Sociologist Li Yinhe: Ours Is Precisely the Generation That Cannot Withdraw From the World | Interviews

"My heart leans toward withdrawing from the world. But there is so much injustice in this world, so much that makes you angry. I think ours is precisely the generation that cannot really withdraw from it."

In 2012, at 60, Li Yinhe retired from the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where she had worked for 33 years. She then moved to Weihai, in Shandong, and settled there, returning to Beijing only occasionally.

Weihai, she says, is her Walden: good surroundings, well suited to a quiet retreat. "For one thing the air is good, and for another there are few people and few cars. It's a five-minute walk from where I live to the beach, so I can walk down three times a day — morning, noon and evening — and it feels wonderful."

She sums up her life there as a "three-part routine": she wakes naturally at 5 a.m., reads in the morning, writes in the afternoon, watches a film in the evening, and is in bed at 10 p.m. sharp.

Unlike Thoreau, though, Li Yinhe has not really gone into seclusion. She is still busy with the world. Every day she answers readers' questions on Weibo's paid Q&A service; she has recorded an audio program about love for the paid-knowledge platform Ximalaya; she still appears at public events and gives talks; she taped episodes of the hit web variety show Qipa Shuo (《奇葩说》); she writes books and publishes them.

The public knows Li Yinhe mainly through two labels. One is widow of Wang Xiaobo, a writer largely ignored in his lifetime whose following has grown ever since his death. Many young readers love Love You as I Love Life (《爱你就像爱生命》), the collected letters between Wang Xiaobo and Li Yinhe; they long for the love the two had and mourn his death at 45. The other label is Li Yinhe the sociologist and public intellectual, who has spoken out again and again on marriage, family, gender and sex, challenging what the public takes for granted. As early as 2003 she put a proposal for same-sex marriage legislation before the "Two Sessions"; for nearly 20 years she has called for repealing three sex-related provisions of the criminal law — the crime of group licentiousness, the obscene-materials law and the prostitution law.

Fewer people know what Li Yinhe did in the late 1970s. In 1978 she was transferred to the State Council Research Office, where she and her friend Lin Chun co-wrote an article reflecting on the Cultural Revolution that caused a sensation across the country: "Greatly Expand Democracy, Greatly Strengthen the Legal System" (《要大大发扬民主，大大加强法制》). "We must set about perfecting legislation and the judiciary. First, all of the people's democratic rights must be set down in law precisely and completely, and given legal force that no one may violate," they wrote. It was the piece that made her name.

Thirty years later, in 2008, when Li Yinhe was interviewed by Economic Observer, she still held to those views. "If some people don't accept the values of democracy, freedom and human rights, or feel China doesn't need these values at all, that is simply wrong. Everything else is open — the choice of a development path, for instance, can be argued over. But on democracy and freedom alone, I don't think we can give ground," she said.

That laid down the ground tone of her thinking.

In 1982 Li Yinhe went to the University of Pittsburgh to study sociology, earning a master's and then a doctorate. She returned to China in 1988. After six years of rigorous social-science training in the United States, she thought Chinese academic work at the time "had bluster and nothing else," and that "far too much of it rested on no empirical material at all."

Her research after that settled into three fields — marriage and family, gender, and sex — and she did a great deal of basic empirical work, publishing several dozen books, among them Childbirth and Village Culture (《生育与村落文化》), Subculture of Homosexuality (《同性恋亚文化》), Subculture of Sadomasochism (《虐恋亚文化》), Questions of Sex (《性的问题》), The Emotional and Sexual Lives of Chinese Women (《中国女性的感情与性》) and A Study of Sexual Discourse in New China (《新中国性话语研究》). Of these, thanks to a film and a novel, the one the public probably knows best is the field study she carried out with Wang Xiaobo — Their World: A Perspective on China's Male Homosexual Community (《他们的世界：中国男同性恋群落透视》, 1992). It was also the first monograph on homosexuality published in China.

In terms of academic history she holds several other firsts: China's first postdoctoral researcher in the humanities, the first Chinese woman sociologist to study sex, one of the earliest scholars in China to study homosexuality. But as the times and the discipline have moved on, some now criticize her approach and methods as dated.

Li Yinhe's larger significance may lie elsewhere — in her public influence and her engagement with public affairs. Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly) once named her one of the 50 most influential people in China. Many people find her research and her public statements sincere, brave, upright and likeable, the work of an intellectual who accepts responsibility and who has pushed Chinese society forward. Even her private life has become a model of courage. Many young Chinese treat her as an idol, a pioneer who dares to say what she thinks; some fans call themselves the "Guardians of the Galaxy" — a pun on her given name, Yinhe, which means galaxy — to declare their devotion.

The screenwriter Li Jing has known her for 23 years. To Li Jing, she has always been a "simple, straightforward child," someone you can talk to with "no taboos" and "enormous fun."

Ian Johnson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, once wrote of her: "Over the past 25 years I have met Li Yinhe, Wang Xiaobo's widow, several times. For a long time her main identity to me was as China's most advanced scholar of sex. ... Only recently have I come to see that she is also a chronicler of an era, recording a profound proposition: the return of the private sphere to the lives of ordinary people. She studies homosexuality in China and writes about it, and in recent years she has spoken up repeatedly for transgender and bisexual people; but seen broadly, what she is concerned with is the state's withdrawal from people's daily lives."

In December 2014 Li Yinhe used her blog to answer accusations that she was a secret homosexual, explaining that her partner of more than ten years, "Daxia" (a pseudonym), though born female, is in fact a transgender man. "I really am heterosexual, not homosexual," she wrote in the blog post.

People were startled at first, but many soon accepted her account, widened their own understanding, and said they respected and admired her. Chinese media covered the story heavily, and even official outlets spoke up in support. "Everyone has something particular about them. Let social understanding catch up with scientific progress; respecting the choices of people like Li Yinhe is also respecting ourselves," wrote People's Daily Online on Weibo.

Daxia, once a taxi driver, is now Li Yinhe's assistant, handling interviews, publishing and commercial arrangements.

In July 2017 Li Yinhe was banned from posting on Weibo for three months after an article titled "Why We Should Abolish the Censorship System Entirely" (《我们为什么应该彻底取消审查制度》). Since the ban lifted she has been more careful in what she says, but she still follows public affairs and gives her view when the moment calls for it — on the recent Yu Minhong affair, for instance, and on the case of the boys'-love novelist Tianyi.

In the six years since she retired, her writing has been mostly literary, across four forms: fiction, essays, poetry and aphorisms. In fiction she writes about one thing only, sadomasochism — more than a million characters of it — and feels she has nearly written the subject dry. It is also the only subject she feels any urge to write about.

"There are two kinds of sadomasochism novel I write. One is purely the psychological games of sadomasochism; the other is political allegory. Some sadomasochism really is a game of power — I might write a king-like figure who is a sadist, who launches thought-reform campaigns of every sort and punishes any speech that steps out of line," she says.

She has also made fun of herself for writing novels that smell of the academic paper. "I really am not a good novelist. The main problem is that my fiction smells of the dissertation, and I am extremely impatient about writing detail. Beyond appreciating and loving literature, I have no ambitions in it. So I would rather treat this story collection as a fictional illustration of my research into sadomasochism — to put it more bluntly, I want readers to learn through fiction what sadomasochism actually is and what sort of people are drawn to it. Of course, if readers can catch even a little beauty in the stories, and get some aesthetic pleasure on top of the sociology, I'll be delighted," she wrote in the preface to The Kingdom of the Black Knight (《黑骑士的王国》).

On literature, some of Wang Xiaobo's fans like to bring up Li Yinhe's high regard for Feng Tang's writing and translations, and argue it shows her literary judgment is faulty. In 2002 Feng Tang wrote an essay called "Just How Great Was Wang Xiaobo?" (《王小波到底有多么伟大》), in which he held that Wang Xiaobo's "shortcomings are obvious": his prose "shabby," his structure "bloated," his writing given to "mere cleverness." That has made it even harder for many of Wang Xiaobo's fans to accept his widow's fondness for Feng Tang.

At the launch of her new book on November 25, 2018, Li Yinhe answered them: "Feng Tang says Xiaobo's prose isn't good. I think he didn't understand it. I don't agree with that judgment. His own prose is quite good, but Xiaobo's, I'd say, is better."

April 11, 2017 was the 20th anniversary of Wang Xiaobo's death. At a public event in his memory, Li Yinhe summed up what he meant. His significance, she said, lay in two things: he was a writer of pure literature, and his essays set out a fairly classical liberal intellectual position. "I find it rather sad, actually. These things were burning questions 30 years ago and they are still questions now. What he wrote about hasn't dated; in many places there has even been backsliding, on the most basic things he raised — people's rights, human dignity. Part of why he still has such influence, I think, is that his ideals, and many of the most basic values in China's system and culture, still haven't been realized. So his essays are still alive," she said.

The new book is called We Are All Motes of Dust in the Universe (《我们都是宇宙中的微尘》), a collection of essays gathering her thinking on the nature of life, the value of one's own existence, how to make friends, passionate love, ways of living, art and reading. She also described her writing habit: the first thing she does every morning is open her computer and write three aphorisms. "Those three are what I'm thinking about right now, and then I take one of them and turn it into an essay. So there's no deliberate plan — it's all whatever happens to arrive in my head, sometimes something from a book I've been reading, or whatever."

The dust in the universe is her view of life. As a young woman she was drawn to existentialist philosophy: human beings are motes of dust in the universe, and life has no meaning. Having recognized that and looked straight at it, she feels the only thing left is to enjoy life. And for her there are only two such things — love, and beauty.

"Love is the most interesting thing in an ordinary life ... writing is the most worthwhile thing to do in an ordinary life ... what else is there, besides these? All right then, I'll spend these thirty-thousand-odd days doing these two things. What third thing could be worth doing?" she writes in the new book.

At the event she also talked about withdrawing from the world and engaging with it. "My heart leans toward withdrawing from the world. But there is so much injustice in this world, so much that makes you angry. I think ours is precisely the generation that cannot really withdraw from it. Think about it: in adolescence, young people all over the world fall in love, that's the one thing they care about. I was 14 when the Cultural Revolution began. Around then a young man in Hunan named Yang Xiaokai wrote a big-character poster called 'Whither China?' (《中国向何处去？》). For that alone he was locked up for ten years. For our generation, what we thought about in adolescence were huge questions like where China was going. How could we get through a whole lifetime without being torn about it?"

"The state China is in now is alarming to watch. It feels like 'a blind man on a blind horse, at midnight, at the edge of a deep pool' — about to go in at any moment, and you can't help being alarmed. But that alarm can only be talked over with friends. Sometimes you're not in a position to do anything about it. It feels like a huge boulder rolling down a slope: try to nudge it and you're a mantis in front of a chariot, crushed to powder on the spot. Wherever it is going to roll, it will roll there. But what can you do? So someone like me can never withdraw from the world completely. It can't be done."

At the end of the event, as expected, someone asked her about LGBT issues. "These days, when I'm out in public, I'd be surprised if nobody asked about LGBT issues," she said. "China's LGBT situation, I'd say, falls short of the best and does better than the worst. Right now there are more than 30 countries where homosexuality is illegal, and 7 where it carries the death penalty. China is a bit better than those. But compared with the nearly 30 countries that have approved same-sex marriage, China is far behind, and the level of social discrimination is still high. What stage are we actually at? A tug-of-war: loosening a bit, tightening a bit. There was a relatively relaxed period, especially from 2011, when China's official media reported on homosexuality positively for the first time. That was a big step."

"But we keep finding that one moment a web drama with homosexual content is pulled, and the next some new censorship standard comes out classifying every film and television work on homosexual themes as obscene. It's absurd; the reasoning doesn't hold. So once I wrote a Weibo post about that regulation, and it got 60 million views. Those 60 million prove how angry everyone is, how anxious about this ... But these things have to improve gradually, and we should still hold out hope for China's progress."

Below is our short interview with Li Yinhe:

Q = QDaily

Li = Li Yinhe

Q: In October 2017 the American actress Alyssa Milano called on Twitter for victims of sexual harassment to tell their stories, using the hashtag #MeToo. Since then #MeToo, which began in the US, has swept the world. More than a year has passed. Looking back at #MeToo as a whole, how do you feel about it? How would you assess it?

Li: I think it's terrific! All these women came out to expose it, saying "me too," "me too." You know how low the reporting rate for rape is! A lot of people feel it's too much trouble, and humiliating besides. There's one especially rotten thing: blaming and smearing the victim, saying you must have dressed too provocatively, you must have sent the wrong signal, that's why he came after you. That logic is vile. There's even one extreme case where a rapist said the reason was that she was too pretty. Being too pretty is now a reason to harass someone? I think the whole of #MeToo has been a magnificent piece of justice done — it even affected last year's Nobel Prize in Literature, which wasn't awarded, precisely because a judge's husband had been harassing people everywhere.

Q: Alongside the approval of #MeToo, some people have raised worries. Some think it could lead to overreach in claiming one's rights and damage the "right to flirt" that comes with sexual freedom. That has turned into a debate about how to separate flirtation, within sexual freedom, from sexual harassment, and about how sexual consent should be expressed. I'm curious how you see that worry, and the discussion of flirtation, harassment and consent.

Li: What is a "right to flirt"? What kind of concept is that? I think it's ridiculous. Say you're a man — you have to respect the woman. Slapping someone's backside in a restaurant, that sort of thing. If you say you have the right to do that, is that the "right to flirt"? I don't think they have any such right. If you want to sleep with her, if you want her body, go and court her properly. Or it doesn't even have to be courtship — you can ask for sex directly, that's fine too. You can say: I like you very much, I'm attracted to your body, would you go to bed with me? You talk it over properly with the other person. What gives you the right to force yourself on someone who hasn't agreed?

Sexual harassment is forcing yourself on someone. It violates what I call the "three principles of sex" — consensual, private, adult — and the most important is "consensual." In any situation, both sides must agree; it has to be voluntary. The moment it isn't voluntary, it isn't allowed. If you rape someone, that's a sex crime; short of that it's indecent assault. In China we have two categories of law here, the crime of raping a woman and the crime of indecent assault on a woman. Neither act is permitted.

Q: So you think the key to deciding whether something is sexual harassment is clear consent? Without clear consent, it counts as harassment either way?

Li: Right, right, right. The moment someone says "no," it's sexual harassment.

Q: I've seen intellectuals argue that China's #MeToo reminds them of the Cultural Revolution's "speaking out freely and posting big-character posters," and that it will produce unjust convictions. What do you make of that view?

Li: That's no reason to suppress people who come forward. In China a lot of people first need the chance to speak at all — only then can mistakes happen. Say one in ten cases is a false accusation of harassment: then take it to court. Like the case of the US Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh — was it made up, or did it really happen? Let the court decide, let the court work out whether it's true or false. You can't say that nobody may use this method to expose sexual assault they suffered in the past. To say that because this method might produce some wrongful cases, the method shouldn't be used at all — I don't think that's right.

First, everyone who ought to report to the police should report to the police. And if she also posts it online, that's fine, because she has no other means, or whatever the reason. Take the young woman who accused Zhu Jun: she made it public, and at the start she went to the police as well. I think you should report it to the police, and exposing it online is fine too. It's the quicker way to let a lot of people know, and it can stop the crime, stop the abuse. You can't say reporting to the police is the only road, and that posting online is a big-character poster. I don't agree with that.

Q: Right, it's just one method among several. They often report to the police and use the law as well; the two aren't in conflict. And many people try the legal route first, but the results usually aren't good, so they end up posting online. That's a last resort too.

Li: Right.

Q: From what you've seen, where do you think #MeToo goes from here? What have we gained from it, and what should we keep thinking about?

Li: I think potential sexual predators will be a bit more wary now. Some may pull back, thinking it can cause this much trouble, and hold themselves in. That should count as a gain — the number of sexual assaults and harassment cases may fall. I think that's the main gain.

And when people can come forward and expose it, that breaks the old habit of blaming the victim, of always looking for reasons on the victim's side: weren't you dressed too provocatively? Didn't you flirt with him? Or whatever. That's good for correcting public opinion, and good for people who were harassed in the past. She was already the victim; then, if she went to the police or exposed it, she'd be harmed a second time, with plenty of people questioning her motives and saying all sorts of things.

I recently read a Swedish novel called Beartown (《熊镇》), about a girl who is raped. She was raped, and yet everyone, for all sorts of different reasons, said she'd filed a false report, said she'd wanted it herself, and so on. She clearly hadn't wanted it, but in the end the case was dropped for lack of evidence, something like that. There are many cases like this. It's genuinely hard.

Q: I interviewed you at the end of 2016. You mentioned then that the latest draft revision of the Criminal Law still kept the three laws you consider the biggest problems: the crime of group licentiousness, the obscene-materials law and the prostitution law. Almost two years on, all three are still there. The recent case of the boys'-love novelist Tianyi, sentenced to 10 years and 6 months plus a fine for "producing and selling obscene materials," has drawn public attention again. How do you feel about that? Why has progress been so slow after ten or twenty years of arguing the point? Where's the difficulty?

Li: Right, it's been nearly 20 years. I first raised it — I remember it was in a book I wrote in 1999 called Questions of Sex (《性的问题》) — that's where I first raised it. Later I would pull that chapter out and give talks on it specifically, in many, many places: a critique of China's current sex laws.

After all these years of talking, I think two things have in fact changed. One is that far fewer cases are actually convicted under those three laws; the other is that sentences have got lighter. With a case like hers, in the 1980s the death penalty was possible. Going from the death penalty to 10 years is a lot lighter. So there has been some change.

But the change isn't because of my calling for it or anything of the kind. It's simply that society has changed. As it changed, more and more people came to feel that this law is out of date, antiquated, out of step with reality — far removed from reality. The same goes for the prostitution law: prostitution has already become a reality involving several million people, and the law is still written like that. It's a mess, frankly.

As for the difficulty, it's different in each case. People who study the underground sex trade believe there are interests keeping this law in place. When business is bad across the board, cracking down on prostitution becomes a source of government revenue; a lot of police departments rely on it to bring in money. And sex workers move around a lot — fine them here and they go elsewhere, then new ones arrive and you can fine them too. Five thousand yuan for a sex worker, five thousand for a client — that isn't a small income. If you were selling breakfast on the street, how long would it take you to earn that 10,000 yuan? Whereas now you fine the sex worker 5,000, fine the client 5,000, catch one pair and that's 10,000. Because of that they don't actually want to sweep it away completely; they'd rather it kept going, as a steady source of money, with interests attached.

And then there's conservative thinking, of course — anti-sex, sexually repressive. All three of these laws come from an era of sexual repression. None of these so-called crimes has a victim. With no victim, why punish it? Mainly for moral reasons. But if you do it for moral reasons — saying these people are morally rotten, that they've done something immoral, and then using the criminal law against them — that's a problem, because there's no victim, no injured party in this kind of "crime." With the Tianyi case especially, people feel that kidnapping children, rape, prostitution get sentences of two or three years, and this person got 10 — the gap is more than people can accept. The books she sold are books you can choose not to read; nothing was forced on you, so there's no victim. Everyone who bought them bought them voluntarily; people who didn't like them didn't have to. How can that be a crime?

Q: I remember you've always held that sex and morality should be kept separate.

Li: Right.

Q: In 2015 you published your memoir Gathering Honey in the Human World (《人间采蜜记》). Three years have passed. If you were to continue that memoir, what would you add? Is there anything about yourself that has changed, or stayed the same?

Li: I really did add half as much again! It was 100,000 characters, now it's 150,000 — there's a new edition, from Thinkingdom. What I added was mostly the projects I did afterwards. Almost every chapter covers one of my research projects, each of which produced a book. I did a few more later — A Study of Sexual Discourse in New China (《新中国性话语研究》), An Introduction to Sexology (《性学入门》) — and the book gained quite a bit from those. The record of my research grew a fair amount.

I also filled in some details from my childhood. The framework is still the same.

Q: Could you describe a typical day now? I hear you're living beside one of the most beautiful beaches in Weihai, writing in the morning, reading in the afternoon and watching films in the evening. Could you say more specifically what you're writing these days?

Li: Right, right, right, that's basically my three-part routine. As for fiction — from 2012 to now, six years — I've written seven collections of sadomasochism novellas and short stories, and two full-length novels. Three of them came out in Hong Kong; the rest are waiting to be published. But the limits on publishing are still tight — censorship standards are very strict right now, so I'm just waiting it out. In non-fiction I've also brought out a few essay collections, including this one (We Are All Motes of Dust in the Universe). There's a collection of aphorisms as well. And I write poetry — several hundred poems by now; maybe I'll think about publishing them a bit later on.

Q: The fiction is mainly about sadomasochism?

Li: Right, fiction is that one subject only.

Q: Why does sadomasochism pull at you so strongly? I've seen you say that sometimes it isn't that you want to write — it's as if some force takes your hand and makes you set it down.

Li: Right (laughs). It's the only thing I feel an urge about, because I have the inclination myself, so it's the only thing I feel anything about, feel any impulse about. Lately I've been thinking that I really have written about as much as there is — I feel I've written sadomasochism dry, this one subject.

I've tried starting a few other things — could I write something else? No. I can't get anywhere with it, there's no impulse. What can you do?

Q: You can't explain it either — it's just an impulse?

Li: Right.

Q: What were the best books you read this year?

Li: I recently read Sexuality and Sexual Behavior (《性欲和性行为》) by Sigusch, a German professor of sexology. It's a terrific book, really excellent. It puts forward all kinds of theories you could call startling, very advanced, and it's written with real penetration. His views on perversion, on normal compulsive disorders, on the three sexual revolutions — all of it extremely well put, all very good, and it gives us a new way of seeing things we thought we already understood. I agree with nearly every one of his views. I found it fascinating. He also has a philosophical background, he trained in philosophy, so the writing has real philosophical depth.

I also read Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise (《房思琪的初恋乐园》), which is extremely well written. It's a shame about the author — she killed herself. The story itself is harrowing, it's essentially a semi-autobiography, and her prose is excellent too. She was someone who could really write fiction, a genuinely good novelist.

Q: A lot of people outside describe you as a very brave person. I'm curious whether you think you're brave. What does being brave mean, in your view?

Li: I don't think I'm all that brave. If I were truly brave — there are still things I want to say and don't dare say, that's still the case. Given the controls now, if I were really a brave person I should say all of it out loud. But I know that if I ever did, I'd probably end up in prison. Then what? If I don't dare speak because I'm afraid of prison, doesn't that mean I'm not brave enough? I have a bit of courage, I suppose, but not the real thing.

Q: So true courage means saying everything you actually think?

Li: Right, saying every one of your views, all of them, out loud.

Q: Your research covers three areas: marriage and family, gender studies, sexuality studies. This year is the 40th anniversary of Reform and Opening Up. Looking back at these 40 years of change in Chinese society from those three angles, what strikes you most?

Li: Of the three — marriage and family, gender, and sex — sex has changed the most. The main change is that the attitude to sex used to be basically negative, and over these 40 years it has gradually become more and more affirming.

Gender and marriage-and-family have changed less. The family is the sort of thing that changes over very long units of time, decades or more; it doesn't change much in a few years. But some new signs and trends have appeared — the single population has expanded enormously, for instance; it used to be very small, now it's 16 percent. And the divorce rate has passed 50 percent. Those are big changes.

There's also been some backsliding on gender, because a fair number of women have gone home, to be housewives. That has an effect on equality between men and women.

Q: Why has that happened?

Li: It's actually quite simple. In the first 30 years it was high employment and low wages — one person's income couldn't keep a family, so husband and wife both had to work. Back then everyone was a two-income, two-job household, the countryside included; women had to work the fields too. In the villages, women's income made up about a third of the household total and men's about two-thirds.

But after Reform and Opening Up, once the gap between rich and poor widened, well-off families could live on one income, so a lot of women went home. This going-home problem is serious. People may not have noticed, but I've heard that around childbirth about 40 percent of women leave work — a very high proportion.

Q: That would slow the progress toward equality between men and women; women's independence would suffer.

Li: Right, right, right, it has an effect.

Cover image: Li Yinhe. All images courtesy of Thinkingdom.