What's Truly Strange Is That No Space Is Left but Entertainment | Is This Society Too Good to Young People? ②

QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, the media, and publishing. What they share is a long-standing attention to public affairs, and what they hope to pass on is a "good society." The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes the mainstream of society, is this the future world we want?

"Look, I can't even remember what happened — I think everything was just too explosive. I could rattle off Wang Baoqiang, or Zhang Liangying, or Lin Dan, dozens of names like that. But when things that draw this much attention, all of the same kind, keep hitting your nerves at such a high frequency, then by the end of the year, when you look back, there's nothing left. You just feel exhausted."

At the end of 2016, when Dou Wentao talked with us about the year's hot topics, he felt what we felt: noise, bewilderment, and then, obviously, "just exhausted."

Those hot topics kept exploding into young people's lives, one after another, through the internet and their phones. The previous year's reality shows and variety programs had at least been excitement the entertainment industry carefully engineered. By 2016, entertainment had leveled up: celebrities' own gossip stole every pair of eyes — fueled by the most unseemly self-exposures, mutual mudslinging, and paparazzi pouring on fuel.

"Entertainment answers the most universal need — who doesn't want to be happy? That's normal. Entertainment is a hugely prominent industry. That variety shows draw clicks is almost nothing to be surprised about," Dou Wentao said.

For self-media accounts and internet celebrities, the best way to get attention was also to talk about these big celebrity stories. A reporter from Juzi Entertainment said that in that period she had to write several posts a day about "Baobao" — Wang Baoqiang. That stuff got traffic.

Then all of it converged on Toutiao, Weibo, and the older news apps from NetEase and Tencent, becoming a traffic source for these aggregators — and that extended to Taobao, Alipay, and the various e-commerce platforms that had gotten into content. After all, the best way to get people into your store is still to talk about who cheated on whom.

"But what's truly strange? It's that no other space is left," Dou Wentao said.

This "strange thing" is a result.

Start with the fact that society doesn't leave you much to discuss. "If there were space to talk about it, I believe some news stories, once they broke, would absolutely outdraw any variety show. Take Nixon and Watergate. After Watergate broke, I believe the crowd that story pulled in was bigger and broader than the crowd for any entertainment program. But we know that in our country, the space for news reporting, for talking about serious questions, is limited. A society's attention ought to be balanced — people should care about serious questions as well as entertainment. Why does it look as though everything has turned into entertainment today? Maybe we should ask how well that other part was being done. How much was it even allowed to be done?" Dou Wentao said he "can only go this far."

And even where discussion is allowed, we found that getting enough information is a bigger problem still. Chow Po-chung gave a few examples of "little pinks marching overseas": early in the year, a large number of users from Baidu Tieba's "Diba" forum planned to swamp some Taiwan-based Facebook accounts with a mass "declaration of patriotic unification." But ask them how much they knew about Taiwan. "Most of them knew nothing. They had no channel for learning what people in Taiwan think, what Taiwan's history is, what its political system is. So all the information they received was completely one-sided" — and in the end, these expeditions became entertainment events themselves.

For Jiang Fangzhou, the deeper feeling is that talking to people seems impossible. On the 50th anniversary of Lao She's death, she wrote an essay. A high-school student decided she was a "public intellectual," and therefore had to be wrong about the Cultural Revolution. They talked in private messages for more than seven hours. After Jiang Fangzhou had collected a number of messages along the lines of "please go explode where you stand," she still couldn't say for sure whether she had convinced the teenager of anything.

A dead end.

So people can only fall back on entertainment: open, say what you like, no need to answer for it. And then new problems appear. How do we handle privacy? How do we get at the truth — and at the "post-truth" we have come to accept? How do we handle consensus and dissent? Everything is tangled together.

The reports that follow in this series will turn on these questions.

"I don't think intellectuals stand for being right. But when all the intellectuals put their heads together on a question, it gives us insight from the widest range of directions," Dou Wentao said.

Consensus shouldn't be the goal of a healthy society; the space and the capacity for plural thinking are worth more.

Plurality is clearly missing.

This piece is a reflection on some of the events and trends of 2016.

11. Why Have Doctor-Patient Conflicts Turned Deadly? Why Has the Threat of Violence Become a Resource?

Zheng Ge:

Jia Jinglong's case is treated as a form of taking the law into your own hands. Some have even brought up the example that in ancient China, a man who killed his father's killer would be pardoned by the court.

But none of this holds up. Taking the law into your own hands is the least defensible argument there is. The main purpose of a modern state is precisely to rule that out and let the state monopolize the use of violence. If you argue for private vengeance, or for treating it in law as grounds for a lighter sentence, the whole society falls apart. It connects to a lot of things people in China bitterly resent — attacks on doctors, for instance, which are really just anger at doctors. In any society, everyone knows a doctor can't cure every illness. But because the doctor failed to cure someone you cared about, you go and beat him up, or even kill him — that is plainly wrong.

I often teach foreign students too. Foreigners find it hard to understand why attacks on doctors happen in China. They say it would be impossible in their own countries. If a doctor fails to cure a patient, the patient doesn't go straight to the doctor. Even if you think something really did go wrong — an error in a procedure — you go to a dedicated complaints body. A doctor is shielded from the public the way a judge is; there is a professional protection mechanism. There is also thorough insurance, and an insurance company handles the compensation. In our country, neither the ideas nor the supporting institutions have been built. Take a medical accident: how should compensation actually work? People go straight to the hospital and make a scene, because there is no arrangement that works and that everyone accepts.

Su Qi:

It is far from just doctors and patients. Look around, and almost every pair of relationships can turn deadly: chengguan (urban management officers) versus street vendors, demolition offices versus holdout homeowners, homeowners versus property management, and so on — hurting each other, playing a zero-sum game without knowing it. Beyond those, there are relationships that won't turn deadly but where trust has already been poisoned: property developers versus mortgage slaves, food manufacturers versus ordinary shoppers, education authorities versus parents, advertisers versus audiences, airports versus stranded passengers. In each other's eyes, the other side stands for greed and hypocrisy, for dropping principle the moment money appears, or for pressing every advantage past reason and bluffing even when it is in the wrong.

It comes down to one thing: ours is a society that believes in unwritten rules, and real public norms are missing. People generally assume that anyone who actually goes by the stated rules will get nowhere. For instance: if you don't know anyone at the court, don't bother filing a lawsuit; if you don't know anyone at the hospital, don't bother seeking treatment. Under those conditions nobody trusts anybody — so isn't everyone everyone else's enemy? Over time people come to settle things with violence, and violence becomes a resource too, one you can count on.

12. Why Don't We Even Have the Right to Say the Spring Festival Gala Was Bad?

Li Yinhe:

One thing I watched closely this year was the reaction to the Spring Festival Gala. A lot of people posted online saying they didn't like it, and their posts were deleted. I think that's absurd.

How far freedom of speech reaches — that's a big question.

If there are things in a country's media that cannot be discussed at all, I think that is absolutely unacceptable. Take "constitutionalism": not letting people talk about it is wrong, you still have to let people discuss it. I recently came across a post online called “Why Our Reforms Must Firmly Reject Constitutionalism”. The argument is that constitutionalism is a bourgeois political system, which is to say that our socialist system is more democratic and better. The author says: if we have no proof right now that we can't do better than constitutionalism, then why not go ahead and try?

Hearing that leaves you in despair.

Let's be clear first: the opposite of constitutionalism is autocracy. Are you arguing for autocracy or for constitutionalism? It's that simple. How can you say we should reject constitutionalism because we supposedly have something better than constitutionalism? This thing we can't prove — and what can't be proven doesn't exist — so why would we need to accept constitutionalism? Honestly, I think this person is out of his mind. No basic grasp of political science.

People have worked on constitutionalism for over a hundred years, starting with the 1911 Revolution. Now you come along and reject it — what exactly are you trying to do!

How can opposing constitutionalism be allowed? We write "democracy" on the street — isn't democracy constitutionalism?

Democracy, freedom, the core socialist values — and then you oppose constitutionalism yourself. Wouldn't you call that schizophrenic?

13. Should There Be Cameras in University Classrooms?

Gao Quanxi:

Intellectuals have no sense of certainty either; everyone jumps at shadows. There used to be no forbidden zones for exploring ideas, though publishing an article had its own discipline. Now they have put cameras in classrooms, and what gets recorded can be used as evidence in court. It couldn't be used before, because it had no legal standing; now all of it can be presented in court. With that hanging over you, who dares to really lead students in exploring a question? A university classroom is supposed to be a place for exploring the truth. It should have a relatively relaxed, free atmosphere that encourages people to explore. Truth isn't sitting there for the taking — it is produced by arguing with each other. In today's classroom, all of that has been strangled.

14. How Do Conspiracy Theories Like the Freemasons Catch On?

Leung Man-tao:

Conspiracy theories have always been popular; they have never gone away. You saw plenty of them around the American election and Brexit. The reason they are popular today is, first, that there is no authority the public accepts. Nothing in society commands public trust; nothing is authoritative. People ought to be able to trust China's most authoritative media outlets, but because we don't have media like that, all sorts of messages start going around. Conspiracy theories all need the same underlying conditions and the same structure in order to spread.

Second, you find that facts can't be checked, or are very hard to check. The routes to finding out the facts are complicated, and the time and energy they cost are enormous. So what does a conspiracy theory offer at that point? A very convenient tool for understanding the world. A conspiracy theory is a very simple way of looking at the world, but it also always happens to fit the premises and assumptions we already hold. Every theory has to be tested against reality, and when you apply a conspiracy theory to your own life and find it works every time, you come to believe it.

Take Nazi propaganda back then. They loved to stress the "Zion conspiracy" — the idea that a group of Zionists, meaning Jews, had formed a secret alliance of transnational capitalists, plotting to revive the state of Zion and to seize all of Europe at the same time. So why did people believe it? First, because in Germany the richest people really did seem to be Jews; the bankers were Jews, wealthy men whose business you didn't understand. Jews were a minority in Germany, so how had they taken all those rich positions? Everything you saw in ordinary life seemed to confirm the claim. Once you believe the theory, that leaning makes you blind to the facts against it — that there were also plenty of poor Jews, more of them in fact; most Eastern European Jews were poor, farmers working barren land. You simply don't see them, because you already believe the theory. So the structure of conspiracy theories is always very similar.

15. Why Have We Become the Victims of This Society's Popular Conspiracy Theories?

Chang Tieh-chih:

This is social distrust. It reminds me of a concept from sociology: social capital. The stronger a society's social capital, the more democratic it becomes, the better its economy gets, the more people trust one another, and the more civic groups it has. People used to feel that social capital and social trust on the mainland were very low. Five or six years ago, if you remember, someone would lie injured by the roadside and nobody would stop. That reflects a possibly distorted side of China after reform and opening up: some people chase money desperately, while everyone criticizes the public realm, so the level of distrust is very high.

I have always said that the scariest thing in China right now is this commercial logic — everything has to make money, everything can be sold.

Gao Quanxi:

This kind of conspiracy theory, this demonizing, is tied to the uncertainty of the moment. Human knowledge is limited, but people want certainty, and they often don't believe the official line. A conspiracy theory seems to give "uncertainty" a culprit.

On a second level, conspiracy is in a sense also a life skill, a tactic different interest groups use to reach their own goals, and that is common enough. Looking at human development as a whole, after the Enlightenment, once people's autonomy had gradually become full, small conspiracy theories might still exist in large numbers, but national or global ones basically don't. Thought is plural — in viewpoint, in interest, in position, in ethnic group — so no single force can monopolize everything. What force do you think could produce a conspiracy that stirs up the whole globe? No such actor exists.

Third, a conspiracy theory always has a goal, but the split of interests in this society is so wide that even when people start out thinking alike, it falls apart in the end, because interests diverge. A conspiracy theory keeps running from beginning to end, but its goal is never reached — the conspiracy comes to light soon enough. Tulip mania, the clivia craze: both collapsed within a few months. With information moving this fast today, and so many ways to speak, how could a conspiracy theory survive? By any normal, rational account it's impossible.

The Freemasons were once a quasi-organization in Western society. In the 17th and 18th centuries, in a relatively closed social environment, they may have had some influence, but after the 19th century they could not have produced any real power. Better-organized parties and organizations replaced them long ago. Even if the ritual and the forms still exist, calling it a conspiracy is a stretch — with no power and no actor behind it, what conspiracy could be carried out? With no shared belief, no shared program, no organization, what powerful plan is there to plot in secret?

16. How Do We Break Out of Conspiracy Theories and Paranoid Thinking?

Leung Man-tao:

Because conspiracy theories fit the way humans think and perceive, this mode of thinking is hard to break. Life forces people to simplify events; otherwise we would struggle to survive. How else would you explain racial stereotyping, racial prejudice, national prejudice? That kind of bias is a need to sort things into categories that we have from the moment we begin living in this world. When I see something and feel worried, or see something and feel it's good, that is the result of thinking in types. Without it we couldn't survive. That is how culture arose; that is simply how human thinking works. So when I see people whose skin color is completely different from mine, whose language is completely different from mine, I naturally group them into a category. It fits our habits of thought, the basic structure of human cognition. Most of our prejudices are tied to it.

Overcoming that bias amounts to overcoming a cognitive instinct, and overcoming an instinct takes enormous effort. You have to go through rigorous training in logic; you have to examine yourself clearly and constantly. For most people, that is simply too hard.

Su Qi:

The way to break conspiracy theories and paranoia is complete information. So you can't provide only one side of it. I think media with a sense of responsibility should try for a balanced account, giving information from every side, including every perspective. If internet users get more information, things will slowly get somewhat better.

Our education itself runs one way, mainly indoctrination, telling people the settled conclusion. So from childhood people don't develop the habit of thinking in reverse; they don't know how to take in information from all sides in a plural way, without a conclusion or a premise set in advance, and reach their own conclusion. That is the biggest flaw.

Think about it. Once you find that things aren't the single, consistent conclusion you imagined, you get confused. And since you have no capacity for taking in plural information, no ability to pull it into a conclusion, you simply treat the other, many-sided voices as static, as noise — or decide it must be a conspiracy theory. At that point you retreat to the single explanation you are used to, familiar with, comfortable with. Whoever tells you the answer flatly and with certainty makes you feel good, makes you feel safe, makes you feel less anxious.

But the world isn't as settled as we like to say. It is full of uncertainty. You have to try and fail; things are rarely so clear-cut. That may well be the norm. We may just not be used to this norm.

The internet deepens people's biases, but the flip side is that while a person will choose what deepens the bias they want, plenty of the opposite material is also out there — you just have to not block it out on purpose. Those who govern the internet shouldn't feed people information that runs one way and sharpens the tendency. If all sides' views are deliberately put out there, I don't think this would be a big problem. Even if everyone likes to believe what they want to believe, a rich enough environment around them would keep the worst from happening.

17. Why Is the Lack of Respect and Trust the Most Worrying Thing in a Society?

Chow Po-chung:

We can't talk about the individual by pulling them out of the institutions. Fundamentally we have to come back to institutions, because people live inside them. If a society's institutions aren't getting better over time, the people inside them will grow more and more despairing too.

If our institutions can't give people trust, if they make it impossible for people to respect one another — or if our society isn't in a state where reason decides things, but one where whoever holds power decides, leaving us with a strong sense of injustice — then you will find many young people asking: why should we be reasonable? Why pursue a life of equal respect? They will feel a deep despair.

So you'll notice that a decent public culture has to cultivate these virtues. We have to return to the level of institutions, gradually giving people confidence in the world, letting them feel that justice is worth pursuing and that honesty is a virtue. The whole society pursuing some good values, affirming that what is legitimate deserves recognition, and slowly building up some virtuous cycles — that is the crucial thing. Otherwise a lot of kids look around and see that we live in a jungle, where whoever has money and whoever has power gets everything. Then a lot of people lose confidence in morality, and things keep getting worse.

In fact, a great many of China's problems today come down to our institutions. Whether you're talking about the pursuit of truth or the space for free speech, it all relates to the fact that our institutions haven't become more just. If we discuss these things apart from institutions, you'll find much of it can't be put into practice.

A good institution respects every person's rights and dignity, gives everyone full freedom in this society to pursue their rights, and gives everyone a reasonable chance to pursue the life they want to live.

18. Why Does Empathy Matter So Much?

Zheng Ge:

We can't ask ordinary people to rise above self-love and self-interest. Compassion develops only when a society is very stable, when most people can first secure their own interests and then gradually extend their care outward. I think that is one social condition for compassion.

Another social condition is that the society has to value individual ability and have fairly strong mobility. The family a person is born into shouldn't seal their fate. It has to be possible for anyone to become someday the person they want to be, and also possible to become the kind of person they least want to be. In a society where this two-way movement is possible, people are more likely to have compassion. When you see a beggar, you think: someday I might end up where he is — and that makes you lend him a hand.

These intellectual conditions really are related to reading, especially narrative reading, novels and drama. What a person can experience firsthand is limited, after all; most of the room for imagination comes from reading. So a good work of literature can also spark a person's compassion. I think this is a composite question: the social conditions you live in, your reading habits, your upbringing all bear on it.

But humanities education is especially lacking in our country. And if all you know how to weigh are utilitarian and practical factors, that won't help this country find its footing on the stage of human civilization.

19. What Change Can Business Bring to a World Short on Public-Mindedness?

Liu Hailong:

There are two routes to rebuilding public-mindedness in the media. One starts from institutions, which is very hard right now and can only move step by step. The one I think can be done right now is the second: consumer movements. Take Ralph Nader, who fought carmakers over car safety in the US in the 1960s and later kept running for president. He led a particularly important consumer movement, and it worked. A major turn in Western democratic movements in the 1960s was in fact consumer participation — rights are unequal inside consumption too, not just in politics.

Back then several large companies could band together to cover up major safety defects in car design. The industry flatly denied that its products had safety hazards, and a single consumer could do nothing about it, because carmaking is a specialized field and you couldn't out-argue them. But once consumers boycotted together — fix this or we won't buy your cars — the companies admitted the accidents really were connected to them. Consumer oversight is an extremely powerful force; it can even push a government to legislate.

That's why, once Microsoft's monopoly reached a certain point, it threatened society and the public interest and had to be broken up. Google keeps saying "don't be evil," but all of its products still have to answer to public scrutiny. People are still going after the question of its ranking algorithm — it's very complicated, it involves trade secrets ordinary people can't follow, it isn't transparent enough, and consumers never feel quite easy about it. But Google probably wouldn't dare openly sell rankings to the highest bidder; if it did, I'd guess the stock would fall the next day until nobody would buy it. Oversight there is very strong, and it isn't only oversight of government: it concentrates on companies, especially big ones, because their power in modern society keeps growing and is exercised in more hidden ways. Under those conditions a company has to watch itself, or consumers will drop it.

For example, if a media outlet insulted a particular group, the public would flood it with letters and call on everyone to stop watching the program, driving the ratings down. But Chinese consumers aren't especially mindful of their own rights. A few years ago Kai-Fu Lee launched a campaign to boycott a job-recruitment show on Tianjin Satellite TV, because it disrespected job seekers. He called on the public not to watch it. But the campaign fizzled out, because people found the show entertaining and felt it had nothing to do with them. At bottom, consumers don't treat themselves as people worth respecting. No backbone. I think if this had happened in a country with a stronger sense of consumer rights, that show would have been savaged, its ratings would have collapsed, and it might well have been pulled off the air. Cases like that have happened elsewhere. But China still lacks the one or two landmark incidents that would make producers afraid, make companies afraid, and make consumers feel how much power they have. A few years back, when Weibo was at its hottest, there were signs of it — but in the past few years, for reasons everyone knows, that force seems to have weakened again.

This can only move slowly, pushed along one incident at a time.

20. Another Way to Look at Paid Posters: Why They Can Be Tolerated

Liu Hailong:

Another phenomenon I follow is paid posters. The state and companies have always wanted to regulate this behavior; personally I don't think cracking down does much good.

In this era, once an online reputation becomes something valuable, it can be traded and turned into a commodity. Just as real life has public relations and advertising, why can't the online world have public relations and advertising? A reporter can file a story on behalf of a PR firm; a celebrity can endorse a product they have never used. So why can't an ordinary person endorse a product? I'll say I've never used it, but someone paid me, so I'll play the ordinary consumer. The endorsement doesn't pay what a celebrity gets, but the logic behind it is the same. Why is this acceptable offline and not online?

So crackdowns aren't enough. The key is to understand the mechanism behind it. If market demand is strong, you can't dam it up. A misguided crackdown is like the way the internet used to be governed — going after online rumors without first working out why rumors arise, and what the mechanism of their production and spread actually is. It's the same with paid posters: this is worth serious study by academics.

21. Why Do We Make Money Off People's Dark Impulses and Worst Traits?

Jiang Fangzhou:

The place I live is a startup park. A lot of internet companies are in one spot, and I often overhear them talking. When they're building a new app, everyone sits down together, and the first topic is always: "What dark needs do people have?" "What flaw in human nature hasn't been fully mined yet?" For example, do women always want to spend beyond what they can afford? Including that "compensated dating" feature Alipay rolled out a while back — it's all the same thing.

You can't deny these impulses really do exist in many people's minds. What's vile is that they may even think this is a good thing. They'll say: look, this new feature of ours even saved us the PR budget. What's frightening is that your discussion and your criticism are also good things for them. They've already gotten the attention. So what do you do about that?

(More reports in this series to follow…)

People interviewed in this piece:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image from: douban