Between Professional and Amateur: Legal Scholar Wang Renbo on Constitutionalism, the State, and the Individual | Interviews

"I remember a line from Edward W. Said: to keep an intellectual relatively independent, an amateur's attitude serves better than a professional's."

In late 2018 and early 2019, Wang Renbo published two more books that had nothing to do with his proper trade — On Being an Amateur (《业余者说》) and You Watch, I Speak (《你看我说》). The first is a record of questions and answers between him and his students, on Lu Xun, on the political system and national character, on the craft and context of expression. The second collects posts from his WeChat Moments. Since 2014, nearly everything he has posted there has taken the same form — one suggestive line of text and one image, something close to performance art.

Straying from his proper trade has long been a Wang Renbo trait. He has little appetite for writing specialist papers, and in daily life he rarely opens a professional book either. He reads literature, watches films, listens to music, and writes essays about literature and film. In class he recommends novels, music, and outside reading to his students, and never tires of it.

Wang Renbo's field is constitutional law. He is a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) and editor-in-chief of the academic journal Tribune of Political Science and Law (《政法论坛》). His main research is the constitutional history of modern China, and his books include The Chinese Nature of Law (《法的中国性》), China's Modernity (《中国的近代性》), and The Lonely and Sensitive (《孤独的敏感者》).

He was born in 1958 in Laixi, Shandong. After China restored the national college entrance exam, he was admitted in 1979 to the law department of Southwest College of Political Science and Law (later renamed Southwest University of Political Science and Law), where he took his bachelor's degree in law in 1983 and his master's in 1989, before earning a doctorate at CUPL in 2001. After his bachelor's he stayed on to teach for nearly 20 years, serving at different times as editor-in-chief of Modern Law Science and of the Journal of Southwest University of Political Science and Law. In 2002 he moved to CUPL, where he teaches to this day.

That is the semi-official version. In his books, Wang Renbo has given another account of himself: "Wang Erfu (wolf), from a small village in the north, now holed up in a northern city. Well past forty and still muddling along. The course of my life has run like this: when I should have been in school, I was farming; when I should have been making money, I was reading. Now everyone else is busy and I am still idle — apart from reading a bit, teaching a bit, and writing a bit, I also think about questions that will never have answers."

He is one of the university's most popular and most distinctive teachers. Many students call him "Uncle Wang," which he finds funny. Xu Xianming, a former president of CUPL, calls him "a scholar in China's legal academy with a deep humanistic feeling and a critical spirit."

That humanist temperament may be exactly why Wang Renbo is willing, even glad, to be an amateur, a flâneur. The intellectuals he most admires have the same cast of mind — Lu Xun, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Walter Benjamin.

"I remember a line from Edward W. Said: to keep an intellectual relatively independent, an amateur's attitude serves better than a professional's. That line gave an amateur like me a kind of right to exist. ... That is to say, however finely the disciplines are divided, however specialized we become, the walls between disciplines can never fence in the freedom of thought. ... In that sense I see nothing wrong with being an amateur. The amateur's greatest advantage is that he is always full of passion for the world, always full of curiosity about it, and so he has to read and has to think. That may be the shape of knowledge I can offer people, as a legal scholar who doesn't entirely mind his proper trade," Wang Renbo said in a 2018 talk.

Wang Renbo's proper trade has in fact gone very well. His academic life divides roughly into two periods — Southwest University of Political Science and Law and CUPL — and between them he went through a change of direction.

During the Southwest years he and his close friend Cheng Liaoyuan wrote two books together that had a wide influence in the legal field: On the Rule of Law (《法治论》) and On Rights (《权利论》), a companion volume to the first, originally titled Winning the Sacred: A General Theory of Rights and Their Remedies (《赢得神圣：权利及其救济通论》). On the Rule of Law was the first systematic study of rule-of-law theory in China.

"That choice came from the passion and ferment we shared in our field, and also from a certain reflection on history and reality — and what prompted the reflection was the shock of a single scene." The scene was the "Red Guard Cemetery" in Shapingba Park in Chongqing, where most of the buried are children of seventeen or eighteen who died in the armed factional fighting of the Cultural Revolution. "When they fell they were heroes; once dead they became mere grave goods. With their own absurd deaths they mocked the absurdity of history. They lie there to prove one thing: China needs more than a legal system to settle society — it thirsts for a society standing on the foundation of the rule of law. As survivors, and with the passion of youth, we called out for the rule of law, carrying a lantern through the night in search of the footing of a civilized society," Wang Renbo wrote in his essay My Thirty Years: Scholarship as a Selective Memory (《我这30年：学术，一种选择性记忆》).

Looking back at that work now, Wang Renbo thinks the two books expressed the ideal state and the ideal society as a young man of that era imagined them — which was also the mainstream normativist line of thinking in the legal field at the time. The reality is that what ought to be does not necessarily stand for what is.

So why the gap? Wang Renbo was puzzled. Around the time he arrived at CUPL he happened to read Translingual Practice (《跨语际实践》) by the Columbia University professor Lydia Liu, and felt he had found a way into the problem. China's legal concepts all come from the West, but after China borrowed them they no longer looked the way they once did. So he tried the lens of translingual practice on the origins and mutations of basic concepts such as constitution, democracy, and civil rights, and concluded that the basic paradigm of modern Chinese constitutional thought is "wealth and power as the substance, constitutionalism as the function." Western constitutional culture, taken whole, was dismembered by the pragmatism of modern China. From there he turned from the normativist approach to interpreting and researching the history of modern Chinese constitutional thought, its concepts and its ideas.

In Students and the Jianghu (《桃李江湖》) he once described what studying this history feels like: "An American constitutionalist doesn't deserve Chinese praise, because he can never truly understand the pain of a Chinese constitutionalist — just as an Italian football fan can never understand the pain of a Chinese one. The American constitutionalist is a product of America's success; the Chinese constitutionalist is the result of a series of defeats China has suffered since it entered the modern age."

In recent years, as he has aged and seen more, the focus of Wang Renbo's reading and thinking has moved from "thought" to "action." He is interested now in men of action like Zhang Zhidong and Ah Q. As he sees it, China has never lacked thinkers since the late Qing, but even the best ideas come out bent and warped in practice. China's problem is not how to think, but how to act.

Compared with some of his colleagues in the legal field, he is not a man who "climbs to the heights and calls out," nor one who works hard at making money. He cares about the state and society, but prefers to stand apart and watch: "The amateur's creed is: I am myself; no one represents me and I represent no one." His student, the writer Yu Ge, has felt something similar about him — he holds himself proudly apart; he is never zealous, never a follower; he is neither left nor right, belongs to no faction, and even loathes the factional battles that sweep periodically through China's legal academy. ... He tells the students in front of him, earnestly: to seek liberation you must be your own master; to seek freedom you must be independent.

We met Wang Renbo in his office at the end of 2018. Gray-haired, wearing a scarf, smoking one cigarette after another, he talked to us in Mandarin with a trace of Shandong in it about how he sees constitutionalism, the state, and the individual. This law teacher — a rock-and-roll youth who once dreamed of becoming John Lennon, and who once threw himself, full of blood and heat, into the hope that China would move toward an ideal state and society — now thinks and feels quite differently. Asked about the future, Wang Renbo, 61 this year, told QDaily with some feeling: "I have one plain, simple wish: that in the years I have left I see no great upheaval, no war. China has thrashed about long enough. I feel I belong to a lucky generation of Chinese — when I think of Yan Fu's generation, I am quite content."

Q = QDaily

Wang = Wang Renbo

A Strong State Cannot Take the Place of a Strong Individual — Finding the Balance Matters

Q: You argue that "wealth and power as the substance, constitutionalism as the function" is the basic paradigm of modern Chinese constitutional thought — that Western constitutional culture, taken whole, was dismembered by modern China's pragmatism, one part going to the Wuxu Reform and another to the May Fourth Movement. 2018 was the 120th anniversary of the Wuxu Reform, and 2019 is the 100th anniversary of May Fourth. So why do you say one part of Western constitutional culture went to Wuxu and another to May Fourth? What did that lead to?

Wang: This is a somewhat complicated subject. Constitution or constitutional order, either way, it began in the West, and what grows from that ground naturally suits that ground. We wanted to move it here, but you can't move the soil, only what grew out of it. Chinese people are clever too: I move it over, I know it has left its native ground, but I let it grow into something else in this new ground.

The core of the Western constitution is the separation of powers, the pursuit of a government of limited powers — a limited constitution. What happened when that culture and that system were moved to China? This was not the first question Chinese people asked. What they asked first was why the West was strong and prosperous, and why the Chinese were so poor and backward. That was the first question China's scholar-officials put to themselves, and they came to the conclusion that Western strength and prosperity were rooted in Western constitutional order and democracy. So China brought over constitutional order in the Western sense for the sake of national wealth and power itself, not for limited government in the sense of the individual. On the contrary, what the modernity of the Chinese state needed was not the separation of powers but a strong central government. This was a reverse process in constitutionalism's travels across borders.

To explain it properly we have to go back to the late Ming and early Qing. From Gu Yanwu and Huang Zongxi onward, the attention of China's scholar-officials turned toward the localities. Why? Because after the Manchus came through the pass and ruled over the Han, Han scholar-officials felt more or less resistant in their hearts. They tried to counterbalance a powerful foreign regime by building up local strength, and so they argued for pushing power downward.

Later the Manchu Qing regime ran into a huge problem: the Taiping Rebellion. To destroy that force the Qing government had no choice but to lean on the localities; the court at the center could do nothing on its own. That is how the Xiang Army came about, and later the Huai Army. After the Taipings, the basic condition of China was that central power kept weakening while local power had already grown large. It became very hard for the Qing government to hold so vast an empire together. Connect this to the 1911 Revolution: it was not one unified leader liberating the whole country and building a new, modern, centralized government. Wuchang rose, and then province after province declared independence. That too shows how serious the problem of localism had become.

So China's constitutional problem is how to use the strength of the central government to gather a country in a state of loose sand back together. That is what "wealth and power as the substance, constitutionalism as the function" means. "Wealth and power" holds two layers: one is a strong state, the other is that China truly be a state and not a heap of sand. So the modernity of the state was treated as the substance, and the individual had to step back.

At bottom the Wuxu Reform of 1898 was about China becoming a modern state, which is why Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and others argued for opening a parliament, settling the national course, and enacting a constitution. May Fourth, of course, also raised the individual and the question of individualism. But in the end what everyone cared about was still the nation and the people. Hu Shi is the clearest case. He set great store by the individual, and hoped young people would first forge themselves into something serviceable, become qualified individuals. For a Western liberal that would be the end of it — that is the goal. Hu Shi did not see it that way. He held that once such an individual had grown up, he had to return to society and take responsibility for changing it.

So from Wuxu to May Fourth and on to the promulgation of the Republic of China's constitution, the question at the level of the state came first. Making China a modern state and building a modern government — that was the number-one matter facing the Chinese.

Q: Standing where we stand now and looking back at those two events, what strikes you most?

Wang: From Wuxu to May Fourth, this was an entirely normal state of thought in Chinese history — there was no way to put the individual first. Two reasons: one is the situation of national survival the country faced; the other is that traditional Chinese culture had little individual-centered thought to begin with. State and government first, individual second — that is the path along which Chinese history has moved.

Li Zehou once proposed a paradigm for modern Chinese history, "the dual variation of national salvation and enlightenment." He held that the turning point in Chinese history came when salvation overwhelmed enlightenment. Actually that paradigm has a problem: you can't split history into two poles, and a two-pole view of history is one that stands outside history looking in. In fact China has never got out of the difficulty of building a modern state; the modern state has never really stood up. The failure of the Wuxu Reform brought the 1911 Revolution, and the basic pattern after May Fourth was warlord chaos. In 1928 the country was unified, with great difficulty; in 1931 the Japanese came in; and by 1937 Japan's full-scale invasion had broken out. China has been on the road of national survival the whole time.

After the founding of the People's Republic, of course, the task of building the state was basically done, but China still has a long way to go before it is a modern state worthy of the name. Part of that road is the balance between the individual and the state — you can't put the state first forever. A strong state cannot take the place of a strong individual. Likewise, a strong individual does not necessarily make a strong state. Finding the balance matters.

Q: So how should we look at the relationship between individual freedom and national strength today?

Wang: Neither can be slighted. China is a late-modernizing state; as Professor Yang Xiaokai put it, it has a late-mover disadvantage, with no advantage to speak of. It has to make up the lesson of the modern state and the lesson of the modern individual at the same time. China's modern transition has never been finished. To borrow Tang Degang's image, our historical "Three Gorges" of modernity is still tossing about in the upper and middle reaches; it hasn't reached the river mouth.

A modern state is a balance between state and individual. Right now we have a big state and a small individual. The great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is China's goal. But the rejuvenation of the nation is not the same thing as a strong individual standing up. After 40 years of reform and opening the state has piled up a great deal of wealth; this is not the era of the Wuxu Reform or May Fourth anymore. So politics and law need to attend more to the individual, and bring respect for each person's dignity and rights into step with China's modernization.

More Than a Century On, the Road From Common People to Citizens Is Still Unfinished

Q: In 2013 you gave a talk called The Republic: China's Century-Long Burden (《共和，中国百年之累》). You said: "The First World War, and the birth in 1917 of the worker-and-peasant republic led by Lenin, kept China from moving toward civic republicanism in the Western sense and pushed it toward a people's republicanism. China's enlightenment was never finished. We still have to go back to Liang Qichao, back to On the New Citizen (《新民说》). Picking up the thread that was cut after May Fourth is the road China has to take. A century-long burden, and we are still on the road." Could you say more about why? And in concrete terms, what can be done? This seems connected to what we were just discussing — it comes back to the individual.

Wang: From that angle we can swap the concept of the individual for the concept of the national subject. The way China's 1.4 billion people live and think is not the same as the concept of the citizen in Western society. They have "citizens"; we have "the common people." Putting up a tall building is easy; turning the common people into modern people is not.

After 40 years of reform and opening, China looks from the outside much like the developed Western countries — Beijing and Shanghai are more prosperous than many Western cities. But that is the surface. What kind of individual are you, as the subject of a modern state? That is what decides a country's degree of modern civilization. Ever since the Opium Wars our attention has gone to building at the level of the state, and from the outside it looks very modern. But after more than a hundred years, the road from common people to citizens is still unfinished.

A citizen has to care about politics, and not only care about it but take part in it. How does he take part? Because politics is what everyone has a stake in, and interests cross. Wherever interests cross, that is the public sphere. The citizen is an animal of the public sphere. Without a public sphere there can be no citizens. Why did the agora appear in ancient Greece? The agora was a product of citizenship. People gathered there and discussed and argued whatever concerned them all. That is what a citizen is. The Chinese way of life is a wife, kids, and a warm brick bed; affairs of state belong to the leaders and the government, and minding your own business, staying out of "other people's affairs," is a rule of life Chinese people hold to.

So in a truly modern state, the individual appears as his own subject and takes part in political governance. He is willing, even eager, to do it, and will pay any price to win that right. In the end the West took several hundred years; we have had 40 years of reform and opening. To expect today's Chinese common people to have the rights consciousness, subject consciousness, and political consciousness of a modern citizen is not realistic. In many places people are still not out of poverty. So the century-long burden means first putting up the frame of a modern state. The details are a long way off.

Q: That reminds me of a talk you gave in 2014, How Does China Build a Modern State? (《中国如何构建现代国家？》). You said there that, judging by China's history over the past hundred-odd years, China needs constitutional order and democracy, needs the modernity of the state itself, and needs the growth of the Chinese national subject. Do those three have an order of importance or sequence? Can they come into conflict?

Wang: That was said in a relative sense. For a late-modernizing state, constitutional order and democracy are themselves a form of modernity, but the two can't be folded entirely into one another — there is a subtle difference between the modernity of the state itself and political modernity. In the end none of the three can be slighted; all three need to be balanced. It is easy to see why the modernity of the state itself has always come first for China: "fall behind and you get beaten" is a threshold China's modernity has never been able to step past. But the modernity of the state also needs constitutional and democratic institutions to guarantee its values — a modern state must not become a modern Leviathan. And no modern institution can be built without the growth of the national subject himself. If the people cannot grow into modern people, the state's modernity is watered down, discounted. And without modern people as the national subject to hold it up, any constitutional order or democracy is a name without the thing.

Q: So you feel the three don't conflict and have no fixed order, but the problem now is that China stresses the state too much and hasn't found the balance?

Wang: One important task China faces now is the growth of the modern individual. How does the individual grow? By putting into practice, one by one, the individual rights already written into our current constitution — that is the work to be done. Rights of speech, expression, publication, association, and so on are all set out in the constitution. You can't just send people up into the sky; you also have to let them live well down on the ground.

Q: In On Being an Amateur you write: "The establishment of 'modern rule of law' here shows itself mainly as the deconstruction of the jianghu, and that deconstruction meets resistance from the jianghu and is wounded by it in turn. This counts as one of the dilemmas of China's rule of law today." Do you have thoughts on how to get out of that dilemma?

Wang: The Chinese state may be marching down the road of modernity in triumph, but our form of society is still fairly primitive and early. Chinese society is not yet a modern society in the true sense. In Marx's account, civil society is a counterweight to the political state. Western civil society has come down continuously from the Middle Ages: a strong society, a weak state. China is the reverse: a strong state, a weak society. State power can reach into any corner of society; there is no autonomous social sphere. In that sense China's modern transition still has far to go. You could put it this way: a developed country must have a developed "society"; the society China has is of the jianghu kind, and it belongs to the territory of politics.

Q: You once said: "Modern Chinese constitutionalism was constrained not mainly by conservatism, but by conservatism's failure to hold the radicalism of 'progress,' 'innovation,' and 'revolution' in check." More than a hundred years on, how do you see the question of conservatism and radicalism in China now? It seems to me the two still haven't come to balance each other, and some people even argue the 21st century is an age of right-wing conservatism.

Wang: What I said holds in any era. Modern China grew more and more radical because China was so extremely backward. No steady, conservative reform could be carried through, so revolution was the only way. And our revolution was not the middle-class kind the West had. It was a revolution from below, and the further down it went the more radical it became. So the course of modern Chinese history left conservatism no room to speak. When nothing about you works, when you are extremely backward, there is nothing worth conserving — so you smash it all and build a new heaven and earth. It was not people at the top or in the middle who opened up that new world, but people at the bottom. Why? Because the main force of the Chinese revolution was genuinely poor people. This is China's biggest basic condition: from the old democratic revolution to the new democratic revolution, the rural population was close to 90 percent. Every road to reform was blocked; gradual, rational reform had no place in China. Radicalism and conservatism take different forms in different eras, of course, and they can turn into each other. What was once conservative can, in other circumstances, show a radical face, and the reverse — and the balance and mutual check between the two ought to be a country's normal condition.

Every Intellectual Can Find Something of Himself in Lu Xun

Q: In On Being an Amateur you write: "Three words are always present in Lu Xun's thought: hope, despair, and nihilism — and these three are in turn bound up with resistance and darkness. Lu Xun's essence is despair; hope is born out of that despair, and hope always exists inside despair." Comparing yourself with Lu Xun on this point, do you think you are alike?

Wang: You can't really compare — the moment you do, you have made yourself too big. Lu Xun moves me, especially late at night. I can picture him writing at night, one cigarette after another, the ash sometimes dropping unnoticed onto the manuscript paper, and him flicking it off and going on. Besides writing he loved woodcuts and films. While studying in Japan he often slipped out alone to watch movies; it killed the boredom and was also a solitary pleasure. What he learned from the films was secondary. Lu Xun had a playful side, and he loved life — everyone knows he was something of a gourmet as well. He said he was not a man who "climbs to the heights and calls out, and the crowd answers." He always lived elsewhere, never at the center of the world's stage. Takeuchi Yoshimi of Japan said Lu Xun was solitary, outside of history, not a pioneer.

I think every Chinese reader, whatever his political leanings, can draw some instruction and insight from Lu Xun. Lu Xun carries many meanings in China, of character as well as of thought. Every intellectual can find something of himself in him.

Q: You have quoted a passage of Lu Xun's with two key phrases in it — "for others" and "amusing myself." In your view those two phrases catch Lu Xun exactly and vividly. If you used them to analyze yourself, what would you conclude?

Wang: Chinese readers, the traditional literati and modern intellectuals alike, share one thing: they all carry, to some degree, a feeling for family and country. Intellectuals care about the life of the nation and the people — its history, its direction, its future. Every generation of Chinese readers has taken something onto its own shoulders, and not as something to be settled with talk. But even a man like Lu Xun — ask him to hand his whole self over to society and he wouldn't do it, wouldn't be willing to. An intellectual starts from himself first, and throws himself, with his own experience and feeling, at the big words: nation, people, society, history. To put it roundabout, an intellectual's concern for nation and people is finally a concern for himself; he generally does not discard or forget himself in order to place himself in those high, grand places. To put it bluntly: caring for yourself is the precondition for caring for the country.

But these two things fight each other often. Please yourself, and you may have no time left for nation and people. Serve the nation and the people, and you have to give up your own pleasure in "amusing myself." The moment a man starts amusing himself, the responsibility he has granted himself comes back to mind. Some Japanese scholars of Lu Xun like to define him through the conflict between humanism and individualism. I don't think such big words fit Lu Xun. The bigger the words you pile on him, the further from him you get, not closer. Big words mainly serve to hold a subject at arm's length, and they take the human warmth out of an assessment.

This holds for everyone, in fact: the nobler you think you are, the more it feels like trying to lift yourself off the ground by your own hair. We all live in the everyday, and amusing yourself, finding a bit of fun, is only human. Writing On Being an Amateur and The Lonely and Sensitive belongs in that category. Playing with words is a way of pleasing myself; if other people enjoy reading it too, then it takes on a social meaning as well. But once you have played at it for a while you start to feel you owe something, and your thoughts turn back to nation and people, and you get the urge to hurry up and study problems and publish papers. It is true that "amusing myself" and "for others" fight each other often.

Q: Do you feel that conflict strongly in yourself?

Wang: Very strongly. And in some situations I think "amusing myself" matters as much as "for others" — meaning mainly the nation, the people, society. So many people already care about the state; one more of me makes no difference, one less makes no difference. What matters more is to live out yourself first. "Amusing myself" here doesn't mean idling around or touring the scenery; it means holding to your own interests in Lu Xun's sense. Lu Xun said, "The boundless distance, the countless people — all of it has to do with me." Think about it: you don't even know the people in that distant place, and they have no idea you are worrying about them. The nation, the people, the country are so vast, numberless as the sands of the Ganges, and we ourselves are one grain in the ocean. Intellectuals sometimes make themselves too big. To live out yourself over a lifetime, to live it well and with some fun, is in itself a thing of real value.

Q: Professor Cheng Liaoyuan has an interpretation of you. He thinks Chinese constitutionalism and the rule of law are, for you, what Andy Lau was for Yang Lijuan — and that you are Yang Lijuan. What do you make of that?

Wang: Professor Cheng and I have been friends for more than 30 years; we know each other well. He has his own reasons for the comparison. In truth every Chinese reader carries, to some degree, that stubborn attachment to whatever he identifies with and believes in. After so many years of training in your own field, holding on to certain things and not changing or dropping them easily is only normal.

Q: Yang Lijuan's story ended in tragedy. Do you think you'll end up the same way?

Wang: I think that in any era, in any country, a man with real thought carries a touch of tragedy; if he lived out a comedy he would not be a thinker. Lu Xun surely did not want to be finished at 55, but his temperament, his cultivation, his way of thinking about problems meant he could only live out his life within that span. Seen this way, the thinker is mostly a tragic figure. Lu Xun trained as a doctor, but I cannot picture him carrying a medicine chest and practicing medicine. He was a thinker, and that was his fate.

In the Years I Have Left, I Hope to See No Great Upheaval and No War — China Has Thrashed About Long Enough

Q: Apart from Lu Xun, which writers have influenced you most?

Wang: Hard to say, because I have no fixed intellectual idols. My reading isn't sectarian; it has something of a come-from-everywhere quality, and I am glad to seek guidance from all sorts of people. If I have to name one, I suppose I like Walter Benjamin best. He refused to think in concepts, and he himself is hard to place — call him a philosopher, but really he did literary and cultural criticism. He was fragmentary; he made contributions in every field, and from almost anywhere you can trace a line back to him. His way of thinking is strange, unlike ordinary people's. I have read basically all of Benjamin that has been translated. They say a Chinese edition of The Complete Works of Walter Benjamin (《本雅明全集》) is coming out now, which is good news to me.

Q: What other books have had a big influence on your thinking?

Wang: The "Overseas Studies of China" series from Jiangsu People's Publishing House is very good. Those are books by scholars abroad studying Chinese questions, especially Chinese history and culture. Part of why they are interesting probably comes down to a simple truth: the onlooker sees clearest. Comparatively speaking, Joseph Levenson's Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (《儒教中国及其现代命运》) has influenced me more than most; it is also the first book I tell my own students to read. Several Chinese publishers have brought out editions of it. What sets Chinese scholars studying China apart from foreigners doing it comes down mainly to approach. It is a bit like the difference between traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine. Foreigners go by a set approach; the academic term is "paradigm." Their research is methodical, step by step, and they still manage to put their own sincerity into it. It has another feature: when they write about historical figures they quote relatively little of the original text, and generally reorganize and rearrange the material to fit their own paradigm.

Q: If an ordinary reader wants to understand Chinese constitutional history more deeply, what would you recommend besides your own books?

Wang: There were many books on China's constitutional history written in the Republican era, but most are documentary, without much depth of thought. China really has no theory of its own in this area — every theory of constitutional order and of the constitution was brought over from the West, Marxism included. But to study China's own problems you certainly have to look at the documentary work earlier scholars did, such as Jing Zhiren's A History of Constitutional Government in China (《中国立宪史》).

Q: On Being an Amateur mentions a book called Yellow Face: The Perceived China (《黄脸：被认知的中国》). Is that your next book? What questions does it try to address?

Wang: It really discusses one question: what makes China China? It is a reading of the two characters that spell the country's name, with particular attention to China after its modern transition. People have understood China through four lenses, and built up a mirror image of China from them. One is orientalism, mainly through the missionaries; the second is evolutionism, mainly through Yan Fu; the third is nationalism, mainly through Liang Qichao; the fourth is modernism, mainly through Japan. All four in fact came in from the East and the West. China had already lost the capacity to know itself, and had to borrow other people's theories and ways of knowing to understand itself. Even the national-essence school isn't a genuine Chinese product; it was provoked by Western-centrism. Without the West there would be no national essence. There's a whiff of paradox in that.

Q: What do you think that research means for China today?

Wang: I think it doesn't quite fit now. In the context of the time, I believed China had to find its own subjectivity, build its own way of knowing, and stop leaning on borrowed frames. Then I found that wasn't right either — we still have to borrow; without borrowing it doesn't work, and we are back where we started. A person's way of knowing has a great deal to do with the stage of development of his era, or with the realities in front of him.

Q: Do you have any worries about society today?

Wang: I have one plain, simple wish: that in the years I have left I see no great upheaval, no war. China has thrashed about long enough. I feel I belong to a lucky generation of Chinese — when I think of Yan Fu's generation, I am quite content. I don't think it is all bad that China's progress is a bit slow. A country and a society are like a living organism: they have their own rhythm of life, and going a little slower actually gives you a settled feeling. "Slowness" lets people hold on to an expectation free of fear. Only with certainty can you be free of fear.

Cover image: a still from the film The Golden Era (《黄金时代》), with the actor Wang Zhiwen playing Lu Xun, via Douban; the banner image is Walter Benjamin, via Wikipedia.