Is This Society Too Good to Young People? ①

QDaily interviewed more than 20 people, most of them from academia, the media and publishing. What they share is a long-standing interest in public affairs and a wish to pass on a "good society." Our question: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is this the future we want?

When Jiang Fangzhou spoke to QDaily, she said, "This world is too good to young people." Jiang, born in 1989, is a writer and deputy editor-in-chief of New Weekly (《新周刊》). Of the more than 20 people interviewed for this series, she is the youngest.

But is this society really too good to young people?

Young people today get studied, analyzed and flattered for one plain reason: their future spending power. What is wanted is their money. These future members of the middle class mean more revenue and more profit.

There is another way to think about "being good to young people."

A society has to pass something on. If what gets passed to young people is a squalid society — confused values, no trust and no respect, cynicism everywhere, brutality, ignorance, ingratitude — if the civilization humanity has built up is treated as worthless, then by no measure can we call that "being good to young people."

We felt this through the public events and public arguments of the past year. The jaw-dropping, bizarre incidents and controversies were, sad to say, amplified online, on platforms where young people are the majority. This world that doesn't feel good is one young people made themselves. We set out only to take stock of what had happened in society, and that led to a new question: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream, is this the future world we want?

In material life, the younger generation is indeed, as Jiang Fangzhou put it, given too much attention and pushed along — "Whatever you want, we'll give it to you; we might even manufacture more needs you didn't know you had."

But what if brutality and ignorance are pushed onto the masters of the future along with the goods? Or perhaps materialism itself will finally be destroyed in an ignorant society.

QDaily interviewed more than 20 people, most of them from academia, the media and publishing. What they share is a long-standing interest in public affairs and a wish to pass on a "good society."

The series is organized around dozens of small questions. Some have already come up in our lives and been argued over; others dig into what lies behind these phenomena and are, naturally, more serious. But every one of them bears on whether we will deserve that "good society" in the future.

Below is the first installment. It covers 10 small questions.

The interviewee is Xu Jilin, a professor at East China Normal University. He studies history, is 60 this year, and has spent most of his time since the age of 30 on a research project about "intellectuals."

1. Why are fewer and fewer people willing to argue a case?

Weibo's 140 characters turned almost every expression of opinion into picking a side.

Xu Jilin

From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the voices of intellectuals were still the mainstream. Then Weibo arrived and things changed. Weibo was a revolution: public opinion was no longer held by what we used to call the elite.

Public opinion in the past — in print newspapers or on websites — was in practice ruled by the intellectual elite. Weibo flattened the whole of public opinion and made it popular. In the Weibo era the center of opinion was no longer intellectuals, still less public intellectuals; it moved to the opinion leaders who grew out of what people jokingly called "know-it-alls." Look at the most active opinion leaders of the Weibo years: most of them were not intellectuals at all. If they weren't entertainment stars, they were property bosses, or people of every other sort. Some, of course, were freelance writers and media people, professional writers and media people, and their voices came to drown out the traditional intellectuals. They became the internet's opinion leaders.

But do you know what set them apart from intellectuals? Back then a Weibo post ran to 140 characters, and 140 characters meant you only needed the opinion, not the argument behind it. No one asked you to argue your case, and there was no room to. Weibo was about picking a side: you agree, I watch, I retweet, and the more voices, the greater the force. So Weibo created an atmosphere in which no one had to argue anything. Intellectuals have a strength that is also their weakness: when they put a view forward, they must argue for it, and that is how they persuade you and win you over — I am in the right. That is the mark of an intellectual. But by the era of opinion leaders there was no need to appeal to reason. What did they appeal to instead? Force of presence. Or a sense of common sense, an appeal to feeling, with no need to argue whether a thing was right or wrong. So in the era of opinion leaders the internet's public space split apart fast. People stopped reasoning with each other and relied on sheer presence, forming one camp after another. That was the era of opinion leaders.

2. Will Zhihu destroy knowledge?

Taking in knowledge the way we take in information strips knowledge of everything systematic about it.

Xu Jilin

Everyone today takes in information. I feel this strongly: even Zhihu, which we read on our phones — Zhihu is supposed to supply knowledge, but in practice we read it as information, and knowledge itself has turned into information. Knowledge and information are not the same thing. Information is broken into pieces. Knowledge is a system.

So I have always said that today we are pushed around by information of every kind, or by knowledge that has been turned into information. And in the end it is hard to build a set of views of our own, a body of knowledge, even a worldview.

If we must talk about some kind of enlightenment or renaissance, it is not about forcing the ideas of the past back onto young people by one means or another. It is about letting them, even in an internet age, inherit the traditions of the generation before, and still be able to read.

Reading on paper is not the same as reading online. It lets a person quiet down a little and build a worldview of their own. So the core of it is having a body of thought of one's own. This basic worldview should not be dragged along by whatever opinion is in fashion, no matter where that opinion comes from. That is the heart of the matter.

Kant said: have the courage to use your own reason in public. This should not be read narrowly as the elite enlightening the masses. What matters more is giving everyone, and above all the educated public, the capacity to enlighten themselves. Self-reflection, thinking for oneself — that, in the end, is what enlightenment means. It is what American universities stress so heavily as "critical thinking."

3. What does the "independent thinking" we're always said to lack actually rest on?

The path to saying something has become so smooth that no time is left for thinking, let alone criticism.

Xu Jilin

Harvard, for example, has a course called writing, and it is nothing like the "college Chinese" taught at our universities. It teaches you how to think and how to write, and that thinking and writing are critical. Note this: criticism here does not mean only criticizing others. It includes criticizing yourself.

I will not simply submit and follow some opinion. I use my own reason to think it through, to reflect on it, and out of that I form a set of beliefs. That is critical thinking. But in our formal education today, from primary school to middle school to university, all we have is teaching for exams, and critical thinking is very weak. Then came the era of self-publishing and the internet, whose technical features make you look very free but in fact have weakened critical thinking rather than strengthened it. You have no time to think, let alone to criticize.

All you have is a stance, a declaration, a choice of whom to follow. So if you insist on talking about a renaissance or an enlightenment, the core of it is not promoting one set of values or one ideology. It is giving the public at large the capacity for critical thinking.

You ask what can be done, how to fix it? First, our education system needs reform, so that schools from primary to university can build a student's capacity for critical thinking the way Harvard does. Second, young people need their own cultural practice, above all in reading — the ability to settle down and read some classics. Because critical thinking is built by reading the classics. The better the universities in Britain, the United States and Europe, the more they stress the classics, precisely because the classics carry human wisdom and let you form critical thought. That matters a great deal.

4. Why have people lost the ability to listen to one another?

Intellectual authority rests on a civilization humanity built over thousands of years. It has a solid foundation of wisdom. Popular opinion is usually opportunistic and fickle.

Xu Jilin

This era has broken the line between elite and mass, between the enlightener and the enlightened. So everyone seems to be free. And the question becomes: who is enlightening whom?

In fact, though this era looks very free, you should know that Lin Yusheng, a professor in the United States, once wrote an essay on the relationship between freedom and authority. He said freedom needs authority. If a person is to be truly free, he needs authority. Not political authority — an inner set of ideas of his own. If you have no thought of your own, no basic values, no core values, you will be manipulated without end: you follow fashion, you follow whomever you admire, and since the object of your admiration may keep changing, you follow that person's opinions instead — which makes you easier still to manipulate.

In our era, every kind of core value has declined.

People revere freedom, yet they find it hard to have an inner freedom of their own, so they tend to follow internet celebrities. Whatever book Luo Zhenyu tells you to read, you read; it is easy to end up worshiping a cult leader. China today has plenty of them, of every kind, along with stars of every kind.

The existence of these cult leaders means that beneath what looks like a very ordinary state of affairs, we are in fact in a state of cultural anarchy.

What does anarchy mean? It means there is no order. There isn't even an opposing intellectual authority to speak of, and we are pushed around instead by fleeting opinions of every sort.

As everyone knows, popular opinion and what we call intellectual authority are entirely different things. Intellectual authority rests on a civilization humanity built over thousands of years; it has a solid foundation of wisdom. Popular opinion is usually opportunistic and fickle. That is a huge difference.

So today's popular internet celebrities are, in effect, closing off thought too. Their ideas aren't stable even for the cult leader himself; they simply track the market. That is what produces the disorder in today's marketplace of ideas. The disorder comes precisely from the lack of intellectual authority — there are too many fleeting opinions of every kind. And what we lack is not one intellectual authority but many, because it is very hard for us to go back to an era with one voice and one authority.

Social values have already become plural, and in my view every set of values has some reasonable basis. Left or right, conservative or radical, each has its rational ground. But being rational also requires a solid set of ideas behind it to make the case. And that foundation has grown very thin. So the problem in China now is this: once thought of every kind sinks beneath the rock, what floats on the surface of the sea tends to be foam. That is a harm done to Chinese culture. The best state of affairs is one where every kind of thought has room to speak freely, forming an arena where ideas compete. Once that space for competing ideas is lost, all that remains is a stage run by internet celebrities — and that stage is nothing but foam.

5. How did internet celebrities take over our space, step by step?

What defines an internet celebrity is turning your own abilities into cash flow.

Xu Jilin

I have noticed a change over the past two or three years. Opinion leaders have left the stage too, or been driven off it, and "internet celebrities" have appeared. We are now in a third era: in the public sphere it is neither so-called public intellectuals nor opinion leaders but internet celebrities. Among them, people like Papi Jiang and Luo Zhenyu strike me as the most representative.

There is a classic definition of an internet celebrity: they must be able to turn their influence into cash flow. If they can't, they don't count as internet celebrities. It is a specific concept, which is to say what they do is commercial. But the commerce isn't overt. They still seem to be putting out a message, and that message is governed to some degree by commercial logic.

Whatever else you say, this has become an era of internet celebrities. In such an era, serious voices often struggle to find space of their own. Internet celebrities and the livestream hosts of every stripe — aren't hosts all the rage now? — have taken over exactly the unserious space, the space of daily life, even a thoroughly mediocre space. Which makes Weibo interesting now: on one hand, the people who used to spend their time on Weibo feel it is in decline, declining across the board; on the other, the Weibo crowd keeps growing, and the active users are tied to that other part of it, and they are very active indeed.

So what I am saying is that over roughly the past 20 years you can see the decline of public intellectuals, the decline of opinion leaders and the rise of internet celebrities. That trajectory shows how China's space for public opinion has changed in these 20-odd years.

6. Why do we waste so much time on trivial private matters — Wang Baoqiang, for instance?

When self-publishing seizes on a hot topic, it amplifies the heat of what was a private matter.

Xu Jilin

In an era when serious topics are suppressed, private and even trivial ones — Wang Baoqiang's divorce, the falling-out between Guo Degang and his disciple — tend to become the mainstream. That is not surprising at all. But on the other hand, you can also see that self-publishing has blurred the line between public and private.

By rights this is a private matter and should not enter public view, should not enter the public sphere. Yet it can be exposed there with the greatest of ease. So the line between public and private has become very blurred, and the public sphere has been taken over by private matters in bulk. A private incident can, before anyone notices, be blown up into a public event. In these two cases at least, one of the parties chose to expose it. But there are also people who never wanted to be known and whose affairs became public events anyway. In the internet age exposure is effortless. In the era when mainstream media dominated, things were still controllable; in the internet age they ferment easily, and even a private conversation on Weibo can end as a public event. It is far too easy.

Take the Wang Baoqiang affair I mentioned — a lot of people got very worked up. Those defending him and those attacking him both read extra meaning into it. Underneath lies a tension between the grassroots and the elite. The people who disliked Wang Baoqiang were largely so-called social elites, who were unhappy to begin with that a "loser" had made it into the elite club, and who then felt that the way he handled his marriage — even though his wife was the one at fault — was crude and uncivilized. Behind that lies a great deal of elite resentment toward the grassroots, even hatred and envy. The reverse holds too: some saw Wang Baoqiang's supposed betrayal as one more case of the elite class taking revenge on a grassroots hero and punishing him. Its meaning had already been blown out of proportion.

What we find is that any event that becomes a phenomenon has already outgrown the meaning it had for the people involved and is inevitably loaded with a wider social meaning. The question then changes: do we stay in the tabloid gossip, or do we watch these private incidents, dig into them, and draw out of them a more universal public question? If we can draw one out, that counts as a kind of public self-education and self-reflection.

If you stay in the gossip, it is only consumption. There's a saying now: don't "consume" people. If you don't think about something, you are certainly consuming it, because it has become an object of your entertainment — that is consumption. Or you use the affair to make a name for yourself. But when you think about it seriously and give it a critical, reflective reading, you are no longer consuming it. You are able to see, in a lonely, accidental, particular, individual event, a fuller and more universal meaning. That work, as I see it, is exactly what intellectuals and the media are for.

7. With private conversations exposed everywhere, can we still have a safe space to speak?

Protect freedom in private space, or we will live in a state of wearing a mask at every moment.

Xu Jilin

This has to do with citizens' self-restraint. There used to be a rule — one I feel gets broken all the time — that a private conversation must not be quoted in public or printed in a newspaper. It isn't a rule of law; it is a rule of ethics, the ethics of everyday life. It covers publishing or paraphrasing letters too, which by rights should require the consent of the person involved before going public.

But today the line between what we might call public media and private media has become very blurred. Say I retweet or quote a friend's line on Weibo or WeChat — is that public or private? Many incidents now begin with something a person said in their Moments feed, which is then quoted onto Weibo, or into a still larger space. And then that person says, that was an exchange in a private space, even a group chat — but it has been quoted out and turned into a public event, and it becomes a problem. This forces us, whether public authorities or the public, to ask: what are the ethics of everyday life? How do we define public and private? We still need to stress protecting an individual's freedom within their own private space. Otherwise people will live wearing a mask at every moment, living in fear at every moment.

Never mind that — even memoirs are like this now. A fairly well-known scholar from Shanghai, after moving to the United States, began writing memoirs of the 1980s and 1990s and quoted at length things people had said in private, some of it one person's remarks about a third party. That is certainly not fabrication; the problem is that the people involved are still alive. As we see it, it clearly falls short in private morality. Someone said it to you in private, trusting that you wouldn't pass it on; a private conversation does not mean it can be made public. But these boundaries have been broken. Everyday life has an order too. Trust between people is held together by an order and by customary ethics, and that has been broken, with no bottom line left, which leaves people living, generally, in an environment without any sense of safety. People become very fragile, easily hurt, and you don't even know where the hurt will come from. If you knew, you could still guard against it; but once these ethics are gone, once that order collapses, you carry a constant sense of insecurity, a feeling of having hurt someone or of being hurt. So people no longer live among each other in truth. They are forced to guard against each other and live inside falsehood. This is a deeply worrying situation.

Technology has brought the old order down, so a new set of ethics is needed. Every set of ethics is built on an existing order, and once technology changes, the old order and the old ethics are overturned. A new ethics has to form — not through law, but through public discussion.

It starts with public discussion, which forms a convention. That has to do first with public opinion: this is moral, this is immoral. Then what should become law becomes law, and what need not becomes a set of everyday ethics. But first the awareness has to be there. Without it, we fall into anarchy, and in anarchy both public power and private power reach everywhere and penetrate everything, leaving you having to guard against everything, everywhere.

8. Why do so many people believe Zhao Wei is a Freemason?

The less thought an era has, the more conspiracy theories spread.

Xu Jilin

The conspiracy theory is the laziest and most convenient explanation there is. It lays every cause at the door of a conspiracy and turns the other side into a demon — demonizing by deifying, deifying by demonizing — as if the whole world were the result of one conspiracy after another. It is extremely lazy, but it suits our era rather well.

Because the less thought an era has, the more conspiracy theories spread. People always feel that a fairly complicated world can be explained away by one simple piece of logic, and then, like children, they sort everyone into so-called good guys and bad guys. Behind this kind of conspiracy theory is a sign of an immature mind. An immature mind, a child's mind, first wants to ask who is good and who is bad, who is the devil? And the devil, the bad guy, is exactly the one who is supposed to have started the conspiracy.

So when we lack a sound mind, we are easily drawn to conspiracy theories, and we divide the world simply into black and white, good and bad — a world of two poles.

9. Why do we no longer believe anyone, or no longer dare to?

Behind the Han Chunyu affair lies, again, the absence of a credible institution.

Xu Jilin

Science is too specialized. We cannot judge it by common sense and cannot draw simple conclusions. That judgment has to be handed to a third party.

China lacks a mechanism: assessment by an independent third-party institution. A third party stands on neither the affirmative nor the negative side; it has no stake in the matter and can assess it independently. Take the Han Chunyu affair. Personally I don't think we have reached the point of a final conclusion, because it really does take some patience to let Han Chunyu prove himself — was it fabrication, or a misjudgment in an experiment?

Confirming it or falsifying it takes time; that is science. But if there must be an investigation, it needs scientists — an independent body of scientists acting as the third party that investigates.

We generally lack such a third party, and without one a great deal of arbitration and investigation ends up as insiders investigating insiders. This is especially true of government investigations — a supervising department investigating the department below it that got into trouble — so it carries no credibility. In a mature society under the rule of law, third-party investigation is very common. When a university has a case — is this plagiarism or not? — an independent investigative committee made up of outsiders will certainly be brought in to conduct an independent inquiry, so that the report it produces, once adopted by the government or the responsible authority, is also easily accepted by the public. That is what a third party is.

What is needed is a mechanism. The most important thing is not these individual cases but that whenever a dispute arises — and we have far too many disputes now — the department doing the investigating often has a stake in it and therefore carries no credibility. That is why a society under the rule of law needs a third party.

10. Why has the public stopped believing even the media?

Credibility has to do with professional competence, not with political stance. The main reason the media fails to convince people is that professional competence is neglected.

Xu Jilin

The internet age has produced a kind of flattening, an egalitarianism. And within a general egalitarianism there is very little credibility.

Credibility is always built on some kind of hierarchy: certain outlets are more credible than others. It necessarily involves some ranking.

Today is not an age of scarce information but of an information explosion. What we badly lack is credible information, knowledge and media, above all online — exactly the market we describe as awash with rumors, where truth and falsehood are hard to tell apart. Which is precisely why credibility is needed.

Print media used to perform this function. In fact, you should know, there is a historical distinction between broadsheets and tabloids. A tabloid has no credibility; it takes a more commercial, market-driven route, and no reader takes what a tabloid publishes seriously — that is the normal mindset of the reading public. But what a broadsheet publishes, everyone takes seriously. One reason is its reliable sources of information; the second and more important reason is that a broadsheet has a position. A broadsheet always runs editorials. Do you know where the real difference between broadsheets and tabloids lies? It is not circulation. The most important thing is that a broadsheet has its own position, its own stance, and does not hide it, whereas a tabloid is opportunistic: it reports whatever draws attention, with no fixed stance or position, which is why a tabloid does not necessarily run editorials. Seen from this angle, editorials also shape a paper's regular readership. That is what makes it a broadsheet.

I don't think the credibility of a broadsheet like The New York Times is declining. The polling failure this time is worth reflecting on, but it does not touch the question of a broadsheet's credibility. That credibility was built up over many years and rests on rigorous working procedures; it will not be lost over one polling failure. It is simply that polling has run into a problem today — its methods no longer fit the times and need adjusting — but that does not affect credibility. What affects credibility is distorting the facts, and above all distorting them on purpose.

Isn't that exactly what some Chinese media do?

Ha ha ha. China's biggest problem is that the mainstream media have no credibility, and people believe only the things circulating online, especially the voices that have been blocked, which end up acquiring a kind of credibility instead. But you should know that credibility formed this way, by suppression, shows that this society is in fact badly distorted and badly sick.

So from this angle I rather admire the position some media have held to over the past 20 years — "I don't necessarily need a particular position," as opposed to this or that "-ism." I prefer the position of professionalism, someone like Hu Shuli, for instance. Because professionalism can rise above particular positions and ideologies, report a thing from the standpoint of journalistic professionalism, put out its own voice and build its own credibility. Today's news media are contaminated by ideologies of every kind, and what is needed, in my view, is exactly this professionalism. Credibility has to be built on professionalism, not on one ideological position or another.

But professionalism is not everything. It is only that China is especially short of it — that is all I can say. It is not that credibility stands up the moment you have professionalism. Nor does professionalism rule out having a position; it is only that the position cannot be premised on distorting the facts. That is what professionalism means. The moment you find your position in conflict with professionalism, you must reflect and correct it according to the conclusions professionalism produces. It is not that professionalism has no position at all. The New York Times has a liberal position, The Wall Street Journal a conservative one, but both papers are highly professional. Without professionalism they would be tabloids. So credibility is tied to professionalism.

People mentioned in this interview:

Jiang Fangzhou: Writer, deputy editor-in-chief of New Weekly magazine. Author of I Admit I Haven't Lived Through Hardship (《我承认我不曾历经沧桑》) and The Story's Ending Was Written at the Beginning (《故事的结局早已写在开头》), among others. She said: "Society appears to be pleasing young people, but in fact it hasn't given them many opportunities."

Xu Jilin: Professor in the History Department at East China Normal University. Author of Ten Essays on Chinese Intellectuals (《中国知识分子十论》) and How Can Enlightenment Be Brought Back to Life (《启蒙如何起死回生》), among others. He said: "Historically there have been two kinds of enlightenment: enlightening the elite and enlightening the public. But in today's era of internet interaction, enlightenment is no longer one-directional — it is an interaction between elites of all kinds and the public."

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