Members of a Reading Group That No Longer Exists Talk About Public Space and Activists

"In our twenties, we all thought of ourselves as intellectuals. What we wanted to do was respond to public issues."

In 2006, after finishing the newly published Chinese edition of From Hegel to Nietzsche, Yang Xiaogang wrote a review titled "The Rose and the Cross". In intellectual circles, the rose usually stands for reason and knowledge, the cross for faith and belief. Belief is not a matter of established fact, yet it often guides what people do. Yang used the two words to describe how the major thinkers of the nineteenth century differed in the way they understood history.

Yang was then a master's student in the philosophy department at Tongji University, and he sent the review to the "Dupin" reading group under the pen name Yang Bufeng. The group had formed on its own in 2005 and began putting out an e-journal on a regular schedule in early 2006 — twice a month at first, then monthly as the issues grew thicker. Most of its core members were master's and doctoral students at universities, mainly Zhejiang University and Fudan University.

Zhou Mingzhi, one of the journal's chief editors, recalls that some of them were already writing book reviews for the press, but "everyone felt that book reviews in the media were dull" — hemmed in by page space and house rules, and rarely making room for books that were more specialized and harder to read. They wanted "like-minded people to argue it out," and they also "wanted to speak to the public." The e-journal Dupin came out of that. Members subscribed through Gmail and answered one another on the mailing list. Zhou says that at its peak it had more than 10,000 subscribers, many of them young university teachers, who also recommended it to their students.

On January 13, several core members of the "Dupin" group got together, because Yang Xiaogang's new book, The Rose and the Cross, had just been published. The title comes from the first review Yang sent to "Dupin." The book collects academic essays along with what Yang observed of German society while he was working on his doctorate at the University of Tübingen.

Yang divided the essays into four parts: "Knowledge and Belief," "Freedom and Responsibility," "Scholarship and Politics," and "Nation and State." Introducing the last of them, he said: "Some people think that those who talk in lofty terms don't care about real life, don't care about grain and vegetables, and are always discussing enormous political and economic questions and public issues. But we really can't avoid those questions. Among them, one very clear trend of recent years is this: we used to think that as globalization deepened the boundaries between nation-states would gradually dissolve, that inside a country people would migrate and move faster and in greater numbers, and that people would communicate more. What we see now is the opposite. The nation-state trend is getting stronger, and inside a single country different urban communities and clusters are putting up all kinds of barriers, creating new divisions."

At the gathering, though, each of them remembered the "Dupin" group differently. Qiu Luming, now an associate professor of history at Fudan University, was working on his doctorate when he joined. He thought the e-journal came about naturally, since "when you're doing a PhD you always have to read some books." Yang Xiaogang thinks of them first as a group of people who had collected on an online forum; without the e-journal, they would have gone on discussing things there, and tearing into each other there. In those days people were still in the habit of typing long posts on forums. Joining the "Dupin" group felt more like making friends. Yang is now an associate professor of philosophy at Sun Yat-sen University.

All of them agreed that the "Dupin" group always sat somewhere between a profession and a pure pastime. In the second half of 2006 the group also began organizing offline events, working with bookstores and district libraries — sometimes setting a topic and opening a discussion, sometimes inviting authors to introduce new books or to talk loosely about cultural phenomena. Zhou Mingzhi says that in the later years, as the main organizer, she deliberately made the events more accessible, instead of staying inside topics like the "three rural issues" — agriculture, the countryside, farmers — and economics.

"Dupin" stopped publishing in 2011, under pressure from outside. "Public space in Shanghai was being squeezed," Zhou Mingzhi says.

Many of the members went on to make academic research their career, becoming university teachers after their doctorates. Without exception, they stayed wary of "professionalism" and of too much careerism.

Li Jing, now an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University, said at Sunday's gathering: "In our twenties, we all thought of ourselves as intellectuals. What we wanted to do was respond to public issues. My mission was never to be a scholar; even after I went into academic work, I never thought of turning myself into a professional." She added, half joking: "I don't think Xiaogang could write a book like this now... The way we identify ourselves, and the openings we have in public space, are completely different from before."

Wang Xiaoyu, another early member of the group, said: "I think the era of this kind of book — the era of the essay, or the era of the newspaper supplement — is completely over. For me personally, my college years were the era of the essay and the supplement. When I was in college, writing like this was one of the crucial go-betweens that carried us from being amateurs who knew nothing at all about culture and ideas to people who slowly began to take an interest." Wang recommended Yang Xiaogang to the publisher Sanhui Books, which led to the book coming out.

At the book launch on Sunday evening, several "Dupin" members also talked about how public space and young activists have changed.

We have edited the conversation below (some parts cut):

Yang Xiaogang (associate professor, Department of Philosophy, Sun Yat-sen University):

For the past few years I've had a very strong sense of difference: compared with when I was in school, something like a big turn seems to have happened. The basic experience is technology soaking into daily life. More and more people feel that what used to be imagined only in science fiction may really be arriving now. We talk about big data every day, we talk about artificial intelligence, and one day robots may conquer the world. VR and AR have shaken a great deal of the ordinary sensory world we were used to. On the one hand, in an age when technology moves this fast, we get more and more knowledge, and much of the time we can't digest that much information. On the other hand, while I get more and more knowledge, I also feel myself being shaken.

So I want to ask the friends sitting here: over these past years, has there been anything you once felt sure of that you now seriously doubt — in theory, in scholarship, or in some other way?

Wang Xiaoyu (associate professor, Institute of Cultural Criticism, Tongji University):

If there is one thing, it's the so-called idea of progress: that the times are certainly moving forward, that we'll live better and better. At the level of theory I didn't believe in the idea of progress, but in practice I still accepted it without saying so. In recent years I'm no longer sure.

Yang Xiaogang:

The first essay in Hegel's Philosophy of History also deals with the idea of progress. He begins by laying out a whole historical frame for humanity: the world is in continuous progress. Francis Fukuyama later made that popular as the "end of history." A couple of days ago I read an interview Fukuyama gave last year. A lot of people said: look, the world is in chaos now, the situation has changed enormously, everything has been turned over, the "end of history" no longer works at all, and the conclusion that "democracy will finally win" doesn't hold. Fukuyama answered that the conclusion had indeed been drawn too hastily, but that he still believes that in theory a Hegelian philosophy of history — which really rests on what Kant called "perpetual peace," a global order in which human rights are guaranteed universally through law — remains, in theory, the final end of history that humanity can pursue.

But it seems many people who do history wouldn't agree.

Qiu Luming (associate professor, Department of History, Fudan University):

As everyone knows, history teaching in secondary school is strongly shaped by a progressive view of history, or a new-style view of history, which holds that history has a starting point. People differ over what that starting point is. Take the fact that it is now 2019: that is a year in the Common Era, which of course has a close connection to Christianity. If there is a starting point, then of course there is an endpoint. Especially once you enter so-called modern society, history is seen as highly progressive. How progress is understood varies, of course. The old official view ran from so-called slave society to feudal society, from feudal society to capitalist society, to socialist society, to communist society. Fukuyama's end of history is itself strongly colored by the idea of progress: it holds that the mechanism of Western democratic society today, especially after the Soviet Union collapsed, is the final endpoint humanity has found in exploring its own fate, or its form of the state.

Anyone living in his own present will hold some beliefs, more or less, about the age or about himself. But from a historian's angle, especially when we deal with concrete problems, we can't really know the direction of history. Our view of history now comes from the height of several thousand years of human history. In practice this is hard to avoid: our understanding of history depends to some degree on our knowledge of the present. But I think one important feature of society now is that it is harder and harder to find a consensus, or a shared belief. That is probably one of the more obvious changes.

Yang Xiaogang:

You work on institutional history. I've seen some popular historians argue that the way some of our present social institutions have evolved actually carries a lot of historical shadows. For instance, government funding for university research has grown a great deal in recent years, and they think that closely resembles the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty spending large sums of public money on scholarship to compile the Siku Quanshu.

Qiu Luming:

Let me gripe a little: broad comparisons across history, work that hunts for large threads, is usually done by historical sociologists, not by historians.

Although I work on ancient Chinese history, I would absolutely not think there is any resemblance between the rise in university funding and Qianlong's compiling of the Siku Quanshu. My most immediate feeling is that, if you set aside the changes at the level of ideology, the recent investment in universities on the mainland and the expansion of student numbers look very close to what happened in Taiwan after the 1980s. The economy improved, and enrollment rates rose across the board.

Universities in Taiwan are in bad shape now, private ones especially, partly because overall economic growth is slow and partly because society as a whole is having fewer children.

Under Chen Shui-bian, because the north of the island was the more developed part at the time, Taiwan pushed "a university in every county." It also upgraded many technical and vocational colleges into universities, so basically every county in Taiwan has one. Taiwan probably has the highest density of universities in the world. If every county has a university, each one needs a research specialty. So on one trip to Taiwan I ran into a teacher who works on medieval history, and I asked him what he'd been doing lately. He said, we're doing Miaoli studies. His university is in Miaoli County, so it amounts to a county gazetteer of Miaoli. Otherwise, why would the county give you money? So whether this kind of expansion, resting on public finance, is good or bad for universities is, in a sense, a common phenomenon in societies that have had an economic takeoff.

What really needs thinking about is that if higher education changes and the whole economic structure does not change with it, it will run into a lot of trouble. I'm not an economist, but generally speaking, if higher education becomes universal it tends to push overall economic growth. A fairly unsuccessful case is the Philippines: university education there is not bad on the whole, but because the country's economic structure is weak, many Filipino domestic workers abroad are university graduates who can still only do low-end labor.

There's also this: Ma Ying-jeou once mentioned a target of a starting salary of NT$22,000 for university graduates. At today's exchange rate, that is not even 4,000 yuan. So expanding universities on public money and making higher education universal is a fairly dangerous situation once the economy contracts, especially for a late-developing country.

Liang Jie (lecturer, School of Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics):

I have a lot of feelings about this question of technologization. What I feel most strongly is everything turning two-dimensional — the spread of the world of anime, comics and games. When I was a student, philosophy was of course a marginal discipline; everyone thought it was the most useless subject. Political science, sociology and economics all dealt with concrete problems; philosophy was what you thought about after dinner when you had nothing else to do.

Today is different. Today none of the disciplines is useful, none of them can guide what these young people do, and only philosophy is useful. I meet far too many young people who live naturally inside the two-dimensional world and naturally lack any grasp of the world around them. In the two-dimensional world, Tilanqiao and Nanjing Road are both just three characters; there's no difference between them at all. So I meet huge numbers of young people who are all experts on Lacan, all experts on Žižek. Those things are the closest to them and the most immediately useful, and they can talk about them for two hours without a break. But ask them: where do you actually live, Baoshan or Songjiang? Tell me about the place you live. Probably nobody is interested, because they live in the two-dimensional world, where life is settled by food delivery and courier packages, so living in Baoshan or living in Songjiang really makes no difference to them.

And what guides their actions is philosophy too. In our time we were still very interested in things like social movements; for them the most important social movement is posting a meme. Somebody hits them, they post a meme; their house is torn down by force, they post a meme too. I think there is a very deep psychology behind that.

So the relationship between technology and the body has become a very prominent problem. When we were students, many teachers warned us that in learning, what matters is to read ten thousand books and travel ten thousand miles. You need theoretical knowledge, and you also need to look at knowledge of the real world, and connect theory with reality. But in the two-dimensional world everything is made abstract, everything is flattened.

I meet far too many young people who see no point in studying in the United States or in Germany. What German book can't be downloaded in China? Or: just send me the PDF, right? As for what Germany is actually like, maybe I can see it more clearly on YouTube than you can standing there. So once the whole world has been flattened and made abstract, people's behavior has changed a great deal.

Yang Xiaogang:

Once public space changes, the behavior inside that space changes too. A few years ago I went to Guangzhou. Before I went, I read a man based in Guangzhou, a social activist, who had written a piece on "youth of thought" and "youth of action," comparing the ways young people in Beijing and Shanghai act with the way young people in Guangzhou act. He argued that Beijing and Shanghai were full of young people sitting around theorizing, while Guangzhou's young people had their feet on the ground doing all kinds of social practice. And it's true that after I went there I met many young people doing all kinds of social work — environmental protection, labor, all sorts of issues. Technological change will make the differences between places bigger still. But I know Li Jing disagrees; she thinks that's a simplification.

Li Jing (associate professor, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University):

Let me pick up Xiaogang's topic and talk about public space. In China, discussion of public space — the term wasn't used earlier, but broadly speaking, discussion of the relationship between the state and society, and between state elites and social elites — goes back roughly to the Republican era, and then had a considerable revival in the 1990s, when Jeffrey C. Alexander and Deng Zhenglai of Fudan's Institute for Advanced Study put out a series of translated books on civil society. On the whole, though, the discussion of public space, or of civil society, over that first hundred years or so was very elite-driven.

In the last 10 to 15 years, a great deal has changed. From my own angle, there are a few important shifts. One is the professionalization of intellectuals.

When we first started the "Dupin" group, and when Professor Xiaogang was writing this book, in our twenties, we all thought of ourselves as intellectuals. What we wanted to do was respond to public issues. My mission was not to be a scholar; even after I went into academic work, I never thought of turning myself into a professional. But when I came back from the United States, I found that the occupation of scholar, or intellectual, had changed beyond recognition and moved onto a highly professionalized path. The United States is similar in this, in fact — to a large extent we are learning from the United States.

The professional path may well be the right one, and may well be bound to happen. But there is a problem: the timing is completely different in China and in the United States. In the United States, universities were originally there mainly to train clergy, and their relationship to public policy stayed fairly distant. In the 1960s and 1970s that relationship was close for a while, but after the 1970s, as the student movement faded, it stayed loose; academia became a relatively self-standing and independent field, and that is closely tied to the professionalization of scholars. In the United States, scholars becoming professionals does not mean nobody speaks up in public space. A sociologist at Columbia University wrote a book saying that in the United States, "intellectual" is a space, not a particular person. That space is not occupied only by scholars; many kinds of people can act as intellectuals.

But public space in China was elite-driven from the start — the main actors really were scholars — and at this particular moment in history, once scholars become professionals, public space fragments and shrinks.

What we see today is closely tied to the lives and experience of our generation, including the part we are able to play in public space. So I don't think Xiaogang could write a book like this now. (Laughs.) I'd really bet that the way he identifies himself now, and the openings we have in public space, are completely different from before.

That doesn't mean there's no hope. I don't think young people today are simply sitting in a two-dimensional space, depoliticized, cut off from politics. On the contrary — among my own students, and in what I see online, there are plenty of new attempts.

We were talking about this only yesterday: there are groups in Shanghai and in Guangzhou, very young student groups in their twenties. They may not fall at all into the simple quarrel between "left" and "right" of the era we grew up in. Their political space is completely different from what we imagine. What they use is, for instance—

Yang Xiaogang:

"Fools of the world, unite."

Li Jing:

Right, that kind of language. It looks depoliticized, but it is political action and political language in a new dimension. In that sense, we have no way at all to give them new energy or new language. I think there is still a lot of hope. How public space develops from here, and how political action changes, are things to look forward to.

Liang Jie:

Speaking of Matsumoto Hajime (author of A Rebellion Handbook for the World's Fools) — that reminds me: about three years ago, after I came back to China, when the "Dupin" group had broken up and everyone was busy with their own things, one place I went to a lot was a place my friend Chen Yun and I organized. Chen Yun was the main organizer. We found a spot in the city center, in Yangpu District, reachable from a metro station, called Dinghai Bridge.

In that place you can find a lot of interesting history. An important factory used to stand there, the National No. 19 Mill, and the most famous person it produced was a man named Wang Hongwen. In the whole northeast corner of Shanghai, the two areas with the worst fighting and the most developed gang culture were Hongzhen Old Street and Dinghai Bridge. Hongzhen Old Street is already gone, and Dinghai Bridge may go this year. In a place like this, Dinghai Bridge was organized into a public space, with a lot of artists, anthropologists — every anthropologist who comes to Shanghai loves going to Dinghai Bridge — and many other people of all sorts of backgrounds, odd people.

Matsumoto Hajime is a friend of Chen Yun's and mine, and the first time he came to Shanghai he came straight to Dinghai Bridge. He came because he felt our way of living was somewhat close to his, that we had something in common. The most impressive thing about Matsumoto Hajime is that he has never held a job in his life and has never had money from his parents, and he is still alive. That is a remarkable thing. Really, if you can prove you can stay alive without holding a job, then next to you, isn't everyone around you a fool? Don't the rest of us have to work in order to live? Here is a man who doesn't work, who has reached his forties or fifties and is doing fine, and he hasn't run any social movement — he just lives like this. I think a great deal is hidden behind that.

The book he wrote, Amateur Riot, the documentary about him, and some of the things he has done look easy enough to copy on the surface: everyone hanging out together, drinking together, no problem. But how many young people can really be like Matsumoto Hajime? To carry it that far — that is an artist's resistance, or a philosopher's resistance.

Yang Xiaogang:

There's a group like theirs in Guangzhou called Huangbianzhan, in a residential compound near Sun Yat-sen University, in a run-down little ground-floor storeroom, where a group of young people gather from time to time. Western sociology, of course, has long had a phrase for this: "everyday social resistance."

Li Jing:

Let me add one thing, since I happen to have written an article on it. We have a misunderstanding about public space and civil society: it isn't always good. It can be bad. Some political scientists have studied civil society in Germany's Weimar period; with data, they showed that the level of association in Weimar civil society was far higher than in other European countries at the time, but civil society was cut off from political society, political society was in the hands of elites, public space was over-mobilized, and in the end the Nazis seized its energy. So it is a classic case of a bad public space: it went straight from an elitist public space into populism. This is happening again lately, in the United States among other places. Our era has already entered a conservative cycle, more and more like the political situation between the First and Second World Wars. So public space faces a structural transformation too — not the transformation Habermas described, but a new one.

Cover image from Douban (cropped)

Long cover image from Unsplash (cropped)