Xu Jilin, Redimensioning the Enlightenment

Xu Jilin, “How to ‘Redimension the Enlightenment’ When Dealing with Houlang Culture”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Xu Jilin (b. 1957) is a historian at East China Normal University in Shanghai and a well known public intellectual in China.  Xu was the inspiration for the “Reading the China Dream” project, and translations of many of his essays are available on this site.
 
The title of the essay translated here may be initially perplexing to some readers.  The Chinese characters for “redimension Enlightenment” are 降维启蒙, and the phrase appears to have been coined by Xu himself.  Jiangwei 降维 refers to “dimensionality reduction, or dimension reduction…the transformation of data from a high-dimensional space into a low-dimensional space so that the low-dimensional representation retains some meaningful properties of the original data, ideally close to its intrinsic dimension… Dimensionality reduction is common in fields that deal with large numbers of observations and/or large numbers of variables, such as signal processing, speech recognition, neuroinformatics, and bioinformatics.”  Houlang 后浪 literally means “back wave” and figuratively refers to China’s new generations, and particularly those born in the Internet era, which began roughly in the mid-1990s in China and now is a dominant factor of Chinese social life.  So Xu’s topic is:  how to preserve and push forward the convictions and habits of Enlightenment culture in a world where people increasingly live in virtual worlds consisting largely of images, delivered to fragmented individuals, connected to the world by their cellphones.  Xu’s idea of “redimensioning the Enlightenment” makes sense in this context.
 
Houlang became a hot topic in 2020 when Bilibili, a youth-themed video platform, launched a video with that title, in which a middle-aged Chinese actor with a stentorian voice and authoritative presence narrated a video about how wonderful life is for Chinese young people, particularly when compared with the lives of previous generations.  The visual content was full of well-dressed, attractive, happy young Chinese men and women doing meaningful, adventurous things.  Even if you do not understand Chinese, the video is worth watching (see it here); to my American eyes, it looks like a cross between the introduction to the Friends sitcom and the classic Coke ads.  One of the messages conveyed by the video seems to be “Those of us who created this wonderful world for you would not mind a bit of gratitude now and again.”
 
The video was so perfectly cynical and over the top that virtually everyone hated it.  After all, not all 20-somethings in China are beautiful, smart, working at a job they love and going sky-gliding on the weekends, which takes nothing away from the way in which life in China’s cities has changed over the past few decades.  Indeed, youth angst is a major theme in China, and many young people feel that they are working very hard for comparatively little, that China’s economy is not generating enough wealth for them to enjoy the material lives that their parents’ generation did.  Reacting to the furor provoked by the video, Xu Jilin hosted a discussion last year with several members of the houlang generation in which they debated various topics.  In the text translated here, a recent interview with “Shanghai Culture,” Xu revisits the topic on his own.
 
Xu’s basic observation is that people based in print culture think in fundamentally different ways from people based in online culture.  Borrowing a book from a library and reading it in your room is fundamentally different from watching TikTok videos on your cellphone in the subway on the way to the mall.  Words and arguments have to be processed mentally to be understood; images go directly to the brain and provoke immediate reactions.  Online platforms are vastly more powerful than publishers of books and newspapers—although publishers of books and magazines once were extremely powerful and remain so to some degree.  Online platforms have also driven the atomization of much of family and social life over the past few decades, leaving people all the more attached to cell phones and the magical world of images and pleasures they deliver.
 
Xu has much to say about this, not all of which will be new to people who think about the online world.  Much of what he says about Chinese young people is quite interesting:  the degree to which they have been shaped by a lifetime of testing-to-get-ahead, which has made learning purely utilitarian; the fact that they instinctively identify with China without caring all that much about national issues; the fact that friendships and romances are taboo in work environments dominated by houlang youth, because work is about achievement and getting ahead, and relationships would be a dangerous distraction—a choice the youth themselves have made to the surprise of their bosses.
 
Xu’s chief concerns, however, have to do with what the Internet is doing to the Enlightenment project, which to Xu and other intellectuals of his generation basically refers to the 1980s.  The 1980s are seen as China’s “second Enlightenment,” the first having occurred in the wake of the May 4th Movement in 1919.  The May 4th Movement is generally discussed in terms of iconoclasm; Chinese youth broke with Confucianism and embraced science and democracy.  The second Enlightenment was similar; Chinese youth broke with Maoism and totalitarian politics and embraced some kind of democracy, or at least the prospects thereof. 
 
As we all know, the project of China’s second Enlightenment remains unfinished, and most commentators, inside China and out, blame Chinese politics and the Chinese Communist Party for that.  Xu of course is well aware of the Party-State’s role in what did and did not happen, but in this text is focused on other factors that might sabotage the project even if China’s government were to change its stripes.  In fact, his chief concern is with the ever-diminishing dimensions of China’s public space, which emerged as a major factor in the 1980s, the heyday of Xu’s personal engagement with China’s Enlightenment, only to see itself suffocated by Chinese test-based educational system and now by the power of Internet platforms.  Xu’s concern is that Chinese young people would not embrace Enlightenment even if they could.
 
I’m not sure Xu succeeded in finding an answer to his question.  In the end he seems to say to intellectuals that they need to get off their high horses, get over themselves, watch some of the media their kids or students are watching, and try to modulate their Enlightenment message, because human beings at some level like to think, and that is what the Enlightenment is about.  He gives examples of Chinese intellectuals who are doing this, in his opinion.  I can’t think of a better solution, but as someone who has spent many hours talking to (or in the direction of) students checking their Facebook pages, I can’t say I’m optimistic.  People do like to think; I’m just not sure Xu Jilin and I are going to show them how.
 
Favorite quotes
 
“Today, when young people go abroad they experience it differently than we did.  They feel like many countries do not measure up to China in terms of material life, general convenience, and urban management, and they look at the rest of the world with a sort of contempt, thinking ‘That’s all you’ve got?’  One person born in the 1990s told me about tearing up when he arrived in the Shanghai airport and saw the Chinese flag.  These feelings are very sincere, and for them this sense of identity is completely natural. The older generation tied the individual to the country so tightly that they would often blame society and the government for their personal problems and failures. But for the houlang generation, the country and the individual are basically two different ‘skins.’  This is why, somewhat surprisingly, the feeling that ‘I am fully confident about the country’s destiny, but extremely worried about my personal future’ has become a fairly common psychological phenomenon among the younger generation. The younger generation does not reflect on the big picture, but deals with things as they come, and is more involved in local social movements, such as the environment, animal protection, and charity work.”
 
“Many of the houlang generations are value nihilists. They have no clear identity in terms of values, and they do not need to rely on values to support their lives and livelihoods. The older generation needs ‘poetry and faraway places,’ but when asked about this, the new generation typically answers: ‘What's the point?’ Instrumental rationality deals with questions of ‘useful’ and ‘useless,’ while values rationality deals with questions of ‘poetry and faraway places.’  Of course, older generations are no strangers to instrumental rationality,  but there still needed to be a place for values rationality, because a life without meaning is not worth living. But the younger generation has almost completely abandoned such ideals, and the logic behind their question ‘What’s the point?’ is what we might call the elevation of the achievement of ‘minor goals.’ You set a minor goal for yourself, you achieve it, and then you set another minor goal.  This is typical of instrumental rationality, which does not ask whether a thing has value in itself, but only how to achieve it in the easiest and most effective way once the thing has been decided on as a goal. Especially for the generations raised on test-based education, the only measure of value is ‘success.’"
 
“Years of test-based education have led the houlang generations to believe that there is a standard answer for everything. They may not necessarily accept this standard answer in their hearts, but they deal with it in a way so as not to enter into direct conflict with it. The media friend I mentioned earlier said that in the past, if there was something wrong with a program they were working on, everyone would discuss it with the leaders and actively contribute their own opinions.  Now the attitude of the 1990s generation is:  tell me what to do and I’ll do it, but let’s not waste time talking about it. This is a habit that comes from exam-based education: I won’t resist, I won’t discuss, we’re not going to waste time talking about things, I might even refuse to communicate, because you are strong and I am weak, you are the subject and I am the object.  They consciously regard themselves as being at the bottom of the food chain in the social hierarchy.”
 
“Houlang youth make a very clear distinction between the public and private spheres. Today in the workplace there is an unspoken rule that there are to be no friendships and no romances at work.   The workplace is merely a functional place, so there is no friendship in the office, let alone romance. Many companies try to instill shared emotions through team-building exercises, because the positions in the company are impersonal and the boss wants to show the company’s personal side through team-building, but many young people hate team-building worse than anything, and they don't want to show their real selves in the workplace.” 
 
Translation
 
Shanghai Culture:  On Youth Day of last year, May 4, 2020, Bilibili (a youth-oriented video-sharing platform) released a video called "Houlang" [literally, the “rear wave,” i.e., China’s new generation] which provoked a great reaction. It used to be that ideas like “older” and “younger” generations and the distance between them were seen as natural social phenomena, and I wonder why it is that in our era, referring to youth culture as houlang became such a  big deal. How is this different from previous discussions of differences between the generations? 
 
Xu Jilin:  That’s a good question. What we call generational change is an eternal concern, but last year, houlang did indeed become a hot topic. Looking back over the past few years, it seems to me that in the 1990s and 2000s, discussions of the Chinese intellectual world centered on the division between “left” and “right,” or what we call the Liberals and the New Left, in addition to which there were also the New Confucians.  Beginning about 2010, people started paying more attention to issues of social mobility and social inequalities, looking at the “upper” and “lower” parts of society rather than left and right.  Last year, however, “new” and “old” generations entered the equation whenever we talked about Chinese society or Chinese thought—and by “thought” here I do not mean just the “thinking” of elite intellectuals, but instead how society as a whole thinks—which provided a new perspective. 
 
I suspect that this is related to globalization and to developments in high tech over recent decades, especially the emergence of artificial intelligence and the Internet, all of which has accelerated the pace of cultural generational change. This kind of cultural generational change is not part of the natural replacement of one generation by another, but is instead the result of changes in social and technological conditions.  We often say “things go one way for ten years, and then another way for the next ten years,”[2] and to me, ten years constitutes a generation.  But last year, I hosted a discussion where I invited speakers from the 1990s generation who already felt they were the part of an "older generation" and even felt a certain generation gap with people born in 1995.  This shows that generational change in the Internet era is truly something new. This is a revolution, the significance of which we have not yet grasped.  The generation born during this revolution, which we call houlang or the "new human species 新人类," is obviously completely different from us. 
 
Of course, “new” and “old” generations are relative.  Young people had a very strong reaction to the video Bilibili released last year, because houlang are full of self-confidence as the owners of the new era, and they wanted to attack or overturn the prejudices that the older generations have about them.  At the same time, the houlang generation, whatever their self-confidence and struggling spirit, may only achieve a fraction of what the 1980s generation did in real life terms.  The 1980s generation are already at the top of their fields, they have bought their houses, and their future is bright.  By contrast, the houlang video that Bilibili put out last year earned a lot of ridicule from the 1990s generation, because their situation is completely different, suffering the torment of “involution 内卷.”[3] 
 
The idea of houlang is not a very concrete concept, and you need to compare it with something else before you can define it as either “new” or “old.”  I hesitate to use a definition to limit a concept. Given how vague and ambitious houlang is as a concept, we might try to understand it in terms of intellectual or cultural history.  Here’s how I see the current generation of Chinese people, from those born in the 1950s through those born in the 2000s:  Those born in the 1950s and 1960s are the standard “older generations.”  They are the "Enlightenment generation" who went through cultural enlightenment of the 1980s, which was a time of great passion. Those born in the 1990s and 2000s are the true houlang generations that grew up in the secular Internet age.  Those born in the 1970s and 1980s are transitional generations, with some of the characteristics of both the older and the younger groups, marked to some degree by the enlightenment spirit of the previous generations, as well as foreshadowing in some ways the arrival of the new generations. 
 
I graduated from East China Normal University in 1982 and stayed on there to teach. My first students were born in the 1960s, and the ones I am teaching now were born in the 2000s.  What I have found is that those born in the 1980s are the last group of students with whom I am on the same wavelength. I have a hard time getting into the spiritual world of the 1990s generation, and this includes the spiritual world of my own son.  There seem to be obstacles when I try to communicate at a deeper level, and both sides seem to feel that there is a gap that is hard to close.  
 
Shanghai Culture:  It is interesting to think about society in these generational terms.  In your view, where do the principle differences between older and newer generations appear?   What are the deeper problems of our society and culture reflected in these differences? 
 
Xu:  You can look at the differences between these generations in any number of ways, but I particularly want to talk about it from the perspective of the Internet revolution. In cultural terms, today’s parents and children are getting their information through different media. People born in the 1950s and 1960s basically grew up in the print media era, while the 1990 and 2000 generations basically get their information online. If we want to understand the houlang generations, we have to start with the Internet revolution.
 
Everyone knows that the original European Enlightenment was also related to a great technological revolution, that of Gutenberg's printing press. Martin Luther would not have had the impact he had without the printing press, and the Enlightenment nourished, and was nourished by, the newspapers and magazines that grew out of the print revolution, which in turn produced the intellectuals that read the newspapers and magazines as well as what Habermas called the public sphere, a public sphere that drew on a medium whose central element was the paper-based media created by the print revolution. 
 
When I went to Paris a decade or so ago for the second China-Europe Forum, the group I was in happened to be hosted by the Institut de France, and they took us to a particularly interesting place: an 18th century restaurant in Paris, that still exists today, where the "Encyclopedists" met, and they had installed their printing presses in a little attic upstairs. So the Enlightenment and the technological revolution are related, and without the print revolution, there would have been no European Enlightenment. People born in the 1950s and 1960s still mainly read and write through the printed word; this is their medium of production and dissemination, and it is through this same medium that they prove themselves and achieve what they want to achieve.   Of course, we all know that the arrival of the Internet did not mean that from the 1990s generation on, people are no longer in contact with words.  At the same time, what they read and consume as information on a daily basis mainly comes from cell phones and the Internet, and even when they read a book, they would rather read it on their cell.  But there is a big difference in how a text is presented in a book and how it appears on a cell phone.  You do not read the two the same way, and the effects on the brain are different. This has profoundly affected how houlang generations think. 
 
People born in the 1950s and 1960s grew up in an environment where knowledge and information were relatively scarce, while today it is the opposite, in that we face an explosion of information so that there is too much to choose from, which is also a big difference. So there are huge differences in the “cultural platforms” older and younger generations are plugged into, which constitutes an important generational difference. 
 
If we look at things from ideological, cultural, and psychological perspectives, my feeling is that the older generation sees the relationship between the self and the outside world as very close. They take national and world affairs very seriously, seeing them as closely related to their own personal fate, to the point that talking about such things is an inveterate habit, and we do it constantly.  This is not the same for houlang generations, who put their selves and the country or the world in different categories. 

A young friend of mine who works in media, and who manages a group of people born in the 1990s, tells me that people of this age who have returned from studying abroad or graduated from top schools in China do not care at all about the big issues. For houlang generations, we are starting to see a decoupling of the relationship between the individual and the country, but at the same time this decoupling does not mean that they do not identify with the country, and many of them feel a strong natural identification with it. They grew up in a different environment from our generation.  We experienced too much, with a lot of ups and downs, but those born in the 1990s have basically not known any real crisis, and China’s rise has led them to have a very natural sense of identification with the country, which is why we something call them “naturally red.” 
 
Today, when young people go abroad they experience it differently than we did.  They feel like many countries do not measure up to China in terms of material life, general convenience, and urban management, and they look at the rest of the world with a sort of contempt, thinking “That’s all you’ve got?”  One person born in the 1990s told me about tearing up when he arrived in the Shanghai airport and saw the Chinese flag.  These feelings are very sincere, and for them this sense of identity is completely natural. The older generation tied the individual to the country so tightly that they would often blame society and the government for their personal problems and failures. But for the houlang generation, the country and the individual are basically two different "skins." 

This is why, somewhat surprisingly, the feeling that “I am fully confident about the country’s destiny, but extremely worried about my personal future” has become a fairly common psychological phenomenon among the younger generation. The younger generation does not reflect on the big picture, but deals with things as they come, and is more involved in local social movements, such as the environment, animal protection, and charity work. 
 
People born in the 1950s and 1960s are basically "post-idealists.”  I have written an article on the novelist Shi Tiesheng 史铁生 (1951-2010), who is a typical example.  What I am calling "post-idealism" means that you no longer believe that the ideal is real, but at the same time you cannot live without the ideal, without the possibility of "poetry and faraway places." The meaning and value of life are not in the actual existence of the ideal, but in the process of pursuing that ideal. This is a bit like the spirit of Lu Xun's play "The Passerby"[4] or Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus.
 
But many of the houlang generations are value nihilists. They have no clear identity in terms of values, and they do not need to rely on values to support their lives and livelihoods. The older generation needs "poetry and faraway places," but when asked about this, the new generation typically answers: "What's the point?" Instrumental rationality deals with questions of "useful" and "useless," while values rationality deals with questions of "poetry and faraway places."  Of course, older generations are no strangers to instrumental rationality,  but there still needed to be a place for values rationality, because a life without meaning is not worth living. But the younger generation has almost completely abandoned such ideals, and the logic behind their question "What’s the point?" is what we might call the elevation of the achievement of "minor goals." You set a minor goal for yourself, you achieve it, and then you set another minor goal. 

This is typical of instrumental rationality, which does not ask whether a thing has value in itself, but only how to achieve it in the easiest and most effective way once the thing has been decided on as a goal. Especially for the generations raised on test-based education, the only measure of value is "success." The scholar Qian Liqun's 钱理群 (b. 1939) discussion of "exquisite egoism"[5] is also part of this. Today, many elites trained by universities are empty of inner values, and they live completely in terms of instrumental rationality.  They don’t ask whether reality makes sense or not, because whatever exists makes sense, and the thing to do is to figure out where their interests lie in this reality that they have no choice but to accept, and then use (instrumental) rationality to achieve those interests, reaping the maximum benefit at the minimum cost. This is precisely the thinking of the “economically rational man.” 
 
Shanghai Culture:  Does type of thinking reflect changes in human nature today?
 
Xu:  Every discipline has its assumptions about human nature, and economics assumes that people think like this, which means that economics brackets out morality and values in the pursuit of input/output maximization. This kind of "economic man" thinking is quite common in the houlang generations.  In fact, it has become the mainstream psychological model of society as a whole in the past 20 years, but it is more nakedly obvious in the 1990s generation.  
 
However, human nature is complex, and so are the houlang generations. Next to the worldly side of human nature, there is also the divine search for transcendence, which includes the pursuit of "poetry and faraway places," but the connotation of "poetry and faraway places" for younger generations is different.  In this year’s season of the show "I Can I BB 奇葩说,"[6] the economist Xue Zhaofeng 薛兆丰 (b. 1968), who represents the thinking of “economic man” met his match in the person of my colleague Liu Qing 刘擎 (b. 1963), a political scientist at my university. Liu Qing brought a different kind of rationality to the game, one that included humanistic values, and their debates and exchanges were really good.  Despite their ages, both Xue Zhaofeng and Liu Qing represented part of the spiritual world of the houlang generations in these exchanges. They may aspire to "poetry and faraway places," but in real life they are more accustomed to thinking and acting like "economic man."  This is part of the intrinsic complexity and tensions within houlang culture. 
 
The 1990s generation is very individualistic, as shown by the young Chinese athletes at this year's Tokyo Olympics, who were very open in front of the camera, doing hand hearts 比心 and mugging for the camera 卖萌, unlike previous generations of athletes who only spoke in clichés. The younger generations are not interested in public life, but they have very deep thoughts about their private lives and "selves." They will take a small issue of daily life and layer it into a very rich and detailed idea. In the past, we didn't think so much about our private life, but they think very deeply about it, and each of them has their own personality, which creates a collision of different personalities. This is a very winning aspect of the 1990s generation. I even feel that they show their individuality in class, which was quite rare in the past. 
 
But on reflection, it seems to me that that the "ego" that shows itself through individuality is actually volitional, or aspirational. We can divide the ego into three levels: the rational level, the emotional level, and the volitional level. The present generation is not strong on the rational level, and it is not clear that thinking things through is their strong suit.   Let’s leave the emotional part aside for the moment.  For this generation, the strongest of the three levels is that of volition. Volition says "I want to," and if the motto of the Enlightenment generation was "I think, therefore I am," that of the houlang generations is "I want, therefore I am."  I often find that the younger generations rarely know how to think about things from someone else’s position.  For example, many students who apply to do their M.A. or Ph.D. with me justify their application by talking about why they are applying, and they usually do not think about what kind of students I might need.  Many candidates say something like: "Although I do not meet the standards, I still want to…" This is a expression of will.
 
Value nihilism is actually a kind of voluntarism, which does not imply the loss of the self, but rather that the self that remains is a voluntarist self.  In scholarly terms, this is part of the Romantic tradition, the idea that each person is a unique self, and that this self is creative, a self that can create a new destiny through willpower. But the values behind this will have been hollowed out. The most obvious representative of this is Nietzsche, who was an active nihilist. For him, there is no longer a universal, absolute value behind the active will, because "God is dead."  Various axial civilizations and the modern Enlightenment have provided different sets of universal and absolute values, but today these universal values are disintegrating.

For the 1990s generation, the foundation on which values have meaning has become blurred and fragile. When Liu Qing said "people are the purpose" on "I Can I BB," it became one of the most searched online items on that very same day!  Of course this was not news to the old generation, already steeped in Enlightenment discourse, because it is the very baseline of morality, but for houlang generations, it was like they had discovered a whole new continent of values.  No one thought “people are the purpose” might be a way to resist your boss that wants you to work overtime.  Because "living for success 成功学" and instrumental reason will never offer resistance from the level of values. 
 
I am really amazed that something like “man is the purpose,” a moral baseline of modern society, has wound up being diminished and forgotten in the ideology of daily life in China, and it leads me to the observation that what the younger generation of Chinese believes in is the voluntarist creation of ego, behind which there is no baseline value.  Baseline values are in general very banal and shallow, but it is precisely these characteristics that make it possible for everyone to accept them. But the problem is that, when this baseline value comes to be forgotten, especially in the houlang generations, everyone winds up believing only in in struggle, where struggle is a kind of will, and success is the product of will. The declarations of the students we read about from Mao Tanchang High School and Hengshui High School[7] today are statements of will, and there are no values behind "living for success." 
 
Shanghai Culture:  I noticed that you opened an account on Bilibili.  Can you share your feeling of being a content provider on it and whether you feel any awkwardness in communicating with young people on such a youth-oriented platform? 
 
Xu:  Of course I feel a lot of distance.  I said a few minutes ago that I am not on the same wavelength with students who come after the 1980s generation, which is not to say that the 1990s generation is bad, but that it is sometimes really hard to bridge the gap between the two generations of parents and children. I opened my account on Bilibili in order to promote my book The Pulse of China 脉动中国, and now that the ad campaign is over, I need to wait for the appropriate moment to do something else. The difference between the 1950s generation and the 1990s generation is not an unbridgeable gap, but it is still quite a gap. 
 
These days, my undergraduates were born in the 2000s and my graduate students in the 1990s.  I find that the biggest change compared to previous students is the connection between what they are concerned about and the knowledge they want to acquire. I often describe myself with a quote from Liang Shuming[8] 梁漱溟 (1893-1988), to the effect that my chief concerns are problems, not scholarship, and when I learn something, it is to resolve some dilemma I feel within me. What I really care about is the problem, and knowledge is only the way to solve the problem. I teach because I want to bring to bear my knowledge of history and culture to get to the things I am concerned about, and all of this is a part of my relationship to China and the world.

But even the best and brightest of the new generation learn only what is needed to succeed in the course 知识点, and they do not connect knowledge to issues or concerns. What are they concerned about?  Sometimes I ask controversial questions in class, and if it touches a sore spot they might get all worked up, but it has to be something closely related to themselves, and they are not interested in issues that are a bit more abstract. I find that knowledge and emotion are two different "skins" for them: when discussing knowledge, it is always knowledge, and emotion does not enter in; when discussing emotion, they are not good at using what they have learned. 
 
Shanghai Culture: Could it be that the reason why young people are more concerned about micro-level things has to do with the environment they grew up in? 
 
Xu:  That’s right.  There are at least two reasons. First, in terms of external environment, the environment the older generation grew up in had a public space[9], which created the awareness and the possibility of participation, which led us to think we had a certain agency in this space, and we could change it through participation. But the houlang generations have no sense of this at all, and there is no public space that will satisfy them, because they are always thinking "What's the point?" This has become their mantra, which generally reflects a sense of powerlessness. Since it is useless to care, think, and speak, then it makes sense to devote yourself to your professional life. As a result, many people stop participating in public affairs and slowly and unconsciously stop thinking.
 
Second, I think it has to do with test-based education. These years of test-based education have led the houlang generations to believe that there is a standard answer for everything. They may not necessarily accept this standard answer in their hearts, but they deal with it in a way so as not to enter into direct conflict with it. The media friend I mentioned earlier said that in the past, if there was something wrong with a program they were working on, everyone would discuss it with the leaders and actively contribute their own opinions.  Now the attitude of the 1990s generation is:  tell me what to do and I’ll do it, but let’s not waste time talking about it. This is a habit that comes from exam-based education: I won’t resist, I won’t discuss, we’re not going to waste time talking about things, I might even refuse to communicate, because you are strong and I am weak, you are the subject and I am the object.  They consciously regard themselves as being at the bottom of the food chain in the social hierarchy.
 
Test-based education gives you a standard answer that you cannot push back against. You will find that the 1990s generation can very thoughtful and active in the restricted circles of private space, but once they enter the public space, they immediately and unconsciously become a symbol of what society wants, and give you the standard answer.  They have no trouble at all switching between public and private spheres. The older generation always finds a way to express some degree of private opinion when they are obliged to say certain "prescribed" things in a public space, but the younger generation does not. Whenever they are asked a question, they come up with the most standard answer possible.  This double personality is completely natural, and they have no sense that there is anything wrong with it. 
 
I argued in my book The Pulse of China that China has been a "mobile hierarchical society" ever since ancient times. The society is mobile, but there is still a clear hierarchy alongside the mobility. The feudal hierarchical society, which lacked mobility, was certainly flawed, but everyone knew their place, and as long as they played their roles well, they received a certain social respect. In modern times, we emphasize "systems of internal competition," and cruel notions of "final elimination" and "winner-take-all," which makes everyone anxious. Test-based education produces the same results, a kind of internal competition which ultimately becomes alienating and produces an irrational “involution.” 
 
This "mobile hierarchical society" could produce people with deformed personalities, who would bow and scrape to try to please their betters, while being arrogant and brutal to those below them. They compensated for their feelings of inferiority in the face of their superiors by oppressing those beneath them, meaning that arrogance and inferiority were two sides of the same coin. Arrogant people actually often have an interior inferiority complex, and use their arrogance to try to get others to recognize their superiority. A truly confident person is calm inside and can treat anyone without condescension in any setting.  A certain student from Hengshui High School, which we talked about before, gave a speech in which he talked about being "a rural pig digging up the big city cabbage,"[10] which is a manifestation of an unbalanced mentality, feeling that he is a "rural pig" at the bottom of society and has to "dig up a cabbage" to join the upper class, “only after which could he feel proud. This distorted mentality is often seen in young students. 
 
Shanghai Culture:  We talked earlier about young people having a very natural dual personality.  How should we understand this duality? 
 
Xu:  Houlang youth make a very clear distinction between the public and private spheres. Today in the workplace there is an unspoken rule that there are to be no friendships and no romances at work.   The workplace is merely a functional place, so there is no friendship in the office, let alone romance. Many companies try to instill shared emotions through team-building exercises, because the positions in the company are impersonal and the boss wants to show the company’s personal side through team-building, but many young people hate team-building worse than anything, and they don't want to show their real selves in the workplace. 
 
Where do they show their real selves? In virtual spaces. Today's young generation indulges in games and anime, and "secondary world" and "meta-universe" are all the rage. Habermas divided the world into two: one is called the system-world and the other is called the life world. The classroom and the workplace are the system-world, which is dominant and impersonal kind of world. The 1990s generation do not show their real side in the system world, but only do what they are required to do in their jobs, and their real self exists in virtual online space.

That today's games, including "murder mystery games 剧本杀" can be this popular is a reflection of their suppressed and frustrated nature of life in the real world. Houlang generations imagine the unreal world as a free world, a world where they can truly express themselves.  People who play together are not in competition over personal interests, and in fact have no functional relationship, merely a temporary meeting, which is nonetheless a kind of emotional relationship. In the virtual world, there is no harm, you can exit and enter at any time, and you can travel between various worlds, both ancient and modern. 
 
Habermas says that the problem of modern society is the colonization of the life world by the system world, where even making a friend is a matter of usefulness and profit. In real life, the system world, the logic of power, the logic of money, is everywhere. By contrast, the virtual world allows you to display a self which is both virtual and real, to realize the side of humanity that seeks transcendence. This is also a kind of escape, because the more frustrated a person is in the real world, the more he or she needs a haven. In the past, the shelters of the older generation might have been poetry, reading, and travel, but today, with the birth of the virtual world, they can enter such a world at a fraction of the cost.

In ancient times, the transcendent self was connected to the "infinite", but they don't need that now, they find a virtual world, a world parallel to the real world, but more transcendent, where they gain a certain freedom. This phenomenon is still too little studied, and this virtual world did not yet exist when the Frankfurt School was making its cultural criticism. Today a new school is needed to analyze how the virtual world can replace the traditional transcendental world of the past and produce something virtual and divine. 
 
Today's young generation, especially those who are only children, may well feel lonely, which means they feel a greater need for subcultures and imaginary communities. They need games, and Yan Feng严锋(b. 1964), a professor of Chinese literature at Fudan University, has a very high opinion of games. In fact, games create virtual utopias, and people always need utopias. Games satisfy people's imaginations, and at the same time, the various defects and frustrations people suffer in reality can be satisfied and elevated through the utopias the games offer. Games are also richly panoramic, so that the virtual world is sometimes more "real" than the real one. 
 
Shanghai Culture:  As you mentioned just now, young people form imaginary communities. Group culture 圈层文化is a very important phenomenon in the cultural field, for example, the "fan circles" that everyone is concerned about now. How should we understand youth behavior in the context of these group cultures? 
 
Xu:  Fan culture is one of the hottest topics lately, and I am also very concerned about it. In fact, there is a gap between me and fan circles, because there is no one I support and admire. I mean, there are certain scholars I respect, but this is not fan culture.  Fan culture is something new that has spread to the older generation to a certain extent, but those born in the 1990s are really into it, so it is part of houlang culture. 
 
I like to think about this from a religious perspective.  Weber talks about the "disenchantment" of modern society, but we should not think that everyone becomes worldly and secular following disenchantment. In fact, understanding any social problem requires a deep understanding of human nature. Human nature is always dual, part animal and part sacred. Man has a transcendent nature, and there will always sacred things even in a secular society. The repressed sacred nature, the transcendent side of secular society, will find another way to manifest itself. 
 
There was a famous American theologian named Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971) who talked about two aspects of human nature, pride and self-indulgence. In fact, we see both of these among houlang youth, and they complement one other.  Indulgence is the animal side, and in the midst of worldliness and value nihilism, man has the desire to indulge himself.  The other side is related to pride, and pride always wants to achieve self-fulfillment, to display the highest, most transcendent side of human nature. The problem now arises:  what to do when most people cannot realize their sacred, transcendent nature? 
 
I watch "I Can I BB" because I want to understand the 1990s generation. In one episode, the topic was "Moms go crazy to support male celebrities," and a contestant from one fan group, whose name was Li Jiajie 李佳洁, said that she would support her idol even if she had her own fans supporting her. She explained that this idol represents the unrealized side of herself, that she realizes herself through her idol. It suddenly made sense to me when I heard it. The relationship between idols and those fans must be understood from a religious perspective, because society, no matter how secular it becomes, cannot extinguish the human pursuit of transcendence, which can only be expressed in various secular ways, so in a secular age idols have to be secular too. 
 
In an Internet era like ours, when everyone is following online stars, these idols have two "bodies:" one is their physical body, and the other is the "body" that contains the ideal of the fan circle, which is its sacred side.  Of course these “gods” are completely worldly and secular, but at least for hard-core fans they are “gods without divinity” in which they invest all their hopes and dreams.  The pursuit of idols represents the desire for infinity, because people live through hope, so they see the finite body of the idol they worship as representing their own imagined, infinite hope.

This mentality is completely in line with the value nihilism I talked about before, because it is hollowed out and contains no values, so what should these fans do with all the projections of self-will and the "I wants" they cannot realize by themselves? They can only project them onto the finite flesh of an idol and imagine the idol to be infinite. Chinese people quite readily invest infinite expectations in a finite flesh-and-bones body, experiencing a sense of "devotion," which is a sublime and addictive spiritual state. Because people need this kind of transcendental passion, and after falling into it, they can feel sublimated and even sublime. 
 
But after all, we are living in a materialistic age, and support for idols must be expressed through tangible material means in order to show affirmation of the transcendent self.  This is the only way to understand the fans’ incredible support for their idols. I call this phenomenon the salvation of today's secular age. Professor Benjamin Schwartz (1916-1999), a leading scholar of Chinese intellectual history at Harvard University, once said that in today's secular age, human redemption has become very easy, because all your worries go away when you take a Prozac, and without anxieties your spirit is redeemed. Today's "fan circle" phenomenon is another kind of redemption, that is, projecting oneself onto an idol, which is also a higher level of redemption, and this redemption is both spiritual and material. 
 
Unlike traditional hero worship, today's fan circles are highly organized, forming strictly disciplined subgroups. In a sense, it is something like an outlaw group 江湖社会,[11] a new type of tight-knit community that lives in a kind of "fellowship.” Various traditional communities in contemporary society are disintegrating, including families and churches, but new kinds of groups are emerging, especially in urban life. The fan circle provides a close life of "fellowship," which has a certain secular religious character and fits the characteristics of what Professor C. K. Yang (1911-1999) called "diffused religion."

​In today's highly competitive age, scattered individuals are especially in need of a subgroup or some kind of "fellowship." Solitary individuals, unable to resist the ups and downs of fate, often feel that no one around them can be trusted—they can’t communicate with their parents, colleagues and classmates are unreliable, everything is held together by considerations of personal interest—and suddenly, in the fan circle, individuals gain a sense of community where they feel they share common concerns. 
 
Shanghai Culture:  A common feeling today is that it is difficult to find cultural forms that can represent the idea of the public. In an era where public attention and focus are highly scattered and divided, and where people are constantly bombarded with isolated bits of news and information in their daily lives, is there a crisis of the “public” brewing beneath all of this? 
 
Xu:  The idea of the public is getting weaker and weaker in China, as we can see solely from the perspective of the Internet, without bringing in external factors. This has been going on since the 1990s, and what I've been working on for almost twenty years is how to restore a sense of public. According to Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the public is like a table in the middle of a group of people. When this table exists, people around it can engage in public discussion on an equal footing, relying neither on power nor on money as a medium, but solely through reasoning together, which eventually produces public opinion. What we call truth is obtained through public discussion, not through the manipulations of power or money. This is the ideal state we are talking about. 
 
The biggest change in the past 20 to 30 years has been the change in public platforms; in other words, the "table" has changed. With the emergence of the Internet, the technical form of the table mutated. I have been a participant in online culture since the beginning, from the BBS (online forums) in the late 1990s, followed by blogging on Weibo, then WeChat, and now the most popular form is short videos like on TikTok. So there have been at least four distinct changes, and we don't know yet if there will be a fifth one. 
 
This change in the public platform, the move away from the table, obviously has two characteristics: first, we have moved from words to images.  People today associate truth with images, but now even photos don’t count, and we want videos, which is a change. Second, the content is getting shorter. In the BBS era, Liu Qing and I used to host a "Century Salon," which was very influential in the Chinese intellectual community at the time. Now I think of the BBS era as the golden age of public interaction, because the technical form of BBS allowed people to fully and freely express their views.  It was sort of like today's group chat, but BBS was an enlarged format, similar to the civic square of the ancient Greek era. We still miss the BBS era, a period when there was a great deal of open and free discussion, and even a lot of famous intellectuals also participated in the discussion using screen names.  Since everyone was anonymous, everything was fair and equal. 
 
Things were different in the Weibo era of microblogging. It was like entering a living room and having a discussion around the networks’ "Big Vs,"[12] which was the characteristic of Weibo. In the era of blogs and microblogs, the voices of intellectuals were no match for the voices of celebrities and business people, and the topics discussed at that time changed too.  All the Big Vs had a certain point of view, and Weibo only allowed you 140 characters, so all you could do was to express your own opinion and then see who came up with something clever. In this form, neutral and rational voices couldn’t cut it, and you attracted people either by being more extreme or with your writing skills. Every Big V had a group of followers and "defenders," and any heretical voice that entered the space was subject to obstruction and attack.

The structure of Weibo definitely turned everything into a one-way street; there was a lack of equal discussion and attention was on making sure people had the “same attitude.”  In a sense, it was the prototype of the fan groups, with a Big V in the center. So public discussion disappeared with the Weibo era, leaving nothing by a cacophony of voices yelling at one another, a change brought about by technology. 
 
In the WeChat era, small circles are created through group chats, and these subcircles share the same information and knowledge, becoming more and more homogeneous. This has produced what Marcuse called "one-dimensional people," which shows that the best way to control people is to control the information they receive. We live in an age of information explosion, to the point that people cannot handle it, and all the information we receive is filtered and selected in some way. Any given group chat is homogeneous in nature and receives one-dimensional information. By filtering the information, the group is controlled and eventually shaped into a homogeneous group of "one-dimensional people."  Trying to control a person is very difficult, for example, it is almost impossible to control your children; but controlling a group of people is very easy, because they will deal with their internal agitation through self-filtering and self-control. Everyone lives in a closed "information cocoon" and sincerely believes that they represent the majority, but in reality they are just frogs in a well. 
 
With the emergence of short videos, people's thoughts become more and more intuitive, completely at the mercy of the manipulation of a short video image without context.  Video images and text are different, of course.  Text is indirect, and your brain has to process it, and it only becomes information after passing through your imagination.  Images are intuitive, and can jump directly into the brain without the filter of thought, and directly impact your mind, which is the magic of the image. Therefore, in the era of short video, the role of the subject is dissolved. In addition, there is a difference between information and knowledge. Information comes in pieces, while knowledge is holistic, systematic, and structured, and presented in the form of schools, theories, and disciplines. But in most short videos, knowledge is fragmented, and broken into segments of unrelated information. Over time, audiences are no longer accustomed to reading long segments of knowledge and can only absorb fragmented information, and eventually people themselves can only survive in a fragmented manner.
 
If the houlang generations maintain a strong enough agency over knowledge, then these broken bits of information can be incorporated into their own knowledge structure and values, and they can also digest and understand it. But today, many houlang young people are value nihilists, and once they lack rational agency, they are easily manipulated by information. For those who have their own knowledge structure, it is different. A person's knowledge structure is kind of "grammar," which is basically in place by the time you’re 20, when you’re in university, and what is absorbed later is only some added "vocabulary." Once the "grammatical" structure is set, even new information (in the form of information or knowledge) is unlikely to change it.  Joseph Levenson (1920-1969), a leading American scholar of Chinese studies, once described the Chinese Confucian culture as being enclosed within its own “grammar.”
 
Many of the 1990s generations have technical backgrounds, and they are very strong in their professional fields, but they have almost no knowledge of the humanities and social sciences, or their “grammar” has been defined by the stereotypical thinking you find in politics classes. Another situation is that of people who read a lot of books, but are unable to integrate the conflicting knowledge and put together a stable knowledge structure. So they are not only value nihilists, the instability of the knowledge structure also constitutes an inner void.

Many people today feel anxious and confused, and constantly ask other people what to do, and are at the mercy of too much information, which is also related to the problem. I usually counsel them to read something systematically, not so much to find a definite and unchanging truth, but to build their own open-ended knowledge system. Each person should have his or her own core knowledge structure with some rich, diverse, background material on the periphery, so that they are not at the mercy of random waves of knowledge or information and have both a definite self and at the same time an openness and flexibility. 
 
Reading is very important, because information is not a substitute for knowledge, and overall knowledge is acquired through systematic reading. This is why I recommend that the houlang generation that is exposed to so much information should read some books:  first, it will help them clarify their own values; second, they can have a stable and open set of references. In this way, it is possible to obtain a relatively certain self in an uncertain era, and find your place in the world. 
 
Shanghai Culture:  You mentioned that the times have changed in many ways, and in this context we are interested in the concept of "redimensioned enlightenment 降维启蒙" that you brought up. How has the process of enlightenment changed in contemporary times? What challenges does enlightenment face? 
 
Xu:  Regarding the relationship between intellectuals and public culture, this is how I understand myself: I am both a scholar and an intellectual. According to the original meaning of the concept of “intellectuals,” they must be public in nature.  But today the term “public intellectual 公知” has become derogatory, and means “talking head,” so it is no longer the same as the concept I am discussing.[13]  Still, to me, a public intellectual is one who faces the public, speaks in public language, and discusses public issues. As for the specific stance of this public intellectual, it does not much matter. We cannot ask all experts and scholars to become public intellectuals, but there must be some people who serve this function.

In today's Internet era, there are two public intellectuals whom I greatly admire: one is the jurist Luo Xiang 罗翔 (b. 1977) and another is the medical doctor Zhang Wenhong 张文宏 (b. 1969), both of whom are experts, but they also meet the above three criteria for public intellectuals. We cannot expect all experts to have the same sentiments and abilities, but society still needs more intellectuals to come forward to face the public and discuss public issues in a language that the public understands, just like they do. If experts do not come forward to play the role of public intellectuals, then the public square will be occupied either by powerful people or by people posing as public intellectuals, or by people trying to direct public opinion for their own commercial purposes, all of which would be terrible. Because today's social problems are very complicated and cannot be solved by common sense alone, experts are needed to play the role of public intellectuals. 
 
Finally, I can talk about enlightenment. I built my career on the Enlightenment , and I became a "trendsetter" by chance during the "cultural fever" of the mid-1980s. So I have been a participant in and an observer of the changes in Chinese thought from the 1980s to today. 
 
For public intellectuals, enlightenment has to do with reason, and this "reason" must unfold in a public space. At present, this public space is suffering from technical problems, which means that traditional intellectuals using WeChat public accounts have much less influence than self-published writers, who have advantages in terms of choice of topic and use of language. I used to be an author on Tencent Dajia,[14] and gradually came to understand the big players, called  “headliners,” because it turned out that anyone who achieved traffic numbers of more than 100,000 did so not through content but through catchy headlines.  If you look at my book The Pulse of China, you will see that the chapter titles do not looks like what you see in academic books, but follow the “headline” style of blogs like Tencent Dajia.  All of this has changed somewhat traditional intellectuals' habits of reasoning and equal dialogue, because technical conditions that made these possible no longer hold. 
 
Today is the era of online Big Vs and net stars.  However, no matter how much influence a Big V has, he cannot turn the influence into cash flow. Net stars are different.  They are not fighting their battles alone, but have managers and companies behind them and operate according to the logic of business, with the goal of converting traffic into cash flow. In the era of net stars, this cash flow is the most important, and everything is controlled by the logic of business. In this sense, the era of intellectuals has passed, because intellectuals are too individualistic to become "net celebrities." We have no choice but to admit that this era is no longer ours. 
 
Shanghai Culture:  So, in your opinion, what is the best contemporary enlightenment can hope for? 
 
Xu:  Given that the "table" that Arendt talked about has changed and is now shot through with a pervasive business logic, the question is whether can we use these new platforms for the purpose of enlightenment. Luo Xiang on Bilibili, Liu Qing on "I Can I BB", and Yan Feng on Weibo have all taken their shots and succeeded. This means that intellectuals are not completely lacking in the public square. The market for ideas in China is huge, and even if you don't want to be in the mainstream, there are still markets on the fringes, with significant "niches." The "age of the niche" has been around for a long time, and once any one of China's 1.4 billion "niches" is connected to this imaginary community through the Internet, it can get surprisingly big. 
 
However, you need to be clear on the fact that when you are speaking to houlang generations, you can no longer think that you are going to enlighten them as you did in the past. The older generation is always dreaming that the "renaissance" of the 1980s will return, but this is an illusion. The technological conditions have changed, and even if we managed to get rid of various control mechanisms, young people still wouldn’t follow us. So the best we can hope for is a kind of "redimensioned enlightenment." 
 
Enlightenment discourse presupposes three kinds of human beings: the exceptional people who grasp things first, the people who can be taught these things once the exceptional have discovered them, and the people who remain indifferent and hence unenlightened. The object of enlightenment is the second group, while those carrying out the enlightenment believe they belong to the first group and have grasped the truth, which is why they have a sense of moral and intellectual superiority, as I think the older generation of enlightened people does. But this posture is completely invalid in the eyes of today’s houlang generations.
 
What’s to be done? When I talk about the concept of "redimensioned enlightenment," I mean that as an enlightened person, the first thing you need to do is to reflect on yourself and realize that you are not all-knowing and all-powerful. Niebuhr talked about four types of pride in human nature, and for intellectuals, the two most important are pride in their intellects and in their morality.  If we cannot sit down and reflect on our own arrogance in these matters, then we will be unable to communicate with the houlang generations, to say nothing of enlightening them. 
 
I think Luo Xiang is an model example of "redimensioned enlightenment."  What Luo Xiang teaches is not merely a body of technical knowledge about criminal law, but more importantly, he communicates a firm belief that supports this technical knowledge: the idea that human beings are what is most noble, that human life and dignity are crucial, and that the rules of the law as practiced ultimately have to comply with these values.  This is the most attractive part of Luo Xiang. In several interviews, Luo Xiang engages in sincere reflections on the intellectual pride and moral pride of intellectuals, and examines himself to reveal the limitations of human beings, and his humility and sincerity are most impressive. His mode of exposition is also unique, telling stories in the particular cadence that houlang youths like, illustrating the truth through stories, turning feelings into knowledge...The whole process full of wisdom.
 
Enlightened people use reason, but the power of emotion is greater, although emotional narratives are often out of the reach of enlightened intellectuals. Perhaps we should “enlighten” to the fact that using logic drawn from our emotional lives is a good way to move people.  Rationality is what strikes the brain, while emotion is what goes straight to the heart. From this point of view, Luo Xiang is the best at combining reason and emotion. One might think that writers would be best positioned to do this, but writers seem to have no place and no voice in today’s public space. 
 
Enlightenment needs a new attitude, a new way of being.  We cannot feel that we’re always superior, but instead need to “roll around in the dirt,” after which we can calm down and have a dialogue with our children's generation, without assuming that we are always right and they are always wrong. I have learned a word called "sharing" in the past two years, which means to convey your ideas to other people in an equal way and at a shared pace. The younger generations have a much better sense of the real world, and real life, they are more "grounded" than the older generation, who must come out of their ivory towers if they want to discuss real issues. Otherwise, we will remain “suspended[15] 悬浮” in another world. If you don’t do this, then no matter how beautifully you speak, no matter how pleased you are with yourself, your message will not reach the houlang generations [隔靴搔痒, lit., “it’s like scratching an itch from the outside of one’s boot”]. 
 
So "redimensioned" refers to a posture, and does not mean the content of enlightenment is diminished, nor do we want to vulgarize it. Different fields should have different cultures, and universities should have a culture that belongs to the university, and which should not be play to the peanut gallery. These days, it has become popular to use too much inappropriate Internet slang in university graduation ceremonies; I would prefer that on such occasions we adhere university's own norms and respect elite culture. In a pluralistic society, universities should have their own groundedness, because the most terrible thing is when the same culture dominates everything, dominates all fields. 
 
However, once you leave the university and enter houlang territory, you have to talk and share with them in a way that they enjoy, and most importantly, you have to connect with their life experiences, knowledge, and textual approaches. This is not about abandoning yourself. In today's world, the more the market tries to suck up to the houlang generation with kitsch, the less successful it is; it is only when you stay true to yourself, but at the same time reach a "compromise" or a "reconciliation" with houlang  youth in appropriate ways, through a different kind of voice, that you create a unique energy in the market.  Because the market always welcomes scarce resources, commodities, and voices, which means that anti-market voices are more easily marketable. For example, Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), an American public intellectual, has always been anti-market and anti-establishment, but his influence is particularly strong because the market needs a variety of voices in order to “hedge its bets,” a function that intellectuals can serve. Even in an era when traffic is king, you can still keep a certain balance between self and traffic as long as you hold on to who you are. 
 
Shanghai Culture:  Our last question is also one that Shanghai Culture has always been concerned about. In your opinion, imagining we can rebuild a public culture in today’s era, what would it look like?
 
Xu:  Arent’s "table" is still there, but in the form of new technologies and platforms. We cannot imagine the public as something monolithic or homogenized. What is missing today is the Habermasian sense of public, by which I mean that we have lost the sense that public is somehow equal, and exists as a kind of communicative rationality. We are still resisting in various ways, hoping to rebuild this kind of public. I think that in this era, we have to hold onto ourselves first, and then adapt to the era. I don't think there are many issues that we cannot talk about today, and I look forward to Shanghai Culture’s taking advantage of your connections to writers and scholars to arrange a dialogue between these two groups. It will be very interesting, a dialogue between sensibility and rationality, and I especially look forward to this kind of dialogue, gathered around a "table," stimulating and inspiring each other, which may well spark something new.
 
Notes

[1]许纪霖, “面对’后浪’文化，如何’降维启蒙,’” published on Xu Jilin’s web portal, 许纪霖之窗, on November 14,2021. 

[2]Translator’s note:  In Wu Jingzi’s 18th century novel, The Scholars, there is a passage about the river running “thirty years to the east and thirty years to the West.”  This is based on the currents of the Yangzi river, which are notorious for changing direction.  Xu Jilin is saying the same thing:  the pendulum swings one way, and then it swings back.

[3]Translator’s note:  “Involution” is a commonly used word in discussions of Chinese youth culture.  The idea is that hard work is now running up against the phenomenon of diminishing returns in China’s economy, where growth has slowed.  Young people feel that they work much harder to achieve considerably less than did previous generations.  Xiang Biao provides a sensitive discussion of involution here.

[4]Translator’s note:  Lu Xun (1881-1936) is widely believed to be modern China’s greatest writer.  “The Passerby” is a poem-play in which the main character, the passerby, is on an endless journey, the destination of which he does not know.  A key passage conveys the main theme:  “Ever since I can remember, I have been walking like this, on my way to some place ahead.”

[5]Translator’s note:  Xu is referring to this remark:  ”Some of our universities, including Peking University, are currently training ‘exquisite egotists,’ who are sophisticated, worldly, thoughtful, good at playing a role, good at fitting in, and even better at using the system to pursue their own goals.  By exquisite egotists, I mean egotists who have been skillfully dressed up or even disguised.” Click here for further details.

[6]Translator’s note:  Also known as “You Can You BB” and “Oddball,” this is an extremely popular show in China, available on many different media platforms, a kind of debate/reality show where the best talker wins and stays on to debate again.  The Wikipedia description is quite helpful; scroll down to see the kinds of questions they debate.  Episodes are available on YouTube.

[7]Translator’s note:  These are two high schools that are well-known in China as being extremely successful in preparing students for the college entrance examination (gaokao).  Xu cites some specific statements of these high school students below.

[8]Translator’s note:  Liang Shuming was an important intellectual and political activity in Republican-period China, known for his philosophical writings as well as his engagement in rural reconstruction.

[9]Translator’s note: Xu is referring particularly to the 1980s, a very open decade when intellectuals were particularly active. There was little to no public space under Mao.

[10]Translator’s note:  The expression is 土猪拱白菜, which can mean something like “pearls before swine,” i.e., wasting quality resources on someone who is undeserving of them, and in China the expression is often used to describe marriages in which the man is unworthy of the woman.  Here, the student is depicting himself as completely unworthy, and promising to work until he succeeds in the big city.  For a discussion of the speech, see here.

[11]Translator’s note:  Xu is probably thinking of outlaw bands like the one described in the famous novel The Water Margin, where the author extols the brotherly spirit of a marginalized outlaw band.

[12]Translator’s note:  V is an abbreviation for “verified” and Big Vs were the celebrities and opinion-makers of the Weibo platform.  See here for more information.

[13]Translator’s note:  Xu is referring to a general populist tendency which has been common in recent years to discount the voices of experts and intellectuals in the public arena.  The American rejection of “experts” in the context of the coronavirus pandemic is somewhat similar.  See here for more details on the Chinese situation.

[14]Translator’s note:  Tencent Dajia, also known as iPress, was an opinion blog founded by Tencent on December 15, 2012. It was shut down on February 19, 2020.  The blog used to bring together many Chinese liberal intellectuals.

[15]Translator’s note:  “Suspension” is another buzzword frequently used in China, somewhat like “involution.”  In Xiang Biao’s concise definition:  “Suspension indicates a state of being in which people move frequently, conduct intensive labour, and pause routine life—in order to benefit fast and then quickly escape. People keep moving, with no end in sight, instead of changing their current conditions, of which they disapprove. As a result, frantic entrepreneurial energy coexists with political resignation. Suspension is a life strategy, a multitude of experiences, a feeling—and now, a keyword: a crystallized consciousness with which the public problematize their experiences.”  Xiang’s article is available here.