Wu Fei on Suicide

Interview with Wu Fei, “When Four Young People Plunged to their Deaths in Zhangjiajie, it Was Not a Simple Matter of Blind Suicide”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction

The text translated here was originally published in The Time Weekly 时代周报, and the reference in the title is to a number of suicides that occurred in early April 2023 in Zhangjiajie, a popular nature site in northern Hunan province which inspired the visuals in the movie Avatar.  Three men jumped to their deaths from the top of a cliff, and a woman was also found, who did not jump, but had taken poison from which she did not recover. 
 
The bulk of the text, however, is not directly related to the Zhangjiajie suicides, but is instead an interview with Wu Fei (b. 1973), a researcher in Beijing University’s Philosophy Department who studied with the famous anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (b. 1941) at Harvard University, and now works on issues related to ethics and morality in contemporary China.  I translated it because it reflects widespread concern in China about psychological issues, particularly but not exclusively among Chinese youths, and this concern has only been intensified by the experience of the pandemic (see for example here, here, and here, among others).
 
Translation
 
Were they avenging themselves out of blind rage?
 
Question: You have researched the issue of suicide in China, so I wonder what is your opinion of suicides like these?
 
Wu Fei: I see many similarities between these cases and the suicides that I have studied, in that some suicides in China are not due to mental health issues, but are motivated by a sense of grievance, meaning that the person is seeking revenge. Some of those who commit suicides actually seek to take revenge on others by punishing themselves. In fact, this is a reflection of the fact that our society has issues on questions of fairness and justice.
 
Question: From these few cases, we can see that these people are in general disappointed or disillusioned 失意者. They may well think that the reason for their failure is not themselves, but society. "Society" is a word we use all the time, but it is also abstract and vague.  How should we understand it?
 
Wu Fei: Understanding society means understanding the public sphere, which is distinct from family, ties of kinship or place, and normal friendships.  In traditional China, there was no real concept corresponding to “society.” Now that we have the concept, the question is how to make it into a better, healthier social idea, so that people can live together in a more harmonious society.  Things like suicide make us raise these questions.

In elite discourse, or mainstream discourse, most of us treat "society" as something good, something positive, believing it represents, for example, a kind of justice or a kind of collective strength.
 
But in our daily lives, society is always seen as a cruel and indifferent space. For example, when parents are trying to educate their children, they often say, "What will you do when you finally go out into the world (lit. “enter society 走上社会”)?  From their perspective, they mean that their children are leaving a family that cares for them, where they don’t really have to take care or pay attention, or be on their guard, and they entering a public space completely put together by strangers, who will put them in danger, where they will need to be vigilant at all times, and where they will have to learn all sorts of coping skills.
 
So in the daily lives of the Chinese people, society is still seen as something cold and indifferent, or in any case, people today see society as cold and dangerous, the equivalent of, almost equivalent to what in traditional times we called the “rivers and lakes 江湖,”[2] the world of people with no attachments, who roamed from place to place.
　　
The problem of coldness in social relations
 
Question: In the eyes of many people, society is a dog-eat-dog jungle, where the weak are at the mercy of the strong, which creates a climate of coldness and indifference.  What are thoughts about how this came about?
 
Wu Fei: In Western culture, the idea of “society” has a much deeper meaning, and if you trace the idea back its roots, you find that it comes from the idea of the church. 

If you belong to the same church, you can be from anywhere in the world, and you may have never seen one another before, but your common faith makes you part of a shared community. This community is not the same as a political organization like a city-state or a nation, which is the positive side of this notion of society.
 
In China, I think it is not unreasonable to say that since the late Qing period, after we encountered the idea of society, Chinese people, on the basis of their own understanding, gradually came to the conclusion that society is cold and cruel, a place where the strong lord it over the weak, and you cannot say that they had no reason to feel that way. 

But on the other hand, in some cases, those who commit suicide find their families to be as cold as society, because there are people whose family relationships are not good. In these cases, the distinction between family and society is not so absolute, and in fact they overlap to a certain extent. So, if we want to understand coldness and indifference in society, to a large extent we need to look at the same phenomenon within the family. 
 
Question: In Chinese, especially in the past, "society" was often equated with the "state".
 
Wu Fei: Yes, and if society and the state are the same, and then you add in families and the villages linked to the families, and then the friends – if you can put all of this together then this could be very positive.  Since the 1990s, however, there has been a powerful trend talking about separating state and society, although things are less clear now.
 
Question: In fact, in today’s society, values focus on material things, on social position, or to put it bluntly, on whether or not you have money.  What do you think about such values and the spirit they reflect?
 
Wu Fei: It is hard to separate the society from the state, but the mechanism producing these values is a social climate and was not imposed on society by any government organization.  People just gradually came to be this way. 
 
At the same time, in recent years, many state policies, such as economic reforms, have become more and more pragmatic and even money-worshiping, and various policies have tended to be increasingly technical and bureaucratic.  No attention is paid to culture or ethics, so the whole thing slowly turns into a vicious circle.

The idea that money decides everything is part of this, one result, but it may not be the ultimate reason why people no longer seriously think about higher and more noble things.
　
It’s not a question of belief, but rather of spiritual order
 
Question: In our current society, we as individuals also have this tangible feeling that if we talk about spiritual things or the meaning of life, it has somehow become something ridiculous, and people make fun of us.  Some people say that “society is moving too fast, and the soul can’t catch up.”
 
It is hard for the spirit, the soul, to find a place in this society.  We know in our hearts that this is not good, because such a situation necessarily limits what we can be as human being.  How do we change this?  What direction should we look to in terms of individuals, in terms of ideas?
 
Wu Fei: I really don’t know how we should change, at least at the point where we are now.  It's not that there is no culture at all, but culture itself has become more and more commercialized, and even if the state promotes traditional culture here and there, it does it in a way that is incredibly commercialized.
 
Change needs to be fundamental, and in fact requires deeper thinking. The current state-society system was always meant to focus on the economy, on power, and on modern technology.  I have no problem with modern technology, but I think we need to know what we are using it for. 
 
Right at the beginning of the reform and opening period, economic reform was merely a means to an end, and it was meant to serve something more noble. But over time the ends became more and more empty, and people lost faith in them, but now we can’t find anything to replace them, nor have we been able to imagine something more noble, so the means eventually became the ends. 
 
State and society can determine its policies in this way, but it is impossible to live without a higher purpose. If life becomes merely a pursuit of material goods, business, and power, then your spiritual condition is bound to be a problem.
 
Question: Since we’re talking about spirituality, in everyday communication, when people are talking about suicides on campus, they often mention the word “belief,” and the lack of faith.  This seems to be widespread in contemporary Chinese society.  How should we understand the question of faith and the lack of faith.
 
Wu Fei: I think the word "faith" is a bit too Westernized. It is hard to say that China has religious faith in the Western sense, but people's minds and the social order are relatively stable. Of course, you can call it faith, but strictly speaking, I don't think it is, but it can be a higher spiritual value, or a belief, or something that people identify with.

If the problem is one of faith, then the problem can of course be solved by restoring faith. Religion would be one natural way to do this.
 
But I am afraid that this is not the case, so I don't like the word "faith," and I prefer the word “order,” which seems a bit more appropriate.  Order is not only about people and society, but also includes the spiritual order, and is also about things that are valued more and things that are valued less, and how much difference there is between them. 

So, the so-called lack of faith references the fact that people do not share a common belief that they see as more worthy than the pursuit of money. The good life should be based a foundation of order, and this includes both society and the spirit.
　　
We need to rebuild both social ethics and the moral order.
 
Question: For the moment, social ethics are in a shambles, and some people say that morality has collapsed. Since reform and opening, individuals have gradually been liberated, especially those in the cities, and people are now atomized. To date, society has yet to evolve a new ethical system to meet its needs. How do we break through this, or maybe I should ask how should we think about things more deeply?
 
Wu Fei: In fact, a lot of people are aware of this, and the question is how to solve this problem, and changing the status quo is not so easy. People will tend to think that the current chaos is because some people lost their way, but it is actually a more complex problem, and it is not clear that most of us would do a better job if we were to make state policies.
 
I think the words “order” or “ethics” works better than “faith.” In fact, it is an inevitable trend in modern society to live in a society made up of strangers and to stress the emancipation of individuals and the fact that society is made up of strangers.

For example, I think that individual liberation is extremely valuable, but it does not mean that liberated people no longer need ethics. In a society of strangers, order is paramount. This is urgent, because ethics came more naturally in traditional society, which had its own institutions and social structure, while now, in an artificial and abstract society made up of strangers, without a clear sense of ethics, chaos is inevitable.
 
Question: Given where we are, where do we start?  What should everyone be looking for?
 
Wu Fei: There are at least two aspects involved here, and one is to understand more deeply the cultural foundation is behind the modern concept of society.
 
For example, we already talked about the idea of society.  If you just bring in the idea without looking at the cultural basis behind it, you wind up with a society that is completely different from other societies. This is why I think that in terms of concepts such as freedom, equality, society, reason, and science, we are still a long way from really understanding what they mean.
 
Another, more important aspect, is that we need to come to a deeper understanding of traditional Chinese thought and traditional ethics, and we need to bring these two aspects together.  This means understanding how to live in China today, under today's condition, and if we succeed at that, then we might solve the problems we are currently facing. 
　　
We can’t lightly discard morality
 
Question: Does a Chinese lifestyle have its own model?
 
Wu Fei: Without conducting a detailed study, I can only speak off the cuff. Chinese people first and foremost value family ethics. Although modern families have undergone significant changes from traditional ones, this is a foundation that must be upheld.  Building upon this, there is a concern for society and the state that is related to the family and family ethics. This concern for society and the state cannot be disconnected from the family but should be consistent and unified. This should be a direction for development.　
　
I still consider modern concepts, such as freedom, democracy, and equality, which came from the West, as extremely important, but they must be understood in a Chinese way, and they must be given a proper place in the Chinese system of family, state, and society. If we can do this, I think it may be a direction of development in the future.

Question: In China, morality used to be promoted by the state, but now some people hate to talk about morality and have fallen into a kind of moral relativism.  How do you see the state of morality in Chinese society?
 
Wu Fei: This kind of vulgar liberalism or moral relativism is the source of all evils. Western liberalism does not ignore morality. The ethics and order that we were just talking about, or the issue of faith that you brought up, they are all related to morality. One of the most important foundations of a healthy society is to have a moral order and a sense of a moral life. I think this goes without saying, that morality must be very, very important.
 
Question: In the view of vulgar liberals, a certain kind of morality is possible, because they are caught up in an imagination that morality can be exploited or hijacked by power. They themselves lack morality, but demand that others have it, and so on.
 
Wu Fei: This kind of logic is either completely commercialized, or completely power-based.  But you can’t completely discard morality just because someone is using it for ulterior motives. 
 
It is not natural that morality be used in this way, but if it is, this means that morality clearly must have value, but you can’t cut off your nose to spite your face, and you cannot completely deny morality because there’s a chance someone might use it improperly.
 
Notes
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[1]跟吴飞的对话： “4个年轻人同在张家界跳崖，不是盲目自杀那么简单,” April 8, 2023.

[2]Translator’s note:  The idea of “rivers and lakes” is often linked to the outlaw world, as in the famous novel Water Margin, where the idea is romanticized.  Wu Fei is using it to refer to people who do not manage to find a place in the world of work.