How Do You Cultivate Civic Consciousness, and How Do You Build a Sound Mechanism for Public Discussion? | Living With the Future No. 12

Posing the question matters as much as solving it. Sometimes thinking the question through is the only road there is.

"Sometimes the point is not to change the world but to explain it."

At a critical moment, on the question of how to explain this world and how to live with the future, we need to hear wise, independent voices.

We asked more than 20 specialists in economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields to answer our questions.

The questions are many and tangled, but they bear directly on how the younger generation will live. Our interviewees hope that the world left to the next generation works well and keeps advancing as a civilization — and that in a complicated, bewildering world, people hold on to independence and reason.

Lei Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told a story.

A few years ago, Beijing planned to move its zoo. When it went up at the end of the Qing dynasty, the Beijing Zoo — then called the Wanshengyuan, or Garden of Ten Thousand Beasts — stood in what was by any measure the remote outskirts. As the city spread, the land outside Xizhimen became downtown ground worth its weight in gold, and someone had designs on it. As soon as word of the move got out, it set off resentment among many Beijing residents; there was a great deal of discussion online, and in the end the move never happened.

Lei Yi sees this as a good example of opinion in public space shaping policy. He said: "I do think it's because the government has limited people for governing — a great many things can't, and couldn't possibly, reach into every crevice. That is exactly where civil society does its work. Some matters get handled through social organizations managing their own members; and when members have a problem or a demand, that too gets reflected in an orderly way through the organization, rather than as a riot-like mass incident. If a member believes the organization can protect him effectively, then that kind of organization is precisely what connects the top to the bottom: it passes the government's intentions down to the members below, and at the same time, when members have interests and demands that need protecting, the organization can reflect them rationally, through organized means. That is the healthiest kind of society."

Lei Yi calls discussion in public space "a shock absorber, or a conductor, sitting between the government and its citizens" — conducting in both directions, which helps keep society healthy.

Most of our questions opened out from this one. Among them was our original worry: high-quality public discussion is rare to see; online, cursing people out and picking sides are the mainstream. Now that an ordinary person has an online space to say what he thinks, what norms should we have, beyond picking sides and hurling abuse? What does good public discussion look like?

Most of the scholars we interviewed showed an optimistic side: complaining, extremism, picking sides, emotion or even unreason, abuse — none of it is worth worrying about, because sound ideas take shape in the process.

They also had a pessimistic side: in that process, what role should public administrators play?

Do they use their own "righteous spirit" to suppress dissenting views before they can form? Does what they do help build a "marketplace of ideas"? Only in a space — a market — where opinions are fully exchanged is the best outcome likely to emerge.

When public power shows the virtue of restraint, what the weaker parties in the space of public discussion — each of us ordinary people — need to practice is independent thought, judgment, and care in the face of views not our own.

1. How Public Opinion Gets Expressed Is, at Bottom, a Question of Public Administration

You learn to swim by swimming — but first there has to be water

He Weifang, Professor, Peking University Law School

There's really no way to say this in advance. You learn to swim by swimming; you pick it up gradually in the course of real discussion.

Take good judgment. Can you tell which kind of speech can be trusted, and which kind looks tempting on the surface but is in fact frightening? That kind of judgment is, I think, one of the very important goals all education pursues. At the same time you get better and better at expressing yourself — arguing your view rationally, with evidence and with facts. Only then do you write things that are more and more readable, things people take real pleasure in; only then do you know how to take issue with someone whose views differ from your own.

All of this is learning to swim in the water — you can only learn it slowly, in the doing. Of course, I believe some people may never learn it well in a whole lifetime, and others may learn it very quickly. It depends on each person's cultivation: the upbringing they had as a child, and what they have read since, both matter.

(The precondition is) there has to be water first.

Becoming a citizen is not an empty phrase!

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

By Aristotle's definition, a citizen is a participant in politics. He used the word "participate" in a strict sense: serving on the council or on a jury, taking part in political deliberation and judicial trials. A citizen, in other words, means someone who rules. Athenian democracy, for instance, used sortition and fixed terms, and the share of citizens who held office was very high; most citizens held public office at least once in their lives. Socrates had little enthusiasm for practical politics, yet even he served as chairman of the council's standing committee — roughly equivalent to a head of state today — though the term lasted only a day. In ancient Greece, taking part in politics was not just a citizen's right but a citizen's duty. What the ancient Greeks argued for was an active conception of citizenship.

The modern conception of citizenship is passive. A citizen's rights — to life, health, property, speech, thought and so on — are set down in the constitution and the law, and a government under the rule of law is one that protects those rights according to law rather than violating them. The only thing a government should obey is the constitution and the law; otherwise it is an unlawful government.

Modern citizens also have channels for taking part in politics, such as running for public office (mainly political appointments). But because modern democracy uses election rather than sortition, most citizens can go no further than the threshold of public office: democratic election is a way of choosing the capable and virtuous, and the capable and virtuous can only be a minority, so most people never get to serve. A view is in fashion now that runs roughly like this — the China-specific method of promotion and appointment by one's superiors is meritocracy, while choosing by popular election is not meritocracy but merely democracy, and electoral democracy does not select for merit. This shows ignorance of the most basic political science. How is modern democratic election not a way of choosing the able? It is precisely because it is election, and because most ordinary people never reach public office, that the ancient Greeks would have seen today's democracies as aristocracies. Whether the people elected are necessarily capable and virtuous is hard to say — just as people appointed purely by their superiors are not necessarily capable and virtuous either. The difference between the two lies not at all in whether they select for merit, but in who does the selecting: the China-specific way has the Party leadership select; the democratic way has the people select.

The other modern route into politics is choosing other people. A few get chosen, the many get to choose — that is modern democracy. Western countries began spreading universal suffrage from the middle of the 19th century; at first only some adult men could vote, and it widened step by step to women and finally to everyone, whatever their occupation, class, ethnicity or race. Some say the masses aren't fit to choose others because they are ignorant. To a degree that isn't wrong: France established universal suffrage in 1848, when peasants made up most of the population and most peasants were illiterate, and they elected Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte. But the real meaning of universal suffrage lies in holding that people are equal. It is an abstract equality, granted — yet set against rank and privilege, it finally gave the majority of the population some small say. Universal suffrage might be called the one institution that puts the mass line into actual practice. Many modern political and economic systems and doctrines are bound up with equality: "strike down the local despots, divide up the land," one person one vote, fair trade, equal pay for equal work — all of them express a demand for equality.

In the common modern conception of politics, citizens are the masters of the state. But to become a master in fact and not just in name, you first need the consciousness of a master. That consciousness cannot be inborn; it has to be shaped. If every citizen in a country becomes a real master of the state, then it is a nation of masters. A nation of masters is, first of all, one where the people are prosperous and strong. If most people inside a country are weak, selfish, small-minded and servile, then however rich and strong the state grows, it belongs to a few. Since the Qin and Han, imperial power in China grew ever stronger, reaching its extreme under the Ming and Qing, when the emperor alone was master of all under heaven and everyone else a slave — which is why the mentality of the subject and the concubine spread so widely. Flatter those above and you collect fame and profit: hence scholars for hire. Treat ordinary people as dirt while playing the loyal servant: hence cruel officials. What was scarce was any sense of being a master.

Today, nearly 70 years after the founding of the People's Republic, the very idea of the citizen feels like something from another age. Richer knowledge and greater ability don't necessarily raise civic consciousness or the ability to practice citizenship. When power controls and handles everything, the public naturally needs only to sweep the snow from its own doorstep. In two or three decades, the shaping of a highly rational, self-interested citizenry was completed — no small achievement. Let everyone chase his own private interest; leave ruling to the capable and virtuous. It looks like laissez-faire, but the laissez-faire is not for ordinary people — it is for the rulers. Anyone who really believes he can hole up in his own little tower and shut out the world is being naive.

The human heart inclines toward self-interest. Getting people to care about public matters, and not only their own gain, takes cultivation and shaping. Democracy is a way of producing capable and virtuous people, and it is also a form of civic education. No one becomes a citizen by reading books on politics — political scientists are no better at doing democracy than ordinary people. Obedience does not produce citizens either; it produces bureaucrats more readily. Only the political practice of citizens produces citizens. But false political practice by citizens only trains people in political insincerity, and is the surest way to cultivate political apathy.

Good civic political habits — treating people as equals, respecting others, exercising self-respect, self-discipline and self-restraint when wielding power, feeling shame at scheming for advantage — take a long time to form. If a society has no community of citizens, good political habits have nowhere to grow. Bureaucratic organizations are the breeding ground of official intrigue, and a person who rises above the rest in officialdom is not necessarily a good public servant; quite possibly he is a master of secret politics.

Public discussion presupposes a public space, and the state should cede part of its power to it

Ren Jiantao, Professor of Political Science, Tsinghua University

Public discussion presupposes that public space exists. Because if there is no public space, or if public space is squeezed down to something very narrow, public discussion loses the thing it rests on — call it its material space. So the material space of public discussion has to be public space, and public space requires power either to be ceded or to be pledged. What does "ceding" mean? It means acknowledging that beyond state power there is a place power does not reach: a place where citizens can discuss public questions with one another, improve the quality of public policy, improve the state's public structures and advance the state's public development. These are places state power does not reach.

The other half is that, while ceding, the state should pledge to protect public space. What does "pledge" mean? It means that beyond state power, some matters can only be settled by citizens themselves, within public space.

So in this situation, an important part of the background to 40 years of reform and opening up tells us that letting citizens speak is an urgent matter.

Self-restraint — especially from people who feel filled with "righteous spirit"

Ren Jiantao, Professor of Political Science, Tsinghua University

Citizens themselves do need the capacity for self-restraint. In China there is fairly wide room for extreme speech, especially among people in the patriotism business, who think themselves full of righteous spirit, order others about and hand out accusations at will — defending power in a way that, over the long run, actually damages it, simply by protecting it plainly and without thought. Sometimes we even grant these unpaid volunteer defenders of the state, the self-funded "fifty-centers," an exemption from any scrutiny of power.

A state ought in fact to accept both the support and the criticism that rational citizens give its policies. Irrational criticism has limited value; irrational praise has even less. But at the moment, when administrators and citizens discuss issues — especially in recent years — this view doesn't seem to be accepted. It's as though, standing on the side of power, I can accuse anyone who criticizes power.

The stigmatizing of public intellectuals should be seen as a tragedy for China, not a good sign. Because at bottom a public intellectual is not talking about professional questions inside his own specialty; he is attending to problems that belong to you, me and everyone. He may get some things right and some things wrong. A public intellectual is not a public dispenser of truth; it is not his job to hand you the truth. So where he is wrong, people should point it out and discuss it calmly. The power and the moral duty that the self-funded "fifty-centers" assume for themselves do nothing to preserve a genuinely rational social space. In that sense, giving public intellectuals a more rational assessment — rather than shrinking "public intellectual" into a sneer and letting the name become a stigma — is something all of us who take part in public discussion should be very alert to.

Public administrators above all should beware the group polarization of opinion

Wu Fei, Professor, College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University

Group polarization of opinion is the same in China and abroad. People's biggest problem is that they find it easy to accept the views and the people they already admire, so the moment you criticize something someone admires, plenty of people can't take it. Group polarization is a genuinely hard thing. But if a good climate slowly forms — the kind Robert's Rules of Order stresses, where we enter the arena in good faith and discuss things by a standard procedure — then it will slowly change. So I'm neither that pessimistic nor that optimistic.

Where's the not-so-optimistic part? This process is certain to be long. Where's the not-so-pessimistic part? There is still a chance of gradual progress. Any institution with real strength — civic or official — has to allow, and even cultivate, citizens' capacity for rational debate; only then can a society develop well. So in a sense, from the standpoint of the Communist Party's leadership: making everyone tell lies and forbidding rational comment does the Party no good at all — one day something goes wrong and you don't even know it. If everyone says the Communist Party is good while cursing it in his heart, what good is that? It is actually bad. Other people's voices need to be able to show themselves, so we can hear them at any time and correct whatever misjudgments or mistakes there may be in our decision-making. That means something for a party, for a country and for a whole nation, so I think this is work that has to be pushed forward step by step.

History has always been like this. The times when speech was most tightly controlled were not, in fact, China's most prosperous times. In his Southern Tour speech, Deng Xiaoping said reform and opening up had to continue and minds had to be opened. (For example) it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white (as long as it catches mice; planning and the market are both economic instruments, not the essential dividing line between socialism and capitalism...). You can see that this was a liberation of thought. And liberating thought is what brought China economic prosperity and a relatively stable society. The tighter things get, the worse things get. So this is a basic rule: the more open-minded a society is, the freer its thought and its media, and the more truthful the information that comes out, the more likely our decisions are to become sound. This is a universal law.

2. A Marketplace of Ideas Can Only Be Built If a Society Forms First

Extremism is nothing to fear — it should be settled inside the "marketplace of ideas"

Ren Jiantao, Professor of Political Science, Tsinghua University

When a society grows after being held down too long, there is bound to be a period of overcorrection at the start. I might deliberately say something very steep to you — something very extreme. But that extreme talk does not stop being extreme because you suppress it administratively. Suppress it and people only grow more extreme; it just becomes less likely to be voiced. And once it is voiced, you won't be able to contain it.

The only way extremism can be corrected is by letting extreme views collide with one another in public space, in discussion. This was also the well-meant advice Ronald Coase gave China at the age of 100: open a marketplace of ideas. I hold a very extreme view; in public discussion I run into someone else's extreme view, and I find I can't accept it — and now there are two extreme points. Once there are two extreme points, the Confucian saying applies: knock at both ends, hold the two and use the middle. That is how I develop a better habit of public discussion, and that matters a great deal too.

So governing extremism is not a matter of calling other people extremists. Who isn't extreme sometimes? We should put that question to everyone taking part in the discussion. We are creatures of flesh, beings of passions and desires, so of course we all get extreme. But extremism has to be corrected by other extremism, and it cannot be corrected by administrative power, so there has to be a marketplace of ideas that pushes things toward reason. That is exactly why democratic societies let citizens discuss questions rationally: because they have formed a long habit of public discussion. People come to know, together, not to be too extreme. If you indulge your own extreme, obsessive feelings to your heart's content, others will fall into the same obsession, and you will never have a society capable of decent cooperation.

The bigger the racket, the more notice it gets? A vicious circle.

Hong Tao, Professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

Without ever having gone through the cultivation of civic consciousness and practical ability, how is a person suddenly supposed to speak up about public affairs? Information doesn't reach him; and even what little he knows, he is told to read backwards. Since everything looks plausible and wrong at once, and impossible to untangle, all that's left, naturally, is to grumble. Picking up the chopsticks to eat meat, putting them down to curse — that comes of having no other option; ignorance is why people curse. If all you know is how to eat the meat, you're not far from a beast. Some say our ordinary people are of such poor quality that there is no way to let them take part in politics. But even if ordinary people are politically incapable, they did not make themselves so: their political capacities never got the chance to develop, because they have never once practiced politics.

The more passive, apathetic and ignorant ordinary people are, the fewer obstacles the manipulators of power meet — they move as though through empty country — and the more passive and apathetic ordinary people become in turn; each is the cause of the other. For a small person, escaping being an object that political power plays with is real luck: he can go on living his private life carefully. But once he has the bad luck to catch political power's eye, or can no longer even keep himself fed, he often goes to extremes. There is no public space, and even less public opinion; shout online and no one answers, or you get shut down. Why do people go to extremes so readily? Perhaps because it seems the one way left to draw notice, or perhaps it's just despair venting itself. "A petty man in dire straits will do anything" — and the gentleman shakes his head.

Violence is silent, understated, without shape or shadow, without sight or sound — and yet it is enough to leave public space unable to speak. It demonstrates to everyone that violence is the only voice. What happens above is copied below: this is the root of going to extremes, and the root of the indiscriminate killing of the innocent.

Don't be afraid — ideas worth having come out of interaction

Sheng Hong, economist and director of the Unirule Institute of Economics, a private Chinese think tank

There's no way to demand that of other people [high-quality public speech]. I'd turn it around: it is precisely the suppression of free expression that leaves a society's thinking underdeveloped. And when thinking is underdeveloped, there is nothing good to express — it may come to nothing but abuse and picking sides. Only when a society can express itself freely — even if at first that produces writing that really is unfit to look at, or abuse, or nothing more than crude side-taking — should we, I think, refrain from being too hard on it; as long as no one is directly harmed, it should not be restricted. It is precisely by letting everyone speak freely that outstanding thinkers and theorists will emerge, and they are the ones who can carry a society forward. In any society, the people who advance its thought and culture are always a tiny few.

Of course you don't know in advance who that tiny few will be, but there is a way to find out: let everyone speak, including the people who curse all day long. Then the very best thinkers, the small handful, will emerge. Once they do, they will carry the society forward. As for the abuse, people forget it soon enough; don't mind it. Those words have no life in them; there's nothing to fear. We might even say that cursing others is cursing yourself, and only shows how low you are. Why should I mind? Why should I stop him? Don't stop him — he is harming himself, not anyone else.

At the same time we are giving real thinkers their chance. It isn't only that they have ideas; their ideas are struck into life by interaction with other people, and only then grow richer. If you say a man is only a solitary contemplator, that isn't enough: ideas have to be developed and struck out through exchange and interaction with others, even through argument. So I don't think we should worry that for a while the quality of what people say is low. Just don't read the bad stuff and it's fine.

Beware the arrival of an atomized society

Wang Jianxun, Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law

A society without trust is bound to be a plate of loose sand — nothing holds it together, and it has no way to act collectively — and this kind of society is the easiest for a few despots to rule. Because you cannot combine with one another at all; nobody trusts anybody. A society with a high degree of trust is very hard to rule despotically, because banding together to resist is comparatively easy.

Trust has a great deal to do with public space and public spirit. If a society has no public spirit, no public space, no public life, that means each person lives isolated in his own world. Tocqueville discussed this. He believed that in an age when people are equal in rank and station, each person is necessarily isolated. In the aristocratic age, commoners were all attached to some aristocrat. The aristocrat in effect held everyone together — we all followed him. He took on every responsibility for us, and we gave him our loyalty and our lives. It was an extremely strong bond, a relationship of personal dependency.

But in an age of equality, each of us is an independent person; none of us owes anything to anyone, and no one stands above anyone else in rank or station. In such a society, if we have no form of public life to hold us together, each of us is bound to become atomized. Each of us lives in his own world, caring nothing for other people, nothing for society. We can imagine that a society like this is very easily controlled from the top down by a few people; despotism arises very easily.

One point is crucial: if there is no such public life, there is no civil society, only private life. Everyone enjoys his own life, eats well and drinks well; but when public affairs have to be handled, we are completely helpless. Suppose public order here is terrible and bad people turn up — how do we deal with it? We can't. We can only call on the government for more police and a stronger army. That's the end of us: we are bound to end up under strongman rule. We cannot govern ourselves, cannot become our own masters.

The more isolated we are, the more we demand that a powerful government step in and the more we depend on it — only it can help us, only it looks strong in our eyes, and permanent, while each of us is gone in an instant. And so it cuts away every bond between us, until we have no connection to one another at all.

Once we have lost public life and lost our connections to one another, we stop sympathizing with, understanding and cooperating with other people. Why should I sympathize with you? Why should I cooperate with you? I don't care about you at all; I care about myself. This creates an enormous problem for a society. When there is no strong, powerful civil society, tyranny arrives very easily.

3. What We Should Ask of Ourselves

First make your thinking normal: use normal words, start from normal concepts

Guo Yuhua, Professor of Sociology, Tsinghua University

It comes down to nothing more than reading and thinking. You have to read the right books — stop reading the ones that control your ideology. You need to read classics, books of common knowledge, and history too — real history, not fake history. Quite a few good books of historical research have come out in recent years. You have to know how the society you live in got to today, how it came to be this way. You have to read real history and know how this society came about. I think that matters a great deal.

Then you need to think. Thinking rests first on an ordinary person's common sense, common reason and logic; that is the most basic layer. With those, plus a few books read and some basic training in normal thinking, you can actually see a great many problems very clearly. That's why I keep saying: stand on reality, think with common sense, think with normal logic. I believe everyone can understand and get hold of this, and it matters.

Once you understand that, there is a basic thing you have to have: you have to be aware that you are an individual with rights of your own. You have to know what rights you have. Don't say these rights were all granted to you by the Party and the government. They weren't. You were born with them. And then you find there are young people who quite naturally say, thank the Party, thank the government, for everything. When I meet a student like that I always say: put your hand on your heart and think — who should you thank first for getting into Peking University or Tsinghua?

Isn't it your parents? Isn't it the parents who bore you, raised you, educated you and supported you? Thank them first. Then thank yourself: you got here by your own effort and struggle. Don't go around calling just anyone your father. Isn't that simply how a normal person thinks?

You become aware of what your rights are, and what freedoms you have. Then you have to acknowledge that everyone — including people whose views differ from yours — is, like you, a person with rights and dignity. You cannot do what you want at the cost of harming others, because in this sense everyone is equal. The same holds when you are discussing something with someone. The moment they disagree, don't go straight for their motives. So much discussion goes like this, and so does picking sides: right away it's "what's your motive?" Address the matter at hand, apply common sense and logic, and discussion becomes possible.

So these days a lot of people, including a lot of entrepreneurs, have spent the past few years reading Robert's Rules of Order. I think that's another basic thing. (The complete Robert's Rules) is too elaborate; you can read an abridged version. Hold on to the few most basic rules: don't go off-topic, don't run over time, don't interrupt, no personal attacks... Someone seems to have boiled it down to 12 principles. Keep to those, and go ahead and discuss.

Truth and sincerity matter: even when the information is incomplete, the judgment has to be a sincere one built on the fullest information you can get

Wu Fei, Professor, College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University

Because beyond his private space, a person always has a public life of his own. Public life involves questions like how we can live better, or how our living together is possible at all. The ancient creeds contain this sort of thing too: the Bible has its Ten Commandments, Buddhism its Eight Precepts... These creeds were not built on purely private grounds; they took account of the fact that living in a group necessarily involves mutual adjustment and compromise, which is why you get rules like thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not lie.

When we come to the public sphere where information circulates, the most basic creed is that the information flowing there has to be abundant, truthful and accurate enough. Only in such conditions can we make reasonably accurate judgments about our own public life. If it's all rumor and hearsay, and the information we want isn't clear — say, how did this official get where he is? Is he a bad man? We have no idea, and you won't allow anyone to expose or report on him. Then why should he be the one governing us? On what grounds? Seen this way, our public life has to be open, and relatively more and more transparent. Complete transparency is of course impossible, but it has to be an open society, a transparent society, a society in which every person can voice an opinion on public questions.

Seen from this angle, journalistic professionalism needs exactly these things. Journalistic professionalism holds that even if the information I have gathered is not complete — because no one can get 100% complete information about anything — my judgment must be a sincere one built on the fullest information I could gather. So both points matter: truth matters and sincerity matters.

We see plenty of situations now where you haven't read my article or the information I wrote at all and you comment recklessly anyway. Many people look only at a headline before they start commenting. Even with a 140-character Weibo post that has a link attached, they don't open the link before they start commenting or cursing. It very easily turns into lining up, into picking sides.

Looking back at Socrates arguing with people, you find that he let the other side lay its ideas out fully. Socrates was cunning, using something close to sophistry — letting you state your view, hitting you with yes-or-no questions without stopping, until you find he has led you into a ditch and you have no choice but to deny your own idea. But whatever else, he let you say it.

That is a very interesting process. Public life has to be reasonably rational. Not off the top of your head, with incomplete information and false information, and no sincerity either, purely because I am here to line up on a side, or because someone paid me, so I curse you out — like every paid poster online. That sort of thing is genuinely frightening, or genuinely loathsome. So the kind of public space journalistic professionalism faces is exactly this; these are the questions it is about.

What does building consensus actually mean?

Wang Jianxun, Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law

This too needs a number of factors, or conditions. First, is there a platform or a mechanism for people to exchange with one another? If none of us associates, deals or communicates with anyone else, we cannot have a public life, because we don't know each other to begin with — we don't know what someone thinks about an issue or what he wants, and there is no consensus. Forming consensus first requires a mechanism, a platform, for public exchange and communication. Are there associations of all kinds, reading groups, public events? Are there many well-developed NGOs? Are there volunteer activities? And so on. Without these, where would you go to talk, and with whom? Public exchange becomes impossible. All of this is critical. One thing we need is platforms, mechanisms, methods and places for exchange.

But that requires a precondition: you need some minimum of freedom of speech — if I discuss certain topics, you can't arrest me for it — and some minimum of freedom of association: if we want to organize a club, an association or a reading group, you have to allow it. Without even that, how could there be a public life? There couldn't be any at all. And in a residential compound, can people organize a homeowners' committee? Can residents band together to deal with the compound's garbage, the elevator repairs, the parking? If I, living in that compound, say this is none of my business — you people put up the money, I'll pay my share, but I'm not taking part — how could there be a public life? So it really takes effort on every front: platforms for exchange, enthusiasm for taking part, mechanisms for taking part, and so on. All of it is needed before public life is possible.

The consequence of going a long time without freedom is that you don't know how to use it; you don't know what to do with it. Freedom of speech was meant to keep the government from interfering with what we say, and instead you take out all your anger on other ordinary people, cursing them at the slightest provocation. You are abusing that freedom. This is a deeply paradoxical situation. On the one hand the space for free speech is very small; on the other hand you find that people abuse the little freedom they have. There is the internet, where you can say a few words freely, and instead of expressing themselves rationally there, people look at a headline and start cursing without reading the content. What does that show? That you have no idea how to use freedom at all.

(And the result is that) people call on the government to do something about this reckless abuse. Doesn't that make the space even smaller? That's why I call it a paradox. On the one hand it is caused by having too little freedom; on the other hand it is caused by not knowing how to use, and by abusing, the freedom you do have. There is a paradox built into it.

But to solve this problem in the long run, freedom of speech still has to be opened wider, so you have more of it. We can imagine that at first people will certainly abuse it. If you curse recklessly, feeling that now no one is watching you at all, you become completely unrestrained — especially once you think no one will sue you, and then you fear nothing. But I think that after some time people will gradually calm down and learn what they should say in which circumstances, and what views they should express when. I think you have to give people a learning process. Someone who can't swim will thrash about the moment he gets in, and might even drown. But if you never let him in, he will never learn.

To solve this, rational exchange is certainly a basic precondition. You have to learn it — which means education in reason. How do you learn reason? That comes back to education, of course. First of all, parents at home have to teach children how to have a rational conversation. Our parents never think to discuss any public question with their children. All we care about is whether the schoolwork is going well. No one cares to talk over what has just happened in society, to let each of us state his own view and see whose position holds up better, whose argument is more persuasive. We have no such thing as public debate. That is a genuinely alarming thing. Go to the United States and you'll see debates on television every day; the host brings on someone for and someone against, and the two of them go at it hammer and tongs. American children learn this kind of debating from the age of a few years old, because they see it on television every day. Any question at all gets argued out to the last inch — one Democrat, one Republican, and in the end you see who can persuade whom. Not by force.

If persuasion can't do it, the outcome is bound to come down to violence and fists; those are the only two ways to settle a problem.

If we can't reach agreement with other people through this kind of rational exchange, then in the end the outcome is achieved by force. The latter is of course undesirable. So our only option is to work out how to improve the quality of our exchanges. Learning rational exchange really is not easy, because for a long time the space for reasoned argument has been very narrow. On a great many matters the government does not allow you to reason at all; they are settled not by reasoning but by fists and by guns.

The effect of this on the whole society is negative. Living in this society for a long time, a person picks it up — the same violent tendencies and habits as the government. Or, turned the other way around: it is because there is violence among the people that there is violence from the government. Because the government comes from the people; every civil servant inside the government comes out of this society. Once everyone has been used to violence from childhood, the government is naturally one of its products, one of its results.

(Further reporting to come, updated continuously)

Interviewees in this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

The cover image is a still from the film 12 Angry Men, via Douban.