Gentry, Neighbors and Ordinary People——Xiang Biao's Peach Blossom Spring

I once saw an article saying that there is a trend in simplified Chinese media now, "Ask Xiang Biao if you are undecided about anything", which may not be an exaggeration. A quick search on WeChat shows that in the past few years, Xiang Biao has talked about: involution, love, academic ecology, youth anxiety, meritocracy, and the recent Russo-Ukrainian war. Almost all public issues that can be discussed in simplified Chinese media have been covered by him. Xiang Biao has a prominent academic status, but he does not have the sense of superiority over the public that academic intellectuals often have. He himself quotes extensively in academic articles, but in interviews, he tends to use plain, descriptive language to unravel a problem and fully present its complexity. This is a treasure for those who have reflected on elitism and are tired of the current polarized public opinion ecology.

Many people have the impression that Xiang Biao is a person with a vague position, or in other words, on some less controversial issues, he will stand on the side of the majority/ordinary people, such as the criticism of involution; for those very controversial issues, he generally does not show a clear position, but wanders around the topic, showing his audience all aspects of his observation. The poet Yuanzi said in his book review of "Using Myself as a Method" that the book "almost has no conclusion" on many of the topics discussed. Xiang Biao himself also said, "My specialty is to enter very specifically, find an interface, and look at his contradictions. I try to avoid looking at things from a standpoint."

Yuanzi made a sharp criticism of this "no stance" attitude, which was fiercely refuted by many readers of Xiang Biao. In their view, this style of not drawing conclusions and not taking sides is exactly why they admire Xiang Biao. But I think Yuanzi and these readers have misunderstood Xiang Biao on this point. On those controversial issues, Xiang Biao is not without a stance. Rather, he likes to put his stance into the corners when describing the complexity of things, so for most of the audience, it just flashes by, which is basically the same as nothing.

Xiang Biao has some positions that he does not hide. One of them is the "populism" that people avoid. In "Using Myself as a Method", he directly admitted that he is a "petty-bourgeois populist". He feels close to populism because he is "not comfortable looking at all those who hold authority".

Borrowing this label he gave himself, I can expand on it a little: Xiang Biao's populism can be discussed from two levels, one is the methodological level, and the other is the normative level. Methodological populism has a bit of phenomenological method, suspending theory and observing and describing things directly and concretely. Xiang Biao said that his way of looking at problems is most similar to those people who make lighters in Wenzhou. He has a "spontaneous interest in directness" and is resistant to theory. On the one hand, this tendency is related to his experience studying at Peking University. He lamented that he read too little during his undergraduate studies and did not receive any theoretical training; on the other hand, it also represents his own method and style, which is what he often calls "gentry."

The essence of the gentry as a method is to "tell the things in his own small world clearly". "On the one hand, it can be said to be very detailed and empirical, and on the other hand, it pays attention to the overall structure." Because the gentry has been immersed in this small world for a long time and is very familiar with it, he can use the local language, or "the language of the actor to describe his own life" to tell the things in this small world in detail. This method is completely different from the deductive method that starts from a general principle and then relies on logical deduction to draw conclusions. Xiang Biao does not completely reject theory, but his imagination of theory is different from that of other scholars. He talked about an English paper he published, "Theory as a Picture", saying that theory is not to make judgments, but "give the world a picture, and at the same time reveal possible future pictures behind it."

Xiang Biao's methodological populism is closely linked to his normative populism, which is mainly manifested in two aspects. The first is the distrust of intellectuals, especially enlightenment intellectuals. This attitude is quite obvious and runs through several interviews in the book. At the beginning of the "Beijing Interview", Xiang Biao and Wu Qi talked about the format of the interview, and suddenly said, "One problem today is that intellectuals are not down-to-earth. They cannot talk about things from a very specific state of existence. What they say is relatively inorganic and ethereal." Later, he talked about his undergraduate experience at Peking University and admitted that he had some "psychological barriers" when talking to intellectuals. He felt that "some intellectuals live in discourse, talking about the logical deduction from one discourse to another, which may be far from what actually happened." He borrowed a word from Wang Hui, "posture", to describe contemporary Chinese intellectuals, "Many people are always posturing, not explaining things clearly, and just give you a judgment." Even though he spent more time dealing with intellectuals than with other social groups due to his work, he never had a "sense of belonging" to the intellectual group. This can also explain why he is so willing to accept media interviews, or why he prefers to convey his views to the public through interviews.

Behind this distrust of intellectuals is a high degree of recognition of "ordinary people". He has talked about his interactions with the research subjects of Zhejiang Village on many occasions, and even took Xu Zhiyuan to meet the villagers of Zhejiang Village he met at that time in "13 Invitations". He admitted that he was greatly influenced by Wang Hui, one of which was "to integrate with farmers and workers and take the mass line". In "Ordinary People's Theory of the State", this admiration for ordinary people is vividly reflected. The "ordinary people" here should be "ordinary Chinese" to be precise. Xiang Biao thinks that the previous "state theory" was proposed by intellectuals. He wants to propose a "ordinary people's state theory" based on the expectations of ordinary Chinese people for the country and their attitudes when talking about the country. According to Xiang Biao, the opposite of "ordinary people" is not "elite". Elite is also part of ordinary people. Gentry is both local elite and ordinary people. Xiang Biao said: "The key here is not the division between state and society, official and private, and elite and mass, but the division between real life and professional academic and policy texts." Therefore, the opposition to "ordinary people" is actually intellectuals, especially enlightenment intellectuals, who are high above and their theories are also out of touch with reality. This is why we need "ordinary people's state theory."

Xiang Biao's distrust of intellectuals and admiration for ordinary people is not a simple personal tendency, but has obvious normative implications. It is no exaggeration to say that Xiang Biao not only has a normative stance, but his stance also covers almost all aspects of normativity, including "how the country should be organized" and "how we should live." Xiang Biao said in the above article: "Ordinary people's state theory carries a strong tendency to make value judgments and guide actions. Ordinary people's state theory does not answer empirical questions such as what the country is and what it does, but is concerned with what the country should be like, what it should do, and how the masses should face the country. These are normative questions." In other words, ordinary people's concept of "state" has a considerable degree of binding and guiding force on the organizational model of the state, which is also one of the manifestations of people's sovereignty.

The special feature of this "ordinary people's theory of the state" is that it particularly emphasizes the totality and morality of the state. The so-called "totality" means that there is no distinction between the country, the nation, the violent ruling machine (state) and the administrative execution agency (government) in the geographical sense, and they are collectively referred to as the "state". The so-called "morality" means that "for ordinary people, 'state' is still the most recognized category, and 'society' means informality and untrustworthiness." Simply put, the "state" is the embodiment of absolute moral legitimacy.

In terms of ethical life, Xiang Biao's position is also related to "common people". When talking about gentry, Xiang Biao said that gentry would make ethical judgments, but his ethical judgments "must be consistent with the practical rationality of the common people". (If I understand correctly, the meaning may not be much different if "the practical rationality of the common people" is replaced with "human relations and worldly wisdom" here.) Among them, "harmony" is very important: "It's not just about whether you do it right or not, but whether what you do is harmonious with others."

This involves the "nearby" that Xiang Biao often talks about. The first time I saw Xiang Biao mention "nearby" was in "13 Invitations", when he lamented to Xu Zhiyuan the disappearance of "nearby". This "nearby" is roughly close to the "small world" he mentioned when he mentioned the gentry, that is, the layer between the individual and the vast external world. He has some "golden sentences" in it, such as: "The way out for personal meaning and dignity does not lie in the individual, but must lie in relationships. There is no natural personal dignity, there is nothing there. You cannot pursue personal dignity, you must construct the nearby, rethink this relationship, and construct a relationship." This sentence seems to be something that everyone can agree with in isolation, but when it is put in the context of "gentry", the meaning it conveys is more complete.

The so-called "relationship" here does not simply refer to the relationship between one individual and another individual, but refers to the relationship between an individual and other people and things in his small world. Xiang Biao's "small world" is a bit like what Qin Hui calls a "small community", that is, an autonomous unit composed of blood or other organic connections, but the relationship between the "small world" and the country is different from the relationship between the "small community" and the "big community" (see "Out of the Imperial System" for details). Qin Hui's small community can bear the function of resisting oppression from the big community, but Xiang Biao's small world and the country, or the system, are not so tense. Xiang Biao said that the gentry "started from their own small world and looked at the big system, with distance and independence, rather than simply resisting." The gentry represented other ordinary people in their small world and put forward their demands to the system, which is equivalent to the "people's representatives" in the current political system. Petition, but not protest.

It is not difficult to see that in Xiang Biao's work, the normative level and the methodological level are often entangled. The most representative sentence is: "The opinions belong to the people, and it is our job to sort out the opinions." Precisely because the opinions come from the people (rather than intellectuals), those opinions must be taken seriously. The role of the gentry is not only to sort out those opinions, but also to use them to provide a basis for ethical judgments and political practices.

There is a little methodological problem here: since he is a gentry, he only represents a small world. Why can Xiang Biao propose a national theory that represents all ordinary Chinese people? There are two possibilities. One is that Xiang Biao believes that the people in his small world can represent the people of China as a whole. If so, what is Xiang Biao's basis? After all, China is vast and the groups are extremely diverse. Another possibility is that Xiang Biao himself has long surpassed the "gentry", or in other words, has jumped out of the scope of activities of the gentry's self-restraint. His advice to "become a gentry" is for others, especially for those young people, not for himself. I personally think the latter is more likely. In fact, Xiang Biao himself has not only jumped out of Zhejiang Village, but also jumped out of China. He has worked in top academic institutions in Europe for a long time. The research object of "Global Body Hunting" is Indian IT workers. For such a scholar who embraces globalization, it is not convincing to call himself a "gentry".

Xiang Biao would also admit that "giving full attention to the subjective status of ordinary people does not mean accepting their political vernacular in its entirety" and "ordinary people's theories of the state certainly have many negative factors." But his attitude is very clear: the views of intellectuals are not as worthy of attention as the views of the people, unless the intellectuals transform themselves into "gentry", go deep into the masses, understand the masses, express the voice of the masses, and narrate the world they live in in their own language.

Xiang Biao himself admitted that he was a "leftist", but from the above perspective, he should be closer to the domestic leftists rather than the Western leftists. In fact, many Western leftists are in line with what Xiang Biao criticized, "to propose a universal principle, to propose a model in theory, knowledge, morality, and behavior, and to be a critic." On the contrary, Xiang Biao's criticism of this kind of intellectuals is very similar to the criticism of Enlightenment intellectuals by romanticists or conservatives in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, that is, the obsession with abstract universal principles and a critical stance towards the status quo. Few of the (well-known) domestic leftists choose a leftist stance based on their recognition of the abstract communist principles themselves. Most of them do so because of their recognition of the national system, or their complex about past times, or their simple emotions towards the people.

I am not sure if Xiang Biao is aware of the difference between the two leftists. When he said in the interview with Russia and Ukraine that after this incident, the leftists would definitely be suppressed, an awkward feeling arose. In it, he continued his distrust of intellectuals and "grand theories", spent a lot of time analyzing Dugin and his Eurasianism, and believed that this was the ideological root behind Putin's invasion of Ukraine. As a "political cognitivist", even I think such a judgment is too hasty. Moreover, when Wu Qi asked whether it was possible to make some "identification" of Eurasianism, Xiang Biao seemed quite embarrassed. He probably meant that such an ideology has its own internal logic, and you can only believe it or not, or accept it or not, and it is difficult to debate with it logically.

Xiang Biao was very surprised at the ordinary people in China who quarreled or even broke up because of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Perhaps in his opinion, such things only happen to intellectuals who are out of touch with reality. "Wenzhou people are good at social skills because they do business, and they make money by being harmonious. However, they broke off relations and other unpleasant situations." So he could only explain that this was not caused by the ideological differences between the two sides, but just an emotional conflict. "If it was just an ideological difference, it could be discussed strictly speaking, but the emotional difference is difficult to overcome. It is not related to ideological theory, but more to the meaning itself, and is an intuitive reflection of good and bad, happy or unhappy, comfortable or uncomfortable."

This is incredible. Xiang Biao said earlier that the logically self-consistent ideology can only be accepted or not, and cannot be debated. Then why did he say that the difference in ideology "can be discussed"? Also, why did he easily judge that these ordinary people he was familiar with would not break off relations because of ideological differences? More importantly, is it possible that these conflicts are based on more fundamental principles?

Xiang Biao is not completely a relativist. He also said that we should protect those principles that can be clearly stated, such as the "Five Principles of Bandung". If so, his middle school classmates in Wenzhou who broke off relations with Ukraine because of the Russian-Ukrainian war, if the supporters of Ukraine believe that "Russia's invasion of Ukraine" violates such clearly stated principles, why can't they feel angry and then break off relations with those who oppose such principles? If he truly believes that Russia's actions against Ukraine are an act of invasion and violate some of the most basic principles, when he sees that some ordinary people also have such views and feel angry, how can he think that the other party is just an emotion? He seems to think that his classmates are incited by the entire atmosphere of public opinion, and their quarrels cannot be based on ideology or more fundamental principles. This is quite different from his previous position of upholding the "autonomy" of ordinary people. In "The Theory of the State of Ordinary People", he even criticized other scholars for not paying enough attention to this point, "We cannot 'reject politics' because of the pursuit of ethnographic details, that is, to over-routine and trivialize the behavior and ideas of ordinary people and ignore their ability to participate in formal discussions and social movements."

I personally feel that although Xiang Biao seems to have always stood on the side of ordinary people against intellectuals, he actually wants to maintain the distinction between "ordinary people/intellectuals" more than some intellectuals. "Ordinary people" and "small world" give him a sense of belonging and are the utopia of his exhausted academic life. The quarrels among ordinary people brought about by the Russo-Ukrainian war broke this illusion.

This also explains why he still gave a solution similar to "nearby" for this situation:

"In this situation, we do need a method to keep a certain distance from various claims and gestures, and at the same time form a meaning picture that is more consistent with our own experience and more self-consistent. How to do this? I think we should return to the understanding of our own daily practice of material life. This is actually not so intuitive and simple. For example, what kind of work do you do, why do you sometimes feel happy and sometimes unhappy doing this job, how much is your salary, how is the entire work arranged, where do you live, who built the community, how was this land originally expropriated, what building materials were used to build it, how much did it cost, etc. If you pay more attention to these things, you will know where your anxiety as a person comes from, and where the social origins of joy, anger, sorrow and happiness are. With such a basic grasp, you don't need to write it into a paper, it doesn't have to be very systematic, but a little awareness is enough. In this way, when you encounter various different events or narratives, you may not have a direct answer, but you basically know what kind of position you are in this society. When you encounter other opinions, whether you agree or disagree, why you agree or disagree, and what is the reason behind it, you will basically be clearer."

Xiang Biao wanted to use "gentry" and "neighborhood" as an antidote to the current polarization of public opinion. When he criticized Dugin for indulging in absolute discourse, the object of his allusion was obvious. "The problem now is that kind of projection, which is very simple to project one's emotions onto an absolute discourse, which becomes an obsession and generates a great impulse, feeling that one must convince others, and that convincing others is saving others, because others must be deceived." Xiang Biao believes that the "grand narrative" proposed by intellectuals is some "absolute discourse" and takes it as the main target of criticism, but putting aside this reference, I think he is not wrong, but that kind of "absolute discourse" may not come from intellectuals, but from political power that claims to be absolutely correct. And those who project their emotions onto an absolute discourse are the "common people" who are trapped by the absolute discourse advocated by the official.

Xiang Biao placed his hopes on the "common people" and the "gentry" among the intellectuals who returned to the common people. He expected the gentry to be like the "people's representatives" and become a bridge of communication between the state and the common people. This is a beautiful wish, but its naivety is proportional to its beauty. In China, the "people's representatives" are part of the system. They fundamentally represent not the demands of the common people, but the demands that the government hopes the common people will raise. However, Xiang Biao pretended not to see this. He said that it is not that difficult to be an independent scholar in China, and there is no need to exaggerate too much. This is probably the academic version of "Why not eat meat?"

More importantly, the common people did not always listen to the gentry. As Xiang Biao himself said, they believed in the country more. The country had absolute power and absolute shaping power over the common people. If the common people were to be always kind and respectable, then the country must also be always kind. The question is, is this possible?

Xiang Biao only sees the warm side of the common people in his own little world. I wonder if he has seen those "ordinary people" who often bully public intellectuals, help-seekers and victims online? Xiang Biao hopes that there will be more gentry, and that those who pay attention to public affairs can first manage their own little world well, so that everyone's attention to public affairs will decrease, and it seems that the polarization of public opinion will also decrease or even disappear. If he really thinks so, then he does not understand the current public opinion ecology. Those who are tired of this polarization of public opinion and are willing to retreat from public affairs to their own little world are the intellectuals he despises, but precisely because the voices of these people have disappeared, the public opinion field is occupied by more "ordinary people". Contrary to Xiang Biao's assumption, the polarization of ideas caused by ordinary people occupying public opinion is much more serious than when public intellectuals are everywhere.

If the public opinion of ordinary Chinese people is anti-American, anti-public intellectuals, and they want to catch traitors, what should the gentry do? Xiang Biao feels that the public intellectuals are in a situation that is somewhat their own fault. He is a leftist, and anti-Americanism is also a routine operation. If the polarization of the people worries him in one way, he has already found the object to be blamed for it: modern society, globalization, network technology, capitalism... In this interview with Russia and Ukraine, he found another one, that is, the "absolutism" invented by intellectuals. But there is an obvious factor that he never mentions.

His "ordinary people's theory of the state" is a closed loop: ordinary people are absolutely good, so a theory of the state should be constructed based on the ideas of ordinary people, and ordinary people believe that the state is absolutely good, so the state is absolutely good in this theory; the state has an absolute shaping effect on ordinary people, so ordinary people shaped by an absolutely good state are also absolutely good. If some people do things that are not absolutely good, then either these people are not ordinary people (intellectuals), or they are just deceived by (intellectuals), and ordinary people are still absolutely good. I wonder if Xiang Biao himself has ever thought about whether his own theory is really that different from Dugin's "Eurasianism"?

There is one point that Xiang Biao and I agree on. We both believe that there are some basic principles that are universal and can be grasped not only by intellectuals but also by ordinary people. I think ordinary people may also act and have emotions based on such universal principles. Theoretically, Xiang Biao should also think so. For example, he mentioned in "Ordinary People's State Theory" that ordinary people's state theory has "abstract and generalized capabilities", and quoted Yu Jianrong's concept of "abstract anger", that is, "beyond one's own direct interests, forming judgments on the overall interest pattern of society, and making statements on general issues such as what role the state should play". But when this "abstract anger" involves international affairs, Xiang Biao seems to find it incredible. Therefore, paradoxically, on the one hand, he over-glorifies "ordinary people", and on the other hand, he seriously underestimates their "subjectivity". An "ordinary person" who is defined as absolutely good cannot have real subjectivity. Only when they can do good or evil, they have real subjectivity.

Contrary to Xiang Biao, I think the way to jump out of absolute discourse is not to "rediscover the neighborhood", but to try to transcend one's own small world and rediscover "public rationality". Confined to one's own small world, people who come into contact with people who hold similar views as oneself, once they believe in a certain absolute discourse, they will only continue to strengthen this belief. On the contrary, those who believe in some grand theory are more often aware that they are different from the people around them, because the people around them are unlikely to believe in these theories as much as they do.

The question now is, what forces are guiding the people towards an absolute discourse? And what forces are hindering the formation of public rationality and preventing challenges to this absolute discourse?

Xiang Biao and I have the same observations on ordinary people. I also think that what distinguishes ordinary people is intellectuals, not the elites in general. The vast majority of elites in China are just ordinary people who have done well, and their views and attitudes are not much different. I also agree with what he said that ordinary Chinese people have a general and moralized concept of the country, but because of this, I feel that the existence of intellectuals is necessary: ​​except for the thankless intellectuals, no one will dare to strongly question such a concept at the risk of being stigmatized and sent to Jiabiangou. Xiang Biao believes that Confucian intellectuals are gentry, but I think Mencius and Fan Zhongyan are the outstanding representatives of them.

Discovering the “nearby” is not without value. If we can find traces of what makes us who we are in the “nearby” and resonate with our inner beliefs (even if these beliefs are based on grand theories), if we can find those “small but certain happiness” in the near by to resist the corrosion of our souls by the increasingly oppressive environment, if we can find those neighbors affected by the epidemic in the near by and provide them with warmth and help, then discovering the near by is indeed of great significance, but this significance does not mean retreating from the wider world, does not mean compromising with the big system, does not mean giving up the right to make universal judgments, and does not mean becoming a “squire” who can only be recruited by the system.

When Xiang Biao explained why he was a petty-bourgeois populist, he said that he felt that he was too weak to be a revolutionary. So we can understand why he felt that he was often driven by a general rebellious spirit, but we rarely saw him express any "rebellion" against that behemoth, only some advice like "don't pursue the center". His rebellion was almost always directed at China's fragile market system and those intellectuals who were out of power. What is the word called?

Annotated version pdf link:https://pan.baidu.com/s/1G-7VmUBdSWjb4ac0b-__sw

Extraction code: 46pP