Xu Jilin on the Shanghai Lockdown

 Xu Jilin, “A Professor Reflects:  How to Understand the Shock Lived by 24 Million Shanghainese”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xu Jilin (b. 1957) is a well-known historian and public intellectual at East China Normal University.  He was the inspiration for the research project that eventually became Reading the China Dream, and many of his works are available on this site.
 
The interest in reading Xu Jilin or any other Chinese on their experience of lockdowns in China is obvious.  Xu wrote this is June of 2022 – or delivered it as a spoken address to the Chinese branch of the well-known writers’ organization PEN – merely a few days after the 75 day-long Shanghai lockdown came to an end.  Xu refers to the event as “the silence” throughout his talk, suggesting the emotional aspect of the experience, but I chose to vary “silence” and “lockdown” in my translation, as “silence” struck me as slightly overwrought in some contexts, and Xu Jilin is rarely overwrought.
 
His point nonetheless is to suggest just how hard it was for 24 million people to experience two and a half months of anxiety and uncertainty, and if Xu talks about his own experience, he talks more about his colleagues and students, as well as the general texture of life – or the absence of such – during the silence.  He frames it as a challenge to his “enlightenment” beliefs.  Xu was a prominent player in China’s “second enlightenment” in the 1980s – the first having occurred during the May Fourth/New Culture Movement – a “rational” reaction to the excesses of the Mao era and an embrace of something like universal values.  Xu has remained steadfast in his commitment to these values over the course of the succeeding decades but recognizes that reason was not enough to see him and his fellow Shanghai denizens through their recent ordeal.
 
Xu further links this experience to his recent embrace of Chinese youth culture, a new area of interest he has been developing over the past few months (see here and here for examples), growing out of his recognition that he no longer speaks the same language as many of his students.  He decided to try to meet them halfway, which is a lovely display of open-mindedness, no matter how it works out.
 
Translation 
 
The silence taught 24,000,000 Shanghainese a lesson
 
Amid the greater Shanghai lockdown, our community went silent on March 12, and stayed so until May 31, although the lockdown was lifted for three days or so during that period.  So it was more or less a full month and a half, or 75 days.  In truth, these 75 days of silence at home or confined to the neighborhood were a completely new experience, an unprecedented shock to the souls and the lives of 24 million people.  In the nearly 180 long years since its opening in 1843, Shanghai has never experienced anything like this. My feeling is that this experience brought everyone to a new understanding of themselves, their lives, our city, our country, and the world. 
 
The Shanghai silence was a big deal not only for Shanghai but for all of China, in that historical changes are often made up of big events that function as a pivot. I think we are still a long way from understanding the significance of the transition this silence triggered. People usually talk only about the economic impact, and that’s part of it, but more important things happened too. People live their lives according to certain expectations and a belief in certain future perspectives, and there is also a certain sense of trust that exists within groups of people, including between citizens and the government and between individuals.  All these bonds were so severely shaken as to produce a sense of crisis.  This is a huge deal, whether we are talking about the economy, politics, or cultural psychology, which will become clearer in the fullness of time. 

As a witness to this event and a student of history, I was constantly thinking about these events and feeling their impact during the silence. This first-hand experience is extremely important, because someone who is not from Shanghai and did not experience such a lengthy lockdown may have a hard time grasping the fact that it illustrated the limits of human rationality.  I have been part of the enlightenment movement[2] in China since the 1980s. According to Kant, enlightenment refers to the moment when people have the courage to openly make use of their rationality. Over the course of the past three decades and more, I have consistently believed in the power of reason, in the idea that all forms of ignorance are due to the lack of reason, and that with enough reason, enough information, and enough truth, a person can make the right judgments and become enlightened. But over the years, I have come to the increasing realization that while reason is important, it is far from enough.
 
Hume famously said that human reason is always a slave to emotion. In the past, those of us engaged in enlightenment did not take this particularly seriously, simply thinking that Hume was an empiricist for whom experience was important.   Yet looking back on things now and reflecting carefully on Hume’s statement, I feel that it is extremely important to stress human experience and emotion. If all you have is reason, and all your knowledge comes from books and studying, if you have few personal experiences and have not lived through great historical events, then your understanding is very limited.  During the lockdown, I have seen the changes in some young people who used to be Little Pinks.[3] Of course, they have gone from one extreme to another, which I do not particularly approve of.  In the past, many scholars did their utmost to achieve enlightenment, but the impact of such efforts pales when compared to one huge personal experience.  Our reflection on this Shanghai silence has only just begun, and I think that in the fullness of time and with the distance this provides, we will see things more clearly, just as we have come to understand various important events in modern Chinese history.
 
It so happened that these two and a half months also gave me a chance to rethink and appreciate history and realize how important this sensibility is.
 
At midnight on June 1, the Shanghai lockdown was lifted, and people set off firecrackers all over the place.  Lots of young people went to the Bund and there were people everywhere, and the pealing of the bell of the Shanghai Customs House was like the sound of the bell that marks the new year.  Many people had tears in their eyes and all the cars were honking their horns.  I would have loved to experience this historic moment, but I couldn’t find anyone to go with me, and I wouldn’t have been able to take pictures while driving alone.   Later I shared the moment indirectly through many streaming platforms, and I had tears in my eyes as well. If you had not experienced the two and a half months of silence, then you would not have appreciated the feeling of “liberation.” I was reminded of when the Japanese emperor suddenly announced Japan’s surrender, and when the news reached Chongqing, the city exploded with cheers and people paraded with lanterns all night long. The scholar Fu Sinian 傅斯年 (1896-1950) was among those marching, and he finally broke his cane, tore his clothes, and lost his glasses.
 
The next day I read some comments by people who are not from Shanghai, saying “What’s the big deal?  It’s not like this can’t happen again 好了伤疤忘了痛!”—making fun of us for being so excited.  I get it, but they did not go through this, and can’t understand the feeling of that particular moment.  People had not forgotten what they had been through, but the Shanghai people who lived through the silence have a right to the euphoric feeling of liberation.  You can't take away that feeling of joy, and you can't feel this emotion without having had the experience yourself, so shouldn’t judge others from your own overly rational perspective. Chen Yinke 陈寅恪 (1890-1969) always talked studying history through "sympathetic understanding," which is the same way we should view people in everyday life.  Don’t judge people from your own perspective, but instead put yourself in their shoes and try to feel what they feel and understand why they feel that way.  This is the only thing that makes sense.
 
I cite this example to illustrate that whether you are doing research or seeking enlightenment, feelings based on experience are extremely important. These two and a half months of silence taught 24 million Shanghainese a lesson that goes far beyond the enlightenment of the past thirty years. Of course, the contents of this lesson include things that were shared and things that were different for different people, but again, the impact of the lesson far exceed our past efforts of enlightenment.
 
What was terrifying was living with uncertainty
 
For most Shanghai people who experienced the silence, food shortages were not the most important issue, and once group purchasing got organized, that particular crisis passed. What was most frightening was living with uncertainty. You didn’t know what tomorrow would bring, and this created a general feeling of irritation which made it impossible to focus and get things done.
 
Among my scholarly friends, Shen Zhihua 沈志华(b. 1950)[4] was the most determined; his lockdown lasted a bit longer than mine, and he focused on his research and basically finished a book, something I really admire.  In my case, I only wrote one article during the two and a half months, a piece marking the passing of Hao Chang[5] 张灏 (1937-2022), a professor I greatly respected.  This is all I got done, so from a research perspective it’s not so great, because writing only one article over the course of two or three months is a bit inefficient for me.   But I launched two new research topics, the first being on differences between how people experience spiritual transcendence in modern and traditional times, and the second being on how to understand the younger generation's view of love.
 
I found that most people had a hard time maintaining their normal focus during the pandemic. People are, after all, social animals and need to communicate with other people. Just because we have the Internet does not mean that such needs disappear, because communication in person is different.  When people get together a kind of energy is created that you don’t feel when you are online. 
 
During this period, many people closely followed the evolution of the pandemic, which led them to witness many painful experiences and disasters second hand.  Such tragedies had a huge impact, which in turn produced all sorts of emotional changes.  Some of these things we only heard about, while others we experienced ourselves, or knew people who did.   The one that hit me the hardest was the suicide of a young journalist I knew.  She was only in her early 30s and committed suicide after being locked down for a long time. She had interviewed me many times and the news floored me, because this was the life of someone I knew.  The only way to be unmoved in a situation like this is to completely cut off contact with the outside world.  I experienced vastly more emotions in these two months than in the preceding two years, or perhaps even longer.   And it was not just me.  I saw lots of people with acute anxiety, a generalized depression.  In Shanghai we say that someone is “600,” because “600” is the street address of the Shanghai Mental Health Institute, so if we say someone is “600” we mean they are having mental health issues.  I think we are all a bit “600” at the moment, although of course I hope it is only temporary.
 
Those who were most affected were probably the students because they were confined to their dormitories as part of pandemic control measures.  My situation was better, because my house is bigger, and later I could go out and walk around the neighborhood, which was also quite spacious. But many students were in dorm rooms of a dozen or two dozen square feet.  There were online classes, and we did what we could to comfort the students, but we could still see their anxiety and depression. In this sense, I think we still are vastly underestimating the psychological trauma brought about by the lockdown.
 
I gave my last online class to graduate students on June 9, and at the end I asked them to talk about their feelings, but none of them wanted to. Of course, there are some contextual reasons for this, and it might have gone better offline. But I can also understand that many things are difficult to talk about. Maybe for them, crying and being hugged by someone they love is better than talking. They didn’t need the comfort of words because words are powerless at such moments. I understand and sympathize with them. Many students want to go home, but they can't. Many places charge them high quarantine fees and the quarantine conditions are very poor (the Ministry of Education has now issued a notice that quarantine for returning students must be free).  Many of our students at East China Normal University are from the countryside, and their parents have made incredible sacrifices for them, but they still were willing to welcome their children back home, because they see them suffering in Shanghai.  The students, however, feel they owe their parents too much, and they didn't end up going back.
 
The pandemic linked everyone’s destiny together. In the past, many people probably never felt this sense of standing together through thick and thin with everyone else. I live in a predominantly middle-class neighborhood with many executives and small business owners, but in the past, none of us knew one another or spoke to one another because everyone was too busy and there was no need to, and everyone's connection to community life was very tenuous. But during these two months, everyone suddenly had a sense of common destiny. In the past, there was a sense of alienation between Shanghai and the rest of China, the rest of China saying that Shanghai belonged more to the world than to China, that Shanghai was “the world’s Shanghai.”  But in the past two months, everyone felt that Shanghai was just “China’s Shanghai.” 
 
Having been pulled out of their daily routines, people face an uncertain fate alone
 
When someone is locked down at home and is incredibly lonely, it can be a kind of loneliness where even family members sometimes cannot be there for one another.  This in turn winds up creating a kind of huge gap, in which, while your fates are linked, everyone is still on their own.  Lots of people talked about this kind of loneliness, and I felt it too.  It is both physical and abstract, and the silence cruelly reveals the abstract side of things.  Ultimately you have to rely on your inner strength to overcome it and get past it. 
 
Of course, there are any number of ways to do this.  In my case, if someone asked me to give a talk or take part in a dialogue, I would throw myself into it completely.  There was no way I could change things, but if I could, through sharing a bit of knowledge, give students or the public…not strength, maybe, but a bit of temporary comfort, then I felt it was worth it. Several of the lectures were over attended in ways they usually are not, and I felt that they at least brought a little warmth, or the power of knowledge, to those listeners and students. I myself organized several things like this. When people are lonely, the more they are immersed in their own loneliness, the more painful it will be.  At such moments, only when you think about other people, and realize that you are not the only one who is suffering, can you overcome the loneliness you feel inside.
 
Before the pandemic, people did not think much about the value of their own life, or about their own spiritual feelings, but simply rushed through life thinking about practical things. This is what Max Weber called instrumental rationality, trying to figure out the best plan to achieve a certain goal.  But then suddenly, you are pulled out of your everyday routines, and find yourself completely alone, in a situation where no one can help you.  All you can do is face heaven, and God, and an unknown fate all alone, which is when you start to think about the meaning of your existence and the ultimate value of life. 
 
In the past, everyone focused on the rational qualities of the human mind, but in addition to this rational brain, there is also a mysterious part of the human mind, and when people cannot make it through a difficult situation, it is because this part of the mind has been damaged.  Planning is a way to overcome confusion at the rational level, but psychic pain affects a hidden world that is hard to share and talk about.  This can become one of the biggest hurdles in life.
 
Talking with friends during this period, these issues have come up a lot.  Many of my friends have suddenly become very emotional. When a person is suddenly thrown into a lonely situation, the absurdity of life stands out. Of course, you have to get over this absurdity, or “600” will become a reality.  Philosophy and religion have the strength to help you get over it, as does literature, but literature of course builds on philosophy and religion.
 
Over the course of the past few decades, Chinese people’s minds have gotten cruder
 
During the two and a half months of silence I didn't read too many theoretical works, but instead caught up on a lot of TV shows. I am usually very busy and can’t spare the time. I had watched The Game of Thrones off and on in the past, but this time I watched it all the way through. The Game of Thrones has a lot of say about how power works in the world, as well as how power relates to various utopias, and I learned a lot.
 
I also began to explore some new cultural angles, because over the last year or so I have been interested in the culture of the post-1990s generation of young people.  I have always worked on thought and culture and have tried to keep up with current trends.  Now it seems that one wave follows another, and since the 1990s we have seen the Bilibili video platform, the Little Universe podcast app, the Little Red Book social media platform [“China’s answer to Instagram”], Douyin [China’s Tik-Tok], and Kuaishou [another video platform], making up a new cultural landscape, which has become something I want to research. 

All our current students were born in the 1990s and the 2000s, so it is hard to be a good teacher if I don’t understand these things, why is why I’ve developed quite an interest in them over the past year.  Understanding them requires empathy – what is it that they are doing?   What kind of work influences them? This is when you realize that abstract understanding doesn't work, and that you need to actually understand the blind boxes[6] they play with, the virtual worlds they're obsessed with, the meta-universe, and all kinds of science fiction, etc. I recently watched "Love, Death and Robots" again, which is very popular among young people, and that's when I felt completely inside their world. I also revisited some works that I had seen a little of in the past and were not my cup of tea, like "The Matrix" and the just released "Everything, Everywhere, All at Once," through which I could learn more about the hearts of young people.
 
There’s one thing I find really interesting. In the past, people lived in two worlds, the real world and the transcendent world made up of God, the gods, or fate. Today the younger generation generally does not believe in God, but they have their transcendent world, which consists of the secondary, virtual world, and the meta-universe, where the physical body and the spirit are also separated. This means that people always have a divine side, and cannot live solely in the real world, as we like to imagine. The games young people play are not just out of boredom or to fill their leisure time, but also speak to a search for some kind of transcendent existence. I used to think about this rationally, but after having played the games myself, I find that it is totally different. Of course, this is just the beginning, and I am just thinking about the question of the modern world and the traditional world (in terms of the real world and the transcendent world, or the physical world and the spiritual world), but it may ultimately become a new research direction. 
 
I also watched South Korean movies.  People always told me they were really good, but I never had much time to watch them, so I had just sampled a few that dealt with political and social issues.  During the lockdown I focused on romantic movies, because I was into literature when I was younger, and still have a literary side.  I was really surprised, because in the past we didn’t have a lot of respect for South Korea, thinking they were rather crude, without an enduring civilization and no real classical historical works.  But I found that South Korea has taken over and developed the Japanese cinematic heritage, and in terms of the expression of emotional subtlety, has surpassed Chinese film and television.
 
South Korea has fully supplanted China in international films over the past few years. Korean films have won every major film award in the world, and Korean dramas are very popular, including last year's smash hit "Squid Game," which I wrote a review of. Their exploration of today’s world, especially of the dark complexities of human nature, has surpassed that of Chinese artists, if we’re being honest. Or at least we are already inferior to South Korea in terms psychological complexity and expressiveness. I also watched a few Chinese romantic movies, like the one starring Zhou Dongyu 周冬雨,[7] but there are very few with much depth. Chinese minds have become cruder over the past few decades, and are lagging behind other cultural superpowers, and even South Korea.
 
You may be enlightened, but don’t think you’re always right
 
I also especially want to mention the popular HBO British drama “Normal People,” a love story about people born in the 1990s, which tells us a lot about their emotional world.   This drama was recommended to me by Mao Jian 毛尖 (b. 1970), a professor at East China Normal who is also a film critic. The play is based on a best-selling novel by the Irish writer Sally Rooney, who was born in 1991, and which is very popular among young people. The depth of Rooney’s writing is amazing. Several of my literary friends who watched it were also very impressed. It very subtly weaves elements of class, gender, and sexual power into the story. Although a bestseller, it has been recognized as a 21st century classic, and the series based on the novel is even better. It is a text full of tensions that can be interpreted and understood from a variety of perspectives. I am concerned with the post-90s generation's view of love and their unique spiritual world, which is obviously very different from that of older generation, such as portrayed in "The Bridges of Madison County," and I plan to write about it when I get a chance.
 
There are many scholars who have been arguing that we should stick to the tradition of the enlightenment and read the classics, which is true enough, and in fact I cling to the classics as well, but those we are trying to enlighten are a new generation, and the spiritual world of those born in the 1990s and 2000s is especially different from what we imagine. We cannot just keep plodding forward and expect them to be like us, because they will not repeat our generation’s experiences. If we want to influence them, we first have to understand them, and not ask that they submit to us. The most important thing in dealing with the younger generation is to "share," and this sharing is a two-way street. You have to let the younger generation share the world you appreciate, and you have to get off your high horse and share new classics and new cultural styles they like with them.
 
Two years ago, I watched Oddball 奇葩说[8] and was amazed that the younger generation had such fine, deep thoughts about many social and cultural phenomena in the private realm, especially their individual emotional lives, while the older generation was relatively crude on that front. Now that I have sampled the new generation's literary works, I find that it is a completely different world, although I may not fully identify with it and still have a sense of distance. But as an enlightened person, you should never think that you are right and that the classics you like are the most beautiful. As you grow older, the part of you that thinks that "the world is going to hell in a handbasket 九斤老太" gets stronger.   Even the enlightened need to be aware of their inner demons.
 
Notes

[1]许纪霖, “一位教授的反思：如何看待2400万上海人受到的冲击？” published on the blog of the Chinese Pen organization on June 9, 2022.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  The 1980s are often referred to as China’s “second enlightenment,” the first being the May 4th/New Culture Movement, and throughout this essay, Xu uses the word “enlightenment” in a way that suggests embrace of “universal values.”

[3]Translator’s note:  Little Pinks xiaofenhong/小粉红 refers to young Chinese online groups who take pride in waging online wars against those who criticize China.  They are called Little Pinks in part because the particular groups in question were often made up of young women, although their online behavior was modeled on soccer fan groups who attacked the fans of opposing teams.  See here for more information on this group.  When Xu talks about changes in their behavior, he is referencing the online criticism of the lockdown by young people who had formerly been staunch nationalists.

[4]Translator’s note:  Shen Zhihua is a famous Cold War Historian at East China Normal University.

[5]Translator’s note:  Hao Chang was a Chinese American scholar of modern Chinese intellectual history who died shortly before Xu wrote these words.  Read a brief overview of Chang’s life and work here.

[6]Translator’s note:  "Blind box is a type of sealed packaging that keeps what's inside a mystery until you open it. If you order a set of 12 Boxes, you will receive a set of 12 figures in 12 different designs. Besides basic figures, some figures are rarer, and are called secret.”  Xu is a year older than I am but seems to be doing a better job keeping up with the younger generations...

[7]Translator’s note:  Xu may be referring to “Ancient Love Poems” (2021), although this is a television series and not a film. 

[8]Translator’s note:  Xu is referring to a popular online reality show, also translated as U Can U Bibi, a kind of debate/reality show where the best talker wins and stays on to debate again.  The Wikipedia description of the show is quite helpful; scroll down to see the kinds of questions they debate.  Episodes are available on YouTube.   Xu talks about the show—and about his friend and colleague Liu Qing, a contestant on the show--here.