Xiang Biao, Hello Stranger

Xiang Biao, “I am a Stranger”

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated below is a slightly abbreviated version of the introduction to Xiang Biao’s new book Hello Stranger 你好陌生人, recently published in China and selling briskly.  Like his previous work, Self as Method 以自己为方法, Hello Stranger is a public-facing work, addressed basically to Chinese young people, although the themes evoked are in many ways universal, meaning that the book should be read not only for what we learn about China, which is certainly important, but for its insights into contemporary society everywhere in the developed world.
 
Xiang Biao is a social anthropologist and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Sociology and Ethnography, and has spent most of his professional career outside of China.  Like many diaspora intellectuals, Xiang publishes in Chinese as well as English, and through his writings, interviews, public appearances, and other marketing efforts has established himself as an important intellectual figure in China, especially among Chinese young people, largely because Xiang talks directly to them about the problems they are facing in their everyday lives:  loneliness, alienation, meaninglessness. 
 
Years ago, Xiang observed that many Chinese people – and particularly Chinese young people - appear not to be very happy as “China’s century” dawns. This may seem strange at first glance because after a century and a half of humiliation, crisis, and struggle, China in the early twenty-first century seems poised to reestablish its historical position as a (if not the) center of the world. Reform and opening have succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of those who initially conceived the policies, and China in 2025 is vastly richer and more powerful than China in 1980.
 
Yet despite China’s rise, many young people—while patriotic and proud of China’s rise—are anxious and dissatisfied, at least with their individual lives and life chances. If reform and opening transformed the Chinese economy, it also brought intense competitiveness, sky-rocketing real estate prices, long workdays and weeks, and seemingly endless stress. Particularly in China’s mega-cities like Beijing and Shanghai, young people often feel like they are running in place—and running hard—as China’s period of high-speed growth begins to sputter out.  Many feel that they have lost control of their lives, that vast machines (the educational system, the workplace, social media) chew them up and spit them out, and that they have no identity beyond the image of success they have to project to get ahead.
 
How should young people deal with the pressures of constant tests, performance reviews, competition, and constant role playing?  Parents and schools enforce the gospel of success, the workplace imposes the discipline of competition, and the Party-State spews out slogans that stress national pride, obedience to authority and service to the collective, but these messages do not and cannot cohere in an individual soul for whom the experience of their grandparents and even parents can sound like ancient history and for whom competition and success are the realities of life from a very young age.
 
The ambitious goal that Xiang Biao set for himself is that of enabling Chinese young people to relocate and reassert their agency.  He believes that this is possible because young people in China are vastly better educated than they were a generation or two ago, because they are connected to the world through the Internet and the smartphone in their pocket, and because China’s hyper-rapid social changes have wrenched them out of the familial and communal structures that have governed Chinese social and cultural life until the late 20th century.  They are painfully alone and vulnerable, but their angst and solitude also fuel their hunger for meaning and connection, and Xiang wants to teach them to see and to think about their situation clearly via a user-friendly version of the social sciences.  The individual awakenings Xiao imagines might of course eventually lead to social and even political organizations that could pique the nonbenevolent interest of the Party-State, but for the moment authorities allow private lives and the semblance of civil society (or the vision, the feeling, of what might be one) and Xiang’s message circulates in China with little friction and considerable interest.
 
The chief weapons in Xiang’s arsenal are his ideas, his voice, and his presence, all of which circulate throughout China through his books, interviews, online discussions, and offline projects, some of which attempt to motivate young people to leave their screens behind and discover the environments and people among whom they live (which Xiang calls the “nearby”).  In many ways, Xiang imitates or even takes advantage of China’s vast self-help industry, the chief goal of which is to sell books that teach Chinese people how to get ahead, how to succeed.  Xiang is willing to use the same approach, the same tone, and similar language, but his goal is to call people to set their sights on a more reflective, individualistic, conscious life, an objective he would well have borrowed from Socrates, as well as from Zhuangzi.
 
In both Self as Method and Hello Stranger, Xiang Biao chooses to use interviews or conversations rather than textual exposition and scholarly argument.  The reason is obvious:  interviews and conversations are more human and accessible than dense paragraphs of analysis.  Self as Method is loosely autobiographical, and Xiang uses his own story and celebrity in China to illustrate his arguments concerning personal agency.  The second book, Hello Stranger, begins with the introduction translated below, but the body of the volume is made up of conversations with well-known artists, film makers, and other members of China’s educated elite, the sort who would give Ted Talks in the West (in fact Xiang’s interviewees give the equivalent in China).  But the theme of Xiang’s introduction and the content of the conversations diverge somewhat, and we should address them separately. 
 
The title Hello Stranger has at least two meanings.  The first is to urge readers to pay attention to the “strangers” in what Xiang Biao once again calls their “nearby,” part of his pitch to get people to realize that they are ignoring their material, physical lives in favor of virtual reality and online engagement.  In part this speaks to a worldwide phenomenon in which social media are winning the battle for attention, but in China, social media capture has accompanied wrenching changes that have transformed Chinese society over the past few decades, changes – such as rapid, massive urbanization - that have weakened if not broken the ties of family and locality that have traditionally bound Chinese society, even under the PRC.  The atomization of society in China is such that for many young people, it is normal to know none of their neighbors and to maintain arms-length relationships with classmates or workmates.  Students or workers sharing a residence for reasons of economy or expediency often choose not to know one another and to share their space in relative silence.  A natural outcome of this set of choices is that some young people have come to prefer this isolation to intimacy (Xiang calls this “stranger-making”) and even break off relations with their parents and reject romantic relationships in preference of ephemeral “situationships.”  In this perspective, Hello Stranger means saying hello to a stranger, greeting a neighbor, a subway attendant, a fellow student or workmate, a delivery driver.
 
The second meaning is in many ways implicit in the first:  everyone is now a stranger, and we are strangers from our larger selves.  If we wander through our lives without meaningful offline engagement, seeking only to fulfill the roles necessary to be seen to succeed, then who are we?  With whom are we interacting?  For whom are we performing?  Do we have any real idea?  The second meaning of Hello Stranger is thus to ask Chinese young people who they see when they look in the mirror.  If everyone is a stranger to you, then you are a stranger to everyone and also a stranger to yourself.
 
These are of course weighty themes that philosophers have debated for centuries, in China and elsewhere.  The conversations that make up the bulk of the book Hello Stranger are not abstract discussions of life’s ultimate meaning, but instead hands-on discussions with Chinese intellectual and artistic doers and shakers about how they do what they do.  Over the course of the five conversations, Xiang Biao searches for what he calls “handles,” life-hacks that will open up into something else, leveraging a unique experience into a broader approach with wider applications. 
 
The heart of Hello Stranger is these conversations and the conversationalists.  Four of the five were chosen by Sanlian Life Weekly, one of China’s best-known mainstream journals (when it remade its profile in the 1990s it modeled itself after the American weekly Time magazine).  Xiang Biao’s previous projects and impact caught Life Weekly’s attention, and Xiang worked together with the editorial staff of the journal to put together the package that became Hello Stranger, illustrating again that Xiang is not a marginal academic figure working in obscurity in Germany but instead a cultural and intellectual figure of considerable importance in China’s mainstream media world, a world with which Xiang is eager to collaborate because it multiplies his reach and his message in China.
 
The five conversationalists include: 

Liu Xiaodong, an oil painter and one of China’s best-known artists (he has a considerable international profile as well);

Liu Yuelai, an urban planner and environmentalist who engages in a sort of sneaky activism by finding empty spaces in urban Shanghai and convincing Shanghai residents to come out of their isolation in their high-rise apartments and work together to plant gardens;

Li Yifan, a documentary filmmaker who focuses on China’s marginal population(s), in the context of Hello Stranger on a subgroup of very young migrant workers known as the “Smarts” who assert a bold if fleeting sense of agency through radically extreme and immediately visible hairstyles;

Shen Zhijun, who runs one of China’s major zoos in Nanjing and engages with Chinese young people’s newly developed affinity for animals (many seem to prefer pet ownership to intimate relationships with other people) by creating a zoo that is animal-centered and not people-centered, where animals are active and not passive players in the experience;

​and He Wapi, an anthropologist and media personality who writes detective novels and works on murders (which often occur in the context of intimate personal relationships) and public security issues.
 
Xiang Biao’s goal in these conversations is not to discuss his ideas about alienation and strangers in China with his guests but instead to present them as people who in some way have broken through the barriers that confine many Chinese young people to isolation. 
 
Xiang chose Liu Xiaodong because of his unique powers of observation.  Virtually all of Liu's works are portraits, some of friends and family, some of relative strangers, but all are rendered with both a verisimilitude and what I can only describe as a massive dose of empathy, which makes his art attractive and unforgettable (just google his name and click “images.”  You’re in for a treat). 
 
The conversation with Liu Yuelai describes China’s process of urbanization – ring roads and high-rises, basically – and how Liu has worked patiently, empty lot by empty lot, to draw Chinese people out of their apartments and into hands-on work and conversations such work inevitably produces.
 
Li Yifan and Xiang discuss Li’s career as a filmmaker and his focus on marginal groups, beginning with the 1.5 million people displaced by China’s Three Gorges Dam project (“displaced” is a bureaucratic word for the disappearance of hundreds of villages, markets, temples, memories by submersing an area larger than the municipality of Chicago).  Li and Xiang focus on Li’s ethnographic work with the Smarts in the factory towns of Guangdong, learning about the bleakness of their lives and their desperate attempt to assert agency through changing their personal appearance. 
 
With Shen Zhijun, Xiang discusses the changing attitudes of Chinese young people toward animals and what this means for their sense of identity and personhood.  Shen in turn describes in detail how he has rethought the mission of a zoo in light of China’s current social and cultural realities, in a sense elevating animals to near-human positions, giving them names and psychological traits, at the same time working to return them so something like their natural habitats and thus respecting their dignity as animals.
 
Finally, Xiang and He Wapi discuss two distinct, if perhaps related, aspects of her work.  First is a popular blog she has run in which she follows murder cases in China, providing details and documents that inspire a large following.  In terms of the Hello Stranger project, this speaks to the fear of intimacy and the “stranger-making” tendencies that Xiang observes in Chinese society, in other words, the idea that intimacy is problematic.  Second is He’s research on security guards working in residential complexes in the larger Shanghai region.  He was drawn to this topic after noticing a huge rise in the security industry despite the lack of a corresponding rise in crime rates.  Her ethnographic research led her to several conclusions:  1.  The guards do relatively little in terms of crime prevention, and instead interact with delivery drivers and residents (over concerns like parking, garbage, etc.); 2.  The guards are almost always migrant workers, the same sort of people they are trying to control (delivery drivers), more or less despised by residents, who seem them as much as a nuisance as genuine protection; 3.  The economic purpose of security guards is to maintain, through their physical presence and attributes, the idea that the residential compound is well cared for, thus preserving its market value.  The discussion thus turns around the themes of security and insecurity, and how such feelings are managed in certain situations in China.
 
Hello Stranger is thus a window into some of the vexing problems contemporary China is facing and what Chinese intellectuals, artists, filmmakers, and activists are doing about these problems, as well as further proof of Xiang Biao’s efforts and impact in China.  Self as Method sold more than 200,000 copies in Chinese and was named one of China’s “most impactful” books of 2020 by Douban (the rough equivalent of Amazon for books in China), and the English-language translation of the book (available free here) has been downloaded more than 430,000 times as I write this in early December of 2025.
 
Xiang Biao has been largely ignored to this point in North America, perhaps because he is not a dissident, which is the lens through which North America prefers to view Chinese intellectuals.  But if Xiang is not a dissident, neither is he an enthusiastic supporter of the Chinese Party-State.  He tells his truth and shapes his message as best he can in order to have the impact in China that he desires, an approach he shares with many patriotic Chinese intellectuals who are aware of the regime’s many flaws but who hope to make their contribution to China and thus to the world.
 
If Xiang Biao were French, or South Korean, or Brazilian, or Australian, chances are he would long ago have been recognized as an important thinker addressing universal themes:  young people and our collective future.  Early in 2026, Xiang and his team will start looking for a publisher for the English-language version of Hello Stranger, and we hope to find one who shares our vision of the global importance of his work.  If any of the readers of Reading the China Dreams have ideas, we're all ears.
 
 
Translation
 
I Am a Stranger
 
Who are Strangers?
 
Strangers are not merely people we don’t know. The world has always been full of people we don’t know, and if they are far away and unrelated to us, then they don’t really count, they aren’t on our radar.  In fact, the realization that there are many people in the world that we don’t know—and that these people might at the same time be connected to us—is itself a modern phenomenon.
 
In pre-modern societies, the appearance of a stranger often was an event in itself, and a stranger was seen either as an enemy or welcomed as a rare guest. In Latin languages, the words for hostility and hospitality share the same root, both derived from hostis (an outsider, someone from afar). Hostility and hospitality can shift in the blink of an eye, and it was only in modern times that “stranger” became a relatively stable concept, after a long period in which the idea occupied a prolonged intermediate status somewhere in between. Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe describe a key moment in modern society's discovery of the stranger. As a European colonial explorer, Robinson Crusoe encountered strangers in distant lands he had never imagined and when he returned to London’s bustling streets, not only did he feel like a stranger but this feeling made sense to him.
 
The stranger has become a universal modern persona; strangers embody differences of race, class, and gender, and the discovery of a world of strangers fueled the rise of colonialism and global capitalism, the plunder of resources, and exploitation of labor, even as the idea of the stranger also foretold the rise of individual consciousness, freedom, and democratic institutions. Indeed, Friday’s discovery of Robinson had a deeper impact on the course of world history.  The Fridays’ collective response to European strangers became an important driving force in the revolutions and transformations of the 20th century.
 
Modern strangers also reflect particular economic and social orders at a more micro level. Georg Simmel noted that one key characteristic of modern strangers – as opposed to the wanderers who are here today and gone tomorrow – is that they often come to stay.  I understand Simmel to mean that modern strangers find their place within the local economy and society without fully integrating culturally, spiritually, or in terms of lifestyle. Simmel was likely thinking of European Jews, who played a significant role in commerce but faced suspicion and exclusion in religious and social spheres. Roles associated with this image of the stranger include what are known as “minority brokers,” cultural minorities who become economically active intermediaries, as well as what Robert Park called “marginalized individuals,” such as immigrants and their descendants. These strangers are not outside of society, but instead constitute an indispensable part of social life. We talk about strangers like these because they have a certain relationship to us.
 
The emergence of a society of strangers has wrought alienation and conflict, even as it promised inclusivity and progress. Criticism of industrial society since the 18th century, as represented for example by German and British Romanticism, was largely inspired by a sense of fear and caution toward the phenomenon of strangers. These thinkers believed that the widespread presence of strangers signified social indifference, tension, and even the danger of society’s falling apart.
 
Marx's understanding of alienation is directly linked to the concept of the unfamiliar; alienation means that the world has become unknown. Influenced by Marxism, existentialism often critiqued the absurdity and oppression of society from the perspective of strangers – one thinks immediately of Albert Camus. In China studies, Lee Haiyan’s The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination (2014) explores various images of strangers in modern Chinese literature, including women, outsiders, foreigners, and even ghosts. Through the depiction of these strangers, modern society establishes hierarchies distinguishing what is “natural” from what is “unnatural,” and what is safe and reliable from what requires vigilance. Political scientists Dorothy Solinger and Li Zhang's research on China's migrant workers also makes clear that the household registration system excludes mobile populations from China’s urban life as defined by authorities, turning them into inferior “outsiders,” or strangers.[1]
 
Another perspective holds that strangers are a symbol of the openness and rationality of modern society and a driving force for progress. Had we been unable to imagine and recognize distant strangers, Kantian cosmopolitanism would have been impossible, as would the universal values that played a significant role in 20th-century politics. Benedict Anderson argues that modern nationalism is an “imagined community” whose psychological foundation lies in seeing strangers within national borders—no matter how far-flung—as being closely connected to oneself. Things like modern transportation, maps, vernacular novels and newspapers make up the infrastructure on which the image of the modern stranger rests (or, in Anderson’s words, the “grammar” of the imagined community). Durkheim argues that the essential feature of modern society is a complex division of labor, where strangers who do not know each other become mutually dependent, forming what he called “organic solidarity.” Organic solidarity replaced the “mechanical solidarity” of traditional societies, where people who knew one another lived together on the basis of shared similarities. Organic solidarity brought about major innovations in economics, society, and politics. For minority groups, women, and young people, unfamiliarity and anonymity often also mean freedom. This is one of the important reasons why cities are attractive.
 
The reason we are discussing strangers today is not only because we need to address the relationship between indifference and freedom, alienation and liberation, but also because something more concrete is happening in Chinese society at the beginning of the 21st century: a society of strangers is choosing to make strangers out of people who are not.  I am referring here to several trends that have emerged since the end of the 20th century.
 
First, strangers have become commonplace in daily life in China, and the boundaries between strangers and non-strangers have blurred. The distinction people once made between insiders and outsiders is no longer as significant as it once was, and people's wariness, fear, curiosity, and concern about strangers have all diminished, leaving indifference as the predominant feeling.
 
Second, what makes some people anxious – particularly younger people – is not how to interact with strangers, but how to deal with people they know. Some people now deliberately build degrees of distance into relationships, so that strangers remain strangers, something that occurs even in intimate relationships. In other words, people with whom one once had intimate ties can now become strangers almost overnight, and some young people even try to protect themselves from emotional pain by cutting ties with their loved ones. If one of the defining features of the modern era is that people came to understand that distant strangers might be related to them, today the reverse seems to be occurring:  we are starting to feel that people we know are unfamiliar to us. 
 
Ultimately, this kind of alienation also means that we become strangers to ourselves, unable to recognize who we truly are and what we really want. When we decide to do something, or even when we fall in love with someone or someone falls in love with us, we constantly worry about whether our decision or our love is sincere.  This inability to love is a consequence of the multiplication of strangers.
 
What some people call “weekend anxiety”—watching the clock tick away on weekends, wishing Monday would hurry up and get here so someone else could tell us what to do with ourselves—is another example of making a stranger even of oneself. It’s as if we can’t be alone with ourselves. In a society filled with strangers, people may feel uneasy or excited; but in a society where we constantly create new strangers we are seized by a sense of loneliness and confusion, an existential unease—not knowing how to relate to the world or to ourselves. People are not afraid that a stranger will suddenly cheat them, but rather that they themselves might turn into a stranger, suddenly metamorphosizing into something unimaginable.
 
This book is made up of five conversations organized around the theme of “Hello, Stranger,” the idea being not only to explore how to welcome strangers into our ranks, but more importantly, how to address the problem of feeling that “I am a stranger.” The people we talk to come from the fields of social science, contemporary art and painting, film and documentaries, community development, crime analysis, and the relationship between humans and animals, all to reflect on the social transformations underlying the phenomenon of what I call “stranger-making” and to discuss possible solutions. In these conversations, we foreground perspectives on everyday life, aiming to explore a grounded mode of thinking—that is, an intellectual exploration based in lived experience, which can help us find our own footholds and life hacks amidst the tidal wave of alienation.
 
Transparent but Impermeable
 
The current trend toward willful alienation in Chinese society reflects a changing image of strangers over the past few decades. In the late 1990s, the notion of strangers triggered a sense of moral anxiety in the thinking of many Chinese people.  At the time, there was a highly mediatized series of events in which people failed to help others in distress, displaying a cold indifference toward the suffering of strangers (traffic accidents or abandoned babies, for example).  There were also cases where scammers played on the sympathy of strangers, for instance pretending to be hit by a car and accepting “offers of assistance” from the driver who believed they had hurt the person.[2] People did not dare to help strangers, nor did they dare to readily accept help from strangers.
 
In the summer of 1994, I went on a fieldwork trip to Guangdong with fellow classmates from Beijing University to conduct a survey of migrant workers. On the train, an announcement repeated that “Under no circumstances should you entrust valuable items to strangers for safekeeping. Be extra cautious about accepting advice from strangers.” My classmates and I were quite put off by this, feeling that public messaging should promote public trust rather than constantly reminding people to be suspicious. Our discussions completed, I took a nap. When I woke up I discovered that the expensive Sony tape recorder I had left beside my head had vanished. The faces of the passengers seated around me were a total blank, and when asked if they had seen anything, they swore ignorance. My classmates and I looked at one another, wondering what to make of our theoretical arguments, while the financial loss left me bereft for the rest of the trip.
 
Public anxiety at the time was closely linked to the sharp increase in urban-rural population mobility after the late 1980s which led to the appearance of large numbers of strangers in cities. In Dongguan – our fieldwork site in Guangdong – we witnessed firsthand the concerns of citizens and local governments about social order in a booming economy. We also observed the extent to which migrant workers were strangers: they could not integrate into urban society despite being one of the foundations of urban economic development; at the same time, they could not return home (except as failures) despite the roots they still had there. So they were treated as strangers by urban residents and no longer felt at home in the villages they had left behind.
 
What left a particularly deep impression on me was when migrant workers told me that their most frequent conflicts did not occur at work, but often grew out of trivial matters in the dormitories where they lived, such as washing their hair or using a hot plate. I had originally imagined that migrant workers would become friends and learn to support one another in the dorms where they lived. The reality was just the opposite: in the confined space of their shared living quarters, they were strangers to one another.
 
Thirty years later, train announcements no longer warn of the dangers of strangers, and I no longer worry about my tape recorder being stolen. The ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition technology have greatly improved public safety, and strangers no longer fear one another. However, the phenomenon of stranger-making seems only to have intensified. One of the people interviewed in this volume, film director Li Yifan, also visited Dongguan - the same town where I had done fieldwork with my Beida colleagues as students years ago - while filming his documentary “We Were Smart.”[3]
 
Li discovered, as we had, that migrant workers sharing the same dormitory barely knew one another. The assembly lines run 24 hours a day, and workers do not start and end their shifts at fixed times, but instead work according to the daily demands of their factories. The dorm has become a place where workers take turns sleeping, and the beds are full day and night.
 
This willful estrangement we observed among those sharing a living space has now spread to university students, young white-collar workers, residents of youth apartments[4], and tenants in urban villages. A German colleague of mine asked me about a friend of theirs, a Chinese student at Leipzig University, who lived together in a Germany university residence with other Chinese roommates, none of whom spoke to one another on a regular basis.  When asked if they wanted to eat together or go out and engage in a collective activity, they acted as if they were offended. My guess is that these students likely see socializing as a burden and fear that once they are no longer strangers and get to know each other, the relationship will become more complicated and an even greater chore.
 
Accompanying this trend toward stranger-making is a process of orderliness, in which society becomes safer and more predictable. Duan Zhipeng, a designer and my colleague at the Max Planck Institute in Germany describes this highly ordered form of alienation as being “transparent yet impermeable,” like a glass box. He points out that materials like glass and plastic are transparent yet impermeable; in other words, light passes through, but not matter.  Sealing living matter in glass or plastic containers will almost certainly kill it. Permeable yet opaque materials include leaves, soil, seawater, air laden with dew and dust, and especially the skin of living organisms, all of which are porous without being transparent. Life is sustained through the ceaseless yet often invisible exchange of substances through such media.
 
Chinese society has become increasingly transparent in the early 20th century, or to be more precise, it has become increasingly organized around the principle of transparency. The goal is that everything should be recognizable and predictable, with no surprises, mysteries, or waiting. But in a transparent but impermeable world, people cannot hear one another breathe and find it difficult to open up or to ask others to open up.  Strangers remain strangers, never becoming friends, enemies, or guests, never communicating ambiguity, surprises, shadows, or highlights.
 
In this context, transparency does not mean the ability to truly see everything, but instead that what you want to see, what you prioritize, is already laid out before you. At the same time, you do not see what you don’t want to see or consider irrelevant—like the expressions and emotions of people you pass in the street. Everything that can be seen makes perfect sense, and what is not seen is not worth seeing.
When we cannot see something, we assume it does not exist or should not exist. What is objectively invisible becomes subjectively unseen. We can see an endless stream of strangers, greet them, connect with them through social media, and express our thoughts without reservation, but they remain forever strangers. If their responses are not what we want, we can just block them. The entire world seems to be at our fingertips, the world displayed on our screen, but in an instant, this world can turn blank. We seem to have mastered the bird’s-eye view, but it feels like we are always standing outside of the messy richness of life.
 
Life has become transparent yet impermeable, part of the abstraction of the public sphere. Transparency clearly implies the notion of public—a space where everyone is fully exposed and has no place to hide—but this public is not constructed through our mutual interactions. Instead, it is shaped by third-party systems that permeate every aspect of our lives. These third parties define all individuals, dictate their behavior, and hold them directly accountable. A public sphere formed through horizontal interactions between individuals is not transparent but rather porous; the public sphere established by a unified third party is abstract and transparent.
 
This third party manifests itself in different ways and produces different effects at different stages of history. It can be a deity in a highly religious society where all individuals are loyal to and accountable to the deity. This third party can be money, as in Simmel’s analysis, where money is the measure of everything, enabling everyone to make their calculations and predictions according to a unified rationality. This third party can also be a commodity; Marx profoundly revealed that the logic of commodity production and exchange eliminates various social differences, transforming nearly all social relationships into relationships subordinate to commodities. This third party can also be political authority. Jeremy Bentham's circular prison is highly transparent because all prisoners regard the soldiers in the central watchtower as the core reference point—the sole nearly omnipotent third party—while prisoners do not communicate with one another horizontally. Hannah Arendt described the rise of totalitarianism in this way: everyone flocks to a single authority while individuals enjoy no privacy and exhibit no substantial differences or connections between one another, thus becoming completely transparent.
 
In the 21st century, these forces—ideological, economic, and political—are intertwined in an unprecedentedly intricate and complex manner. Equally important is the fact that technology has become a decisive third party that permeates all areas of life. Online payments, public and private surveillance, and facial recognition have made social life highly transparent, while also rendering substantive communication between individuals nearly non-existent through its impermeability.
 
The impact of technology on everyday public discourse is particularly evident. Public discourse was once shaped by the interplay of personal letters, face-to-face conversations, gossip, word-of-mouth, and personal reputation. In the era of social media and platform economies, individuals can directly participate in transparent public discourse without gaps or entanglements, intermediaries or delays. However, everyone expresses themselves with extreme caution because they are all naked in the eyes of the system.
 
The transformation of taxis in China is a case worth analyzing. In Chinese cities during the 1990s, taxis were jokingly referred to as “the number one channel of the People's Radio Station.” Taxi drivers had no end of news stories and rumors, and loved to chat and debate with their passengers. However, today's taxis have become very quiet. One of the reasons for this was the public safety incidents involving ride-hailing services in the late 2010s. In a period when public safety was in general improving, these cases caused widespread panic. Instead of looking at driver qualifications and labor relations, platform companies and the government introduced a comprehensive monitoring system.
 
While this system has indeed improved personal safety to a certain extent, drivers and passengers no longer communicate. Drivers are reluctant to talk, and some have posted signs saying, “conversations in this car are being recorded.” The monitoring system even automatically reminds drivers and passengers, to “not discuss matters unrelated to the trip.” As another example, people are now hesitant when speaking in public places like streets or restaurants, as they never know where someone might be recording, filming, or live-streaming, which could capture their casual remarks. In a world that is less and less interactive, countless people are set on recording as much as they can, creating a transparent society.
 
The workplace is another arena where third-party forces render the public sphere abstract. A netizen named “Opera” with whom we communicated in the context of this project wondered why colleagues remain so distant at work. He noted that colleagues often do little more than nod at one another at the work place, and leave deeper interactions for occasions that are not work-related. Such incidents of stranger-making in the workplace are certainly related to interpersonal competition and conflicts of interest, but most of it is structural. Technological advancements have linked each individual's work process directly to the system, so that there is no longer a need for interpersonal connections. In order to ensure its own efficient interactions with individuals, the system does not encourage horizontal connections. Friendships become scarce precisely because they consist of emotional and intellectual exchanges between free individuals, completely detached from the system as a third party. In this kind of abstracted public space, strangers themselves are no longer frightening, but groups of strangers—where strangers may form relationships in which they are no longer strangers to one another—become a danger that must be constantly guarded against by the system.
 
When everything is transparent, this kind of abstracted public can lose its content. For example, moral considerations may become meaningless. People have moral questions largely because of limited information. When things are not transparent, people need to make judgments and choices, which is why they need morality, which allows people to continue to interact meaningfully even in the absence of transparency.
 
The virtue of altruism requires people to make many judgments in ambiguous situations, such as whether the person seeking help truly needs it, how the funds they are asking for will be used, and whether the recipient will truly express gratitude. Once the process becomes completely transparent, it will be highly vigilant toward those seeking help, investigating their “true background,” and interrogating the “true motives” of those offering assistance; moral issues here are transformed into matters of risk control and efficiency management. This does not mean that people will henceforth be at ease and suffer no more moral anxiety. On the contrary, once morality becomes an issue of probability, everything becomes untrustworthy, unreal, and uncontrollable. All goodwill is tainted with shadows and doubts, and moral and ethical considerations are replaced by pervasive psychological tension and anxiety.
 
Finding good friends through social media is another example of how transparency can lead to anxiety. When human interaction becomes a process of matching and selection, it can be more efficient than ever. However, it also means that you are constantly being judged and scrutinized. People must always be careful not to send out negative messages, lest they be abandoned and rejected. In Camus's The Stranger, Meursault – who is the stranger at the core of the story - sees brilliant sunlight everywhere, an intense brightness that illuminates everything and leaves him blinded and lost. Is Meursault’s sunlight our transparency?
 
On the one hand, people feel there are too many unknowns and the future is uncertain, but at the same time, they feel they can size up anything in a glance; the two perspectives are not contradictory in a society pursuing transparency. A prisoner knows little about the other prisoners surrounding them, nor do they know what will happen today or tomorrow, yet this does not affect their sense of transparency.
 
In a transparent world, a person’s fate is already determined by the powers that be; an uncertain future is an individual’s misfortune and it has no meaning. At the same time, if a person truly conforms to the rules of the transparent world, these unpredictable events can be overcome and transformed into predictable ones. The meaning of life seems to lie in overcoming one's own opaque experiences according to the slogans that hang on the walls and in the air, thereby becoming a person everyone can recognize. Finally, transparency is the way society is organized, an image through which people understand personal and social relationships, and thus also becomes their objective state of existence.
 
Approval and Recognition:  Small-Town Test-Takers as Strangers
 
If migrant workers were the typical representatives of strangers in late 20th-century Chinese society, then “small-town test-takers”[5] have replaced them in the 21st century. The term small town test-takers (小镇做题家/xiaozhen zuotijia) refers to people from small towns – or those who are otherwise underprivileged – who master the educational system and test their way into a good university and ultimately a good job, but who mistake test-taking skills for the skills needed for success in the real world.  The expression began as a put-down by big-city people who believed themselves to possess the skills these other people did not, but that subsequently, the small-town test-takers reappropriated the expression themselves, using it both ironically, self-deprecatingly, and also as an expression of their sense of alienation.  The term emerged and spread in the 2010s as a widespread and heart-felt sense of identity among Chinese young people who are aware of their success but still feel somehow as if they don’t deserve it and are living a lie.
 
These small-town test-takers present a stark contrast to migrant workers, who exist outside the system (especially in terms of household registration and social security).  Migrant workers have had no choice but to carve out a niche outside the formal system, since what they receive from that system does not allow them to survive and flourish. In contrast, the small-town test-takers are part of the system and receive its approval and support.  They do not feel like outsiders in the city, yet they still lack a comfortable sense of agency.
 
Small-town test-takers often attribute their feeling of being a stranger to their background; hailing from small towns, they know little of the wider world, and the scarcity of educational resources has left them without needed social and cultural capital. However, this does not explain why this self-identification as small-town test-takers did not emerge earlier. After all, people from rural areas have played significant roles in China's revolution and reform, without being burdened by this sense of being a stranger. Indeed, a small-town background has often been seen as an advantage. For example, one of the interviewees for this volume, the painter Liu Xiaodong, draws significant inspiration for his art and ideas from his own small-town background. Additionally, by the end of the 20th century, the gap in educational conditions between urban and rural areas had closed significantly. After 2000, the nationwide consolidation of rural schools allowed many children from the countryside to attend county-level primary schools and live on campus, with the result that their learning and leisure activities differed little from those of urban children. Finally, we also find the mentality of small-town test-takers in many young people born in cities. The reason why this mindset resonates widely is that it reflects how many people feel, and not just the uniqueness of a particular social group.
 
That small-town test-takers choose to see themselves as strangers is due to their unique background and instead a result of the pressure they have long felt to escape that background. It is not that they can’t be “forgiven” for their rural background, but rather that their efforts to sever ties with this background have robbed them of their peace of mind, leaving them unable to effectively utilize the resources provided by the life world they have entered. Compared to young people in big cities, small-town test-takers have been told from a young age that their goal is to leave their hometown, and that they should see themselves as strangers in the environment in which they grew up. They are familiar with the urban environment and the lifestyle of the urban middle class but know little about their origins. In a conversation with me, an undergraduate student from Shenzhen University said:
 
“The fate of the small-town test-taker is to always feel the need to leave the place where they were born, and the farther away the better. There is nothing but pain there, so home always feels both familiar and unfamiliar. To this point in my life, I have never formed a genuine connection with any place. When I was at school, I lived in a very isolated space, a space that was closed and closely managed. I felt hesitant, insecure, as if unfamiliar with everything. I felt that my mission was to escape. I never want to go back to that fucking place. I felt that my life was out of my control, and I had a sense of complete powerlessness.”
 
In addition to wanting to leave their place of origin, small-town test takers also often find themselves in situations where their relationships with people are fraught or even ruptured.  In the same discussion just mentioned, another Shenzhen University student said: 
 
“[When I was young] I had a heavy workload at school and didn't have much social life, so my parents basically abandoned us to the school. My life experiences were completely cut off from the world around me. I knew nothing about my parents’ work away from home. Nor did I have any idea about people of my age who didn't attend good schools like mine. I was isolated from reality...and felt distant from the life I was leading. I couldn't understand these people I saw. I felt like a monster, and that other people were monsters too.”
 
The sense of alienation felt by small-town test takers is also linked to their sense of self-denial.  A scholar who participated in a China Youth experiment called “seeing what’s around you” is not herself from a small town, but her forthright self-analysis may well express the feelings of many young people:
 
“You can work together with your parents, teachers to create an ideal person. This ideal person can be very strong but also can deeply dislike himself, because he is a fake person. In my case, this person suppressed my true self, turning me into an empty shell, producing a sense of powerlessness. I don't know why I’m here. So my struggle is truly a matter of life and death—a struggle over whether to exist at all. Because this powerful ‘me’ looks at itself and refuses to accept itself. If it cannot meet society's standards of success, it feels it has no value and will be rejected by others. It’s true that the underlying logic here is that I cannot accept myself. My current situation is bad because I despise myself. My disgust doesn't have a specific target or focus on a particular aspect of my personality. It's more of a generalized feeling that the real me is unacceptable, and only the acceptable version of myself is the one that’s striving to improve. This isn't just about work or study; it extends to my appearance, physical health, and weight. I feel I can't accept myself as I am, so I feel compelled to work out, take classes, and learn social etiquette and communication skills. In other words, I feel that my true character is unacceptable, so I need to remake myself.”
 
The sense of being a stranger felt by the small-town test-takers reflects the nature of Chinese social life, which again is transparent but impermeable. We see the transparency in the fact that their life trajectories and achievements accord with the standards and expectations set by the system, leading to the expected stamp of approval. The impermeability lies in their inability to freely express their personal struggles, hesitations, and anxieties. While they have earned approval, what they lack is recognition in the sense of being understood and seen. Approval is the system's evaluation of an individual's achievements based on predetermined standards, determining whether to reward or punish. Recognition, by contrast, involves agency:  it is one subject's comprehension of another subject—seeing that person's emotions, thoughts, struggles, and history, with no relation to testing, judgment, or rewards and punishments.
 
Approval is a one-way street.  It is the system's judgment of the individual, and individuals who seek approval cannot influence the system. Recognition is a matter of reciprocal understanding. Recognition must be achieved through two-way communication; the sense of dignity that recognition brings does not come from praise and rewards, but from the sincerity of the communication process. The nature of recognition means that if we do not recognize others, we cannot feel others' recognition of us. This also means that our sense of our own value does not only involve others' recognition of us, but also our recognition of others. This is because when we recognize others, we must open ourselves up and recognize someone else by evoking our own experiences and emotions. In this sense, what we get when we recognize someone else is a new insight into ourselves in addition to what we learn about the other person. 
 
Our recognition of others, others' recognition of us, and our self-understanding are all one and the same. If a person can only boast of the glowing achievements the system has bestowed upon them but has no personal experiences worth sharing, they will not be recognized and will have difficulty recognizing others. Moreover, in the long-term pursuit of recognition, one’s self becomes an object to be mobilized and controlled so as to suppress impulses unrelated to scholarly achievements.  One no longer recognizes one's own natural feelings and becomes a stranger to oneself.
 
The issue we are currently facing is not merely that approval has replaced recognition; more critically, approval has become the very basis of recognition. The idea that “love is conditional”—you will only be loved if you prove you are worthy—is a significant reason why many young people feel from an early age that life is a burden. Most of them do not lack love, but the conditional nature of love instilled by family, school, and society has turned nurturing into a burden. The condition for obtaining love and understanding is to first obtain approval. The reason many people sacrifice so much time and effort in pursuit of approval is precisely because this is the first step to earning recognition—when I prove that I am normal and successful, I earn attention, understanding, and love.
 
In an exchange with me, a reader with the online name KK (26 years old, graduated from university and worked in the public sector before recently resigning) wrote that “we have been immersed in a tense atmosphere since childhood. In family relationships, we must repay our parents' sacrifices; in academics or careers, we must outcompete others; in marriage, we must maintain the ideal image in our partner's mind. It seems that every social relationship has its own set of demands, and those who fail to meet the standards lose their eligibility to be heard and loved.” In our online conversation, KK mentioned the famous case of Wu Xieyu[6]: “He went from the village to Peking University, I feel like this could have been anybody. He had nothing else to cling to; his only reasons for living were his own ambition, his own efforts to study and prove himself. He was proving himself for his mother. His life was consumed by this, and it ended in killing his mother [as a way of putting an end to his endless pursuit of approval and recognition]." When approval becomes the foundation of recognition, familial bonds can become an additional burden. Wu Xieyu may be the mirror image of Meursault. Meursault distances himself from his mother (“My mother died today. Or maybe yesterday. I don't know.” This is the first thing we hear Meursault say), rejects society's judgment of him, and believes that human existence is meaningless. Meursault becomes alienated in the process of distancing himself from and resisting social relationships. Wu Xieyu clung to his mother and to society in his constant pursuit of approval, which ultimately alienated him from everything. Wu Xieyu is the tragic stranger of our time.
 
Negative empathy
 
In today's China, people have become strangers to one another, not merely because they feel others are too different from themselves to be understood, but instead the opposite—they feel everyone is too similar. Since everyone is so alike, we have lost our curiosity and have no interest in getting to know one another. Since everyone is the same, our interests are similar, and there may always be competition and conflict. Because everyone is so alike, if we were to open up to others, it might expose our own vulnerabilities. Finally, because everyone is the same, other people’s struggles are not worthy of particular sympathy, their successes are not really worth celebration, and their passion for their careers is also suspect. A doctoral student from an architecture school told me about her experience studying abroad in the US. She put a lot of effort into a particular project, and all of her classmates were excited about it except a fello Chinese student, whose first reaction was, “Why are you so cutthroat?”
 
This is a form of empathy in which people share the same heart, and these hearts feel the same thing. However, this empathy is quite different from the kind of empathy we generally talk about, which fosters deep understanding. Nigel Rapport emphasizes what he calls the “anyone” consciousness (the idea that anyone could have such an experience, that “I could be next”) that enables people to transcend the particular world in which they live and recognize the commonality of humanity. “This irreducible life force manifests itself by transcending any attempt to reduce or categorize it... enabling us to transcend political boundaries and acknowledge our commonality.”[7] However, the understanding that “we are all the same” can also lead to alienation. We may be lonely because we can’t find anyone like us, but we may also be lonely because everyone around us is just like us.  The meaning and destination of life have already been defined; everyone is a copy of one another. There is nothing to say, and no need to speak. I call this “negative empathy.”
 
Why might empathy potentially shift from positive to negative? A key difference between the two may lie in their starting points. Positive empathy is more likely to assume that “everyone is different,” that life is multifaceted, people are complex, and each individual's experiences—especially their feelings at this particular moment—are unique. Starting from the idea that “everyone is different,” one approaches communication with respect and curiosity, seeking to discover specific overlaps and similarities in each other's experiences. Negative empathy, however, begins with the assumption that “everyone is the same,” which becomes the lens through which they see the world:  they only see sameness, and anything different becomes abnormal, something that should not appear in one's transparent world, and thus an object to be blocked out. Starting from the premise that “everyone is the same,” differences are perceived as disturbances, anomalies, or even pretentiousness displayed by the other person.
 
Negative empathy is a construct created by humans. The “utilitarian assumption” is one aspect of this process of construction. The utilitarian assumption does not mean imagining one another as competitors but refers instead to the idea that people should understand the world and handle interpersonal relationships based on this assumption. Since everyone makes their own calculations when doing things, it is best not to ask too many questions, nor is there any need to do so. The utilitarian assumption also serves as a reminder to focus attention on matters that can bring tangible benefits, and not to concern oneself with matters that have no direct consequences. This differs from judging others according to one’s standards or putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. When you do either of these, the “self” is clearly defined, and the assumption is that others are the same as oneself.
 
However, negative empathy and utilitarianism do not have a clear sense of self as their starting point. They emphasize that all people “ought” to be the same, and one should align one's thoughts and actions with this “ought.” It is not about putting yourself in another’s shoes, but rather “putting others into your shoes.” The utilitarian assumption is, in a certain sense, also a self-protection mechanism. It does its best to eliminate the emotional, complex, subtle aspects of life that cannot be optimized, making the world simple and transparent, making thoughts swift and smooth, a single logic capable of explaining everything.
 
Another mechanism for constructing negative empathy is “dehistoricization,” which involves discarding to the extent possible those parts of one's life that are undignified, do not meet mainstream expectations, and are unrelated to current interests. In our conversation for this volume, He Wapi mentions a case where a father killed his two small children to ensure the happiness of his new marriage. While this is an extreme case, it reflects a more widespread mindset: that a new beginning seems to require the complete burial of the past.
 
Also linked to dehistoricization is disassociation. The meticulously cultivated “persona,” the automated whitening of photos and even web conference footage, and the glorification of “double purity” or “double virginity” in online novels (where the protagonist, regardless of gender, is always a virgin both psychologically and physically)—all these are ways of applying makeup to reality, erasing personal history and conforming to others' expectations. The cruelty of hymen repair surgery is not merely because it seeks to conceal the past and lock oneself into a lifelong lie through physical surgery, nor is it merely because it signifies submitting to vulgar forces and betraying one's life experience and dignity. Rather, this severing, this dehistoricization and disassociation, causes one to genuinely hate oneself, to curse those one once loved—or those one still loves—hoping they never existed. The self-cleansing and bleaching of one’s identity is surrender of agency to something external.
 
How are Ungrounded People to Achieve Groundedness in their Thinking?
 
When we say “hello, stranger,” it does not mean that we consider ourselves natives of a particular place or even people who have found a place to settle down. However, to reflect carefully on the subjectivity of the statement “I am a stranger” and think about the state of stranger-making, we cannot think of it from the perspective of a stranger or an outsider. What we need is a new “grounded” way of thinking.
As I’m using it here, grounded attempts to combine Heidegger's notion of “dwelling” with Pan Guangdan's[8] concept of “adaptation.”   As we use the term in daily conversation, “dwelling” means making a house a home, emotionally embracing one’s immediate environment.  For Heidegger, the notion describes the sense that our existence in the present moment is safe, knowable, and rich. It means building and nurturing a home on this earth where all parts of the world are closely interconnected. At the same time, the idea of dwelling is open-ended; people are constantly changing, and life continually unfolds new meanings.
 
If Heidegger’s dwelling refers a constant state of being, Pan’s “adaptation” is an ethical state of being, the search for an appropriate place within rich social relationships and harmoniously coexisting with all aspects of life. The idea is that once we harmoniously positioning ourselves within social relationships, we can continue to grow and flourish. So if Heidegger's notion of dwelling focuses on the relationship between humans and nature, and humans and themselves, Pan’s adaptation emphasizes social relationships and social ethics.  My idea of “groundedness” aims to combine these two concepts.
 
A grounded style of thinking is based on the awareness that changing the status quo cannot be achieved through a single action or decision but rather requires a new understanding of life. From this new understanding, new behaviors, new relationships, and new meanings of life emerge. This new understanding must be grounded in concrete reality and confront various complexities: Why do I always feel like a stranger? Why do I unconsciously compare myself to others? Why is it so difficult to accept certain criticisms? Rather than making a blanket judgment about life—Why isn't life the way I want it to be? why is everything unjust and unequal?—grounded thinking involves “consciousness-raising” of one's own experiences.  In this context we might think of Paulo Freire's educational philosophy, which aims to enable oppressed groups to gradually become aware of their social circumstances through the narration of their own experiences rather than through the study of new theories.
 
Grounded thinking is open-ended, requiring constant back-and-forth between different experiences and ideas, and continuous self-correction. The purpose of this kind of thinking is not to reach a conclusion, nor does it have a clear direction. However, each step strives to give richer meaning to experience and to plant one’s ideas ever more firmly in reality. This process of thinking is like wading in water or strolling through a forest, evoking emotional and physical responses, much like good works of art and philosophy. It allows thinking to grow out of experience, experience to grow into thinking, and for us to grow into our environment. Thinking and experience intertwine like vines, firmly embracing our bodies.
 
In today's world, and especially for young people living as strangers, grounded thinking requires extra effort to develop. The thinking habits we acquire from modern education are in no way “grounded.” They objectify (reify) the content of thought, engage in detached, abstract, deductive reasoning, thus becoming highly “transparent.” As Arendt noted, pure thought often amounts to an escape from reality, ultimately leading to a dogmatic ideology that claims to explain everything.
 
To develop a grounded way of thinking, the first step might be to treat thinking as a practical process, that is, to recognize that thinking is inseparable from observation, memory, bodily perception, expression, and dialogue. The conversations in Hello, Stranger represent just such a practical exercise in thinking, exploring what grounded thinking as a practice might look like. Our five guests are all experts in “recognizing strangers”—in that their work involves understanding and expressing the lives and psychological states of strangers. For example, painter Liu Xiaodong uses a highly realistic style to give us vibrant, moving images of what those ubiquitous, yet faceless strangers (such as migrant workers and small-town youth) actually look like. Anthropologist He Wapi has studied one of the most familiar examples of strangers in Chinese society—security guards. Documentary director Li Yifan introduces us to the “smarts,” a group of low-income young people who express their sense of otherness through bizarre hairstyles that cry out for attention. Urban design expert Liu Yuelai organizes strangers to participate in the construction of urban community gardens. Finally, Shen Zhijun, director of Nanjing Hongshan Zoo, aims to transform the zoo into an animal-centered institution, placing animals—as strangers—at the center. As artists, researchers, and social activists, their work does not merely make unfamiliar phenomena familiar; they also propose unfamiliar perspectives, re-familiarizing familiar phenomena to spark new reflections.
 
I hope that the conversations in Hello, Stranger will also provide a space for reflection. The multitude of perspectives, and especially the back-and-forth dialogue, can create a space where you can walk in, look around, and touch different ideas. Perhaps you will feel like you can linger for a while and let your thoughts take over. You may not leave with a clear-cut decision about a concrete question, but the world as a whole might look a little different.

Notes

[1]See Dorothy J. Salinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China:  Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley, 1999); and Li Zhang, Strangers in the City:  Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China’s Floating Population (Stanford, 2001).
 
[2]Translator’s note:  In Chinese, this is known as “knocking over the porcelain 碰瓷 pengci,” something unscrupulous owners or clerks in China shops might do before blaming it on the customer and demanding compensation.

[3]Translator’s note:  See here for an interview with Li about his film as well as images of the young people and their distinctive hairstyles.

[4]Translator’s note:  青年公寓/qingnian gongyu.  The term generally refers to apartments or hostels subsidized by companies and located close to those companies, where young recruits, generally just out of university, can live at reduced rates. The degree of “sharing” can vary widely, from kitchens and shared living spaces to beds for those who work on different shifts.

[5]Translator’s note:  Small-town test-taker perhaps overlaps with the concept of the “imposter syndrome” in North America, a term first used in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes focusing on high-achieving women who felt they were frauds despite their objective accomplishments.

[6]Translator’s note:  See here for more information on the Xie Tianqin story, a major event in China.

[7]Nigel Rapport, “Anthropology Through Levinas: Knowing the Uniqueness of Ego and the Mystery of Otherness, Current Anthropology 56.2;  256-276 (April 2015).
 
[8]Translator’s note:  Although Pan Guangdan (潘光旦; 1898–1967) is best known outside of China for his now outdated views on eugenics, he in fact was a sociologist and intellectual with wide-ranging interests and a considerable impact in the Republican era.