Xiang Biao on the Student Protests

Xiang Biao Talks about the Worldwide Student Movement, the Crisis of the Liberal Order, the Nearby and “Global Grassroots”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xiang Biao (b. 1972) is co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany.  He began his scholarly career as a sociologist studying migrant workers in 1990s Beijing, and in 2000 published a widely read book on “Zhejiang Village,” the name of the community where the migrant workers lived.  After moving from China to Oxford, Xiang broadened his focus to high-tech Indian migrant labor in Australia, and then to the subject of unskilled labor migration from China to Japan, South Korea and Singapore. 
 
He deliberately widened his research field in this manner to avoid being labeled a China anthropologist, because he wanted to ask questions that extend beyond the field of Chinese anthropology.  Indeed, from the beginning, Xiang has been less concerned with theory as it is understood in the Western academy and more with real world problem-solving and practical agency.  In his work on Zhejiang Village, for example, he contrasts the pragmatism, flexibility, and creativity of the migrant workers with the rigidity and lack of imagination of government authorities, and celebrates the victories, however ephemeral, of entrepreneurial agency.[2]
 
In 2020, he published Self as Method, which signaled a move away from ethnographic fieldwork and toward a more public-facing posture as a public intellectual.  Self as Method is composed of three interviews Xiang gave to Wu Qi 吴琦, a journalist who works for Dandu单读, a newish publishing house in Beijing that promises to “unite a new generation of authors and readers through text, audio, video, and multimedia platforms.”[3]
 
The origin of the project was the observation by a Dandu editor that many Chinese people – particularly young people - appear not to be very happy as China’s century dawns.  Massive and rapid changes have radically changed the social worlds and daily lives of two or three generations of Chinese people since reform and opening.  To cite just one example, when I was a student in China in the 1980s, most people did not buy newspapers, but read them in public display cases because people were poor and because not enough newspapers were printed to go around.  Now everyone lives, shops, comments, and fantasizes on their smartphone.  China is much richer now, but modernity and the market economy have created their own new challenges and stresses, particularly as China’s period of rapid growth seems to be coming to an end. As a result, young people often feel lost and confused, and don’t know what questions to ask or where to look for counsel or wisdom.  This is the need Self as Method set out to fulfill.
 
In terms of content, the interviews in Self as Method are in part autobiographical – Xiang was already something of a celebrity in China – and in part pedagogical.  The main lesson Xiang hoped to teach is that each of us should start with our individual, thinking selves, analyze our surroundings so as to situate ourselves in terms of history, social class, education, family and genetic heritage, etc., and then, employing the tools we have available thanks principally to the Internet, locate and activate our agency for our own individual betterment and for the betterment of our local community.  To Xiang, this means something like applying the spirit and method of the social sciences to our individual (and eventually communal) lives through a grounded engagement in the worlds we inhabit.  As we will see, this approach provides the framework for Xiang’s subsequent work, and is the spirit that informs the interview translated here.
 
Reduced to its core, Xiang’s message in Self as Method can perhaps sound a bit too hopeful, but the book nonetheless struck a chord with readers.  To date, it has sold some 235,000 copies in China, and Douban - the rough Chinese equivalent of Amazon for books - named Self as Method the most influential book of the year for 2020.  The English translation of Self as Method (available here in Open Access) has been downloaded 330,000 times, and in 2023, The Economist included Self as Method as one of the four basic texts one should read to understand the discipline of anthropology.[4]  The popularity of the English translation has been surprising – it helps that it’s free – but it reflects Xiang Biao’s ambitions:  he is not a Chinese scholar writing China books, he is a scholar from China who writes about China from a global perspective.
 
The text translated here is another interview with Wu Qi, part of a new book project currently taking form.  It is focused on international relations and student demonstrations, which have not been among Xiang’s major concerns to date, but the piece nonetheless reflects his approach, which is to look at the stresses a system produces and to search for solutions to those problems through grounded engagement with local worlds.
 
What sparked the interview was Germany’s suppression of views that are critical of Israel’s conduct of the ongoing war in Gaza. Artists, journalists, and scholars who did not follow the official line were silenced, threatened, attacked, and even fired.[5]  This shocked Xiang Biao, who greatly values intellectual independence and the role of universities and research institutions in protecting that independence.  He subsequently began to pay close attention to the student demonstrations protesting Israel’s prosecution of the war, and especially to the aggressively offensive posture of the German government and German universities, although he came to see them as merely an extreme example of a worldwide posture.  In the interview with Wu Qi, Xiang attempts to tease out the logic of the demonstrations and the universities’ reactions to the demonstration. 
 
His argument, in a nutshell, is that the backlash against the demonstrations is a product of a larger failure of the postwar liberal global order.  However one views the current war, the Palestinian problem has been festering for decades, and the global liberal order has, broadly speaking, sought to solve the problem by supporting Israel as the sole genuine democracy in the region.  The point of the student demonstrations is to shine a light on the manifest injustice this “solution” has produced.   Governments and universities have shut down the protests so vigorously essentially because their only answer to the Palestinian problem is more of the same and “let’s not talk about it or I’m sending in the police.”
 
Xiang Biao notes that the blind spots of the global liberal order are particularly glaring in Germany, where anti-antisemitism and support for Israel are at the core of how Germany rebuilt itself after the war, the result of course of the immense guilt occasioned by the Holocaust.  Citizen identity, particularly in what the former West Germany, is in part fashioned by the need to atone for past crimes by condemning any expression of antisemitism, which has of course added to the difficulty of integrating Muslim immigrants (5.5 million, out of a total population of 83.8 million, roughly 6.5% of the total), some of whom hold antisemitic or anti-Israel beliefs, into 21st century German society.  The far right in Germany – particularly the Alternative for Germany - is on the rise, largely fueled by fears of the Muslim population, and uses rhetoric that threatens to “crack the Nazi firewall.”  The base of the far right is in the poorer areas of the former Eastern Germany which remain less integrated into the postwar liberal order.  This only makes German authorities more sensitive and brittle.
 
In other words, the symbolic, almost ideological weight of the language and feelings surrounding Israel and anti-antisemitism has taken on such proportions that it blinds German leaders and German universities to manifest cases of injustice on both the international and domestic fronts.  Whatever one thinks of Israel’s conduct of the war, there is no way it will resolve the Palestinian question, yet in Germany, a debate topic such as “Hamas was wrong to attack Israel, but Israel’s response appears to be out of proportion” risks accusations of antisemitism.  And fighting the far right in Germany by prosecuting those who flirt with Nazi symbolism or antisemitic postures will not solve the social problems fueling the rise of the far right.  Telling people who protest this situation to sit down and shut up, without answering their questions or concerns, will not solve the problem, but make it worse.
 
Much of the interview involves Xiang’s effort to figure out what to do with this insight.  He frames his response in ways consistent with his approach in Self as Method, as illustrated by the title of the piece, which may be mystifying to readers unfamiliar with Xiang’s work.  The title is “Xiang Biao Talks about the Worldwide Student Movement, the Crisis of the Liberal Order, the Nearby and “Global Grassroots.”  Everyone is familiar with the student movement, and I have already discussed Xiang’s view of the crisis of the liberal order, but a few words about “the nearby” and the “global grassroots” might be welcome. 
 
The “nearby” is a translation of the Chinese word fujin/附近, a concept Xiang has been working on over the past few years, beginning with his observation that many people – particularly but not exclusively younger people – live their lives largely through their smart phones.  This means that they are immediately in contact with the faraway, whether it be international news headlines or entertainment – gaming or virtual reality shows – and tend to forget their nearby.  Their nearby does not necessarily mean the physical community in which they live, although it could be.  It means instead the immediate surroundings all of us take with us or accept from the world everywhere we go, the services we consume and the people who supply those services.  The 1980s newspaper display case I mentioned above  was also a spot for spontaneous exchange of opinions. Strangers who gathered when reading newspapers almost always got into lively debates with each other about government policies and how policies affected their life.  
 
In essence, Xiang is calling for a clear-eyed mindfulness toward the circumstances that surround us, in this instance the student protests, the students, the administrators.  Xiang describes his efforts to engage his nearby in the context of the protests, talking to students and fellow professors and deans rather than reading yet another scholarly article as an exercise in attempting to comprehend and perhaps change systems that are not functioning as they should.
 
The “global grassroots” has perhaps a more rebellious connotation than the nearby.  The Chinese word I have translated imperfectly as grassroots is minjian/民间, and requires further explanation.  Minjian literally means “among the people,” and thus is used in terms like “popular religion” or “folk art.”  But the term also means “non-governmental” or “something done by the people and not by the government.”  Sebastian Veg has written a lovely book titled Minjian:  The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals, in which he describes the evolution, in the 1990s and 2000s, of writers, cinematographers, historians, lawyers, etc., who attempted to work out from the people and not down from the state. 

To me, minjian has something to do with the profound divide between people and state that marks Chinese history and China today; “grassroots” is close as a translation, but I’m not sure it packs the same political charge.  By talking about a “global grassroots,” Xiang is perhaps saying “maybe the divide between state and society is as profound in the West as it is in China, and maybe we need to consciously step outside the rigid structures that are silencing us instead of trying to solve problems within the existing systems.”
 
The Chinese interview has been read some 36,000 times in China.  Not of Xiang's readers agree with him, of course.  I found one online comment particularly interesting:  "We used to be 'grassroots' here, but somehow those grassroots disappeared. The truth is that the grassroots has been 'naturalized' by those in power through various institutional means, whether by force or by soft persuasion. Once   naturalized, the vitality that comes from the grassroots withers and dies. If the grassroots has to hide itself, how can it ever become public?"
 
Translation
 
01. The student movement reflects the overall crisis of the global liberal order

Dandu:  Have you been paying attention to European reactions to the recent mass protests against the Israeli-Palestinian war in the U.S.? It must be interesting to be in Germany, which has formed a very strong alliance with Israel over the years because of the Holocaust, all of which plays out in a very special way in the international arena.
 
Xiang Biao:   One of the striking features of the student movement was that the protests were defined before they even started, as if the schools, the government and the media were in a state of preemptive panic. It wasn’t the movement itself that first brought the world's attention to the event, but rather the Congressional hearings where the presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT were called to testify, resulting in the resignation of the presidents of Harvard and Penn for having "condoned antisemitism." The student movement at Columbia only really got big after the university president, Minouche Shafik, was called to testify, after which the university asked the police to intervene on the university campus and the protests spread like wildfire throughout the country.   It was like this but worse in Germany, where every time students set up tents or voiced their opinion, it was as if the school had already decided this could lead to antisemitism, hatred, unsafe schools, etc., so they called the police whenever it looked like there would be more than a handful of protesters. There are also schools that took the initiative to tighten security in all of their buildings, nipping in the bud the possibility of protesting.
 
If governments and universities are already in a state of preemptive panic, then they completely lose it when something happens, because this is exactly what validates the initial sense of panic. For example, it is not surprising that the Freie Universität Berlin called the police early on, because authorities there were already worried that such things might happen, and when it looked they might, they made the call.  This only made the students angrier. 
 
Both the panic of the government and the universities and the determination of the students were huge surprises to me, and to my mind, they speak to the crisis of the global liberal order. The students are so committed because they see that the liberal order is incapable of addressing basic injustices, and even tries to cover up the historical injustices it has left unresolved, leaving the students utterly disillusioned. And the authorities are panicking in advance because they realize that the protests are not just isolated events, but part of something that will eventually strike a nerve at a much deeper level. 
 
This is easier to see in Germany. The liberal order goes very deep in Germany, and its reconstruction after World War II was a model for the success of the liberal order.  But now the political and social elite have come to realize that their beloved liberal order is facing internal crises, and that it is unable to solve either problems in Gaza or internal divisions within German society, such as the rise of the ultra-right.  So they are in a sense of high alert, which is why they wanted to put down the student movement as soon as they got a whiff of it.
 
Dandu:  Why do you draw a direct line between the Palestinian-Israeli question and the crisis of the global liberal order?

Xiang Biao:  I should start by saying that by “liberal order” I mean the actual liberal order that has evolved over the course of history, and not liberal principles in terms of theory. This order describes itself in the theoretical language of human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and justice, but when it took shape in the world, it was grounded in Western ideas and interests, and was inseparable from the history of colonialism.  Its current military foundation is the American imperial order, and its material foundation is the neoliberal economy.   It requires a certain ideological and emotional buy-in for this order to control world affairs, as well a series of institutions to manufacture this buy-in, one of which is the university.  From this perspective, the student movement has intensified and highlighted the contradictions of the liberal order.
 
In Germany, the suppression of the student movement was principally motivated by an extreme vigilance on the question of antisemitism, given the links between preventing antisemitism and the German post-war liberal order. This is of course part of a historical repentance for the Holocaust, but it is also related to the fact that after 1990, the liberal order in Germany meant that West Germany imposed unity on East Germany – and not on the equal terms that East Germany had wanted.  It turns out that while historical repentance was important for West Germany, East Germany felt it had already done its part by joining with the Soviet Union to defeat fascism during the war.   After unification, historical repentance and vigilance against antisemitism, as understood in West Germany, became the moral standard for progressive Germans. Questions that require serious historical reflections have since been reduced to questions of identity. 
 
In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hanna Arendt emphasized that the Holocaust was not just a crime against the Jews, but against all of humanity, and should be understood in this larger existential sense as an example of the “banality of evil” and not reduced to the sins of one race against another. The vast majority of those killed in the Holocaust were Jews, but many Communists, gypsies, and homosexuals were killed as well. Members of the Frankfurt School argued that one of the causes of the Holocaust was modernity, in the sense that it applied rationality to the systematic murder of people; indeed, Frankfurt School thinkers were surprised by the extent of antisemitism they discovered while in exile in the United States, where of course no such massacre occurred.
 
The Holocaust was thus not a necessary consequence of antisemitism. Antisemitism has been a fact of life in Europe since the Middle Ages, a manifestation of racism, but Jews and Christians in Germany have also coexisted for a long time, and the massacre of Jews was not the result of a sudden intensification of the conflict between the two groups, but rather a problem of modernity, including the problems of racial categorizing and the rigidity that that can accompany rationalism, dehumanization, etc. 
 
It goes without saying that we need to seriously reflect on both the murder of Jews and antisemitism, but one does not necessarily lead to the other. After the Cold War, however, the two seemed to become increasingly linked together in Germans’ minds, and the Holocaust became solely a crime against the Jews. In this way, the liberal order has come to manifest itself in Germany as a moral rebuke to the German people and a profound sense of guilt regarding the Jewish people, and not a thorough reflection on the rationality of modernity.
 
In the United States, the material and institutional foundations of the liberal order stand out even more clearly, because American global domination would be impossible without them. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the military-industrial complex, etc. form the basis of the American liberal order, including the control of the resources and regions of the Middle East through controlling the circulation of  the petrodollar. Israel plays a key role in this context, which is why American defense of Israel is basically unconditional. The United States often says that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and therefore must be defended.
 
Another institutional basis of the liberal order is the increasing role of technology and bureaucracy in areas such as education, industry, and even business. People like me are also part of the liberal order.  The generation of managers that has grown up after 1968 has had basically no experience of handling serious political disputes; they see themselves solely as managers, and this includes university administrators.  Basically, their education comes from books, from which they learned basic liberal principles, such as "freedom of speech must be protected, but freedom of speech is not absolute," by which they try to smooth things over.  But they have not weathered the storms of history and are incapable of dealing with issues having to do with the historically formed power relations, especially those having to do with justice. 

Dandu:  With events still unfolding, what other concrete evidence is there to support this judgment?
 
Xiang Biao:  In fact, I am not the only one who saying that the students are challenging the reigning order; those who oppose the movement insist on it. Recently, more and more people have accused the student movement of challenging modern civilization, Western civilization, and democracy, and some commentators in the US have even put the students and Trump on the same page, arguing that they, like Trump, want to destroy Western democracy.[6]
 
In fact, the students have not said that they are opposed to the current order. Many of their slogans are also liberal, such as those touching on human rights and freedom; their demands are even very market-oriented, such as the demand for divestment from Israel and for transparency in university finances. But universities and governments are treating students like the enemy.

Dandu:  So how do you explain why the universities and the government have been so quick to silence students this time around?
 
Xiang Biao:  This is the key question. When I say that the liberal order is in crisis, it is not because the students are attacking it; the liberal order is already suffering from so many internal conflicts and weaknesses that its institutions took one look at the movement and overreacted. Most of us, including the students themselves, did not expect the universities’ reactions to be so strong and unified. The Democratic Party is still in power in the United States, and Germany is ruled by a left-wing coalition of the Greens and the Social Democrats is in power.  So why are universities, which are supposed to be very liberal places, so adamantly opposed to the student movement on this issue? It would be understandable if a right-winger like Trump were in power. But now liberal institutions like universities and research institutes seem to have taken sides against themselves.
 
There may be two reasons behind this.  One is that the liberal order is becoming more and more rigid in its day-to-day management, to the extent that the order itself decides, regardless of the nature of the incident in question. Even a Leftist scholar  like Joseph Stiglitz said that while students have the right to protest, that right to protest cannot violate others’ rights to learn. Psychologist Steven Pinker, a co-president of Harvard's Council on  Academic Freedom, agreed to withhold diplomas from 13 pro-Palestinian Harvard students, leading to more than a thousand people leaving the Harvard graduation ceremony in protest.  One of Pinker’s explanations was that the protestors were using loudspeakers outside the dormitories, which kept other students from sleeping.
 
It's the same story in Germany: the students were criticized for violating the rights of other students to study in a certain building (i.e., the one occupied by students). These accusations are ridiculous. In Germany, especially in Berlin, there are regular train and public transport strikes, and during the pandemic, people did things like storm test centers.  All of this was permitted, and everyone believes that the point of protests is to disrupt daily life, otherwise they wouldn't be called mass protests, and these disruptions have to be accepted because it is their right. So how can it be said that it is wrong for students to pitch a tent, use loudspeakers, or occupy classrooms on campus? This is a conservative tendency resulting from an instrumentalist rationality in a liberal order that is no longer capable of facing true political debates.
 
Another reason the liberal order is so sensitive may be more profound, going back to questions at the level of ideology or values. How can the students’ pursuit of justice be a challenge to Western civilization? This has to do with the inextricable relationship between Israel and the predominantly Western international order. In the transition from the European colonial era to the current era of nation-states, Israel came into being as a nation-state as a European solution to a European crime.  Indeed, we can see the establishment of the state of Israel as a sort of formal end to this European evil, a period at the end of a shameful sentence. 
 
Now, however, the fact that people strongly question Israel’s behavior, and particularly the unimaginable price paid by the Palestinian people for this “solution,” the European evil of the 2nd World War has resurfaced, becoming a run-on sentence without a period.  Post-war American imperialism is different from European imperialism in that it is grounded in an order of nation-states, all sovereign but also militarily, economically, and politically under the overarching influence of the United States. European colonialism was opposed to the nation-state because of its direct occupation of territory, which did not allow for independent sovereignty. The worldwide rise of the nation-state put a formal end to European colonialism.

Race also plays a role here, and there is a real fear of Muslims in some parts of the German popular mentality. Germans don't see the price that Muslims, especially the Palestinians, had to pay when Western-style "universal principles" suddenly arrived in the Middle East, first with the dismantling of the Ottoman empire, and then at the end of the 2nd World War. Instead of understanding Muslim feelings, they see them as undermining universal values. This time, among the forces opposing the student movement we also find what is called “pinkwashing,” meaning that sexual minorities accuse Hamas and even the entire Muslim region of persecuting sexual minorities, and thus support Israel, believing that to support Israel is to support the principles of tolerance and equality, and to support civilization.

02. The specter of racism in the liberal order
 
Dandu:  At the outset, the student movement was focused on their universities’ investments in Israel, and the movement continues to spread globally on a wide range of social media; with this spread, the range of topics has expanded to include not only the question of Israel and Palestine, but also other injustices, such as why women and the LGBT community support Palestine.  So the scale of mobilization has escalated, and the focus of concern has grown even wider.  I wonder if, looking from inside the student movement itself, it was their experience of protest that led them to this greater self-awareness?
 
Xiang Biao:  I would tend to think so, otherwise you can't explain their high emotional intensity and determination. What explains the motivation of the American, British and Dutch students? The American students realized that had Israel not played an important role in the existing US-dominated order, it could not have waged the brutal war that it did and could not have gained so much international support in the last 70 years.  They were particularly angry because they felt that their own economic contributions were being used to kill people.
 
British students know this history as well. In 1937, Winston Churchill defended Zionist movement before the Palestine Royal Commission in London by saying: "I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time […] I do not admit that a wrong has been done to [people in Palestine and other colonies] by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."[7]  British students feel historically responsible. Education in Holland on the history of colonialism is quite good, which explains why students there are as active as they are.
 
The students' concerns do not stop at the humanitarian level. In fact, governments are engaged in humanitarian aid, and Germany recently gave the Palestinians 16 million euros to this end, but Palestinians may view such humanitarian support as humiliating:  “What do you think we are when on the one hand you give arms to Israel, and on the other give us ‘humanitarian’ aid?”  In the anthropological discussion of gifts we find the idea that some gifts are actually very hurtful. Nor are the students making humanitarian demands. What the students have understood is, first, the historical roots and responsibilities on the issue, the historical injustices that have been perpetuated up to the present, and the inability to solve these over the past 76 years, which many of the students find intolerable; and second, a strong sense of injustice in general, to which they associate issues of race, class, environment, and the suffering they have experienced in their own lives. 
 
British students constantly bring up the Churchill quote mentioned above because it connects British history, racism on British soil, and the current tragedy in Gaza. In the United States and the United Kingdom, social movements against racism, such as Black Lives Matter, have affected the movement, which has become a centralized revolt against perceived injustices by many people, especially young people.

Dandu:  The situation in the United States is relatively easy to keep up with in the Chinese-speaking world and is probably one of the few international issues that can be relatively openly reported in that world. The situation in Germany is even more surprising, as several generations of intellectuals and young people in China have been educated to take Germany as a model of how to deal with historical memory and how to reflect on oneself, and that’s as far as it goes for Chinese impressions of Germany.
 
Xiang Biao:  Many Germans are also surprised at just how sensitive some government officials and university leaders are on these issues. It seems to be a reflexive refusal to rethink their previous position.

Dandu:  How can this surprise be understood at the micro level?  You talked about the global liberal order as becoming ever more holistic and abstract, so how is it that the weight of all of this falls on university teachers and government officials?  How does it translate concretely into the sensitive decisions they have had to make?  Popular German newspapers like Bild-Zeitung went so far as to put names and pictures of the students involved in the protests and the professors who supported them on their front page, saying that they are core antisemitic players.  This is almost like big character posters from our Cultural Revolution![8]
 
Xiang Biao:  There may be several reasons, one of which is that in the education and upbringing of the current generation of managers in Germany, reflection on the war has been the overriding concern. A German colleague told me that their education at the primary and secondary levels was all about what Germany did in the 2nd World War, and as a consequence, they knew very little about world history. It is deeply ensconced in their memory that the Nazis systematically killed six million Jews.
 
In the consciousness of the average German, this is a very difficult figure to digest, and now that the Jews finally have their own homeland, the Germans feel that they have a moral obligation to help the Jews to protect this homeland. Of course, there are blind spots in the public debate. Many Germans could only see that the Jewish homeland had been attacked by an external enemy, but they did not think about the fact that history did not begin on October 7, and indeed at least had to be pushed back to 1948.

Second, domestic politics in Germany is also in a state of heightened sensitivity and confusion right now because of the rapid rise of the AFD [Alternative for Germany, a far-right party founded in 2013], so liberals are very nervous and unsure of how to handle the situation. From the liberal perspective, the right-wing tradition of antisemitism and the international left-wing critique of Israel are lumped together.  In the absence of a clear understanding of the overall situation, everything comes down to the words you choose to use.
 
Antisemitism is an absolute taboo in Germany, and if a politician is criticized for condoning it, their political life comes to an immediate end. This in turn suggests that the liberal order is becoming more and more fragile and rigid, its judgements more and more grounded in symbolic statements rather than in debate, reflection, and analysis. I once said in a German newspaper that it seems as if politicians have become policemen, and only worry about red lines that must not be crossed.  They no longer have their own worldview. That was last year, and what I see now is even more extreme.
 
Dandu:  So there are two surprises here.  One is that Germany, a country whose cultural image has always been one of rationality, analysis, and rules, has run into a blind spot when it comes to Israel.  The other is that the decision-makers in universities, who should be scholars, lack knowledge about the basic context of the Palestinian-Israeli issue in the 20th century, and have problems understanding the distinction between the state of Israel and the Jewish issue. This latter is even more surprising to me.

Xiang Biao:  We all imagine that German institutions are very rational, but in fact, if there is a lack of a democratic culture, then rationality, with its emphasis on obedience to rules, can nourish the sprouts of hierarchy or even totalitarianism. As for managers lacking knowledge, the truth is that it is common that all political classes and management are limited in knowledge , but the willingness to call police onto your university campus has nothing to do with your knowledge of the Middle East. Similarly, they know that they can’t just fire people, but they did it anyway.  Their political independence as educational and scientific institutions, at least on this topic, has now taken a big hit.
 
All of this has been an education for me.  Before this, I was not too concerned about race relations or post-colonial relations. Now it seems that the specter of racism is still very much alive. This is not saying that today’s liberals are racist, but the system and ideology on which they are based have historically been closely linked to racial inequality. This latent contradiction was perhaps not obvious before, but as economic growth has slowed, societies have become more diverse, and the international situation more unstable, contradictions have continued to accumulate and are now exposed. 
 
Had there not been historical racial prejudices and a selective positioning of Israel and Palestine on the scale of Western universal values, it would have been impossible to remain indifferent to the massacre of so many Palestinians.  The fact that people turn a blind eye to such a catastrophe only shows that, in their minds, the lives of some people are worth more than others. The weight of their own moral burden and the need to deal with their own guilt has meant that they are willing to let others suffer and die.
 
03. A large opening has been made
 
Dandu:   Student radicalization has been a global phenomenon, and radical social movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have been popping up all the time, so why do you think this movement is so unique?

Xiang Biao:  Because it opened up a big hole in a sensitive place. There have been several waves of protest movements since the end of the 1990s. For example, the Seattle protests in 1999 were against neo-liberalism and globalization, and on their heels came Occupy Wall Street, the anti-capitalism movement related to the financial crisis; a second wave was anti-war, mainly against the US and British invasions of Iraq and later Afghanistan; the third was about climate change, and Germany was very active in this one; the fourth was related to gender and race, #MeToo and "Black Lives Matter”;  and fifth was the democratization movement, including the Arab Spring, Iranian resistance to the morality police, etc. Then came the current Palestinian-Israeli issue.

The shortest of these previous movements, and the one that got the least media attention, was the movement against the war in Iraq. At the same time, this movement probably accomplished the most in the way of pushing immediate change forward, in Britain bringing an end to Tony Blair's “New Labour” and what his called his "Third Way," an attempt to navigate between traditional visions of right and left, embraced by Bill Clinton as well. The Third Way was not directly related to the Iraq war, but the movements against the war and against the militarism of the Western-centered order were not something that liberalism itself could readily appropriate, so the movements galvanized a wide range of social forces in the UK. 
 
Other movements, such as anti-globalization, pro-democracy, and identity politics were in fact appropriated by the dominant liberal order to varying degrees. For example, racism became an issue of opposition to police brutality, a matter of talking about how to improve police enforcement and give more support to marginalized groups, a matter of social work and social policy. By contrast, the Palestinian-Israeli issue cannot be transformed into a liberal topic like identity politics – although in fact, that's exactly what the mainstream media and the government are trying to do right now, to depict support for Palestine as a matter of personal identity rather than political choice – which is why it can powerfully challenge the existing order. At the same time, because things in Palestine now are so unacceptable, more and more groups like "Queers for Palestine" or "Jews for Palestine" are joining the movement.
 
From this perspective, I think that this movement is different, in that it will spill over from the current terrain, allowing young people to face society with a new political and historical understanding. For example, as things worked out, Columbia University was unable to hold a university-wide graduation ceremony and had to hold separate events in each college.  Several students handcuffed themselves and one or two ripped up their diplomas on the spot. Such behavior will shape new personalities, and the people affected will explore new ways of life and working, and these attitudes will spread out from the battlefield of the university to the whole of society.
 
This is similar to what happened in 1968, where it started with students, and students at elite universities, and as things diffused throughout society, it really changed people's self-perception and lifestyles, playing a role in deciding what kind of people you find interesting, what kind of people you want to be friends with, etc. The other movements from the 1990s on probably did not have such effects.

Dandu:  Is it possible to achieve any positive results when the student movement continues to be rapidly suppressed in various countries?

Xiang Biao:  In the short term, movements in a particular country or region are likely to be suppressed, but as a global movement it will continue, despite ups and downs. Government interests around the world are not the same, and the speed and manner of response will be different. It's a bit like what how we used to think about guerrilla warfare, which reacts in terms of facts and opportunities on the ground. There are obviously connections between the movements, but each place has its own particular local ecology. Looking at it now, it started in New York, then moved to France, then to the American South and West, and finally to Canada, Australia, England, ultimately expanding to Malaysia, Indonesia and even Japan, Latin America and of course South Africa.  This even reminds me of Zhejiang Village back in the day, the way that it ebbed and flowed, following its own path, feeding on its own life force.[9]

Even if the movement recedes, the coastline is never the same after the tide goes out. As Gramsci said, if those in power have to use direct force to control the people, it means that the original cultural and ideological hegemony is no longer effective. What we are facing is no longer an unconscious or subconscious obedience to the present order, but a "war of position" in Gramsci’s terms.[10]  In other words, we have to redefine things, re-discuss basic norms and standards, and make clear our ideological positions. Once combat is engaged, it is difficult to contain it by short-term repression in the short term. The "war of position" is likely to be long-lasting and therefore requires our special attention.

Dandu:  Since society's opinions are now more polarized and it's hard to form a broad coalition, how do you go about pushing the government or the rule-makers to make changes?
 
Xiang Biao:  The short-term effects may not be visible for a while. But the long term is still important. The most important thing is that this movement has given many people hope. I was particularly struck by the refugee camps in Gaza, in the West Bank, where Palestinian refugees wrote "Thank you, American students" on their tents.  During her speech at a commencement ceremony at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Amira Hass, the only Israeli journalist to have been based in Gaza, read a letter from a friend there saying that the U.S. student movement had given them “a ray of hope.”
 
Though there has been no immediate change in the political situation in the United States or Germany, it may be hugely important that that students gave three million Palestinians a ray of hope. The students are still young, and this movement will have an impact on the next forty or fifty years of their careers, on how they organize their lives, what dreams they chase, what they are willing to give up. You perhaps feel desperate at the moment here, but a gesture you make shines a ray of hope elsewhere; and when people elsewhere see that hope, the light of hope echoes back, which gives you the strength to carry on.  Hope is not about expectations for the future; hope is about the present. Hope is not optimism that things will get better; hope is keeping a belief alive when you don't know if things will get better. Confucius actually gave us a very good definition of hope:  “working toward a goal the realization of which [we know] to be hopeless.”[11]

Some people have asked whether everything will go back to the way it was before October 7 once the war is over. I don’t think so. First of all, we have seen substantial progress. The United Nations, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice and other human rights organizations have all actively played their roles. At the same time, the huge hole torn in the liberal order has changed people’s ideas, ways of thinking, and workstyles, so we will not simply go back.
 
04. The nearby and the “global grassroots”
 
Dandu:  You've been talking a lot about the "nearby" in the past few years. This time you are talking about distant and important international situations and historical changes.  I am wondering if there is a specific reason for this shift?
 
Xiang Biao:   This is all directly related to what’s going on in my personal nearby. If I had not been paying attention to my own local world, I might not have been able to see why the student movement puts its finger on the inherent contradictions of the liberal order, nor would I have truly understood the thinking of young people, all of which allowed me to grasp the fact that this movement would not be appropriated by the liberal order.
 
Dandu:   So the nearby and the distant are related.  What other impacts will the movement have on your nearby?

Xiang Biao:   Everyone’s nearby is of course influenced by many distant places, but this in no way means that when you’ve understood what’s happening there you understand what’s happening here. The actual cognitive process is often the opposite, in the sense that only when you have a clearer understanding of the concrete world around you can you see what’s happening a long way away, and what it means to you. In my case, one of the "nearby problems" I am now confronting is how to reconceptualize the nature and social role of universities and public research institutions.

The protests have clearly diminished the credibility of these teaching and research institutions. Many people now feel that universities are problematic, including students, professors, as well as political forces outside the universities.  When a foundational component of the liberal order is challenged from all sides, how can we call it a benchmark of liberal democracy?
 
At the same time, there may be divisions within the university, divisions that may have more and more to do with disciplines. Another context we have to face today is militarization, the rapid growth of the military-industrial complex around the world. With militarization, there may develop a new set of relationships between research institutions and military and state politics. Military-related disciplines will become more and more reliant on official funding or even military funding, which can get in the way of debates on social issues.
 
The humanities and some of the social sciences, by contrast, may well oppose militarization and the concentration of power, and would constantly create problems for officialdom. In this way, we could wind up with giant disciplines that keep getting money, keep producing results, and are compliant with power, and other disciplines that don't get any money but are constantly critical, and such contradictions might well become more profound in coming years.
 
But a bigger conflict may arise between professors and students on one side and the universities on the other. People may feel that universities are becoming more and more like official institutions and lose trust in them. It is awful to watch your university president call for the police to come and arrest your students. Many of my colleagues in the U.S. and Germany now are extremely on edge and only use their private e-mail accounts for fear of being spied on by their universities. This would have seemed unthinkable to me even a year ago.

What will happen next? University administrations, out of inertia and self-protection, may evolve toward a more conservative liberalism, i.e., increasing dedication to making everything run smoothly, to which end they devise sets of ever-more detailed rules, which become more and more encompassing so as to ensure that everyone feels "safe" - as if the main goal of the university is to ensure safety, and not free exploration and debate. Demands on teachers may also become more and more performance-based, forcing them to publish more in academic journals, so that they will not have the time and energy to care about social issues.
 
It's easy to see how professors might become even more polarized should this happen.  Some teachers will go back to their studies, bury themselves in writing and publishing, and pursue career success. Other professors, having experienced the protests as a sort of baptism of fire, will prefer to orient their work toward the outside world and toward politics.
 
More critical are the students. Having experienced the protests, what sort of intellectual nourishment will they look for? In the wake of the student movement, people will have a new understanding of their relationship with history, an understanding that can be very concrete and can include their own physical reactions of fear, excitement, disappointment, etc., during the movement. They may want to see ideas that can help them deepen these feelings and lose interest in the kind of academic papers they generally write at university. Columbia's emergence as a center of the movement is clearly inseparable from Edward Said's intellectual legacy. They need ideas that give them strength.

At a conference in Berlin that I attended, a German academic had just returned from a stay in Oxford University, and mentioned a friend from Oxford who had told her that decolonizing the Western university was tantamount to "de-boning" a skeleton: nothing will be left.  She said she had given up on the university. Then she looked at the group - most of the people who were there were university teachers and students - and said, “Please don't put all your eggs in one basket.  You must have your own space outside of the university, so that when we de-bone the university, we will still be able to see you.”  So young students and dissenting professors may move toward a kind of “grassroots stance” in their research, teaching, and life course.
 
I'm using the word “grassroots” to describe a kind of self-positioning or stance.  Grassroots does not just mean non-governmental, but instead refers to a particular kind of position, a way of making demands, and a workstyle.  For example, if I talk about a grassroots lawyer or writer, I am not saying that they have no formal work position, but instead am pointing out that their workstyles, self-positioning, and social function are different from those of more “official” people. When I say that it is an orientation, this is because grassroots itself has no organizational sense, and gives everyone a sense of what is interesting and what is not. 
 
In the scholarly world, a “grassroots orientation” refers to a way of producing knowledge.  This mode of knowledge production is suspicious of the norms that generally surround scholarship and has lost interest is conventional scholarship.  It is turned off by the CVs, qualifications, and titles associated with famous universities, and is more interested in ideas coming from places outside of formal institutions, and in collaborating more with artists, activists, and non-academics.  This mode of knowledge production no longer wants to submit its work to university journals but would rather turn its hand to writing for different audiences. 
 
Looking at history, important ideas have often had a strong grassroots sense.  When we present a scholar today, we always say what university or institute they come from.  But with which university or institute do we associate Marx, Rousseau, Sartre, or Marcuse?  The reason Hannah Arendt’s ideas were different is in large measure because she never had a permanent position in a particular institution, which allowed her to follow her path to its grassroots end.  If a grassroots orientation can really take hold, it goes without saying that our nearbys will become more interesting.  The nearby has always been grounded in the grassroots.
 
Dandu:  Your discussion of “grassroots,” your mention above of “echoes of hope," as well as the concept of "the nearby" is meant to motivate people to continue to do things, but another common feeling today is a sense of despair, and there is a lot of discussion or skepticism about what kind of action is more effective.

Xiang Biao:  Actually, we are doing something all the time. Silence is also a way of doing something, whether you are silent because you refuse to obey, or refuse to follow the trend, or are silent out of fear, or are silent because you choose not to feel - the meaning and consequences of such silences are different, this is action nonetheless.
 
In the case at hand, my actions can be described in a certain sense as a "reconstruction of my nearby."  Such a reconstruction involves two levels of understanding. The first is to rediscover people who think in ways similar to me and with whom I can exist as a community. Some of my friends told me that during the protests they had many exchanges outside their usual university settings; for example, lawyers and artists from different settings came together to form new local groups.[12]   My upstairs neighbor, a mathematician, kept me informed about the progress of the social debate in Germany, and also poured cold water on my ideas time to time, affording me another way to see what was going on.
 
The second and more important layer has to do with dealing  the various cracks that suddenly appeared in our nearby.  When something big happens, we suddenly realize that the people we work and socialize with see things differently than we do, which can lead to emotional rifts. How do you keep working with this neighbor given your new realization?  Should we continue talking or do our best to avoid them? Dealing with such rifts and awkwardness is an important topic of the nearby.
 
I have tried any number of approaches, including individual talks, group talks, and roundtables.  I have also explored the idea of “starting out by embracing the feelings of the other and then discussing the differences between us,” which allows people to share their personal feelings (e.g., fear, insecurity) before discussing social issues. The purpose of these practices is to avoid drawing lines at the outset and then getting emotionally involved, which only further widens the differences in viewpoints and makes it more and more difficult to talk, and to reverse the relationship between feelings and viewpoints, so that we can recognize each other emotionally before we talk about our viewpoints.
 
To give you an example, I made a special effort to seek out young German students who had reservations about the pro-Palestinian movement, and at one point I asked a Ph.D. student how those anti-Israel slogans made her feel, whether angry, hurt, or something else.  She said that it was neither, and that her first reaction was fear:  fear that such slogans would further destabilize German society. She noted that various extreme views have been on the rise over the past few years in Germany, especially racism and of course antisemitism. If anti-Israel hate speech continued to spread, she said, it could increase tendencies toward violence. She was actually very concerned about everyday racism in German society and was empathetic to the Muslim community. I later found out that this is what quite a few Germans think, which means that considerations of security and stability are a sensitive issue in their minds. This was very enlightening for me.
 
Here we might make a distinction here between "position" and "positionality." Position is what you are for or against, and its fairly black and white. Positionality refers to how you relate to the environment and the system, e.g., your gender, identity, and the perspective from which you see things. If you just look at this Ph.D. student's position, it’s that she does not support the student movement against Israel, and it looks pretty set in stone. But when you understand her positionality, i.e. the fear of further destabilization of German society, then the meaning of her position becomes more understandable and open to discussion.
 
But I have also found out that it is not easy to have such discussions on sensitive topics in our daily work. Everyone seems to have plenty to say, but once I have to organize a discussion, many people bow out. This wastes a lot of energy, and sometimes I wonder if it is really necessary. But it has also been a very crucial part of my growth process, forcing me to face some very concrete issues that I had never thought about.
 
Dandu:   So how do you handle your own positionality?  Or how do you reconcile the distance between the nearby and the faraway?
 
Xiang Biao:   This is one of the issues at the heart of our debate. There is this debate among our colleagues in the institute, and among the participants in the movement, about the relationship between the distant and the nearby:  when we focus our eyes on the nearby, are we not comparing apples and oranges, making a life-or-death issue in Gaza Strip into an issue of academic freedom in a research institute?  In the eyes of some people, this not only obscures the issue of Gaza, but risks appropriating the death and suffering of others to seek the limelight.  Changing the subject locally may mean abandoning the real faraway issue.
 
My feeling is that it is virtually impossible to avoid the distant issue by focusing on the nearby, and the greater danger is the opposite, that is, focusing on the distant issue only which leads to distortion in understanding and  evading one's own specific responsibility. For example, in my case, if I did not have a local positionality, then I would see the outer world in the same way as the news media does, and I would feel no urge to do something.  Reading the news, I might get angry, but things would stop there, and I wouldn't say to myself:  “Take a breath and think about the next step.”
 
It was only through looking at my nearby that I started to think about what my relationship was to whatever was making me angry, and what can I do to respond to the situation. The question ultimately became the following:  What was the situation facing the social sciences, how could we preserve the strength of critical research, and, more particularly, how could we change the way we work, for example, how could we work in a more grounded, grassroots way. Reflecting on our own work is much more difficult than condemning the Gaza situation with righteous indignation. This debate about how we should deal with the relations between the nearby and the faraway continues.
 
Dandu:  Turning to China, we can note on the one hand that there is no restriction or censorship on this topic for the moment, and even perhaps unprecedented freedom, but at the same time, Chinese universities are relatively quiet and increasingly silent in terms of public expression, and more Chinese students are still happily receiving their diplomas at graduation ceremonies in American universities. What can Chinese youth do?
 
Xiang Biao:  Many of the personal problems faced by Chinese youth, such as stress, their difficulty in finding a job, and their sense of powerlessness, are linked to the crisis of the global order. At a time when the liberal order needs to make comprehensive adjustments, China is bound to play a pivotal role, but what role this will be is more complicated than many people think.  Should China uphold the current order, reform the current order, or replace the current order? Who knows?
 
Such a state of limbo will naturally affect everyone's life, especially that of young people. At the same time, China's young people are engaged in an internal movement to rethink the meaning of life, to arrive at a new understanding of  themselves, and to redefine their relationship with society. While many people are still taking the exams to get into university or graduate school, and while they still want to get to the top, there seems to be a grassroots trend in their thinking, that is, they want to find meaning outside of formal institutions and institutionalized norms. 
 
In this kind of movement, it would surely be helpful to learn how people of similar age elsewhere in the world make courageous decisions, deal with fear, and reimagine their lives, currently in limbo. In this way, people might be able to be part of the "echoes of hope" I mentioned earlier - seeing their own hope in the actions of others, and letting their own reactions bring hope back to them. To do this, it's not enough to make abstract comments from a distance, what is more meaningful is to bring the topic into your own nearby, relate it to your own struggles, and discuss it with those around you. I hope that our conversation generates discussion, and then we can bring the responses of Chinese readers back to the rest of the world and see what kind of reverberations develop.
 
Notes

[1]“项飙谈全球大学生抗议运动：自由主义秩序的危机、附近和’全球民间,’” published on the online platform of 单度/Dandu, on June 20, 2024.

[2]For specific references to Xiang’s publications and a more detailed discussion of his work and career, see my introduction to the English translation of Self as Method, which is available here.

[3]See https://book.douban.com/series/4717.

[4]https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2023/04/21/what-to-read-to-understand-anthropology (paywalled).

[5]Translator's note:  These incidents include the decision by Xiang Biao’s employer, the Max Planck Society, to fire Ghassan Hage in February 2024, who had been a Visiting Professor at Xiang’s institute since April 2023.  The termination followed the publication of an opinion piece in a German newspaper accusing Hage of antisemitism because he had published social media posts critical of Israel and it conduct of the war in Gaza.  (Hage’s description of the event is here; the statement of the Max Planck Society is here).

[6]Translator’s note:  See for example Jonathan Chait. "Why the Right Loves the Anti-Israel Encampments: Three Reasons Trump and Bibi Want the Protests to Continue," New York Magazine, April 30, 2024.
 
[7]Translator's note:  The quote is taken from Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny. (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 106.  For good measure the Zionist Churchill was also antisemitic:  “This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing.”  See “The Churchill You Didn’t Know,” The Guardian, Nov. 28, 2002.
 
[8]Translator’s note:  “Big-character posters 大字报/dazibao” were used during China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to denounce class enemies and post political statements.   

[9]Translator’s note: “Zhejiang Village” was the subject of Xiang Biao’s first long-term research project, which studied Zhejiang migrants who moved to Beijing to live and work illegally during the 1980s and 1990s.  During this era, market reforms were being introduced – creating the space and the incentives for economic entrepreneurship - but the household registration system meant that rural people had no rights outside of their villages.  Xiang Biao studied the battles between Zhejiang Village, where the migrants live, and the Beijing authorities.  The village was highly fluid, reconstituting itself many times over the years.

[10]Translator’s note:  For Gramsci, a war of position is not an effort to reform a system, but a pre-revolutionary action to overthrow a system what no longer functions.

[11]Translation taken from D. C. Lao, trans., The Analects:  Sayings of Confucius, 14: 38.
 
[12]Translator’s note:  The art world was most immediately and severely affected by government censorship in Germany after October 2024 and required special legal support.