Liu Qing Interview with Southern People Weekly

“Liu Qing:  A Unique Presence in the Chinese Intellectual World”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Liu Qing (b. 1963) is a Professor of Political Science at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and an important liberal public intellectual.  He is a friend and colleague of the well-known historian Xu Jilin (b. 1957), who also teaches at ECNU.  Liu, who did his doctorate at the University of Minnesota, is a specialist in contemporary Western thought; since 2003, he has prepared an annual overview of the Western thought world (here is part one—of three—on Western thought in 2019), an ambitious undertaking to say the least.  Click here for an example of his work available on this site, and here for the collection of his writings available on Aisixiang.
 
The text translated here—an article about and an interview with Liu Qing—is somewhat different from most of what appears on our site, because the text was published in Southern People Weekly, i.e., some version of People magazine (with Chinese characteristics).  Inevitably, it is a bit of a puff piece-- Southern People Weekly is no more “hard-hitting” than People, after all—and Liu is painted in glowing colors that I suspect may have embarrassed him a bit.  I nonetheless found the piece interesting for two reasons. 
 
First, the idea that Southern People Weekly would choose to profile a moderately well-known mid-career professor and public intellectual struck me as odd.  I do not read People magazine, but I suspect that Liu’s American counterparts do not grace the pages of that publication.  China has just as many movie stars, athletes, and media personalities as we do.  The fact that they devoted several pages to Liu Qing—nobody’s idea of an influencer—says something about the position of the intellectual in China’s society today, and perhaps suggests that some of the natural respect accorded to intellectuals in the Chinese world remains and that ideas continue to matter.
 
Second, Liu’s life as described here is interesting, from his childhood growing up in Qinghai, through his youthful artistic pursuits, his studies in the United States and his ascension in China’s intellectual world.  It is of course natural for Southern People Weekly to accentuate the human interest side of any story, but I happen to know Liu Qing quite well, and can confirm that his life has been interesting and that he is a fascinating character (if much funnier than he appears in these pages). 

That Liu Qing leads an interesting life is not in itself newsworthy, but in these days when our focus is overwhelmingly on the return of Chinese “totalitarianism,” and when we imagine Chinese intellectuals quaking at the feet of their Party masters, I think it is salutary to remember that some semblance of a “normal” life continues for many.
 
Finally, Liu’s recollections of the beginnings of his intellectual career in the 1980s jibe nicely with Gan Yang’s discussion of that period, also published today.  There is, after all, a clear contrast between the free-wheeling 1980s and today’s more somber reality.
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“Why does the atmosphere surrounding academic debate in China leave people unsatisfied?  Because we don’t have the habit of ‘admitting errors.’  Parents never admit it when they are wrong, nor do teachers or leaders—or scholars.  I remember when I was doing my doctorate I would joke with my advisor, pointing out this or that thing that he hadn’t read, and he would be very happy, saying ‘Wow, you’re right, I haven’t read that!’  He never felt that admitting that he had not read something would diminish his authority.”
 
“Our point of emphasis in research in intellectual history is not just ‘reason.’  We are not saying that whatever theory is the most profound or the most refined is the one that is worth studying, but instead (and I think this is more important) we have to pay attention to practical ideas that have a deep impact on humanity because they penetrate the core of public culture, enter into the deep logic of popular behavior, providing the means by which people understand the world as well as the moral principles that serve as the norms for behavior. 

Even if people do not know these thinkers’ names or concepts, the concepts are those that they tacitly acknowledge, or what the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) called ‘social imaginaries.’  This does not necessarily mean that these ideas are exalted or correct, and many of the problems of modern society illustrate that these ideas can have many flaws and limitations.  But this is the very reason that they are important and worth thinking about.”
 
 
Translation
 
Liu Qing had not gone out for some twenty days, which was fine with him.  He enjoyed the peace and quiet of working at home, imposed by the pandemic.  It’s just that he hadn’t really seen the sky for a long time.  So one evening his family of three went for a walk on Binjiang avenue in the Xuhui district.  The orangish track was empty and the young skateboarders were nowhere to be seen.
 
When Max Weber of the Spanish Flu that ravaged Europe in 1918, he was 56, which is Liu Qing’s age now.  In the 1980s, he heard Weber’s name for the first time at a faculty talk by Li Zehou.[2]  For the past ten years or so, Liu had gotten used to according the German thinker pride of place in his courses on Western intellectual history, because Weber represents the maturity of modern thought.  On February 23, when he gave his Dedao course,[3] the title of the opening lecture was:  being an awakened “modern person.”
 
I
 
Four years ago at this time, when I began to audit Liu Qing’s graduate seminar on “Modern Western Thought,” it was just a week after the suicide of political science professor Jiang Xulin江绪林 (1976-2016) , and Liu Qing, as the head of the department where Jiang had taught, had delivered a very moving eulogy.  In 2010 Jiang Xulin had also audited Liu Qing’s class.
 
In the overview that he gave in the first class, he shared one of his goals with the students:  “to continue Professor Jiang’s incomplete reflection” on the question of how, once a person has been “abandoned in the world,” he ‘reflects on life’ so as to avoid living for nothing, how he “coexists with uncertainty,” how he deals with what Camus called the only serious question (suicide),”  how he cultivates a strong mind.
 
When he was young, Liu Qing’s business card identified him as a poet and a playwright.  In the second issue of the 1987 journal Shanghai Theater, we find an article titled “What Are We Experimenting With?  One Part of the ‘White  Bat’ Quartet,” written by Liu Qing, Tao Jun 陶骏, Zhang Zhao 张昭, and Liu Yang 刘洋.  They discussed the reason for engaging in experimental theater, arguing that “the role of the theatrical laboratory in the culture of theater is like that of the scientific laboratory in the development of science and technology,” that “the power of art builds on its uniqueness and force,” and that “theater makes people into people.”
 
Their association began with the experimental drama, “The Tesseract,” written, directed, and featuring Tao Jun. This collaboration then led to Liu Qing and Tao Jun's 1986 four-act poetic play “Survival, or Destruction,” an adaptation and modernization of Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies, written and directed by Tao Jun. The play was later translated into English and included in an anthology, Shakespeare and Asia, published by the prestigious Routledge Press.
 
Zhang Zhao played Hamlet, Tao Jun played Macbeth, the silver-throated Liu Qing brought out the silver-throated Lin Dongfu 林栋甫 who played King Lear, and Liu played himself as a modern man!  The costumes were made of burlap sacks, and the stage was only ten square meters.  In March of 2019, Lin Dongfu, who had just been awarded the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Lettres et des Arts de la République Française, suddenly received a congratulatory text message from Liu Qing, and replied, "Oh my God!," and the two of them got together for a reunion. "It seems like a lifetime ago," Liu Qing said.

II
 
In the 1950s, a technician from Shanghai People's Radio and his wife, a member of the radio choir in the same unit, both responded to the nation’s call and went to Qinghai to build a radio station.  They had planned to stay for four years but wound up staying twenty.  They lived in family housing on the campus of the Qinghai Teacher’s Institute, and had two children, the oldest named Liu Qing.
 
In the apartment next door lived a couple of biologists who had come to the northwest to teach English, and their son was Liu Qing’s best friend when they were young.  Upstairs lived a “rightist,” who was Liu’s language teacher, who taught him to recite the poems of the Russian poets Mayakovsky and Esenin.  There was another unmarried “rightist” who reportedly had once published an essay in The Journal of Mathematics. 

Two apartments over there lived a professor who had once taught at the Institute of Foreign Languages, and her husband had worked at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  One day, a young man from the Science and Technology Commission came from a long way away to consult the translator, and Liu Qing heard the term "information theory" for the first time.  This was in 1975.
 
The Soviet literature in traditional Chinese characters in the college library, the books, covered in gray paper, that quietly circulated among the adults, the matchstick math questions at the back of Prospect magazine, the backstage stories of the Qinghai drama troupe, and the Tibetans that Liu encountered when his father took his son with him to Yushu and Guoluo to run wires and set up speakers, all of these combined to make up a parallel mini-universe in an era when knowledge was scarce.
 
During summer vacation in 2015, on a day when a typhoon hit Shanghai, Liu Qing was at Monsoon Book Store giving a philosophy lesson to some children and their parents who had been driven inside by the storm.
 
 “When I was about ten years old, I met some curious adults who loved to talk about ‘mysterious’ stories and questions, which stimulated my imagination and set me on the road to the studies and explorations I would later undertake, turning me into the person I am today.”  He gave a reading of Julian Baggini's A Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, the subtitle of which is And 99 Other Thought Experiments.  Shen Lehui 沈乐慧, who works in the bookstore, said that both the children and the adults were extremely interested in Liu’s talk and did not want it to end, and that Liu’s talk was the longest of such events held at Monsoon Books.
 
In 1978, Liu Qing, full of energy to “realize the four modernizations,” was admitted to the Department of Chemical Engineering at the East China Textile Institute of Technology, majoring in polymer chemistry.  Roommates often talked together late into the night.  Those who had left high school to join the army as educated youth had lots of stories to tell.
 
“The Cultural Revolution was just over and the country was returning to normal.  These nightly chats with my roommates helped me to understand society, to understand China,” Liu says.  “There were a lot of open discussions in class, too, like the debate over capitalism and socialism…Students of that era dared to think and dared to ask questions.  They dared to challenge authority.”
 
After graduate school, he moved from the chemical engineering department to teach in the social sciences, turning to the liberal arts, which the previous generation loved and feared. He taught while writing poetry, film reviews, running magazines and drama clubs.
 
III
 
During the summer vacation of 1988, Liu Qing went to Beijing to attend the first workshop for young university professors organized by Gan Yang 甘阳.  Over the course of some twenty days, he heard Zhou Guoping 周国平 lecture on Nietzsche, Zhao Yuesheng 赵越胜 on Marcuse, Wang Wei 王炜on Heidegger, Chen Xuanliang 陈宣良 on Sartre, Su Guoxun 苏国勋 on Weber, and Guo Hong'an 郭宏安on Camus, and met Shen Changwen 沈昌文 and Wang Yan 王焱 of the journal Dushu.  At the end of the workshop, Gan Yang recommended Liu Qing as an outstanding scholar.[4]
 
A few months later, in October, Liu went to Chengdu as a journalist to participate in the conference organized by Jin Guangtao 金观涛[5] on “Chinese Scholars Survey the Twenty-First Century,” where he met Zheng Yefu 郑也夫 and Chen Fangzheng 陈方正, among others.
 
“During the conference, Jin Guangtao talked about his theory of modernization, in which he cited Weber’s concepts of rationality and depersonalization.  At the time, my impression was that people didn’t really understand it, because Jin’s way of explaining it was a bit strange.  I thought I understood it, and rashly spoke up, and explained in five minutes what Jin Guangtao had not been able to explain in half an hour or 45 minutes. 

But Jin really impressed me, because when we were eating, he took the initiative to come over to my table and talk to me.  He was already publishing his 'Toward the Future' series, and his star was clearly rising.  He started to talk about Karl Popper, and I immediately started arguing with him, which was really kind of immature and reckless.  That night he came to my room and asked me to think about doing my doctorate with him, because he was about to start taking on Ph.D. students.  I was very tempted. 

Later on, he came to Shanghai to see Wang Yuanhua 王元化,[6] because Wang was planning to start a magazine called The New Enlightenment.  I met with Jin many times, and he took me with him when he went to conferences or gave lectures, to the point that people began to see me as his disciple, and later on, the editor of a publishing house came to see me to ask if I had a manuscript to submit…It was owing to this good fortune that I sort of leapt into the intellectual world with one bound.  At the time, Jin Guangtao urged me to study Parsons and Weber, and he showed me some notes he had taken.”
 
Liu later discovered that the two most active groups within the Chinese intellectual world, “Cultural China” and “Toward the Future,”[7] both of which sought to educate the people and seek solutions to China’s problems, also diverged in important ways.
 
Liu Qing had also been invited to 17 Yongfu Road, the most active place for Shanghai thinkers at the time, where he met Xiao Gongqin 萧功秦, Gao Ruiquan 高瑞全, Zhang Rulun 张汝伦, Yan Bofei 严搏非, Chen Jian 陈兼, Yang Dongping杨东平, He Ping 何平[8]…People were expected to make a contribution when they were invited, and for his first talk, Liu talked about the novels of Milan Kundera.
 
“At that period I was for sure out somewhere four times a week, and I didn’t want to miss anything.  Every day was so exciting it was like being drunk, and new worlds opened up every day.  My mind was wide open, hungry for knowledge,” Liu Qing remembers.
 
“I remember it very clearly, it was New Years Day, 1990, at my place on Huihai West Road, close to Hongmoufang—it was really small—my friends were there to mark the occasion.  I remember there was Gu Gang 顾刚and Yuan Ming 袁鸣.  Gu Gang was on the Fudan University debate team at the International Collegiate Debate Tournament held in Singapore, and was a good friend of Yuan’s.”  Liu’s present-day colleague at ECNU, Xu Jilin, remembers that “Liu immediately passed his TOEFL exam and left for the United States.”
 
“Before he left, he invited us to dinner in a little restaurant with concrete walls and just a few tables.  He gave us all a volume of his poetry, which was mimeographed on wax paper, a very thin volume, maybe a dozen or so pages.  I read through it again over the past few years,” said Yan Bofei.
 
Marquette University is a private Catholic institution, small but beautiful, where the relations between faculty and students are very close.  James Rhodes, the head of the political science department in which Liu Qing enrolled, was steeped in the classics, having studied with the Austrian-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) and audited Leo Strauss’s (1899-1973) classes.  In 2006, Liu Qing invited Rhodes to teach a short course on Voegelin's thought at the East China Normal University, at a time when the Strauss fever and his "crypto-writing" were emerging in China.  Liu thought it was important to acquaint Chinese scholars with another group of prominent conservatives
 
Later on, Liu went to Minnesota University for his Ph.D.  At his doctoral defense, he spoke for more than two hours, stunning the professors present for the occasion.
 
“The 1980s, while exciting, had a grandiose side to it as well. It’s hard to imagine what I would be like had I stayed in that literary world. Nine years in the United States calmed me down. I like myself better now,” Liu observed.
 
IV
 
Liu Qing finally found a home at East China Normal University, where he had attended many lectures as a youth.
 
In 2014, the Si-Mian Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Harvard-Yenching Institute jointly organized a conference on “Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century China,” in which the participants were the major players in the field—Shen Zhihua 沈志华, Yang Kuisong 杨奎松, Wang Qisheng 王奇生, Elizabeth Perry, Joseph Esherick…Liu Qing was also invited.  As Xu Jilin remembers it, “Normally this was not Liu’s research area, but it was his talk that excited everyone the most.  He introduced a unique perspective that historians had not considered.”
 
Beginning in 2003, at the end of every year, Liu Qing has written a critical overview of the year in Western thought, and has now been doing this for 17 years.  Zhou Lian 周濂 noted that:  “What Liu does is first of all based on very extensive reading, but he also needs an excellent grounding in theory, as well as a unique vision to select the most representative and even forward-looking topics among the contributions of Western academia for a whole year.  Summarizing all of this is not an easy task.”  Chen Jiayang 陈嘉映added:  “It is really worth reading, and there is no one else in China who can do this.”
 
“My feeling that Liu’s best role is not as a professor or as a scholar, but as a performer,” said Xu Jilin.  “He feels things very strongly, and needs passion.  In academic circles, as long as he is there, the scene is alive. He is a unique presence in the Chinese intellectual world.”
 
Interview with Liu Qing:  “There are too many answers, so how do you choose?”
 
What is the point of writing essays and debating?
 
In 2007, Liu Qing’s student, Ma Hualing 马华灵, handed in his first academic paper, entitled “Two Portraits of the Crisis of Modernity:  The Century’s Unresolved Debate between Berlin and Strauss,” in which Ma refuted the criticisms of Isaiah Berlin found in Leo Strauss’s “Relativism” and Liu Xiaofeng’s 刘小枫 “The Meekness of the Hedgehog.”  Liu Qing scribbled all over the draft in red:  “What are you trying to say?  This is empty and specious. There is absolutely no attempt to get to the heart of the issue, to develop or explain your ideas, nor to respond to issues within the field.  This is nothing but arguments infused with feelings, in the style of a very bad poet…On the face of it, it looks convincing, but there is no real development of ideas, which will not only leave your reader wondering what you are getting at, but will lead you astray as well…Why not write a straightforward essay, something like “Berlin and Relativism,” where you clearly define the origin of the topic, go through the literature, develop your analysis, and then give your arguments and proofs?”
 
SPW:  When you mention a literary style, I immediately think about a style of arguing.  I saw a debate about this online yesterday.
 
Liu Qing:  My advisor James Rhodes said that there were two types of arguments:  one is that employed by lawyers, whose goal is to win in court, so they will do their utmost to find evidence that makes their case, while they avoid, distort, or suppress proofs that benefit their opponent.  The International Collegiate Debate Tournaments back then were like that.  The other kind of debate is Socratic, where you carefully examine all of the evidence and engage in earnest analysis in an argument whose goal is to understand and to arrive the truth.  I of course defend my point of view, but this does not keep me from listening to you, which might even hone my thinking and bring me closer to the truth.  I have never forgotten this throughout my life, and it has shaped my scholarly personality.  In an academic environment, are we speaking out in order to win?  Or for fame?  Or to stand out?  Or are we seeking after truth?
 
SPW:  Professor Chen Jiayang has praised you in these terms:  “In his research field he has his attitudes and viewpoints, but this does not keep him from understanding other perspectives, which is quite difficult.”
 
Liu Qing:  These days, before we even understand what someone is saying we lose patience and stop listening, or sometimes before he even finishes we are already distorting what he said so as to refute him.  You should listen carefully to topics that are worthy of discussion, and when you have understood a point of view that you do not necessarily endorse, it may stimulate you to come up with a new idea or to sharpen your understanding.  In fact, thought is like life, in the sense that unchallenged ideas and arguments never grow up, which happens only after having survived many challenges.  In this sense I am a lot like Isaiah Berlin; I don’t much enjoy reading things with which I completely agree.  The reason that I left engineering behind for the humanities was to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and my curiosity, and not to build a cult around me.
 
Why does the atmosphere surrounding academic debate in China leave people unsatisfied?  Because we don’t have the habit of “admitting errors.”  Parents never admit it when they are wrong, nor do teachers or leaders—or scholars.  I remember when I was doing my doctorate I would joke with my advisor, pointing out this or that thing that he hadn’t read, and he would be very happy, saying “Wow, you’re right, I haven’t read that!”  He never felt that admitting that he had not read something would diminish his authority.
 
How should a modern person live?
 
SPW:  Rawls was concerned about justice, Berlin about pluralism, Chen Jiayang is concerned about questions of historical determinism and free will…What are your chief concerns?
 
Liu Qing:  The question of modernity boils down to two things. After Nietzsche declared the “God is dead,” and after Weber declared that the world was “disenchanted,” this meant that there were no longer any universal, transcendent standards, or at least that they were not self-evident.  In this case, on what should the individual rely to orient his life?  For the society, what are the basic norms of order and organizing principles?  These are questions of the legitimacy of politics.  The arrival of modernity was a big deal, because we cannot go back.  And as long as the mobility brought by industrialization, commercialization, and urbanization cannot be reversed, we have no choice but to face the difficulties of modernity.
 
Our point of emphasis in research in intellectual history is not just “reason.”  We are not saying that whatever theory is the most profound or the most refined is the one that is worth studying, but instead (and I think this is more important) we have to pay attention to practical ideas that have a deep impact on humanity because they penetrate the core of public culture, enter into the deep logic of popular behavior, providing the means by which people understand the world as well as the moral principles that serve as the norms for behavior.  Even if people do not know these thinkers’ names or concepts, the concepts are those that they tacitly acknowledge, or what the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor (b. 1931) called “social imaginaries.”  This does not necessarily mean that these ideas are exalted or correct, and many of the problems of modern society illustrate that these ideas can have many flaws and limitations.  But this is the very reason that they are important and worth thinking about.
 
In the syllabus for my Dedao course, I did not choose classical texts, because this course is focused on the 20th century, with an eye toward critically discussing the dilemmas and crises of modernity.
 
My criterion was to select thinkers who have had a direct and obvious impact on public culture, in other words that they have contributed to the creation of “social imaginaries.”  For example, modernity has brought three conceptual changes which would not have been understood in ancient times:  first, the principle of equality.  We know that in reality, differences in status exist in all societies, but in legal and moral terms, or in terms of respect, dividing people into high and low, noble and base, will not be accepted by the people, and this is a value belief held by contemporary society. 

Second, individualism.  This does not mean that the individual can pay no attention to society, but instead that in the life of the individual there is always a space where he is free to do as he wishes.  Other people can criticize or offer advice, but in the final analysis the individual decides for himself, which also means that the individual assumes the responsibility for his decisions. 

For example, the quality of arranged marriages or marriages of convenience is not necessarily worse than “free marriages,” so why do modern people reject arranged marriages?  Because the realm of intimate relationships is a typical example of a realm where the individual makes his own decisions.  Third, pluralism.  This means that we must accept that there exist multiple legitimate beliefs concerning human life, multiple life ideals and multiple lifestyles, and other people can be entirely different from us.  These three make up the baseline for modern people, and the basic features of the modern social imaginary.
 
So how can modern man have a good life?  How should we arrange things so as to live better together?  In other words, how should a society both put together a legitimate political order, and also function efficiently so as to bind the people together as a cooperative community, so that each individual can obtain the basic respect he deserves and pursue his own life goals?  Of course this is a tough question, but the problem is not that there is no solution, but that there are too many solutions.  So how do you choose?  How do you explain your reasons?  These are my primary concerns.
 
Coexisting with uncertainty
 
SPW:  In your view, how are you different from the earlier generation of intellectuals like Lin Yusheng 林毓生[9] or Wang Yuanhua?
 
Liu Qing:  Let’s start with a distinction.  Neither in terms of academic research or impact on the public can I be compared with either of those two.  I had many interactions with Prof. Lin and Prof. Wang, and I feel that both were sincere idealists, as well as possessing fairly clear ideas for how to achieve an ideal society.  Of course they knew that they faced many complex problems and contradictions, but these were but the darkness before the dawn, and as long as you kept exploring you would certainly find a way out, which would finally lead to the light.  I think most scholars and thinkers of their generation shared such a conviction.  This is admirable, but compared to them, I am much less certain.
 
In my view, the uncertainty created by the three key changes wrought by modernity is internal to the system.  Equality, individualism, and plurality—none of these points to a higher level of certainty.  For example, modern society, as well as individual and collective life, all respect the value of autonomy, an important achievement of modernity.  But at the same time, autonomy in a Kantian sense is an even higher demand.  In practice, people readily understand the simple expression and achievement of their wishes as the embodiment of autonomy.  In a culture of equality, it is difficult for us to urge people to think carefully, to discern and clarify their wishes, because such urges must be negotiated and must be based on respect for individual freedom. 
 
If the healthy functioning of a society is so dependent on the will of the people, it becomes crucial that this will is correct and that there is a stable consensus. This is a complex question for which it is difficult to have a definitive solution. This is particularly true because the impact of technological revolutions and sudden catastrophes can overturn old paradigms. What might originally have been a fine solution may well turn out to be a new problem. In addition, I not only believe that the modern world will become more and more chaotic and disorderly, but will also conceive of many different solutions, which will compete and learn from each other, and some progress will be made, but progress itself is dynamic and does not mean that a "good" answer can be found once and for all.
 
SPW:  A few days ago I reread your 2003 volume, The Age of Strife.  In which direction do you see the world evolving?
 
Liu Qing:  Over a hundred years ago, Liang Shuming 梁漱溟[10] was asked by his father, "Can the world be better?" Liang believed at the time that "the world was getting better day by day". This question has been asked again and again since that time, and people are not so sure anymore. For me, the question is whether or not the development of modernity has been able to achieve the ideals that it set for itself. Theoretically, I am considering the possibility that the reason that past achievements of modernity have been preserved is because they relied on certain constraints of tradition, or in other words, that modernity did not fully develop; if its values are further developed in the future, it will show a tendency to overturn itself that will become more and more evident.
 
SPW:  Following the development of mankind’s hunger for wild game and the value accorded to dominating nature, the coronavirus came along and turned our lives upside down.
 
Liu Qing:  In modern life, the subjective will of the human being is playing an increasingly dominant role. On the one hand, this is one of modernity’s important achievements, and has brought about individual freedom, diversity of lifestyles, and the stimulation of creativity and imagination. More importantly, the recognition of the validity of the subjective will is a moral ideal that Charles Taylor calls the "ethics of authenticity," in other words, living one's life in conformity with one's desires so that you do not feel that you are living a "false life" and that you are becoming your self. But autonomy in Kant's sense is not to be completely at the mercy of the simple will, but requires reflect on this will, and ultimately to achieve rational autonomy. In practice, however, this requirement is too high, and we lack sufficiently clear normative standards for reflection on and judgment of the will.
 
SPW:  That makes me think of the promise “I do” in the wedding vows.
 
Liu Qing:  What is the uniqueness of modern intimacy? Not romantic love. There were ancient people who went from love to marriage, but love was not a necessary condition for marriage. The ancient association of love and marriage was mostly tragic, as in Chinese literary examples such as the poem "The Peacock Flies Southeast 孔雀东南飞", and the novel The Butterfly Lovers 梁山伯与祝英台", and in Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet". What is the real creation of modern man? It was the particular concept of "a love marriage", which asserted that love was the foundation and core of marriage and promoted the freedom of young people to choose their partners, a "radical new concept" that began to take hold in Europe and North America only two hundred years ago.
 
But what is love? In reality, falling in love is the feeling of "a light clicking on" or "dopamine production" that leads to feelings of "I like it" and then "I do." In other words, "I do" in practice is an unreflective will, often elusive and even incomprehensible. That is why, at the beginning of the modern marriage revolution two hundred years ago, some people warned that a marriage grounded in love would destabilize the institution of marriage.
 
However, the "love marriage" has survived and is still practiced today. It's been a century since the May 4th New Culture Movement began in China. This is nothing short of a miracle. But a deeper look reveals that modern marriage is held together by many of these "traditional" elements that have not been fully purged, and that it is these non-emotional elements that have protected the stability of marriage, while social developments in the twentieth century are destroying these stabilizing mechanisms.

​A Brief History of Marriage, by the American historian Stephanie Coontz, recently reissued in Chinese translation, addresses four important social changes that are gradually breaking the bonds of tradition and undermining the stability of modern marriages. This is consistent with our feelings about everyday life, where there are many young people who can fall in love but don't want to get married. That is to say, the modern institutional arrangement of "marrying for love" is likely to disintegrate when it is fully developed. This is what I called self-subversive tendency.
 
SPW:  Then what happens to “I do” and a shared life?
 
Liu Qing: Yes, this is my real concern - whether this tendency towards "voluntarism" is also present in modern democratic politics. "People's sovereignty" is the fundamental principle of modern politics, and the supreme legitimacy of the "will of the people" is also an important achievement of modernity. But first, who are the people? How do many citizens develop a collective public will? Secondly, why is the will of the people justified? How do we judge a specific citizen, whose will is often changing and manipulated by various external circumstances? This touches on  many important norms in political theory, such as the constitution and theories of civility.
 
In practice, however, the dominant practice in Western democracies is to vote to express one's preferences. In practice, outside of age restrictions, there are no barriers to restrict the right to vote of "unqualified citizens." What is the result of this? Restrictions rely completely on our own will. This has led to the "will-only theory". In recent years, populism has emerged in some countries in Europe and the United States, and there is a phenomenon that theorists regard as a "democratic decline".
 
The new internationalism and the responsibility of reason
 
SPW:  You've written a number of important articles, like "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: a Historical Perspective on Habermas's Thought" and "Liberalism in the Chinese Context," which have inspired fellow writers. Tell us about what you find to be your more theoretically original work.
 
Liu Qing:  Right now I am working on China’s move from “tianxia ideals” to a “new internationalism.”  At the outset it was a way of finding an appropriate theoretical framework to explore the link between nationalism and internationalism, but I later decided I needed to expand the framework.
 
I know there is a strong inertia in ideas about locality, and many studies in cultural anthropology and social psychology explain this phenomenon. But if attachment to locality was so stubborn, there wouldn't even be nation-states, and we'd all still be living in tribes, or in small feudal principalities. Why, I ask, should the boundaries of this "imagined community" remain at the national level, when it is possible to expand and connect human beings into a kind of community beyond their immediate kinship group?
 
We talk about politics as being about order, and order needs a boundary. So I’m thinking, why does the political order change?  I later discovered that in a completely closed society, there is no possibility for reflection, because reflection requires vision and resources. Just like Plato's "cave allegory" has been seen as a process of escaping from obscurity to truth, but now many people are skeptical about it, believing that stepping out of a cave does not necessarily lead to seeing the sun, but rather to walking into another cave. My understanding is that only when you step out of the cave and see other caves do you realize your own "cave-ness," in the same way that it is only when you hear other dialects do you realize you are speaking one too.
 
Reflection is made possible by drawing on the vision and resources of the Other. If you are unaware of other landscapes, then it is taken for granted that local is everything.
 
For example, in the old days, the Chinese used to say, "spare the rod and spoil the child 棍棒底下出孝子.” Anyway, when my generation was young, children were always beaten, and not beating was the exception. Then suddenly, one day, we saw a culture where children were not beaten, and the order did not fall apart, after which we had the possibility to re-examine our own culture and "relativize" ourselves. Cultures must be relational, that is, they "encounter" each other, including collision, competition, conflict, fusion, etc. Cultural encounters bring the possibility of re-examining oneself, which then leads to change, and this is the driving force behind the survival of culture.

Notes

[1] “刘擎: 中国知识界一个独特的存在,” originally published in Southern People Weekly 南方人物周刊 on April 13, 2020, available online here.  The journalist who composed the piece and carried out the interview is Li Zongtao 李宗陶.
 
[2] Li Zehou 李泽厚 (b. 1930) is a Chinese philosopher and historian who played a fundamental role in “liberating” Chinese thought from the shackles of Maoism and orthodox Marxism in the 1980s.
 
[3] Dedao might be thought of as the Chinese equivalent of Ted Talks.  See here for more information.
 
[4] These are all major figures in the Chinese intellectual world of the 1980s, who were ten to fifteen years older than Liu.  Dushu (Reading) was—and remains—China’s most important intellectual magazine.
 
[5] Gan Yang, mentioned in the above paragraph, and Jin Guangtao, were probably the most important Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s.  Both oversaw important series of translations that brought China back in touch with the Western intellectual world after the relative isolation of the Maoist period.
 
[6] Wang Yuanhua (1920-2008) was part of a much older generation of Chinese intellectuals, revered by liberals like Liu because he was deeply steeped in traditional Chinese culture, joined and loyally served the Communist Party for decades, and in later life developed an independent, critical, “liberal” voice grounded in humanism.
 
[7] These were the two translation series supervised by Gan Yang and Jin Guangtao.
 
[8] These were important figures in the Shanghai intellectual world at the time.
 
[9] Lin Yusheng (b. 1934) is a Chinese-American professor of intellectual history who has had a major impact on Chinese intellectual life since the beginning of the period of reform and opening.
 
[10] Liang Shuming (1893-1988) was a complex figure.  Often dubbed, wrongly, China’s “last Confucian,” Liang launched a program of rural restoration based on Confucian ideas in the 1930s and wrote books attempting to reconcile Chinese, Indian, and Western civilizations (he had strong beliefs in Buddhism as well).  Liang’s father committed suicide after the fall of the Qing in a gesture of loyalty and despair.