Chen Zhiwu on Risk Avoidance and Civilization

Chen Zhiwu, “Civilization, Crisis, and How We Act in ‘Abnormal’ Situations”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Chen Zhiwu (b. 1962) grew up in the Hunan countryside and went on to earn a Ph.D. in Finance from Yale University 1990, after which he taught at several American universities – including Yale – before returning to Hong Kong University in 2016.  Even as he became a major academic figure in his field in the United States, he nonetheless found the time and energy to contribute in concrete ways to the modernization of China’s economy and financial institutions, writing any number of popular volumes on how the modern economy worked and attracting vast numbers of followers on popular blogs (see here for more details).  Just as Wang Shaoguang and Hu An’gang educated China in the concept of “state capacity” in the 1990s, Chen Zhiwu taught China how a sophisticated economy worked.
 
More recently, Chen has turned his attention to economic history and archaeology, and in 2022 published a 900-page tome intitled The Logic of Civilization:  How Humans Have Innovated to Deal with Risk (in Chinese), a volume that is meant to complement or compete with classics such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997).  The lively interview translated here gives a flavor of Chen’s work and is worthy of a careful read.
 
Translation
 
Crisis Response and Confucian Philosophy
 
Southern People Weekly:  In the past few decades, many scholars around the world have tried to identify the causes and effects of the development of human civilization, people such as Jared Diamond, who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel.
 
In your The Logic of Civilization, you make a very interesting point: that increased capacity for material production is not the only driving force behind mankind’s continual innovation in terms of institutions and lifestyles, and more important are things like marriage, family, lineage, superstition, religion, commerce, and finance, and even the rituals and ethics of Chinese Confucianism, all of which were invented as responses to risk. How did you come up with the idea of "risk aversion" as a measure to understand the history of the development of civilization?
 
Chen Zhiwu: These reflections are directly related to my background in finance, because in finance, we always emphasize that in thinking about investments you should not merely consider the future rate of return and the yield.  Of course, yield is important, but it is not the only thing that matters, because you have to take into account the level of risk and how to match return and risk, which are two dimensions that people trained in finance are necessarily familiar with. Because of this, when I read existing studies on the history of human development, no matter whether it is in China or other countries  – and especially the literature on comparative studies between different religions and civilizations – one important contrast stands out:  while in finance, we place a great emphasis on the importance of risk management and response to risk, historians and those working in social science basically ignore the importance of the innovations mankind came up with to better meet such challenges.  But to my mind, at least before the industrial revolution, mankind’s major concern over the course of tens of thousands of years was how to increase “life security.” 
 
This of course is related to the question of risk.  One part of this is how we avoid dying because of droughts, floods, or epidemics, in other words, responses to risks in nature.  At the same time, mankind has also invented any number of things with the idea of reducing man-made risks, for example, how to reduce war and violence and other man-made disasters.  Risk has always been a more challenging threat to human existence than inefficiencies in material production.
 
Once people are suddenly lifted out of their normal, routine lives and thrown into an abnormal state, it is common for people to lose their grip on reason, to want to go crazy, or to resort to violence or act in ways that are illegal. This is because the immediate priority at that moment is to stay alive.   This is why the primary concern of human societies throughout history has been to avoid the occurrence of such "abnormal" situations and to keep our daily lives on track as much as possible.   As Confucius put it in The Analects, “worry not about poverty, but about instability.”[2]  The amount of material output is of course very important, but that is not the most important thing. More important is increasing the sense of life security:  when natural or man-made disasters occur, do we have the risk management tools or means available to keep life relatively stable and avoid going off track. 
 
Our ancestors also had many famous sayings. For example, in the Guanzi we find the statement that, "There is an annual surplus, but there are monthly insufficiencies," meaning that year in, year out, you produce more than you can consume, because there is a surplus, but when the autumn crop does not last until the spring crop comes in, what are you going to do?  This is the fundamental challenge, which is why Mencius said that people are born good – but even if that is true, once they grow up and face the various threats life throws at them, such challenges may mean that they are no longer good, and indeed may become evil people who engage in violence and hurt others.   This is because life experiences often bring unexpected risks that fling us into abnormal states, and to stay alive, we may resort to illegal or even violent behavior as the way to move forward.
 
This is the perspective that that leads me to conclude that how society solves the survival challenges posed by unexpected events and risks has been the main force driving innovation in all societies.  Such innovations are the means by which people increase their capacity to respond to risk as best they can. This is why I have focused on the concept of "risk response," which is actually a very important indicator that can help us understand the path taken by human civilization.
 
Southern People Weekly: How do you understand what you call the "risk-responsiveness" of a civilization? Is there a set of criteria to measure it?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  The risk-responsiveness I emphasize in my book The Logic of Civilization basically concerns the ability of human beings to domesticate, organize, and construct their own world, that is, how to arrange the relationship between people and the organizational structure of society. Whether or not these things are well constructed will in turn determine how well equipped each individual in society is able to cope with natural and man-made disasters and the impact of risks.
 
Of course, many human innovations can enhance both material production capacity and the ability to share resources and risks. Taking the invention of the state as an example, precisely when “the earliest China” began to emerge has come to be a hot research topic in Chinese archaeology. If the state has well designed institutions, this will not only maximize the potential of each member of the society to increase their material production capacity through the application of their intelligence and talents, but will also provide public services, such as national defense, to protect everyone from the threat of war, and by maintaining public order, will allow people to avoid the harm of violence.  In addition, the welfare, monetary, and fiscal policies of the modern state, including the protection of private property rights, are some of the most important innovations that mankind has achieved in order to better meet the challenges posed by risk.
 
Of course, there are also certain civilizational innovations whose sole contribution has been to improve mankind’s capacity to cope with risks, such as Confucianism in China.
 
Southern People Weekly: How can we understand Confucianism as something that helped ancient Chinese people effectively deal with risk?
 
Chen Zhiwu: Confucianism is a classic example of this kind of thing. People generally think Confucianism was created by Confucius (551-479 BCE), but in fact he inherited the ritual system established by the Duke of Zhou (r. 1042-1035 BCE) during the Western Zhou period (1047-772 BCE); this system fixed the responsibilities and obligations between people connected by blood ties.  Building on this foundation, Confucius more systematically added other ideas, and especially prioritized maintaining stability and guaranteeing life security.  This was the primary concern of Confucian philosophers, beginning with Confucius and Mencius (372-289 BCE), and later extending to generations of Confucian philosophers during the Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing periods.
 
Confucius said, "worry not about poverty but about insecurity," meaning that people should not spend all of their time wracking their brains about how to improve their capacity for material production through science and technology, because as long as basic material needs are secured and there is enough to eat then that will do.   At the time, he felt that everyone should focus more on solving problems of life security, including material security, spiritual security, physical security, and the prevention of violence. Therefore, Confucian intellectuals focused their energies on solving the problems of how to share resources and risk, how to cooperate over time, and argued that this was achievable through a hierarchical order that stressed the norms of children’s obligations to their parents, grandparents, and other elders – filial piety, in other words – as well as the “three obediences and four virtues 三从四德”[3] imposed on women.  In other words, they spelled out in detail the obligations and responsibilities of every man and woman throughout society, so that there was no way to escape this hierarchy for the entirety of their lives.   Therefore, it was not possible to pursue one’s individual freedom, because should they do so, then who would fulfill the responsibilities and obligations assigned to families and societies by Confucianism? 
 
So Confucianism ultimately sacrificed forces such as science and technology and the capacity to increase material production in favor of a system where each small group in society, be it an individual or a family or a lineage group, achieved a greater sense of security.  They no longer had to be anxious about the future, or about what they would do when they got old and sick, because as long as they had children then they had no more worries, since the children owed their elders filial respect.  As long as these Confucian rules were followed, there was no need to worry about the challenges of material or spiritual life, or about getting old and sick, and the same rules guaranteed social stability and security.
 
In fact, much of the research I have done in recent years has further shown that civilizations like Confucianism, while not helpful in improving society’s capacity for material production capacity, nonetheless made outstanding contributions in helping the Chinese to improve their ability to deal with risk.
 
The Utilitarian Woman:  Women Who Devote Themselves to Supporting Their Little Brothers, and the Fear of Getting Married and of Having Children
 
Southern People Weekly:  You just mentioned the Confucian ethical and ritual system that endured for some two to three thousand years, which provided for internal risk sharing, intergenerational cooperation, and credit guarantees for small collectives based on blood or kinship, thus enhancing the ability of the entire Chinese agrarian civilization to cope with the impact of risk. However, it came at a price, one being the sacrifice of individual freedom and happiness, and another being the instrumentalization of kinship ties.
 
This made me think of some popular TV dramas in China in recent years, such as "All is well 都挺好" and "Ode to Joy 欢乐颂,", as well as some news stories that have been hotly debated, which all involve the phenomenon of what we call “women who support their younger brothers 扶弟魔 (lit. “little-brother-supporting-demon”)[4] - these stories of family tragedies where the parents prefer their sons to their daughters throughout their lives, constantly squeezing their adult daughter financially, asking her to help her brother to buy a house, to help him get married, and even pay off his debts.  I have been surprised to see that in today's China, this topic can still resonate with so many people, which makes me think that traditional Confucian concepts still have a huge impact on contemporary Chinese people.
 
Chen Zhiwu: We should never underestimate the influence of culture, because the way it works in practice is by influencing the way you act, think and make decisions at the subconscious level.  This is the beauty of culture. Some of my recent studies have also led me to conclude that the levels and patterns of development in different places and regions in China today can actually be traced back at least 4,000 years. This is so because the early development of each place is different, which has affected the development of regional cultures.
 
For example, before people on the mainland were allowed to have two or even three children, most families with many children were from rural areas or small towns, not from the big cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, where people have urban residence permits. The movies and TV shows you mentioned have more to do with the effects of traditional culture on people, because these regional differences exist. 
 
Another important reason is that since the Foreign Affairs movement in the 19th century, and especially over the past 40 years of reform and opening, Chinese society has undergone radical changes, the speed and extent of which has led to great differences in values between generations, and there can be a huge gap even between two successive generations.   Personally, I think things will improve after maybe three or four more generations.
 
In traditional Chinese society, daughters were always seen as someone who would eventually be married off, at which point she would become part someone else's family. Raising a daughter until she is 18 or 19 years old is a waste of resources for her parents' family. Therefore, before she gets married, she has to make as many sacrifices as possible to help her parents raise her younger brother or even her older brother, who will remain in the family and continue the family line.
 
In today's China, people should ask themselves:   why should I think that only sons count as part of the family, and not daughters? Why does it have to be a son? If we can think about things objectively, then this kind of thinking should go away. Also, many Chinese people feel that they can trust only those who are related to them by blood, but this is not necessarily true.  If you have never met your relative or have seen him very little, you may not really know him, let alone be able to trust him.

Southern People Weekly: In China today, especially in the cities, a new social trend has emerged, where on the one hand, marriage has become a matter of personal choice, having escaped from constraints of the patriarchal clan system and the family ethics of the past, but as a result, marriage is much less stable. Divorce rates in the big cities are sky high, and lots of young people are afraid to get married and have children, and the desire to have children is declining.  Many women with good educations and jobs feel like the cost – to them - of getting married is extremely high, and if they wind up getting divorced, the price they have to pay in terms of personal property, career development, and the wear and tear on their bodies and minds are excessive.   What do you think about these views, which are very common among Chinese young people in the cities.?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  I think these are good things. 
 
Southern People Weekly:  They are good things?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  That’s right.  I know that when I say such things, the first reaction of many Chinese would be to yell at me.  But if we think about it, beginning with the Foreign Affairs movement, and especially since the May Fourth period, generation after generation of Chinese intellectuals have been calling for liberation and freedom on behalf of Chinese individuals.  But looking back on that now, shouting those slogans was easy, but for it to become a reality, you first have a method or a tool that will solve challenges individuals face in terms of their physical and material needs.
 
After more than 40 years of reform and opening, incomes are higher, and markets, including financial markets, are much more developed, especially in terms of insurance, so that people can now have private property in the form of houses and cars.  Such private property is now generally protected, and insurance companies, banks, and financial companies have become much more reliable.  As incomes have risen, and commercial markets and financial markets have developed, these institutions replace our former reliance on marriage, on raising kids to take care of when we are old, and on families and clans to protect against illness and old age—all of the measures formerly employed to deal with risk.
 
The reason why Chinese people had stable marriages and were not able to divorce was because individuals, and especially women, had no choice. Because marriage in the past was not about finding someone you liked or loved, after which you would decide yourself who to marry and whether you would have children.  It wasn’t that at all.  Your marriage and your family were not about just you, because your parents, grandparents and your other relatives provided so much help and financial support when you were growing up, meaning that who you marry and whether you have children will affect the interests of all of those people.  So free love was not on the menu, especially the idea that you would marry who you wanted to and completely ignore your family’s interests.  This was impossible.

For the same reason, your family will have gone to considerable lengths to find you a marriage partner with earning power and other strengths and background factors, and the idea that after a few years you could say that you had no feelings for that person, and didn’t love him, and that you wanted a divorce was a complete non-starter.  All of those relatives and family members who married you to someone with a good background, with money and with power – or who welcomed in a spouse with the same virtues – those people were planning on getting a certain return from this marriage, so if you turned around and told them you wanted a divorce, they would certainly be furious, and their first reaction would be:  what happens to everything I invested in you?
 
The thing you just talked about, the fact that young people today are afraid of getting married and having kids, or that there are a lot of people who don’t want to get married at all, or get married and then get divorced – the reason I say that these are good things is that it shows that in the Chinese society and economy, all kinds of markets, including financial markets, are by now quite developed.  So those involved no longer need to first think of their marriages, or their relatives’ marriages, as a kind of life hedge.  In the past, whenever anyone wanted to get a divorce, all of their family members would jump up to put a stop to it, because all of them had personal interests at stake.  But now, all of these interest issues and efforts to avoid risk can be resolved via financial products and commercial produces, such as houses, provided by the market.
 
This is why I say that, after 40 plus years, Chinese society has finally liberated marriage, and has especially liberated women from being instrumentalized in various ways.  Chinese people are finally free to make their own choices and can choose their marriage partner based on their own preferences and decide whether they want to have children. In the case where they find no one they like, then they don’t have to get married at all, because the economic, psychological, and lifestyle guarantees they need can be met by the market or by other things.
 
Southern People Weekly: I remember a public lecture you gave in 2015, called "The Price of Wives and Concubines during the Qing Period," which caused a lot of controversy at the time.  It was about women being sold by their husbands and heads of families so as to buy food in famine years, which was quite common in traditional Chinese society. So from being objectified at the time as "risk-avoidance capital," to today’s situation where women can control their own destiny and decide on their own whether or not to marry and have children – or even to be a DINK or to remain single – because there are various ways for her to arrange her future life, this truly is a great leap forward.  Of course, the older generation may not have kept up with young people in terms of ideas and mentalities and may need some time to adapt. 
 
Chen Zhiwu:  That’s right, it’s a question of generational values, a manifestation of the generation gap.
 
Southern People Weekly: Today when young people decide not to get married or to divorce, and when they decide whether to have children or how many children to have, parents and relatives still intervene and apply pressure.
 
Chen Zhiwu:  That’s too bad.  This is why Chinese parents, and especially today’s Chinese young people, should start to have their own lives, they own careers, their own life pursuits.  If you do things this way, then when you’re older you won’t waste your energy exhausting your kids. 
 
My wife and I don't spend all day thinking about our daughters and making sure they live according to our wishes instead of theirs. To be honest, we’re lucky if we can take care of ourselves, in the sense that I’m still as excited about doing research are writing books and papers as I always was, even though I’m almost 60. Maybe from a traditional Chinese perspective, I don’t focus enough on my children.   But from my view, I have my own life and my own interests, and they have theirs, so I don't see the point in constantly thinking about how to interfere in their lives, especially since I don’t have the time and the energy anyway. 
 
The Maritime Silk Road, Globalization, and Winners and Losers
 
Southern People Weekly: From the late Qing period forward, Chinese intellectuals have been constantly caught up in one big question: Why did China, once one of the world's most glorious civilizations, begin to decline in recent centuries? In your examination of the rise and fall of the hegemonic control of the "Maritime Silk Road" over the past 2,000 years, you link the competitiveness of various civilizations with religion, commercial finance, and risk-sharing, from a financial perspective explain why Chinese civilization did not develop a strong maritime trade, but instead went into self-imposed isolation and decline.
 
We now find ourselves caught up in mankind’s second round of globalization. Fortunately, over the course of 40 plus years of reform and opening, the Chinese people have seized this opportunity, and have become the biggest beneficiaries of and contributors to this round of globalization. But globalization has met with some headwinds over the past three years. In this larger context, if we want to maintain the momentum in this round of competition, what are the internal problems China should pay special attention to?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  That is a great question.  Confucianism always taught that people should stay close to home and not move away, as when Confucius said in The Analects “While your parents are alive, you should not go too far afield in your travels,”[5] meaning that you should do your utmost to take care of your parents and grandparents and should not move away at the drop of a hat.  There are many similar passages in the Three Character Classic that children had to memorize and recite.  Such values led Confucian society to the idea that people should not be interested in moving far away, such as to the Middle East, or Africa, or West Asia, Europe, or the Americas.  Even if you went you should not set down roots there, no matter how much gold there was, or whatever might have attracted you. 
 
But in monotheistic systems, as in the case of Arabic and Persian merchants who believed in Islam, or the later Catholics from Portugal and Spain, or the even later Protestants from Holland and England, these groups who, in turn, ruled the seas did not share these ideas about staying home.  Recently, people in Quanzhou have unearthed a number of graves of “foreign merchants” from the Song and Yuan periods, and engraved on the tombstone is a quotation from Mohammed – “those who died abroad died as heroes” – as well as the sentence “although we are in China, we continue to seek the truth.”  And in the New Testament, Jesus called on his followers to spread the gospel throughout the world, thus encouraging to view the entire world as their home.  
 
Under the influence of Confucian culture, however, Chinese dynasties did not encourage overseas trade.  This is especially true of the Ming period, when the emperor Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398) banned going abroad, an extreme measure.  The result of this was that Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese elite had no historical experience in shaping the world order, nor had they given such questions much consideration.  In a certain sense, there were a blank slate.  I know that Chinese people, and especially lots of Confucian classics talk about the idea of “tianxia 天下,” [literally, "all under heaven"] but in reality, when Chinese people talked about tianxia they were talking about China and its satellite regions, and not “globalization” in the way we use the word today, and tianxia did not include places like Europe, Africa, the Americas, or the Middle East. 
 
So China today faces a real challenge that many people, including intellectuals in academia, have not yet grasped - how to create a new concept of international order that is universally accepted by all countries and societies throughout the world, and that the Chinese themselves can consistently adopt internally and externally. I don't think that many people are truly aware of this.
 
Southern People Weekly: You mentioned earlier that the main purpose of the invention of the state in the early period of human history was to guard against existential risks and to deal with natural disasters and the resulting violent conflicts and wars. In Chinese history, however, disaster relief in times of famine has always been a major responsibility of Chinese dynasties, and there are also legends like Yu the Great who stopped the floods...Today, it is common for modern countries to develop tools such as welfare policies, central banking, and monetary and fiscal policies. In the last three years of the global pandemic, we have seen various disaster relief policies being introduced in the United States and Europe, and the functions and powers of government have continued to expand. Is this a global trend?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  Yes, it is.  This is a universal phenomenon throughout the world, including the United States, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, etc., the powers of these governments are all expanding, especially since the outbreak of the pandemic.  In fact, the governmental powers and central banking powers of these developed countries have all greatly increased since the 2008 financial crisis.  The spread of coronavirus throughout the world in early 2020 accelerated these trends.  In fact, this is a general trend ever since the Industrial Revolution.
 
Southern People Weekly:  What might be the downside of this?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  The expansion of government powers throughout the world has increased the incidence of what are called “man-made risks,” which are the major risks facing mankind at the present moment.  Prior to the industrial revolution, the major risks came from nature.  Of course, human disasters also represented threats and challenges to human survival, but relatively speaking, risks from nature were greater than man-made risks.  After World War II, however, and especially over the course of recent decades, the powers of all governments have continued to expand, and the result is that the danger of man-made disasters is greater than at any point in the history of the world.
 
For example, inflation and financial bubbles are a problem that all countries are talking about today. How did these risks, especially inflationary risks, come about? In fact, since 2008, and especially since the pandemic in 2020, central banks in many countries have been printing money and increasing liquidity on a large scale, and there has been a massive fiscal stimulus, and all of these measures have consequences. One of the consequences is a financial asset bubble, which widens the wealth gap across society, and leads to constant inflation, which erodes the economy as well as people’s purchasing power, which simply adds to the risks. In short, "man-made risk" is now increasingly becoming the central challenge facing humanity.
 
Daily Crises, Anxiety, and Us
 
Southern People Weekly: When the epidemic broke out in Shanghai a little while ago, I lived through the lockdown, and was confined for some 40 days, unable to leave my house.  I lived through the online search for food, the high-price food cooperatives, I waited for the government to deliver goods to us and joined in community efforts at organization and self-help. I can say that this is an experience I have never had in my life.
 
Once the lockdown was over, I discovered that my friends, my family members and I all had varying degrees of PTSD and were extremely anxious about the uncertainty of life.  For example, I now feel anxious whenever I see that the is refrigerator empty, while in the past I never had the habit of stocking up. Many of my friends have bought bigger refrigerators or spare freezers, while others have made some new decisions and plans about the future.
 
Chen Zhiwu:  For experiences like these, you have to live through them yourself before you can understand the question of risk.  In fact, living in a city like Shanghai with all of its buildings and skyscrapers, and with lots of money floating around, you should not have had such a sense of security.  You should have been anxious all along, but most people weren’t before the lockdown.  This is because we don’t really spend that much time reading about history or thinking about human nature or the development of civilization.  To tell you the truth, I had a premonition many years ago that something huge like this was bound to happen, but it is only after the fact that most people will think more about how to respond to risk or what their reaction should be.  If The Logic of Civilization had come out a few years earlier, not all that many people would have been interested in it, because its vision is based on the challenges posed by risk, and its goal is to figure out the logic behind the advance of civilization.
 
For people living in ancient times, there was absolutely no need to remind them what risk means, because they were constantly running into all kinds of abnormal situations.  In this sense, the Chinese people have been really fortunate over the past 40 plus years, but their good fortune also led them to completely forget about risk, and the mental effort necessary to prepare for risk has been forgotten.
 
For example, not many of us are used to thinking about the question of why, in primitive societies, people from different societies had the propensity to move.  The answer is very simple:  if one place experienced a drought or a natural disaster, people would choose to leave and move to a place without the same risk.  So primitive peoples did not build houses, nor did they make pots and pans, because if you are moving all the time, how do you move all those pots and pans?
 
Today, we are fortunate, especially in Shanghai, that there are a variety of financial investment products available on the domestic and international markets from which to choose. If you are willing and able to do so, then on top of the amounts you are investing, you should do your best to invest in different regions and industries, including financial investments, and spread your risk by diversifying your portfolio.  These are all things that people should consider at the moment.
 
In addition, I've been saying a lot lately that people, especially those living in cities, should spend slightly more time than before on maintaining a network of relationships with relatives and acquaintances. No one listened to advice like this before the pandemic. But now, no one should put all their hopes on financial products, because what will you do if you go bankrupt and lose your capital?  We use our networks as the final hedge against risk.   Before the next crisis, you should spend more time with friends and relatives, and have dinner and drinks with those relatives so as to keep in touch.  This way people do not become strangers, and once that happens, it is hard to build trust.
 
Southern People Weekly:  This may sound like I'm joking, but that makes it sound like we should go back to what we used to do and rely on family and kin to share the risk across generations.
 
Chen Zhiwu:  We should recognize that the way people in traditional societies dealt with risk – superstitions, religion, kinship – all had their own logic.  To put it simply, when financial and commercial markets were not developed, people had to find other solutions, including marriage, family, clan groups, religion, superstition, or the primitive state, and use these inventions or innovations as responses to risk where markets were wanting.
 
Southern People Weekly:  This a year that has put globalization to the test.  First was the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine War and the energy crisis, the food crisis, and the refugee crisis this sparked throughout the world.  Then there was the supply chain crisis created by the pandemic that we just talked about, as well as the economic, employment, and livelihood issues that many governments see as just over the horizon.
 
For a long time, we have had a progressive outlook, leading us to be full of confidence about tomorrow, thinking that all of mankind was moving forward.  But now, mankind seems to be kind of stuck in a hopeless position.  In addition, as individuals, our lives are limited.  During the lockdown in Shanghai, I often thought:  If I were an old person who didn’t know how to order food on my smart phone, or if I were pregnant, or if I came down with a sudden illness, what would I do?  Do you really think that we have done as well as we think we have when it comes to solving existential crises or dealing with interpersonal violence?
 
Chen Zhiwu:  Of course, I should first emphasize that nothing in the world is, nor should be, a straight line going up, for the simple reason that the longer the line keeps going up, the more irrational people become, which means that the chance of shooting yourself in the foot increases as well, so at a certain point, from a psychological perspective, you need a setback or two so that you can prepare for the line to start going up again.
 
The same is true in terms of violence, war, and other things. I don't think these short-term detours mean that the overall trend has changed, because it seems to me that the first thing humans want to do is to live, and the second thing they want is to live better. I don't think humanity has ever failed in these two pursuits. That is why I said earlier that risk-response drives the development of civilization; in addition, the reason why risk-response is more important than a lack of material production capacity is because if we do not respond properly to risks, we will eventually wind up suffering. Suffering wakes us up to the fact that we had been ignoring the risk factor and had not taken preventive measures. 

Having reflected, mankind often will undertake certain basic reforms and do their utmost to identify the natural, man-made, and institutional factors that led to the natural or man-made disaster and carry out certain adjustments.  This is the sense of the Chinese expression “fall into the moat and you’ll be wiser next time 吃一堑长一智.”  Mankind has had this experience many times over the course of history.
 
Southern People Weekly:  How do you view Chinese young people?  I feel like this group is highly divided:  one the one hand they show contempt for capital and business, especially the big Internet companies, but on the other, they talk a lot about sadness and “lying flat.”
 
Chen Zhiwu: One thing is that they do not have enough experience and have not lived the entire cycle of ups and downs, crises and recoveries.  Their individual experiences are very limited, so it is difficult to expect them to reach a deep understanding.
 
The second thing has a lot to do with the Chinese educational system, which teaches them to think in terms of other-worldly utopias.  They should be drawing experience and lessons from history, but they aren’t given the opportunity to really study and draw the appropriate lessons from that study.  To put it bluntly, these young people have serious knowledge biases and deficiencies. So making mistakes and falling on their face may prove to be one way to learn.
 
Notes

[1]对话陈志武, “文明，危机，和’非常态’下的我们,” posted on the website of Southern People Weekly/南方人物周刊 on July 24, 2022.
 
[2]D.C. Lao, Analects:  The Saying of Confucius, 16.1.

[3]Translator’s note:  A woman was to be obedient to her father before marriage, to her husband once married, and to her son should her husband die.  She should be virtuous in conduct, speech, comportment and works.

[4]Translator’s note:  This must be a play on words, because the Chinese name for the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort is pronounced the same way – fudimo/伏地魔 – and surely came first.

[5] D. C. Lao, Analects, The Sayings of Confucius, 4.19.