Even Qian Liqun, 78, Is Talking About Artificial Intelligence Now — Thankfully, He Thinks "A Robot Can't Replace Lu Xun"

"The biggest difference between people and robots is that people have creative thinking — they can think wild thoughts and talk nonsense. So the question is: does our environment allow wild thoughts and nonsense?"

At 3 p.m. on November 18, a room on the second floor of OWSpace's Huajiadi store in Beijing was packed with people, some sitting, some standing, all waiting quietly for an event to begin.

The event, titled "The Social Space of Literature and the Possibilities for Contemporary Intellectual Development," brought together two well-known scholars, both 78 years old: Qian Liqun and Hong Zicheng.

Moderated by Gao Yuandong, a professor in Peking University's Department of Chinese Language and Literature, the two old men — both dressed in gray — talked for two hours about their newly published books, about literature, reading and the times. Qian Liqun's new book is A Close Reading of Lu Xun's Works (《鲁迅作品细读》), which works line by line through 33 pieces by Lu Xun: fiction, prose, prose poems and zawen (his polemical short essays). Hong Zicheng's new book, Reading Literature (《文学的阅读》), collects his experience of reading Bei Dao, Niu Han, Shang Qin, Zhang Zao, Xu Shixu, Ji Xian, Liang Bingjun, Zhou Mengdie, Ba Jin, Chekhov and Camus, among others.

The event naturally began with the two new books. According to the event description, Mr. Qian and Mr. Hong are among the most important scholars in the study of modern and of contemporary Chinese literature, respectively (the "among" could probably be dropped). Their styles on the page are nothing alike — one sweeping and bold, the other delicate and restrained — but both rest on the same idealism and the same concern for the human condition.

Hong Zicheng said at the event: "I've always wished I could be someone like Mr. Qian — a man who commands the room and speaks his mind about all sorts of things. I have opinions too, but I just can't get them out. I'm embarrassed, or a little afraid. I'm timid — I often say so myself, that I'm a bit of a coward. But Zhao Yuan once consoled me in an essay, saying a timid temperament also holds something steadfast inside it. So it's hard to say for certain. And it's precisely this kind of difference that makes the world interesting. If everyone were like me, the world would have no life in it, nobody would speak up, and what hope would there be? None at all."

As Hong said, Qian Liqun is known for speaking out. He follows Chinese society and history closely, has criticized the present at length, and coined ideas such as the "exquisite egoist." His scholarship centers on the history of modern and contemporary Chinese literature and on the intellectual and spiritual history of 20th-century Chinese intellectuals. His deep inquiry into 20th-century Chinese literature and society — above all his scrutiny of the history and the inner life of 20th-century Chinese intellectuals, and his reckoning with China's 20th-century experience and China's path — has drawn attention at home and abroad. His books include Encountering Lu Xun, My Spiritual Autobiography, Years of Vicissitude and The Mao Era and the Post-Mao Era. He is not only one of China's most influential humanities scholars since the 1980s; Peking University students also voted him onto their list of the ten most popular teachers — in first place.

But as he has grown older, Qian Liqun has deliberately stepped out of public view. In 2015, to get away from daily trivia and concentrate on writing, he and his wife moved into a retirement home. He also announced his farewell to the academy, to education and to young people, and has lived on a fixed schedule at the home ever since, writing.

"I have a sense of urgency, a sense of time. I'm old, and I don't have much time left. On top of that there are my own health problems, my wife's health, and various social factors, all of which mean my writing could be cut short at any moment. So there's something of a salvage operation about my writing now — I have to finish before all sorts of things can happen, which means concentrating intensely," Qian Liqun said in an interview.

That is what made this event so rare. One member of the audience had come all the way from Xiangtan, in Hunan, just to listen. And as always with Qian Liqun, everything he said — in the talk and in the answers afterwards — carried the sharp critical edge of a humanities scholar. We have put his remarks together below, in the hope that you take something from them.

The More Serious Question: Does Our Environment Allow Wild Thoughts and Nonsense?

I read four newspapers a day, and more than 20 magazines besides. Once I've read them my mind starts to wander. What have I been following lately? Something the academic world is discussing — artificial intelligence and the future.

The Shanghai journal Exploration and Free Views (《探索与争鸣》) put out a special issue on "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Society." I've been reading it every day, and it sets my mind racing. One piece in particular I'd recommend to you all: "What Makes Us Human, and What Will Humans Do? The Future Challenge of Artificial Intelligence," by He Huaihong, a philosophy professor at Peking University.

Facing the challenge of this new age of artificial intelligence, I want to share how I think about the question. As everyone knows, in recent years artificial intelligence has taken over many of the functions of human beings. So some people believe robots will one day replace us, and that this is a crisis for humanity. I don't agree.

Three large questions occur to me. First: faced with the challenge of AI, I think we now have to go back to the most basic philosophical questions, the most basic questions about human beings. That is exactly what He Huaihong asks in his essay — what makes us human, and what will humans do? Much of what belongs to people has already been taken over by machines. Is there anything a machine cannot take over? What is it? That is what would show the essence of being human. Put simply, the biggest difference between people and robots is that people think. And human thinking is not ordinary thinking — it is creative, which is not how a robot thinks. What is creative thinking? In one line: thinking that cannot be copied, cannot be replaced, cannot even be computed.

About this creative thinking I want to stress two things. First, it is heretical thinking. It does not run with the mainstream of its age, and it is enormously imaginative. In my own words: thinking wild thoughts and talking nonsense. That is what real heresy means. Besides heretical, creative thinking, there is also the spirit, the feeling and the will that belong to human beings alone. Those two things together are what makes us human, and what separates us from robots.

That leads to a second question. If we accept this about human beings, then what new demands should we make of literary creation, scholarship, education and reading, today and in the future? Take writing: a robot can write poems too, but if you can write a human poem, a poem a robot could not write, that is what makes you a poet. In his essay He Huaihong quotes Hayek's remark that there are two kinds of scholars with two kinds of minds: the clear-headed kind and the muddle-headed kind. Einstein, for instance, couldn't remember many of his own formulas — when he lectured, he had his students write them on the blackboard. He was muddled, but enormously imaginative. He raised new questions in places where others saw nothing. In the past the highest aim of our education was to produce clear-headed scholars. Now, I'm afraid, the muddle-headed scholar matters more, because machines can already do clear-headedness. Another example: once you have robots, gathering and sorting historical material is no longer much of a problem. What tests a scholar is drawing out of that material something nobody else thought of. Historical insight is what counts now. So this means something for the young people here: think it over for yourselves — how do you train yourself? Where do you put in the work? I think you should work on your creative thinking, and on the all-round development of your feeling, will and spirit.

The third question: if what we now need is creation, scholarship and education worthy of human beings, what sort of social environment does that take? What sort of academic environment, creative environment, educational environment? Forgive me — an enormously free one. Otherwise, as I understand it, the thinking of the future is wild thoughts and nonsense, and so the question becomes: does our environment allow wild thoughts and nonsense? That question is in fact the more serious one. Otherwise everything I have said is empty. You want to think wild thoughts and talk nonsense, and you are not permitted to. That may be the more fundamental question, but this is not the place to discuss it today.

Can a Robot Replace Lu Xun?

Here is a question I find very interesting: can a robot replace Lu Xun? When we read Lu Xun, what exactly are we supposed to learn? Which brings me to the two books I published this year. One is Lu Xun and Contemporary China, where I set out what I've come to understand about his ideas. In that book I stressed that Lu Xun's greatest distinction within Chinese culture is that he stands for another kind of thought, another kind of life, another kind of existence. That is where his value lies. Last time I spoke on the question "Why do we need Lu Xun?" My answer was: we need creative, heretical thinking like his.

What I want to talk about now is the book I've brought with me today, A Close Reading of Lu Xun's Works. The two books are really two sides of my work on Lu Xun — one on Lu Xun the thinker, one on Lu Xun the writer. They have something in common. Studying Lu Xun the thinker, I pay particular attention to Lu Xun as a heretic — the Lu Xun who is another existence, another possibility. Studying Lu Xun the writer, I pay attention to the creative, singular, heretical artistic thinking and aesthetic views his texts express. I won't repeat it all here; it's in the books.

Lu Xun has an essay that spends most of its length describing street conjurers doing tricks in the road. When I first read it I thought: he describes a crowd watching a magic act, and then that's it — is this really a piece by Lu Xun? Other writers could have written it, and written it just as vividly. Then I got to the end, where Lu Xun says: sorry, I got the title wrong — I didn't write Conjuring Tricks (《变戏法》), I wrote Modern History (《现代史》). What he is writing about is modern history. Nobody else could have written that ending. I'd swear nobody today could write it.

Or take another example: Lu Xun has a famous story called Forging the Swords. The first half tells a tale of revenge, rising to a climax where three heads fight one another — superbly done, loud and vivid. But reading that far, I thought: other people could manage writing this vivid. Sure enough, the second half turns sharply. The three heads fight until they are so tangled together they cannot be told apart. The avenger, the man he is avenging and the king all end up fighting each other, and in the end the three heads are buried together, laid in a single coffin and paraded through the streets. Everyone says, what a fine show. In other words, what Lu Xun wrote about was what comes after revenge. Only Lu Xun could have written that.

There is also Lu Xun's own judgment of his work. We all assume his best stories are The True Story of Ah Q, Diary of a Madman and Medicine. But Lu Xun said those weren't good — too sharp, too much on show — and that his best story was Kong Yiji. That probably comes as a surprise too. Even now, I suspect many researchers overlook it. The other stories are too sharp, not unhurried enough, which is what led me to coin the term Lu Xun's "aesthetics of composure." That is Lu Xun's aesthetic.

Then there is Lu Xun's language. The biggest thing about it, I think, comes through in a line of his: "When I am silent, I feel replete; as I open my mouth, I feel empty." There is a deep philosophy behind that. A person's deepest thoughts cannot be put into language. I have also said that the real Lu Xun is the silent Lu Xun, not the Lu Xun who wrote all those works. Human beings live with this contradiction: what is truly deep in a person, what is inward, is hard to say in language. That is the fundamental predicament of writing. And Lu Xun set out to challenge that predicament — to use language to say what language cannot say. So much of his language runs against grammar and against rhetoric. Plenty of high-school students have told me: Mr. Qian, Lu Xun's sentences don't parse, not grammatically and not rhetorically. I tell them: not parsing is exactly what makes him Lu Xun. That roughness is his creativity. A robot could not write language like that. Take the line everyone knows: "The Hundred-Plant Garden seemingly, certainly, held nothing but weeds — but in those days it was my paradise." "Seemingly" and "certainly" don't fit together; they cancel each other out. He deliberately used two contradictory words to carry his enormously complicated feeling for the garden. That is Lu Xun.

Whether we are learning from Lu Xun's thought or from his language, I think what we have to learn is that particular cast of mind — his creative thinking, his heretical thinking. That is what to learn, not the particulars. What should we learn from a work when we read today? Simply put: how to become a person a robot cannot replace.

The "Exquisite Egoists" I Criticize Are Defined Mostly by Their Relationship to Power

The phrase "exquisite egoist" has travelled rather too far, so let me say a little more. Note that I say "exquisite egoist," and that I deliberately keep it apart from another idea, the "exquisite individualist." As I see it, individualism protects a person's right to their own life and meets the spiritual needs of individual character — a basic human right. This is in fact where all of you are stronger than my generation. My generation put far too much weight on collectivism, on utter devotion to others with no thought of self. We paid a bitter price for it. So I support and sympathize with young people today who pursue a material life. I am not against individualism.

The "exquisite egoist," on the other hand, makes personal advantage his only pursuit. What I am really criticizing behind that phrase are two things. One: a great many people today have lost their faith — no faith, no convictions, and the only thing holding them up is personal advantage. The other, and more important: this kind of "exquisite egoist" understands power extremely well and fits himself to the system extremely well, and so the system supports him in turn. So the "exquisite egoist" I criticize is defined more by his relationship to power. He becomes, in practice, the foundation of corruption — the reserve army and support base of a privileged, propertied class.

Of course this touches on another question: the relationship between ideals and reality. Everything I've said for the past hour carries an unspoken premise — that certain social conditions have to exist. Without them, none of it can be realized. So in real life you cannot get by with no compromise at all; you simply could not survive. But what I want to stress is that even when you compromise there has to be a bottom line. The "exquisite egoist" goes past it.

Let me wander off the subject a little. Years ago I got a letter from a university student: Mr. Qian, I've run into my biggest difficulty. On graduating, my school requires everyone to declare a position on … — if you don't declare, you can't graduate, but if I declare, I'll be telling a lie. What should I do? I get letters like this often, and they put me in a hard spot. From an idealist's position I could of course say: you must not lie, absolutely not. That's easy to say, but then the student can't graduate and can't even put food on the table. I hold my professorship; I can't just say that.

I turned it over many times, and I answered: first, tell the truth. That ought to be common sense, but in our society telling the truth is a lofty thing. You may not be able to tell the truth. Second option: say nothing, keep silent. But sometimes you aren't allowed to be silent either; you have to lie. Not lying puts your basic survival at risk. So what then? I said: you may lie.

But there are three lines you must not cross. First, you must be clear about right and wrong — you must know that lying is wrong. Why do I say that? Because many people feel a residual fear when they first start lying, and the more they lie, the more they come to think lying is right. Second, you must be forced into it, not lying of your own accord for your own advantage. Third, when you lie you must never harm anyone else. A person needs a bottom line; some things simply must not be done. You can compromise, but you cannot break that line. That is the basis of being a person.

Confucius Is the Unluckiest Man of Our Time — He's Become a Money-Making Tool and a Political Tool

I am plainly against The Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety. Where is the biggest problem now? I am in favor of studying guoxue, China's classical learning. The times have changed: Lu Xun's generation read too many classical books, which bound up their thinking, whereas we have read far too few. Never mind your generation — I myself have read far too few of them. I have always been ashamed of that.

But unfortunately, in China everything turns into theater. Today's classical-learning craze, I think, is theater from beginning to end. Hardly anyone is sitting down and reading seriously. I have never been able to understand it: why won't people just read The Analects — it's such a short book — and instead go and learn Yu Dan's version of it? I find it beyond reason. Reading The Analects honestly and seriously: that I support. But now everything turns into theater, into amusement, into a game.

So I have said before: Confucius is the unluckiest man of our time, and Lu Xun, by contrast, the luckiest. Back when Lu Xun was raised up on a pedestal, that was the unluckiest thing for him; today he has returned to a normal state — read him if you like, skip him if you don't. Confucius is another matter. Confucius has become a tool for making money and a tool for politics. If I were Confucius I'd be heartbroken. Everyone says Confucius said this and Confucius said that, and nobody reads his books properly. I find it absurd.

Taken as a whole, I don't think this is an age in which education can accomplish great things. Under this system, with this way of teaching, education cannot accomplish great things. But small and middling things are possible. So I tell many teachers: when you're at the lectern, teach according to your own idea of education as far as you can. There are plenty of constraints, of course. If you reach five students in one graduating class, that is a success. It takes tenacity.

To do education in China today you need, first, Lu Xun's spirit of tenacity. You can't do it all at once; every student you reach counts. Second, you need wisdom. Very little is absolute, and there are gaps you can use. Use tenacity and wisdom to do what you can, so that you can face yourself and face the children.

Western scholars say we are now in a "post-truth era." People no longer much believe the propaganda in the papers, and the internet is full of lies. You can't tell who is genuine; you work yourself up into righteous fury for ages and then learn it was fake, and you never find out the truth. And nobody shares any common ground any more — every single question gets argued over. I don't go online and I don't use WeChat. One reason is that WeChat is one endless quarrel, and in it everyone thinks he alone holds the truth and everyone else is either a traitor or a paid government shill. You live in an age with no truth and no consensus. Honestly, if you wanted to open up now and talk nonsense, there'd be nobody left, no one to talk to. And if it's just the two of you, what happens if he reports you?

What I have always argued for, though, is tenacity and wisdom. And doing something where you can. Safety first, of course. Young people, for instance, can read; reading gives you a great deal, and it also lets you do things. It's about finding ways around the constraints and doing whatever lies within your power.

(Note: These remarks were compiled by this reporter, the subheadings were added by this reporter, and the text has not been reviewed by Qian Liqun himself.)

Cover image from: YouTube