s. Two things particularly struck me in reading and translating these excerpts.
The first was that Xiang and his entering class spent the first year of university in a military camp in Shijiazhuang. This was a post-1989 measure, designed to instill discipline and a sense of hierarchy on incoming students, one way of avoiding future demonstrations. I was vaguely aware that this had happened, but had not read concrete details of the situation. Xiang’s discussion of life under hierarchy is quite interesting.
The second thing that struck me was the freedom of student life at Beida. Westerners generally tend to think of Chinese life as being quite regimented, but Xiang describes boycotting classes, criticizing the departmental curriculum, and notes as well that most Beida classes—at least in the sociology department—did not require students to take exams; grades were determined on the basis of an end of term essay.
Moreover, most of Xiang’s Beida experience did not in fact occur on campus. Instead, beginning as an undergraduate and continuing while completing his M.A., Xiang engaged in extended fieldwork in Zhejiang Village, a community of illegal or semi-legal migrants from Zhejiang who were making and selling clothes in the neighborhood they had set up in the capital. As Xiang tells it, Zhejiang Village more or less was his Beida experience, and it resulted in highly praised works in Chinese and in English.[2] Many undergraduates at Harvard lead intensely busy social lives, but if they don’t go to class they eventually get into trouble. I think Xiang Biao must have been an exceptional student, willing to push the boundaries of the possible, but it takes an exceptional institution to allow this to happen.
Translation
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Anxieties as a Youth at Beida
Wu Qi: Our past life experience sometimes only has a random influence on us, and it is hard to identify direct correspondences. But when you get to university, you should be entering a more orderly, clear-headed period. You already mentioned your sense of distance and distrust. Did this continue while you were at Beida? If so, how did it manifest itself? Did you feel like you didn’t fit in with your classmates?
Xiang Biao: At Beida, I was careful in how I dealt with things, so I did not feel like an outsider in my daily life, but the feeling of distance was still there. If you are at home with your sense of distance, then you might not even be aware of it, and in my case, I came to be aware of it when the class monitor 班主任 talked to me about a ton of stuff having to do with our group, the Youth League, elections for the student union, etc., about which I knew nothing at all, because I was not participating in them. He said that he had noticed that it was like I was living in my own little world.
In fact, at Beida, you have kids who are 18 or 19 years old, all of whom are excellent students who have come from different places, and most of them are interested in seeking recognition and approval, especially from officials, but I remember thinking that I did not understand why they thought that was important. Of course there were quite a few people we called “loners 逍遥派,” but I wasn’t one of them, because I worked hard at my studies, and was involved in activities and clubs. I talked a lot and did not mind the limelight. Everybody saw me as someone who was moving forward, who had a goal, very different from those who were doing their own thing.
The military training of the 1990 Beida Freshman class for a year at Shijiazhuang was a very important experience. Although I didn’t realize it at first, talking with upper-level students later on I realized that it had a great effect on us. It had two particular impacts on me. One was that I realized that a rigidly hierarchical system warps your personality. Kids who are 17 or 18 years old generally look for friends, and have all sorts of innocent ideas, but when they are in a hierarchical situation, everyone is constantly thinking about self-preservation, how to ingratiate yourself with the class monitor, or the assistant class monitor, or the cook. In fact, the stakes were not particularly high, and if you didn’t suck up to people there is no real danger, so it was a kind of supra-rational calculation. There were also horizontal relationships as well, because we were classmates, after all, and once we got back to campus in Beijing, everyone became good friends. But the overall feeling was that vertical relations were in control, and the feeling of oppression was very clear.
Later on, when I was in England I met all sorts of people, including some retired military, and learned that in England’s colonial history, the relationship between military service, education, and social status was very close, which is also true in China. In the 20th century, wars completely upended the social hierarchy. People say that Japan modernized itself on the basis of the ruins of the war, and that it was a miracle, but you can think about it from another perspective, which was that because of the war, landlords had to contribute their land and their sons had to join the army, and once the war was over everything was in ruins, which meant that people were all equal, and soldiers returning home after the war had to be properly taken care of, no matter what their prewar status had been. This fostered the growth of universal education and welfare.
When I went to visit my wife’s ancestral home in Onomichi, I said to her that the location of the house was perfect, with an elementary school on one side and a high school on the other. In fact, the huge campuses of both of these schools originally belonged to her family. Her grandfather had pneumonia and could not join the army, so he donated land to the state, only keeping a parcel for himself to live on. Modernization only happens when everyone pitches in, but this was different from the militaristic modernization of the Meiji era and was more democratic.
England is also like this, in that if the war had not broken the power of the aristocracy, that act establishing the NHS would never have passed, nor would have seen the socialist-leaning society like that of 1968. Of course, I do not mean to valorize war, but if old structures are not destroyed, new ones do not grow. This process is also influenced by the army, so physical education is very important in the English educational system, and even more so in the United States. English people I know have told me that the most important thing they learned in their physical education at school, which was modeled on the army, was how to protect their teammates. They said that when you enter the battlefield in groups of five or six, life and death are inches apart, and only if you protect one another will you survive, so you have to coordinate your actions and create an emotional desire to live or die together. Only when you wage war in this fashion is the survival rate high, so you try to instill this every day. This is also an important part of what is taught in American football. This is even more important in the aristocratic tradition, and they believe this is an important trait of the elite, that they understand how to take care of one another and build a spirit of teamwork.
This is very interesting, because it is completely different from my personal experience. This has to do with an important political issue, which is that the character and the role of the army can be completely different. When we went to military camp, the army was no longer at war, and its principle role was training, so it had lost its original positive military tradition, becoming an extremely mechanical organization in which obedience was all that mattered. Of course, the importance of obedience is dialectical. In wartime of course you have to obey, but if obedience is stressed to the point that the spirit of struggle is not internalized among the troops, then absolute obedience will not guarantee victory amid the myriad changes that occur on the battlefield.
So the first thing I noticed at the camp was how frightening the hierarchy was. After I got back to Beida, I wasn’t so eager to receive the approval of any system. Second, the entire experience of military training created a strong utilitarian orientation among my classmates, not that this is all we were, but we paid close attention to how we spent our time. Our professors were quite surprised by this, and said that students who had gone through military training all got up early and went to the library without wasting time, and there were fewer “loners” than there once were. In fact this kind of “rational” or “utilitarian” outlook has to do with hierarchy.
Why is it that after the collapse of communism, Eastern European societies became so utilitarian, so oriented toward money? Their market economies were not like those of existing market economies. Take Germany as an example, one of the most long-standing capitalist economies. Germany has long practiced a “socialist market economy” model, which emphasizes competition and the spirit of individual entrepreneurship, while at the same time also emphasizing state intervention in the market order and the welfare system. Alongside of this there also exists a deep Christian tradition with clear ideas about how to be a person, how to treat other people in the marketplace, how to act when you fail, what kind of success is praiseworthy, and what kind of success is shameful.
What followed the collapse of communism was pure, naked capitalism, that only made distinctions between success and failure, and not between praiseworthy successes and shameful successes. Judgement was completely focused on the bottom line, so that even in the case of success achieved through shameful means, you could still proudly say that you are intelligent and courageous (if fact you might be even more arrogant than if you had succeeded in normal ways). When the left reemerged in Hungary and Romania, it was a reaction to this kind of utilitarian market economy.
An important reason for all of this is that in the original centralized, extremely hierarchical system, there way no way for people to ask decisive questions related to their life experiences, because all resources were distributed from top to bottom. I realized while in military training that if I got on well with my platoon commander, company commander, then I was all set in material terms for the next week. And even if I was not set in material terms, it was still clear that obedience was the source of honor and dignity, which meant that this was what we focused on, which in turn made people nervous.
The hierarchical system truly did destroy a more innocent understanding of oneself. The early period of reform in China was not like this. Early reform in China started in the villages, when the commune system was still playing a positive role. There were still collective feelings attached to town and village enterprises; everybody wanted to make money, but it wasn’t that bad yet. But after reform started in the cities, social contradictions multiplied, and the utilitarianism that emerged from the original work unit system looked a lot like what we see in Eastern Europe.
This had quite an impact on my mood when I was 17 or 18. Like you said, a lot of things happen at random, and having experienced a random year of “sublimation,” it is hard to get rid of it. Even if you want to get rid of it, it takes a lot of struggle.
Truly, not letting go is a problem for me, a huge obstacle in my research. If you don’t let up, and stubbornly push your thoughts deeper, then you don’t let your mind wander, which can wind up limiting your creativity. I have this problem when I do fieldwork. I don’t relax and goof around, and am not good at blending in with everyone else, which is something I would like to improve about myself. Of course this has to do with how I was raised, because I was always with my grandfather, and did not often play with children my own age. In fact, my grandfather would not let me play with children my own age, because the children my own age were all children of dock workers. I remember that if the neighbors gave me something to eat, he would pretend to be polite and accept it, but then would not let me eat it because he said it wasn’t clean.
He could be two-faced: very polite to strangers while he perhaps actually looked down on them, and this had an effect on me as well, teaching me certain lessons but also leading me to never relax. I remember telling my mother about it, that I wanted to go to play at someone’s house, but my grandfather said no, because it might cause trouble for them. They might seem to be polite while they were really thinking they’d rather you not be there. This kind of suspiciousness actually cast quite a shadow on me, which has lasted to this day. My wife and I are completely different. Her personality is the type that thinks that if other people see that you are happy, then they’ll be happy to, so when she wants to do something, she just does it. I always think about the negative consequences first.
Wu Qi: At the time did you ever think about trying to change your personality?
Xiang Biao: I didn’t realize it while I was at the university. I discovered it while doing research—discovered something about my individual personality while doing academic research.
Wu Qi: Usually when you’re at the university, everyone is in a hurry to decide what kind of person they are going to become, because there is not one clear path forward. Especially after I got to Beida, my feeling was that it was even more confusing, because there were all kinds of classmates, some who were ace students and bookworms, some were gamers, some were into the arts, and some were into student government or clubs. But in your memory, it seems as if you were set on becoming an intellectual, and you didn’t need to choose. Maybe this is because your parents were both teachers? Or was this a common thing when you were at university?
Xiang Biao: I think this was more or less natural for me, to just do what I wanted to do. After we got back to Beida from military training, the overall environment was such that we didn’t think much about getting a job, and at least in our first and second years, our parents didn’t bring it up with us too much either. Of course, my parents didn’t really understand my choice of major, because I did not go through the university examination but had guaranteed admission, which meant that I could choose my own major.
My first choice was political science, but my parents said absolutely not—anything but politics. Their recommendations were first, economics, and second, law. They thought I was a good speaker because I gave a lot of talks in high school. I said these two majors were boring, because everything was already decided and you just had to memorize the information, which of course was a very superficial understanding. At the time, everything interesting that I read had to do with politics, but when I talked about it with my classmates, they all said that politics is dirty and wondered if I could be like that. So I finally chose sociology. At the time I had surely heard Fei Xiaotong’s name, but I did not know his research. After I got to Beida, I didn’t pay that much attention to what other people were doing, because I knew what I wanted to do.
Wu Qi: What were your principle anxieties at the time?
Xiang Biao: I really didn’t like the courses in the sociology department. After I started my first year classes, I wrote my mother a letter, and told her that the courses had absolutely nothing to do with our actual life. There was one new course called “social work,” which was full of concepts from Hong Kong, and I found it really boring. My mother wrote back, and I still remember it, saying that when she was young, she had studied the Soviet Union, and now we studied the West, and it was a problem. Reading her letter gave me a theoretical framework with which to criticize the curriculum at the time.
I spent a weekend—two nights—under the light of a lamp (I have a good head for money. I brought 600 RMB with me when I first came to Beijing, did not take any more of my family’s money, but instead relied on writing essays or various other things to make money, so I was pretty well off, and bought my own lamp), and wrote a lengthy letter entitled “Suggestions Regarding the Curriculum,” which I then gave to Wang Sibin 王思斌 (b. 1949), the Department Chair. I told him that I was giving him the letter not to say that the department should reform things in the way I suggested, but that it might serve as a reference point to shine a light on certain problems. Professor Wang got all excited, and in a departmental meeting talked about the multi-page letter he had received from a student, and had them all read it. They thought it was great that there were students thinking like this. This encouraged me a lot. If they had criticized me at that point, I might have gotten frustrated later on. That was the first time I wrote out what was bothering me about what was going on. This spirit seems to be less prevalent now, which is really too bad.
Wu Qi: What were your principle complaints in the letter about how the professors were teaching?
Xiang Biao: All Beida professors are of course excellent, and when we started university, the first group of young professors whose education had not been affected by the Cultural Revolution had just finished their degrees, and some stayed at Beida and gave the first-year classes. Professors from the Educated Youth generation like Wang Hansheng 王汉生 (1948-2015) and Sun Liping 孙立平 (b. 1955) basically dealt with graduate students, and did not have much contact with us. The professors who taught the rest of the curriculum were the older professors who had been there forever, and had little understanding of society, and my feeling was that they were not interested in what was happening in society.
There was something else that surprised me. When I went to do fieldwork, I would usually first seek out professors from the local schools and talk with them about the local situation, because they had written articles about it. But when I started to talk with them I discovered that aside from reproducing what they read in the news, they did not really know what was happening around them. I thought this was very strange. You live here every day, so how can you not know? But they weren’t interested in this, and their articles on the subject were very empty, and contained no concrete observations.
I eventually learned that if you want to find professors in China who are familiar with the local situation, you’ll find them in the bigger, better, older schools in Beijing and Shanghai. Teachers in most local schools have little interest in what is going on around them, and just copy whatever they read in academic journals in the hopes of being part of that discourse system, but they do not pay attention to the world around them. Ten years ago, when I was already a professor, I went back to China to do fieldwork and was stunned to discover this phenomenon. They agree that it is a huge problem, but they are still not interested, so you can see how serious the division is. This means that academic language is completely meaningless.
At the time there were some Beida professors who were also like this, and I thought there teaching was lifeless, that they were just repeating what was in the textbook. I talked about it with an upperclassman, and he said we should find a weak spot, meaning that we should boycott the class of a lousy teacher, which is what we did. There was one professor who was getting on in years, who could barely give his class, and only two three students showed up for each lecture. He was not very confident with the students, and was probably not very pleased to see that they did not come, but there were nothing he could do about it. So I just stopped going altogether. We could do this thanks to Beida, because at the time they did not take attendance and there were no tests, and in a lot of classes you just wrote an essay at the end. After sophomore year, I was serious about learning academic English, because I thought it was practical, and I also went to economics class, but the rest of the time I spent on my Zhejiang Village research, as well as clubs and activities.
When we talk about our youth, people like us easily get nostalgic, but this is not altogether healthy. The importance of youth is not for us to “retrieve” our own experience, but instead for today’s young people to rake us over the coals from their current perspective, so that their “judgement” gets at something more real, on the basis of which we can truly reflect on ourselves. Movies like “Youth”[3] don’t mean a lot. Remembering our youth in such a way idealizes and romanticizes the richness of youth, making it into something extremely pure, and suggesting that we are no longer pure. But “purity” is not the only standard of judgement.
Wu Qi: The fact that you could boycott classes back then means that the entire atmosphere was quite relaxed.
Xiang Biao: The fact that things were relaxed has an important context. We started university in 1990, and spent the first year at a military academy in Shijiazhuang. When we got to Beida in 1991, the whole political atmosphere was very ambiguous and unclear. The only lecture course for the entering class was an English for Reading class given by the professor who had written the textbook for fourth-year English. The class was given in a big lecture hall, and later in an amphitheater. It was freezing cold, and everyone went in their military overcoats. At the time, no one dared say anything, and everyone studied to get ahead, but it was not a happy year.
In 1992, I remember the morning very distinctly, I came out of Dorm 28 at 7:00 a.m. to the sound of the loudspeakers addressing the entire campus, as the news broadcast from China National Radio accompanied us on the way to breakfast, and the woman announcer was reciting "The Vigor of Spring Greets the Eyes as the East Wind Comes 东方风来满眼春," which was the report from the Shenzhen Special Zone News concerning the speech Deng Xiaoping made on his southern tour that launched the next round of economic reforms. To that point, the central authorities had not allowed this to be reported, but once it was, things changed at the top, and they started promoting the story. I remember it very clearly, because the "The Vigor of Spring Greets the Eyes as the East Wind Comes" was new, and I had never heard it before. Over night, the atmosphere changed completely.
What is interesting is that there started to be a lot more courses given, and many were about marketing strategy. In 1991, there were already students who decided to plunge into the economy and make money, but this exploded in 1992, when it was decided that the market economy was normal. All sorts of cultural phenomena got rolling again as well, for example, another wave of “national studies 国学热.” At the time there were no focused debates, and everybody was talking about all sorts of things, like the Scandinavian model. I was very active, and as president of the sociology club, I asked people to organize lectures, and everybody was all excited. There was a lot of space, and the professors didn’t pay much attention to us.
The university also started to make money. The Beida Party Secretary started to build the Beida Resource Building, as well as the Resource Group for Beida as a whole. “Resource” is one of the first concepts I learned at Beida. What does it mean? It means that with the privatization of the market economy, the original things we need to survive are now transformed into potential resources that can appreciate in value. You have to take hold of resources, and possess a clear title to them. Beida used to be a school that organized its daily activities, but now they discovered that the school had resources, with which they run classes and build buildings. This was the beginning of a very important transformation, the “resourcification” of the university. I find the idea of “resource” very interesting, and I was not at all critical at the outset, and in fact all of us thought that it was a good thing. I found it enlightening in a theoretical sense as well, because I could also see how people deployed resources in their daily lives. Wenzhou people grow up doing this, so I was perhaps more awake to it.
Wu Qi: Your father kept a record of the essays you wrote in school. But there was no Internet at the time, so we can’t find most of them. What kind of things did you write when you were at university?
Xiang Biao: The first essay I wrote at Beida was called “The Third Mr.” When I first got to Beida, an upper classman in sociology was putting together a newspaper and invited the new students to write something. I always liked to strut my stuff, so I wrote something up. Everyone had always said that the May 4th spirit at Beida was basically about “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” but I said that there was a third figure, called “Mr. Morality,” or “Mr. New Morality.” I thought the moral question was very important, and should not be forgotten. In part, this was repeating what people said at the time, emphasizing how technical and institutional changes produced cultural changes. At the same time, I also wanted to stress that morality should not be like a hat that we put on our head, a mere protective cover over our lives. For today’s morality we need to hold the hat in our hands and take a good look at it. We can’t see the hat on our head, even if we can feel its existence, but we don’t know its shape or its color, and in the same way, if we don’t know where our morality comes from, and simply follow it unthinkingly, then we are just following along blindly.
It is not moral to ask other people to respect that kind of morality. The idea of “Mr. Morality” is to say that morality should be a matter of choice, based on individual freedom. I surely read about this somewhere; it might have been left over from my “culture craze” readings during high school. And I truly felt that morality should be the result of empirical observation and analysis, and not just sloppy dogmatism. Being anti-dogma, anti-system, anti-intellectual, anti-elite also impacts on the language you use to write, which we can talk about later.
Marx was the first to talk about the question of theft—actually it was Proudhon—asking why it was seen as immoral. First, private property is the precondition for theft being immoral, because in the absence of private of property the question would not exist. In Marx’s analysis, picking up or pulling off branches from trees in a forest was also seen as theft, because the land belongs to the manor, which means that the trees belong to the manor as well, as well as the leaves and branches that fall from the trees—it’s endless. So everyone felt that taking these was theft. There is a historical evolution concerning the conditions under which theft was labeled as immoral.
Another example is the relationship between family and corruption, which allows us to carry out an empirical analysis of morality. Why is it that everyone thinks we can be more forgiving of corruption if it is done for the sake of one’s children? At the same time, when we expose cases of official corruption, our focus is on the relationship between corruption and women, and pay scant attention to the nature of the official corruption, or how the system facilitated the corruption, or what concrete consequences the corruption produced. Morality is multi-dimensional, so why do we accord one dimension more weight than another?
When the President of Peking University knelt before his ageing mother, and the pictures of the event went viral,[4] the effect on young people was extremely bad, because he suddenly confronted you with an unnatural, unclear kind of morality, not only giving you no choice, but taking away your basic feelings about what is moral and what is not. I think that when I wrote that essay I was talking about the new morality proposed during the May 4th period, which would be the product of rational reflection and individual freedom. Morality where you have no choice is immoral, as is morality that is forced on you, because when I force my morality on you, it means that I am thoroughly denying your humanity at an implicit level, and that if you don’t accept my morality, then in my eyes you are not a person.
Researching Zhejiang Village
Wu Qi: In this interview we will not go into detail concerning your well-known research and arguments, for example your work on Zhejiang Village, undertaken while you were at Beida, or your doctoral dissertation on “Global Body Shopping,” as well as certain arguments and criticisms that can be found in the Sinophone world, even if all of this will serve as grist for the mill, the basis on which I hope to push the discussion forward. But your six years’ research on Zhejiang Village must have been a turning point, both in terms of your research work or your personal life. At the time did you have any inkling or awareness of this? Where did the original idea come from and what was your greatest motivation?
Xiang Biao: Of course I had no idea! I was only 20 at the time, and had no idea of “what all this might mean later on.” It may be that people only start to have this sense of history once they reach middle age, when they can say that what I am doing now is the conclusion to what I was doing before, and that it marks as well a new direction, etc., etc. The things you do when you are young are either because someone told you to, and everyone is doing the same thing, or it’s the opposite, and you decide to do your own thing, consciously follow your impulse. Everyone has impulses, so the key point is not whether you have them, but whether you follow them. Things that have truly changed history, whether we are talking about history writ large or your own personal history, are often the result of following your impulses. Plans based on historical calculations often wind up not having much of an impact. This is sort of a miraculous thing about life. It surprises you, it makes you feel like life and history have come alive, it gives opportunities for young people.
My chief motivation at the time was probably to be different from everybody else. Or it was also related to my dissatisfaction with my studies, my feeling that going to class was boring. But the emphasis on fieldwork in the sociology department—fieldwork was seen as sacred by both the professors and my classmates—was also a strong motivating factor. My capacity for observation that I had developed as a child probably factored in here as well. Because in fact, lots of students also wanted to do fieldwork, but if you go there and don’t see anything or can’t spark a conversation with people, then the whole thing gets awkward and you drop it.
Wu Qi: Did you have a lot of friends at the time? People with whom to discuss things?
Xiang Biao: No too many. I didn’t feel the need to share all that, but I do like to talk, so after my fieldwork I would organize lectures, which gave me a great sense of accomplishment.
Wu Qi: How was this kind of independent, individual research viewed in the context of Beida at the time? What did the people around you think about it? Did you discuss it with people? Did anyone criticize you?
Xiang Biao: The fact that I kept going on my Zhejiang Village project was also because Beida encouraged me. Everybody admired what I was doing, and I don’t remember any negative comments or sarcastic remarks. People recognized that it was hard. My professors encouraged me, and later on the Youth League committee gave me a prize. For a young person, this was extremely valuable encouragement, and the fact that I could keep going and expanding the project had to do with this climate. Later on I joined one of Wang Hansheng’s research projects, which came with funding support, and for an undergraduate to have research funds was reaffirming and very satisfying. All of this was very important. Because at the time I didn’t know where I was going with the project. I would go to Zhejiang Village, and they would be there making clothes, and I didn’t know what to ask, and wound up asking what seemed like the same questions every time, and they gave the same answers.
For the longest time I wrote nothing with any theory to it, and later on lots of younger classmates kept working on the topic even after I went to England, and had the same difficulties. This is a really hard academic topic for an undergraduate. The reason that I was able to keep going was that it became a form of social practice. I had funding, I had encouragement, I had a sense of purpose, in that I was participating in their community building, combining it with Beida’s Loving Hearts Society 北大爱心社[5]…When I wrote up my fieldwork notes, I had no theoretical framework, so each chapter addressed a particular question, and I published some of them in the Chinese Peasants 中国农民magazine, like in a small column. I don’t think a lot of people read them, but the editors thought they were pretty good.
I constantly berated myself for being so deficient in theory. Because at Beida I really had no theoretical training, nor had I read a great deal, since I was not a great reader. This may sound strange, but I felt this way at Beida, and I was even more shocked when I saw how on top of the literature the students in England were. This ability is extremely important, because most of our information and reflections rely on the written word, the accumulation of which is really vital. To tell the truth, I was way below the level of a doctoral student, to say nothing of the level of a professor, way below average. Most people think that in systematic academic training, getting a grasp on the literature is the starting point, the most basic skill, a threshold that must be crossed, but I actually circumvented all that. This is why I stayed at Oxford after I graduated, because if I had tried to go to another school, it might not have been easy to find a job.
My guess is that Oxford thinks that everyone has this skill, and just imagines that you do too, and there are still people who say that to me now, that I avoided those theories on purpose, in other words that I knew the theories and purposely did not use them, which puts me at a higher level. In fact, I knew nothing at all about the theories, which is why they don’t figure in my work. For these people, I am like a breath of fresh air. But if I went to a different university, I would have to check all those boxes, and would not make it past the first hurdle.
This has been a weak point of mine for a long time, and I am still struggling with it. I have to catch up, but I cannot let go of who I am and make myself into another kind of person. I can’t seem to decide one way or another, so I’m still trying to catch up. We can talk about it again in 20 years.
I think the fact that I read relatively little at Beida and stayed in my Zhejiang “bubble,” maybe had to do with education at the time. Because when I was in high school I really liked to read, and sought out fairly complicated things. If I had continued like that, then with a relatively good undergraduate education, I would have been in good shape, but that is not the environment I wound up in, and I was naturally really interested in how people did business, so that’s the choice I made. Reading ability has a lot to do with age, and you need to read with a certain intensity at a certain age to develop the ability. But at that age I did not focus on reading academic literature, so my brain did not get training for that function, and I am still that way, and my relation to the written word is a bit distant. The written word does not get me excited.
Wu Qi: This is another reason that you are at odds with the idea of intellectuals.
Xiang Biao: Exactly! On the one hand I feel a certain psychological distance when talking with intellectuals, because everyone has read things that I have not. At the same time, I also feel like some intellectuals live inside their words, and what they say follows a discursive logic from one point to another, and this can perhaps be a long way away from the real world. For me, discourse itself is not very interesting.
I’m always wondering what all those theories correspond to, which is why I am a very picky reader. But this might be my strong point as well, in that if there is nothing in the theory that you’re selling, I won’t be dazzled by the discourse. I always try to get to the bottom of things, to see what is at the core of something. This is why I really like old-style reportage literature in China, which is extremely direct, with no external theorizing, no metaphors or analogies. My lack of theory also created another big problem, which is that I can’t read things that cite a lot of classic texts. If I don’t know the classic, then I don’t know what it means when they cite it. And of course, citing the classics is an important way that intellectuals and scholars write.
Wu Qi: This is one of the pleasures of this kind of writing, to be cited by your peers.
Xiang Biao: It’s true that citations can appear obscure or subtle, and you can engage in a dialogue with other people by using them; there is kind of an epistemological universe there. But I’m outside of that, and can’t get in. I have a friend, Vani, in Singapore, who influenced me a great deal, an Indian. I told her that Joan Baez’s music moved me a lot. Baez sings a lot of folk songs, and I know basically nothing about music, but I like her. Vani laughed—she knows me really well—and said that she finds Joan Baez’s music rather weak. I imagine she meant that her rhythms and melodies are simple, but Vani said one thing that I found very interesting.
She said that the reason I like Joan Baez is that her songs have no references. What she is singing about it what she is singing about, and there are no hidden meanings that you have to figure out. I draw strength from that kind of directness. A couple of years ago, I had my students listen to her songs, especially “The House of the Rising Sun,” telling them to write their essays like that. The song is very direct: “My mother was a tailor, she sewed my new blue jeans; my father was a gambler…Mother, tell your children, not to do what I have done…Live their lives in sin and misery, in the house of the rising sun.” It’s really direct and moving.
So in my years at Beida, I really was quite different from other people. Everybody thinks Beida is about ideas, theories, and scholarship, but for me it was about freedom, the freedom to hang out in Zhejiang Village. I also like social activities, so I rounded up a lot of people and we wrote a lot of letters.
Wu Qi: What kind of letters did you write?
Xiang Biao: We wrote to Tong Dalin 童大林 (1918-2010) and Dong Fufeng 董辅礽 (1927-2004),[6] as well as to some people high up in the Wenzhou government who had been responsible for policy-making. We also went to visit them. After 1992, we wrote to members of what I called the “old elite,” who had gone abroad to study a couple of years earlier, the most famous of which were the economists Zhou Qiren 周其仁 (b. 1950), Wang Xiaoqiang 王小强 (b. 1952), and Du Ying 杜鹰 (b. 1952)…Later, Justin Yifu Lin 林毅夫 (b. 1952) came to China from Taiwan, and set up the Center for Research on the Chinese Economy, and I interacted with them some. There was also Chen Yueguang 陈越光, who used to be the associate editor of the “Toward the Future” translation series.
Wu Qi: You interacted with them as a student? This didn’t happen that much back then, right? Did you learn anything interesting?
Xiang Biao: You’re right. One reason all this happened was that we were introduced by my teacher, Wang Hansheng, and by Sun Liping. So my professors mattered a lot, but I was also very active, and wanted to meet these people. They taught me some important lessons. They did not talk theory, and only told stories and talked about their experiences and their insights. They were very direct and down to business. When they talked about things they went straight to the “point,” in other words, to the most important guiding force behind whatever they were talking about, a force which often had not been understood before. But they did not seem to have the patience to develop the “point,” to make it into a systematic argument. They would talk until they made their point, and then move on to another. They really came up with a lot of propositions that got people excited, but they didn’t test them.
My article on “The End of the ‘Educated Youth’ Era in Chinese Social Science” was based on this. Sun Liping is more academic than they are. He has insights that he works out into theories, but their pleasure was truly in those “points.” Hanging out with them and getting to know their experiences made me very envious, and I felt that they had really been able to talk about policy questions in the real world, and to throw themselves into things they really believed in. But overall, the 1980s did not leave me with many intellectual resources—spiritual resources were more important.
Wu Qi: We’ll talk about the 1980s later, but let’s go back to the directness that you were talking about, and your lack of theoretical ability. At the time, did Beida professors not test you on reading articles or citing the classics? Didn’t the sociology department test you on that?
Xiang Biao: There was no mechanism for that. Wang Hansheng knew about my problem. I remember she talked to me about it once, when I was moving into the M.A. program after finishing my undergraduate work. It was in the summer of 1995, and we were at her house. She said that I might feel some pressure as I moved into graduate school. I had a lot of self-confidence at the time, so I asked what kind of pressure. She said that when I started to work with Li Meng 李猛, Zhou Feizhou 周飞舟, and Li Kang 李康 (they were all a year ahead of me, and knew much more theory), I might feel pressure about theory. Her idea was for me to work harder.
Professor Liu Shiding 刘世定 also encouraged me a lot. He is an extremely kind person, and did not point out my flaws, or criticize me, but he clearly knew about them. One time we were eating together, and he clearly told me that I had great ideas, but would have a hard time developing them because they weren’t engaged with the literature.
It was really interesting to observe these people at Beida. I talked a lot with another young professor, Yu Zhangjiang 于长江, who said that one important thing Beida gives you is the ability to not be afraid. No matter where you go, you are not afraid. He may be right.
My fieldwork experience is what I accumulated from my early period, which wound up being a big problem, because my undergraduate career was pretty much just that fieldwork, which was something that very few people can do at that stage, but it meant that I did not do what most people do, which is things like reading. So things were sort of upside down. I received some recognition fairly early, not only at school but even internationally, but I ignored some basic elements of my education, which is a sort of stress for me even today. Sometimes I can get really stressed out, and it was a big psychological pressure in the last couple of years.
Last year (2018) in Shanghai, I talked about this with my doctoral advisor, Frank Pieke, who has been very encouraging. When I started talking about it, he understood right away, and said that my fear was that I would never do anything better than what I had already done. Chen Guangxing 陈光兴 (b. 1957), from Taiwan, was the moderator for a talk I gave in Singapore, probably in 2003. He was talking about Zhejiang Village, and said that I might never do anything better than that. Of course the point was to praise what I had done, but my thought was “I’m only 31!” But now what he said has sort of come true, and I feel more and more pressure, and one reason for this is I managed to produce a study that surprised even academic authorities without having mastered the basic skills of the craft, but how was I going to keep going like that…
Wu Qi: So when you were working on Zhejiang Village, had you thought about future plans? Had you already decided to be a scholar?
Xiang Biao: When I was working on Zhejiang Village I was really into it, and since I had financial support, there was no work pressure. Because it worked out really well, I got into graduate school without any effort. With a graduate degree from Beida, finding work should not be a problem. I didn’t really think about it until the end of my M.A., and my first thought was that work didn’t look very interesting, so maybe I would do my Ph.D. at Beida. I had been in Beijing a long time, but I would have to pass the Toefl to study abroad. At the time, Zhou Feizhou, who was ahead of me, had gone to Science and Technology University in Hong Kong, and Wang Hansheng thought we should get him to help me apply to the Ph.D. program there, because their scholarships were pretty good, so I applied together with another student from my dorm.
At the time, I had my own computer and printer, fax machine, and cell phone—I was better equipped than most people at Beida. I had put all this together by 1996 or 1997, and then I bought my own laptop. Most of this money came from publishing, and I also did some consulting for companies. One reason I wasn’t worried about work at the time was that my economic situation was fine.
The reason I bring this up is that I remember printing out all of those application forms on the printer next to my bed, in different colors of ink. After a week I got my answer from the university, and they rejected me right away because I didn’t have the required Toefl grade. What happened next was pure luck. I didn’t really know what to do next, maybe stay at Beida to do my doctorate. But right at this point, Frank Pieke, a Dutch scholar at Oxford who paid a lot of attention to what Chinese scholars published in China, happened onto my study of Zhejiang Village and thought it was great, so he sought me out, and encouraged me to go to Oxford, saying that he would arrange a scholarship.
When I ask him about it now, he acts like it is no big deal, but in fact scholarships at Oxford are extremely limited, but he got me a full scholarship, even though there was only one of those for the entire department, so he had to argue with the other professors and convince them. When I got to Oxford, I could not speak English at all, and could not understand my classes. When I had to defend my fieldwork project, one of the professors said “outrageous” two times. This may have been the first time in history that something like this was said at a place like Oxford.
I didn’t know what “outrageous” meant, but I knew that it was not good, and I went back and looked it up in the dictionary, and asked other students, and finally understood. I spent a sleepless night, walking across the campus, the same garden next to where I live now. By all this, I mean to thank Professor Pieke for having fought for that full scholarship for me, because I think there was probably a lot of pressure on him in that first year too, because if the scholarship had gone to another student, they surely would have done better than me. All of this was a huge shock to me at the time.
Wu Qi: In the preface to the Chinese translation of Global Body Shoppers you talked specifically about the difficulty of this transition. Your description was “my entire memory of that year of Oxford was of the clouds hanging over me.” How were you feeling? This must have been a big shock after the freedom, self-confidence, and strength you felt at Beida.
Xiang Biao: I couldn’t understand much in my classes, and when I talked with other students after class, I was also a bit disappointed, because Oxford students did not seem as interesting as Beida students. Thinking back on it now, the biggest problem was language, not liking things that I didn’t understand. I was in a state of shock and not really able to reflect rationally on my situation. It might have been a little bit like what Yoshimi Takeuchi[7] 竹内好 (1910-1977) said was the difference between China and Japan in response to the shock of the arrival of Western culture, in which China fell into a stage of profound self-doubt while Japan instead engineered a transformation. China completely fell apart, trying to figure out why she was different, not trying to figure out where the differences were but what they were, and believing that the difference was an established fact. Moreover, this fact was seen as the origin of reflection and transformation, and hence was revolutionary. Transformation was the route Japan chose.
That’s how I was at the time. I couldn’t thoroughly think through why I was different, I just felt I was different, and behind. I hadn’t read enough, so I needed to catch up, so I read an enormous amount of stuff that I completely did not understand, much of which were quite superficial and not the things I should have been reading, not the basics. At the time, a lot of anthropological research was already quite superficial, simple narratives about whatever they were working on without developing any great idea. Before I went to do fieldwork, nothing I read gave me any real inspiration, so I just lumped all those terms together and put them aside. After doing my fieldwork, I happened upon a collection of essays entitled Virtualism, the preface of which was the first English essay I really understood after arriving at Oxford, because my English was getting better.
That essay was not really a classic, but because I understood it, I began to see things clearly. This gets back to what we were talking about before, which is that it doesn’t matter whether theory is new or old, deep or superficial, and especially right or wrong. The point of theory is to communicate something. This is extremely important, even if what is communicated is superficial, because it wakes up something in your thinking, which makes you into a new subject, which means that the theory has been revolutionary. If is in fact very difficult to find language that resonates with the reader. Not only do you have to address the structure of the subject you are studying, but you also need to have a good grasp of the broader picture and where you are going with it, at which point you can write simply and in a way that resonates. After my ideas became clear, I wrote my dissertation fairly quickly. Of course there were all sorts of problems, but given my language level I was relatively satisfied with what I did.
Wu Qi: So the problems you had with your dissertation at Oxford were not that big a setback when compared with your writer’s block in recent years.
Xiang Biao: That’s right. Thinking back on it, it didn’t leave any psychological scars, because it was like a blitzkrieg. My sole goal there was to write the dissertation, within a certain amount of time, which focused all the pressure on one thing. In that kind of situation, I didn’t think about it all that much, but just concentrated completely on dealing with that huge pressure, and there was no time for this to become a problem in terms of mood or psychology. A lot of single mothers are like this. There are divorced, with two children, but they seem fine, and only later on feel the psychological pressure, because at the time they are focused only on survival, on getting through the year. Of course it’s hard, and you’re run ragged every day, but the problems only emerge later on when you have a little more time and you try to find the meaning of all of that. That’s when it’s harder to deal with.
Notes
[1] 项飙, 吴琦, 把自己作为方法--与项飙谈话, Dandu/Shanghai, Wenyi chubanshe, 2020.
[2] 项飙, 跨越边界的社区: 北京浙江村的生活史, Beijing, Sanlian, 2000. An abridged translation is Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun: The Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing, trans. Jim Weldon, Leiden, Brill, 2005.
[3] Translator’s note: A 2017 film recounting the story of a group of young girls in a PLA art troupe in the 1970s and 1980s.
[4] Translator’s note: Zhou Qifeng 周其凤 (b. 1947), president of Beida at the time, knelt before his mother for at least ten minutes on the occasion of her 90th birthday, an event that was highly mediatized and provoked a certain controversy. See here and here for images and commentary.
[5] Translator’s note: Beida’s first voluntary service club, established in 1993.
[6] Translator’s note: Both of these are “old revolutionaries” who joined the CCP early on and went on to have important careers as “scholar-officials” in the PRC. Dong Fufeng at one point promoted the “Wenzhou model” of economic development.
[7]Translator’s note: Yoshimi Takeuchi was a Japanese sinologist, known for having translated the works of the Chinese writer Lu Xun, and for his support of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution.
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Anxieties as a Youth at Beida
Wu Qi: Our past life experience sometimes only has a random influence on us, and it is hard to identify direct correspondences. But when you get to university, you should be entering a more orderly, clear-headed period. You already mentioned your sense of distance and distrust. Did this continue while you were at Beida? If so, how did it manifest itself? Did you feel like you didn’t fit in with your classmates?
Xiang Biao: At Beida, I was careful in how I dealt with things, so I did not feel like an outsider in my daily life, but the feeling of distance was still there. If you are at home with your sense of distance, then you might not even be aware of it, and in my case, I came to be aware of it when the class monitor 班主任 talked to me about a ton of stuff having to do with our group, the Youth League, elections for the student union, etc., about which I knew nothing at all, because I was not participating in them. He said that he had noticed that it was like I was living in my own little world.
In fact, at Beida, you have kids who are 18 or 19 years old, all of whom are excellent students who have come from different places, and most of them are interested in seeking recognition and approval, especially from officials, but I remember thinking that I did not understand why they thought that was important. Of course there were quite a few people we called “loners 逍遥派,” but I wasn’t one of them, because I worked hard at my studies, and was involved in activities and clubs. I talked a lot and did not mind the limelight. Everybody saw me as someone who was moving forward, who had a goal, very different from those who were doing their own thing.
The military training of the 1990 Beida Freshman class for a year at Shijiazhuang was a very important experience. Although I didn’t realize it at first, talking with upper-level students later on I realized that it had a great effect on us. It had two particular impacts on me. One was that I realized that a rigidly hierarchical system warps your personality. Kids who are 17 or 18 years old generally look for friends, and have all sorts of innocent ideas, but when they are in a hierarchical situation, everyone is constantly thinking about self-preservation, how to ingratiate yourself with the class monitor, or the assistant class monitor, or the cook. In fact, the stakes were not particularly high, and if you didn’t suck up to people there is no real danger, so it was a kind of supra-rational calculation. There were also horizontal relationships as well, because we were classmates, after all, and once we got back to campus in Beijing, everyone became good friends. But the overall feeling was that vertical relations were in control, and the feeling of oppression was very clear.
Later on, when I was in England I met all sorts of people, including some retired military, and learned that in England’s colonial history, the relationship between military service, education, and social status was very close, which is also true in China. In the 20th century, wars completely upended the social hierarchy. People say that Japan modernized itself on the basis of the ruins of the war, and that it was a miracle, but you can think about it from another perspective, which was that because of the war, landlords had to contribute their land and their sons had to join the army, and once the war was over everything was in ruins, which meant that people were all equal, and soldiers returning home after the war had to be properly taken care of, no matter what their prewar status had been. This fostered the growth of universal education and welfare.
When I went to visit my wife’s ancestral home in Onomichi, I said to her that the location of the house was perfect, with an elementary school on one side and a high school on the other. In fact, the huge campuses of both of these schools originally belonged to her family. Her grandfather had pneumonia and could not join the army, so he donated land to the state, only keeping a parcel for himself to live on. Modernization only happens when everyone pitches in, but this was different from the militaristic modernization of the Meiji era and was more democratic.
England is also like this, in that if the war had not broken the power of the aristocracy, that act establishing the NHS would never have passed, nor would have seen the socialist-leaning society like that of 1968. Of course, I do not mean to valorize war, but if old structures are not destroyed, new ones do not grow. This process is also influenced by the army, so physical education is very important in the English educational system, and even more so in the United States. English people I know have told me that the most important thing they learned in their physical education at school, which was modeled on the army, was how to protect their teammates. They said that when you enter the battlefield in groups of five or six, life and death are inches apart, and only if you protect one another will you survive, so you have to coordinate your actions and create an emotional desire to live or die together. Only when you wage war in this fashion is the survival rate high, so you try to instill this every day. This is also an important part of what is taught in American football. This is even more important in the aristocratic tradition, and they believe this is an important trait of the elite, that they understand how to take care of one another and build a spirit of teamwork.
This is very interesting, because it is completely different from my personal experience. This has to do with an important political issue, which is that the character and the role of the army can be completely different. When we went to military camp, the army was no longer at war, and its principle role was training, so it had lost its original positive military tradition, becoming an extremely mechanical organization in which obedience was all that mattered. Of course, the importance of obedience is dialectical. In wartime of course you have to obey, but if obedience is stressed to the point that the spirit of struggle is not internalized among the troops, then absolute obedience will not guarantee victory amid the myriad changes that occur on the battlefield.
So the first thing I noticed at the camp was how frightening the hierarchy was. After I got back to Beida, I wasn’t so eager to receive the approval of any system. Second, the entire experience of military training created a strong utilitarian orientation among my classmates, not that this is all we were, but we paid close attention to how we spent our time. Our professors were quite surprised by this, and said that students who had gone through military training all got up early and went to the library without wasting time, and there were fewer “loners” than there once were. In fact this kind of “rational” or “utilitarian” outlook has to do with hierarchy.
Why is it that after the collapse of communism, Eastern European societies became so utilitarian, so oriented toward money? Their market economies were not like those of existing market economies. Take Germany as an example, one of the most long-standing capitalist economies. Germany has long practiced a “socialist market economy” model, which emphasizes competition and the spirit of individual entrepreneurship, while at the same time also emphasizing state intervention in the market order and the welfare system. Alongside of this there also exists a deep Christian tradition with clear ideas about how to be a person, how to treat other people in the marketplace, how to act when you fail, what kind of success is praiseworthy, and what kind of success is shameful.
What followed the collapse of communism was pure, naked capitalism, that only made distinctions between success and failure, and not between praiseworthy successes and shameful successes. Judgement was completely focused on the bottom line, so that even in the case of success achieved through shameful means, you could still proudly say that you are intelligent and courageous (if fact you might be even more arrogant than if you had succeeded in normal ways). When the left reemerged in Hungary and Romania, it was a reaction to this kind of utilitarian market economy.
An important reason for all of this is that in the original centralized, extremely hierarchical system, there way no way for people to ask decisive questions related to their life experiences, because all resources were distributed from top to bottom. I realized while in military training that if I got on well with my platoon commander, company commander, then I was all set in material terms for the next week. And even if I was not set in material terms, it was still clear that obedience was the source of honor and dignity, which meant that this was what we focused on, which in turn made people nervous.
The hierarchical system truly did destroy a more innocent understanding of oneself. The early period of reform in China was not like this. Early reform in China started in the villages, when the commune system was still playing a positive role. There were still collective feelings attached to town and village enterprises; everybody wanted to make money, but it wasn’t that bad yet. But after reform started in the cities, social contradictions multiplied, and the utilitarianism that emerged from the original work unit system looked a lot like what we see in Eastern Europe.
This had quite an impact on my mood when I was 17 or 18. Like you said, a lot of things happen at random, and having experienced a random year of “sublimation,” it is hard to get rid of it. Even if you want to get rid of it, it takes a lot of struggle.
Truly, not letting go is a problem for me, a huge obstacle in my research. If you don’t let up, and stubbornly push your thoughts deeper, then you don’t let your mind wander, which can wind up limiting your creativity. I have this problem when I do fieldwork. I don’t relax and goof around, and am not good at blending in with everyone else, which is something I would like to improve about myself. Of course this has to do with how I was raised, because I was always with my grandfather, and did not often play with children my own age. In fact, my grandfather would not let me play with children my own age, because the children my own age were all children of dock workers. I remember that if the neighbors gave me something to eat, he would pretend to be polite and accept it, but then would not let me eat it because he said it wasn’t clean.
He could be two-faced: very polite to strangers while he perhaps actually looked down on them, and this had an effect on me as well, teaching me certain lessons but also leading me to never relax. I remember telling my mother about it, that I wanted to go to play at someone’s house, but my grandfather said no, because it might cause trouble for them. They might seem to be polite while they were really thinking they’d rather you not be there. This kind of suspiciousness actually cast quite a shadow on me, which has lasted to this day. My wife and I are completely different. Her personality is the type that thinks that if other people see that you are happy, then they’ll be happy to, so when she wants to do something, she just does it. I always think about the negative consequences first.
Wu Qi: At the time did you ever think about trying to change your personality?
Xiang Biao: I didn’t realize it while I was at the university. I discovered it while doing research—discovered something about my individual personality while doing academic research.
Wu Qi: Usually when you’re at the university, everyone is in a hurry to decide what kind of person they are going to become, because there is not one clear path forward. Especially after I got to Beida, my feeling was that it was even more confusing, because there were all kinds of classmates, some who were ace students and bookworms, some were gamers, some were into the arts, and some were into student government or clubs. But in your memory, it seems as if you were set on becoming an intellectual, and you didn’t need to choose. Maybe this is because your parents were both teachers? Or was this a common thing when you were at university?
Xiang Biao: I think this was more or less natural for me, to just do what I wanted to do. After we got back to Beida from military training, the overall environment was such that we didn’t think much about getting a job, and at least in our first and second years, our parents didn’t bring it up with us too much either. Of course, my parents didn’t really understand my choice of major, because I did not go through the university examination but had guaranteed admission, which meant that I could choose my own major.
My first choice was political science, but my parents said absolutely not—anything but politics. Their recommendations were first, economics, and second, law. They thought I was a good speaker because I gave a lot of talks in high school. I said these two majors were boring, because everything was already decided and you just had to memorize the information, which of course was a very superficial understanding. At the time, everything interesting that I read had to do with politics, but when I talked about it with my classmates, they all said that politics is dirty and wondered if I could be like that. So I finally chose sociology. At the time I had surely heard Fei Xiaotong’s name, but I did not know his research. After I got to Beida, I didn’t pay that much attention to what other people were doing, because I knew what I wanted to do.
Wu Qi: What were your principle anxieties at the time?
Xiang Biao: I really didn’t like the courses in the sociology department. After I started my first year classes, I wrote my mother a letter, and told her that the courses had absolutely nothing to do with our actual life. There was one new course called “social work,” which was full of concepts from Hong Kong, and I found it really boring. My mother wrote back, and I still remember it, saying that when she was young, she had studied the Soviet Union, and now we studied the West, and it was a problem. Reading her letter gave me a theoretical framework with which to criticize the curriculum at the time.
I spent a weekend—two nights—under the light of a lamp (I have a good head for money. I brought 600 RMB with me when I first came to Beijing, did not take any more of my family’s money, but instead relied on writing essays or various other things to make money, so I was pretty well off, and bought my own lamp), and wrote a lengthy letter entitled “Suggestions Regarding the Curriculum,” which I then gave to Wang Sibin 王思斌 (b. 1949), the Department Chair. I told him that I was giving him the letter not to say that the department should reform things in the way I suggested, but that it might serve as a reference point to shine a light on certain problems. Professor Wang got all excited, and in a departmental meeting talked about the multi-page letter he had received from a student, and had them all read it. They thought it was great that there were students thinking like this. This encouraged me a lot. If they had criticized me at that point, I might have gotten frustrated later on. That was the first time I wrote out what was bothering me about what was going on. This spirit seems to be less prevalent now, which is really too bad.
Wu Qi: What were your principle complaints in the letter about how the professors were teaching?
Xiang Biao: All Beida professors are of course excellent, and when we started university, the first group of young professors whose education had not been affected by the Cultural Revolution had just finished their degrees, and some stayed at Beida and gave the first-year classes. Professors from the Educated Youth generation like Wang Hansheng 王汉生 (1948-2015) and Sun Liping 孙立平 (b. 1955) basically dealt with graduate students, and did not have much contact with us. The professors who taught the rest of the curriculum were the older professors who had been there forever, and had little understanding of society, and my feeling was that they were not interested in what was happening in society.
There was something else that surprised me. When I went to do fieldwork, I would usually first seek out professors from the local schools and talk with them about the local situation, because they had written articles about it. But when I started to talk with them I discovered that aside from reproducing what they read in the news, they did not really know what was happening around them. I thought this was very strange. You live here every day, so how can you not know? But they weren’t interested in this, and their articles on the subject were very empty, and contained no concrete observations.
I eventually learned that if you want to find professors in China who are familiar with the local situation, you’ll find them in the bigger, better, older schools in Beijing and Shanghai. Teachers in most local schools have little interest in what is going on around them, and just copy whatever they read in academic journals in the hopes of being part of that discourse system, but they do not pay attention to the world around them. Ten years ago, when I was already a professor, I went back to China to do fieldwork and was stunned to discover this phenomenon. They agree that it is a huge problem, but they are still not interested, so you can see how serious the division is. This means that academic language is completely meaningless.
At the time there were some Beida professors who were also like this, and I thought there teaching was lifeless, that they were just repeating what was in the textbook. I talked about it with an upperclassman, and he said we should find a weak spot, meaning that we should boycott the class of a lousy teacher, which is what we did. There was one professor who was getting on in years, who could barely give his class, and only two three students showed up for each lecture. He was not very confident with the students, and was probably not very pleased to see that they did not come, but there were nothing he could do about it. So I just stopped going altogether. We could do this thanks to Beida, because at the time they did not take attendance and there were no tests, and in a lot of classes you just wrote an essay at the end. After sophomore year, I was serious about learning academic English, because I thought it was practical, and I also went to economics class, but the rest of the time I spent on my Zhejiang Village research, as well as clubs and activities.
When we talk about our youth, people like us easily get nostalgic, but this is not altogether healthy. The importance of youth is not for us to “retrieve” our own experience, but instead for today’s young people to rake us over the coals from their current perspective, so that their “judgement” gets at something more real, on the basis of which we can truly reflect on ourselves. Movies like “Youth”[3] don’t mean a lot. Remembering our youth in such a way idealizes and romanticizes the richness of youth, making it into something extremely pure, and suggesting that we are no longer pure. But “purity” is not the only standard of judgement.
Wu Qi: The fact that you could boycott classes back then means that the entire atmosphere was quite relaxed.
Xiang Biao: The fact that things were relaxed has an important context. We started university in 1990, and spent the first year at a military academy in Shijiazhuang. When we got to Beida in 1991, the whole political atmosphere was very ambiguous and unclear. The only lecture course for the entering class was an English for Reading class given by the professor who had written the textbook for fourth-year English. The class was given in a big lecture hall, and later in an amphitheater. It was freezing cold, and everyone went in their military overcoats. At the time, no one dared say anything, and everyone studied to get ahead, but it was not a happy year.
In 1992, I remember the morning very distinctly, I came out of Dorm 28 at 7:00 a.m. to the sound of the loudspeakers addressing the entire campus, as the news broadcast from China National Radio accompanied us on the way to breakfast, and the woman announcer was reciting "The Vigor of Spring Greets the Eyes as the East Wind Comes 东方风来满眼春," which was the report from the Shenzhen Special Zone News concerning the speech Deng Xiaoping made on his southern tour that launched the next round of economic reforms. To that point, the central authorities had not allowed this to be reported, but once it was, things changed at the top, and they started promoting the story. I remember it very clearly, because the "The Vigor of Spring Greets the Eyes as the East Wind Comes" was new, and I had never heard it before. Over night, the atmosphere changed completely.
What is interesting is that there started to be a lot more courses given, and many were about marketing strategy. In 1991, there were already students who decided to plunge into the economy and make money, but this exploded in 1992, when it was decided that the market economy was normal. All sorts of cultural phenomena got rolling again as well, for example, another wave of “national studies 国学热.” At the time there were no focused debates, and everybody was talking about all sorts of things, like the Scandinavian model. I was very active, and as president of the sociology club, I asked people to organize lectures, and everybody was all excited. There was a lot of space, and the professors didn’t pay much attention to us.
The university also started to make money. The Beida Party Secretary started to build the Beida Resource Building, as well as the Resource Group for Beida as a whole. “Resource” is one of the first concepts I learned at Beida. What does it mean? It means that with the privatization of the market economy, the original things we need to survive are now transformed into potential resources that can appreciate in value. You have to take hold of resources, and possess a clear title to them. Beida used to be a school that organized its daily activities, but now they discovered that the school had resources, with which they run classes and build buildings. This was the beginning of a very important transformation, the “resourcification” of the university. I find the idea of “resource” very interesting, and I was not at all critical at the outset, and in fact all of us thought that it was a good thing. I found it enlightening in a theoretical sense as well, because I could also see how people deployed resources in their daily lives. Wenzhou people grow up doing this, so I was perhaps more awake to it.
Wu Qi: Your father kept a record of the essays you wrote in school. But there was no Internet at the time, so we can’t find most of them. What kind of things did you write when you were at university?
Xiang Biao: The first essay I wrote at Beida was called “The Third Mr.” When I first got to Beida, an upper classman in sociology was putting together a newspaper and invited the new students to write something. I always liked to strut my stuff, so I wrote something up. Everyone had always said that the May 4th spirit at Beida was basically about “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” but I said that there was a third figure, called “Mr. Morality,” or “Mr. New Morality.” I thought the moral question was very important, and should not be forgotten. In part, this was repeating what people said at the time, emphasizing how technical and institutional changes produced cultural changes. At the same time, I also wanted to stress that morality should not be like a hat that we put on our head, a mere protective cover over our lives. For today’s morality we need to hold the hat in our hands and take a good look at it. We can’t see the hat on our head, even if we can feel its existence, but we don’t know its shape or its color, and in the same way, if we don’t know where our morality comes from, and simply follow it unthinkingly, then we are just following along blindly.
It is not moral to ask other people to respect that kind of morality. The idea of “Mr. Morality” is to say that morality should be a matter of choice, based on individual freedom. I surely read about this somewhere; it might have been left over from my “culture craze” readings during high school. And I truly felt that morality should be the result of empirical observation and analysis, and not just sloppy dogmatism. Being anti-dogma, anti-system, anti-intellectual, anti-elite also impacts on the language you use to write, which we can talk about later.
Marx was the first to talk about the question of theft—actually it was Proudhon—asking why it was seen as immoral. First, private property is the precondition for theft being immoral, because in the absence of private of property the question would not exist. In Marx’s analysis, picking up or pulling off branches from trees in a forest was also seen as theft, because the land belongs to the manor, which means that the trees belong to the manor as well, as well as the leaves and branches that fall from the trees—it’s endless. So everyone felt that taking these was theft. There is a historical evolution concerning the conditions under which theft was labeled as immoral.
Another example is the relationship between family and corruption, which allows us to carry out an empirical analysis of morality. Why is it that everyone thinks we can be more forgiving of corruption if it is done for the sake of one’s children? At the same time, when we expose cases of official corruption, our focus is on the relationship between corruption and women, and pay scant attention to the nature of the official corruption, or how the system facilitated the corruption, or what concrete consequences the corruption produced. Morality is multi-dimensional, so why do we accord one dimension more weight than another?
When the President of Peking University knelt before his ageing mother, and the pictures of the event went viral,[4] the effect on young people was extremely bad, because he suddenly confronted you with an unnatural, unclear kind of morality, not only giving you no choice, but taking away your basic feelings about what is moral and what is not. I think that when I wrote that essay I was talking about the new morality proposed during the May 4th period, which would be the product of rational reflection and individual freedom. Morality where you have no choice is immoral, as is morality that is forced on you, because when I force my morality on you, it means that I am thoroughly denying your humanity at an implicit level, and that if you don’t accept my morality, then in my eyes you are not a person.
Researching Zhejiang Village
Wu Qi: In this interview we will not go into detail concerning your well-known research and arguments, for example your work on Zhejiang Village, undertaken while you were at Beida, or your doctoral dissertation on “Global Body Shopping,” as well as certain arguments and criticisms that can be found in the Sinophone world, even if all of this will serve as grist for the mill, the basis on which I hope to push the discussion forward. But your six years’ research on Zhejiang Village must have been a turning point, both in terms of your research work or your personal life. At the time did you have any inkling or awareness of this? Where did the original idea come from and what was your greatest motivation?
Xiang Biao: Of course I had no idea! I was only 20 at the time, and had no idea of “what all this might mean later on.” It may be that people only start to have this sense of history once they reach middle age, when they can say that what I am doing now is the conclusion to what I was doing before, and that it marks as well a new direction, etc., etc. The things you do when you are young are either because someone told you to, and everyone is doing the same thing, or it’s the opposite, and you decide to do your own thing, consciously follow your impulse. Everyone has impulses, so the key point is not whether you have them, but whether you follow them. Things that have truly changed history, whether we are talking about history writ large or your own personal history, are often the result of following your impulses. Plans based on historical calculations often wind up not having much of an impact. This is sort of a miraculous thing about life. It surprises you, it makes you feel like life and history have come alive, it gives opportunities for young people.
My chief motivation at the time was probably to be different from everybody else. Or it was also related to my dissatisfaction with my studies, my feeling that going to class was boring. But the emphasis on fieldwork in the sociology department—fieldwork was seen as sacred by both the professors and my classmates—was also a strong motivating factor. My capacity for observation that I had developed as a child probably factored in here as well. Because in fact, lots of students also wanted to do fieldwork, but if you go there and don’t see anything or can’t spark a conversation with people, then the whole thing gets awkward and you drop it.
Wu Qi: Did you have a lot of friends at the time? People with whom to discuss things?
Xiang Biao: No too many. I didn’t feel the need to share all that, but I do like to talk, so after my fieldwork I would organize lectures, which gave me a great sense of accomplishment.
Wu Qi: How was this kind of independent, individual research viewed in the context of Beida at the time? What did the people around you think about it? Did you discuss it with people? Did anyone criticize you?
Xiang Biao: The fact that I kept going on my Zhejiang Village project was also because Beida encouraged me. Everybody admired what I was doing, and I don’t remember any negative comments or sarcastic remarks. People recognized that it was hard. My professors encouraged me, and later on the Youth League committee gave me a prize. For a young person, this was extremely valuable encouragement, and the fact that I could keep going and expanding the project had to do with this climate. Later on I joined one of Wang Hansheng’s research projects, which came with funding support, and for an undergraduate to have research funds was reaffirming and very satisfying. All of this was very important. Because at the time I didn’t know where I was going with the project. I would go to Zhejiang Village, and they would be there making clothes, and I didn’t know what to ask, and wound up asking what seemed like the same questions every time, and they gave the same answers.
For the longest time I wrote nothing with any theory to it, and later on lots of younger classmates kept working on the topic even after I went to England, and had the same difficulties. This is a really hard academic topic for an undergraduate. The reason that I was able to keep going was that it became a form of social practice. I had funding, I had encouragement, I had a sense of purpose, in that I was participating in their community building, combining it with Beida’s Loving Hearts Society 北大爱心社[5]…When I wrote up my fieldwork notes, I had no theoretical framework, so each chapter addressed a particular question, and I published some of them in the Chinese Peasants 中国农民magazine, like in a small column. I don’t think a lot of people read them, but the editors thought they were pretty good.
I constantly berated myself for being so deficient in theory. Because at Beida I really had no theoretical training, nor had I read a great deal, since I was not a great reader. This may sound strange, but I felt this way at Beida, and I was even more shocked when I saw how on top of the literature the students in England were. This ability is extremely important, because most of our information and reflections rely on the written word, the accumulation of which is really vital. To tell the truth, I was way below the level of a doctoral student, to say nothing of the level of a professor, way below average. Most people think that in systematic academic training, getting a grasp on the literature is the starting point, the most basic skill, a threshold that must be crossed, but I actually circumvented all that. This is why I stayed at Oxford after I graduated, because if I had tried to go to another school, it might not have been easy to find a job.
My guess is that Oxford thinks that everyone has this skill, and just imagines that you do too, and there are still people who say that to me now, that I avoided those theories on purpose, in other words that I knew the theories and purposely did not use them, which puts me at a higher level. In fact, I knew nothing at all about the theories, which is why they don’t figure in my work. For these people, I am like a breath of fresh air. But if I went to a different university, I would have to check all those boxes, and would not make it past the first hurdle.
This has been a weak point of mine for a long time, and I am still struggling with it. I have to catch up, but I cannot let go of who I am and make myself into another kind of person. I can’t seem to decide one way or another, so I’m still trying to catch up. We can talk about it again in 20 years.
I think the fact that I read relatively little at Beida and stayed in my Zhejiang “bubble,” maybe had to do with education at the time. Because when I was in high school I really liked to read, and sought out fairly complicated things. If I had continued like that, then with a relatively good undergraduate education, I would have been in good shape, but that is not the environment I wound up in, and I was naturally really interested in how people did business, so that’s the choice I made. Reading ability has a lot to do with age, and you need to read with a certain intensity at a certain age to develop the ability. But at that age I did not focus on reading academic literature, so my brain did not get training for that function, and I am still that way, and my relation to the written word is a bit distant. The written word does not get me excited.
Wu Qi: This is another reason that you are at odds with the idea of intellectuals.
Xiang Biao: Exactly! On the one hand I feel a certain psychological distance when talking with intellectuals, because everyone has read things that I have not. At the same time, I also feel like some intellectuals live inside their words, and what they say follows a discursive logic from one point to another, and this can perhaps be a long way away from the real world. For me, discourse itself is not very interesting.
I’m always wondering what all those theories correspond to, which is why I am a very picky reader. But this might be my strong point as well, in that if there is nothing in the theory that you’re selling, I won’t be dazzled by the discourse. I always try to get to the bottom of things, to see what is at the core of something. This is why I really like old-style reportage literature in China, which is extremely direct, with no external theorizing, no metaphors or analogies. My lack of theory also created another big problem, which is that I can’t read things that cite a lot of classic texts. If I don’t know the classic, then I don’t know what it means when they cite it. And of course, citing the classics is an important way that intellectuals and scholars write.
Wu Qi: This is one of the pleasures of this kind of writing, to be cited by your peers.
Xiang Biao: It’s true that citations can appear obscure or subtle, and you can engage in a dialogue with other people by using them; there is kind of an epistemological universe there. But I’m outside of that, and can’t get in. I have a friend, Vani, in Singapore, who influenced me a great deal, an Indian. I told her that Joan Baez’s music moved me a lot. Baez sings a lot of folk songs, and I know basically nothing about music, but I like her. Vani laughed—she knows me really well—and said that she finds Joan Baez’s music rather weak. I imagine she meant that her rhythms and melodies are simple, but Vani said one thing that I found very interesting.
She said that the reason I like Joan Baez is that her songs have no references. What she is singing about it what she is singing about, and there are no hidden meanings that you have to figure out. I draw strength from that kind of directness. A couple of years ago, I had my students listen to her songs, especially “The House of the Rising Sun,” telling them to write their essays like that. The song is very direct: “My mother was a tailor, she sewed my new blue jeans; my father was a gambler…Mother, tell your children, not to do what I have done…Live their lives in sin and misery, in the house of the rising sun.” It’s really direct and moving.
So in my years at Beida, I really was quite different from other people. Everybody thinks Beida is about ideas, theories, and scholarship, but for me it was about freedom, the freedom to hang out in Zhejiang Village. I also like social activities, so I rounded up a lot of people and we wrote a lot of letters.
Wu Qi: What kind of letters did you write?
Xiang Biao: We wrote to Tong Dalin 童大林 (1918-2010) and Dong Fufeng 董辅礽 (1927-2004),[6] as well as to some people high up in the Wenzhou government who had been responsible for policy-making. We also went to visit them. After 1992, we wrote to members of what I called the “old elite,” who had gone abroad to study a couple of years earlier, the most famous of which were the economists Zhou Qiren 周其仁 (b. 1950), Wang Xiaoqiang 王小强 (b. 1952), and Du Ying 杜鹰 (b. 1952)…Later, Justin Yifu Lin 林毅夫 (b. 1952) came to China from Taiwan, and set up the Center for Research on the Chinese Economy, and I interacted with them some. There was also Chen Yueguang 陈越光, who used to be the associate editor of the “Toward the Future” translation series.
Wu Qi: You interacted with them as a student? This didn’t happen that much back then, right? Did you learn anything interesting?
Xiang Biao: You’re right. One reason all this happened was that we were introduced by my teacher, Wang Hansheng, and by Sun Liping. So my professors mattered a lot, but I was also very active, and wanted to meet these people. They taught me some important lessons. They did not talk theory, and only told stories and talked about their experiences and their insights. They were very direct and down to business. When they talked about things they went straight to the “point,” in other words, to the most important guiding force behind whatever they were talking about, a force which often had not been understood before. But they did not seem to have the patience to develop the “point,” to make it into a systematic argument. They would talk until they made their point, and then move on to another. They really came up with a lot of propositions that got people excited, but they didn’t test them.
My article on “The End of the ‘Educated Youth’ Era in Chinese Social Science” was based on this. Sun Liping is more academic than they are. He has insights that he works out into theories, but their pleasure was truly in those “points.” Hanging out with them and getting to know their experiences made me very envious, and I felt that they had really been able to talk about policy questions in the real world, and to throw themselves into things they really believed in. But overall, the 1980s did not leave me with many intellectual resources—spiritual resources were more important.
Wu Qi: We’ll talk about the 1980s later, but let’s go back to the directness that you were talking about, and your lack of theoretical ability. At the time, did Beida professors not test you on reading articles or citing the classics? Didn’t the sociology department test you on that?
Xiang Biao: There was no mechanism for that. Wang Hansheng knew about my problem. I remember she talked to me about it once, when I was moving into the M.A. program after finishing my undergraduate work. It was in the summer of 1995, and we were at her house. She said that I might feel some pressure as I moved into graduate school. I had a lot of self-confidence at the time, so I asked what kind of pressure. She said that when I started to work with Li Meng 李猛, Zhou Feizhou 周飞舟, and Li Kang 李康 (they were all a year ahead of me, and knew much more theory), I might feel pressure about theory. Her idea was for me to work harder.
Professor Liu Shiding 刘世定 also encouraged me a lot. He is an extremely kind person, and did not point out my flaws, or criticize me, but he clearly knew about them. One time we were eating together, and he clearly told me that I had great ideas, but would have a hard time developing them because they weren’t engaged with the literature.
It was really interesting to observe these people at Beida. I talked a lot with another young professor, Yu Zhangjiang 于长江, who said that one important thing Beida gives you is the ability to not be afraid. No matter where you go, you are not afraid. He may be right.
My fieldwork experience is what I accumulated from my early period, which wound up being a big problem, because my undergraduate career was pretty much just that fieldwork, which was something that very few people can do at that stage, but it meant that I did not do what most people do, which is things like reading. So things were sort of upside down. I received some recognition fairly early, not only at school but even internationally, but I ignored some basic elements of my education, which is a sort of stress for me even today. Sometimes I can get really stressed out, and it was a big psychological pressure in the last couple of years.
Last year (2018) in Shanghai, I talked about this with my doctoral advisor, Frank Pieke, who has been very encouraging. When I started talking about it, he understood right away, and said that my fear was that I would never do anything better than what I had already done. Chen Guangxing 陈光兴 (b. 1957), from Taiwan, was the moderator for a talk I gave in Singapore, probably in 2003. He was talking about Zhejiang Village, and said that I might never do anything better than that. Of course the point was to praise what I had done, but my thought was “I’m only 31!” But now what he said has sort of come true, and I feel more and more pressure, and one reason for this is I managed to produce a study that surprised even academic authorities without having mastered the basic skills of the craft, but how was I going to keep going like that…
Wu Qi: So when you were working on Zhejiang Village, had you thought about future plans? Had you already decided to be a scholar?
Xiang Biao: When I was working on Zhejiang Village I was really into it, and since I had financial support, there was no work pressure. Because it worked out really well, I got into graduate school without any effort. With a graduate degree from Beida, finding work should not be a problem. I didn’t really think about it until the end of my M.A., and my first thought was that work didn’t look very interesting, so maybe I would do my Ph.D. at Beida. I had been in Beijing a long time, but I would have to pass the Toefl to study abroad. At the time, Zhou Feizhou, who was ahead of me, had gone to Science and Technology University in Hong Kong, and Wang Hansheng thought we should get him to help me apply to the Ph.D. program there, because their scholarships were pretty good, so I applied together with another student from my dorm.
At the time, I had my own computer and printer, fax machine, and cell phone—I was better equipped than most people at Beida. I had put all this together by 1996 or 1997, and then I bought my own laptop. Most of this money came from publishing, and I also did some consulting for companies. One reason I wasn’t worried about work at the time was that my economic situation was fine.
The reason I bring this up is that I remember printing out all of those application forms on the printer next to my bed, in different colors of ink. After a week I got my answer from the university, and they rejected me right away because I didn’t have the required Toefl grade. What happened next was pure luck. I didn’t really know what to do next, maybe stay at Beida to do my doctorate. But right at this point, Frank Pieke, a Dutch scholar at Oxford who paid a lot of attention to what Chinese scholars published in China, happened onto my study of Zhejiang Village and thought it was great, so he sought me out, and encouraged me to go to Oxford, saying that he would arrange a scholarship.
When I ask him about it now, he acts like it is no big deal, but in fact scholarships at Oxford are extremely limited, but he got me a full scholarship, even though there was only one of those for the entire department, so he had to argue with the other professors and convince them. When I got to Oxford, I could not speak English at all, and could not understand my classes. When I had to defend my fieldwork project, one of the professors said “outrageous” two times. This may have been the first time in history that something like this was said at a place like Oxford.
I didn’t know what “outrageous” meant, but I knew that it was not good, and I went back and looked it up in the dictionary, and asked other students, and finally understood. I spent a sleepless night, walking across the campus, the same garden next to where I live now. By all this, I mean to thank Professor Pieke for having fought for that full scholarship for me, because I think there was probably a lot of pressure on him in that first year too, because if the scholarship had gone to another student, they surely would have done better than me. All of this was a huge shock to me at the time.
Wu Qi: In the preface to the Chinese translation of Global Body Shoppers you talked specifically about the difficulty of this transition. Your description was “my entire memory of that year of Oxford was of the clouds hanging over me.” How were you feeling? This must have been a big shock after the freedom, self-confidence, and strength you felt at Beida.
Xiang Biao: I couldn’t understand much in my classes, and when I talked with other students after class, I was also a bit disappointed, because Oxford students did not seem as interesting as Beida students. Thinking back on it now, the biggest problem was language, not liking things that I didn’t understand. I was in a state of shock and not really able to reflect rationally on my situation. It might have been a little bit like what Yoshimi Takeuchi[7] 竹内好 (1910-1977) said was the difference between China and Japan in response to the shock of the arrival of Western culture, in which China fell into a stage of profound self-doubt while Japan instead engineered a transformation. China completely fell apart, trying to figure out why she was different, not trying to figure out where the differences were but what they were, and believing that the difference was an established fact. Moreover, this fact was seen as the origin of reflection and transformation, and hence was revolutionary. Transformation was the route Japan chose.
That’s how I was at the time. I couldn’t thoroughly think through why I was different, I just felt I was different, and behind. I hadn’t read enough, so I needed to catch up, so I read an enormous amount of stuff that I completely did not understand, much of which were quite superficial and not the things I should have been reading, not the basics. At the time, a lot of anthropological research was already quite superficial, simple narratives about whatever they were working on without developing any great idea. Before I went to do fieldwork, nothing I read gave me any real inspiration, so I just lumped all those terms together and put them aside. After doing my fieldwork, I happened upon a collection of essays entitled Virtualism, the preface of which was the first English essay I really understood after arriving at Oxford, because my English was getting better.
That essay was not really a classic, but because I understood it, I began to see things clearly. This gets back to what we were talking about before, which is that it doesn’t matter whether theory is new or old, deep or superficial, and especially right or wrong. The point of theory is to communicate something. This is extremely important, even if what is communicated is superficial, because it wakes up something in your thinking, which makes you into a new subject, which means that the theory has been revolutionary. If is in fact very difficult to find language that resonates with the reader. Not only do you have to address the structure of the subject you are studying, but you also need to have a good grasp of the broader picture and where you are going with it, at which point you can write simply and in a way that resonates. After my ideas became clear, I wrote my dissertation fairly quickly. Of course there were all sorts of problems, but given my language level I was relatively satisfied with what I did.
Wu Qi: So the problems you had with your dissertation at Oxford were not that big a setback when compared with your writer’s block in recent years.
Xiang Biao: That’s right. Thinking back on it, it didn’t leave any psychological scars, because it was like a blitzkrieg. My sole goal there was to write the dissertation, within a certain amount of time, which focused all the pressure on one thing. In that kind of situation, I didn’t think about it all that much, but just concentrated completely on dealing with that huge pressure, and there was no time for this to become a problem in terms of mood or psychology. A lot of single mothers are like this. There are divorced, with two children, but they seem fine, and only later on feel the psychological pressure, because at the time they are focused only on survival, on getting through the year. Of course it’s hard, and you’re run ragged every day, but the problems only emerge later on when you have a little more time and you try to find the meaning of all of that. That’s when it’s harder to deal with.
Notes
[1] 项飙, 吴琦, 把自己作为方法--与项飙谈话, Dandu/Shanghai, Wenyi chubanshe, 2020.
[2] 项飙, 跨越边界的社区: 北京浙江村的生活史, Beijing, Sanlian, 2000. An abridged translation is Transcending Boundaries: Zhejiangcun: The Story of a Migrant Village in Beijing, trans. Jim Weldon, Leiden, Brill, 2005.
[3] Translator’s note: A 2017 film recounting the story of a group of young girls in a PLA art troupe in the 1970s and 1980s.
[4] Translator’s note: Zhou Qifeng 周其凤 (b. 1947), president of Beida at the time, knelt before his mother for at least ten minutes on the occasion of her 90th birthday, an event that was highly mediatized and provoked a certain controversy. See here and here for images and commentary.
[5] Translator’s note: Beida’s first voluntary service club, established in 1993.
[6] Translator’s note: Both of these are “old revolutionaries” who joined the CCP early on and went on to have important careers as “scholar-officials” in the PRC. Dong Fufeng at one point promoted the “Wenzhou model” of economic development.
[7]Translator’s note: Yoshimi Takeuchi was a Japanese sinologist, known for having translated the works of the Chinese writer Lu Xun, and for his support of Mao Zedong and the Chinese revolution.
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