By now, it is clear that the rules of the post-Cold War order are irreparably broken—leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos recently declared as much. Alongside the breakdown of international norms and integration is a farewell to an age where youths can expect the economy to be stable, predictable, and grow at a certain pace.
This is especially true in China’s cities, where young people are learning how to live in fin-de-siècle limbo. Unlike the world inhabited by earlier generations, jobs are hard to come by, consumption is depressed, and housing prices are prohibitively high. In the West, podcasters and populists tend to soak up these frustrations, but in Xi Jinping’s China, youth are turning to a less cynical, more refined figure: a soft-spoken anthropologist named Xiang Biao.
Xiang Biao is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany and previously a professor at Oxford. He has also become one of the most recognized public intellectuals in China in recent years. Last month, I followed Xiang on a tour across China. As we walked along the streets of Beijing, he was routinely stopped by fans. At a university in Hubei, students packed lecture halls to hear him speak. Afterwards, they lined up for autographs and ask him for advice on deeply personal matters—how to navigate unemployment, cope with family trauma, or whether their boyfriend was wrong in an argument.
I first heard of Xiang Biao in 2020, when he helped popularizei the Chinese term “involution,” or neijuan (内卷). Neijuan refers to a type of extreme competition in which a system traps participants in a cycle of endless exertion without reward. Xiang has cultivated a brand out of proposing vivid metaphors to describe Chinese reality. He described neijuan as a “spinning top that must keep whipping itself to stay up.”
At a time when the Chinese government seems incapable of offering youth an alternative source of hope, Xiang has managed to break through. He is working with similar source materials to those of Western populists, but he’s channeling discontent in creative, though somewhat unorthodox ways. I wanted to find out what he is doing.
Xiang recently visited Tokyo, where I am based now, so this conversation was recorded live at the One Way Street Bookstore in Ginza. We hope you enjoy the episode.
Summary of Interview:
Xiang’s one year of mandatory military school after the crackdowns in Tiananmen Square (03:41)
Xiang’s fieldwork in Zhejiang Village in Beijing (07:36)
Xiang’s discontent with the Chinese “new enlightenment” intellectuals of the 1980s (10:43)
Parallels between post-Cold War American elites and 1980s Chinese elites (15:10)
The roots of youth unhappiness in China and West (21:11)
Is youth disillusionment not the Communist Party’s fault? (30:29)
Xiang’s concept of “the nearby” and rebuilding one’s attention to local life (37:22)
Parallels between Xiang’s philosophy and Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone(43:40)
Xiang’s issue with claims of universal values, the Nobel Peace Prize selection, and lectern-style politics (51:17)
The spirit of the “nearby” in Zohran Mamdani’s politics (01:00:06)
Similarities between American involution and Chinese involution (01:01:12)
Why young Chinese aren’t protesting like their counterparts in other countries (01:02:38)
The role of intellectuals in an age of political disaffection (01:07:38)
Curriculum reform at Chinese universities on the “nearby” (01:10:25)
Where Xiang hopes to lead his intellectual movement (01:13:45)
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Chang: Xiang Biao, welcome to Tokyo and the Into Asia podcast.
Xiang:
Thank you. Very happy to be here.
Chang:
I want to begin in the year 1990. This is the year you entered Peking University. It’s also the year after the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the subsequent crackdowns. In your book Self as Method, you wrote: “the political atmosphere was very ambiguous and unclear—no one dared say anything.” Can you describe what that climate was like, and whether it influenced your trajectory or your intellectual interests?
Xiang:
The 1980s was a time that was often described as an era of “cultural fever.” There was a lot of debate, including many radical views, which you could read in official newspapers and also see on TV programs.
Then 1989 came. Peking University decided to send all first-year students to a military academy for training for a whole year. So I spent my first year, from 1990 to 1991, in a military academy. So I arrived in Beijing in 1991.
After one year in the military academy, we were really eager to enter a university campus for the first time—and it was Peking University. We had all these images of its association with the May Fourth Movement, with library debates, with all kinds of radical and unorthodox views.
We expected a very lively atmosphere of debate and exchange. But in 1991 it was very quiet. There were hardly any seminars. I remember the very first public talk was about how to prepare for your English-language test. So I felt a bit sad at that time.
Then in 1992, Deng Xiaoping made his Southern Tour, saying that China must open up again. The whole nation plunged into this market economy. Suddenly there were lots of talks about how to make investments.
There were many more lectures and seminars, but they were about how to prepare for TOEFL, how to prepare for GRE, and how to go to the U.S. for study, and so on. The courses were, to be frank, very boring. It was a politically very careful and conservative period. Everyone thought: now we have to be pragmatic, we have to “jump into the sea”—xiahai 下海—which means joining market forces. That was my undergraduate experience.
Chang:
You mentioned the military school. What did you do there?
Xiang:
What we did was a lot of bodily discipline. For instance, you were supposed to stand in the proper posture for thirty minutes without a single movement. Or you practiced how to hold and aim your rifle in the right position—but without any real bullets. You never fired, you never pulled the trigger. You just learned how to carry it and how to aim. So it was very tedious.
Chang:
You entered what is really a critical stage of your life—when you’re supposed to absorb and learn about the world—at a time when the political system contracted and became much harder. Yet you somehow found a way to satiate your intellectual interests. Can you talk a little bit about how you managed to do that?
Xiang:
I could not do anything during the first year in the military academy. But once I came back, I was very disappointed and disillusioned—first by the total quietness on campus, and then by this feverish mentality of “jumping into the sea” and making money.
What did I do? I did something slightly unusual for an undergraduate. Starting in my second year, in 1992, I began my own fieldwork in a migrant community in Beijing, more than two hours away by bus from the university campus.
Actually, it was not far from Tiananmen Square. It was a migrant community formed by peasants from southern China—actually from my hometown. So I had no problem communicating with them because we shared a very distinct southern Chinese Wenzhou dialect.
They gathered there to make garments and sell clothing. All of this was supposedly illegal at the time. You were not supposed to set up workshops in cities without a special permit. Every year—before National Day, before the Chinese New Year—they were periodically ousted by the local police and government.
But soon after being chased away, they would come back and restart their businesses. Over the years they grew very quickly. By the time I began my fieldwork in 1992—about six years after the first families arrived—the population was already more than 10,000 people. The community had started in 1986.
Over the following years, I observed how it grew very fast and became economically very successful.
You asked how I found space to do my own observations about what was going on in society. It was through fieldwork—through having a space like that, which was not political. It gave me a lot of material, a lot of fuel, for me to think.
Chang:
And freedom.
Xiang:
Yes freedom, but this freedom was not freedom defined as antithetical to what you were supposed to follow. It was freedom of practice, freedom of experiment—or you could say, freedom of experience.
Chang:
For listeners who may not know: Xiang Biao published a book, based on his dissertation and fieldwork on Zhejiang Village called Going Beyond the Boundaries. And he became a kind of young intellectual star. He was already quite well known in the 1990s for this work—precisely because he was able to do serious intellectual work at a time when many intellectuals felt that nothing of substance was possible.
There’s also an interesting background here. You weren’t satisfied with the intellectuals of the “cultural fever” era of the 1980s. This was just after the Mao years, when intellectuals had been labeled the “Stinking Old Ninth,” the lowest tier of society—one of the so-called black categories. [NB: intellectuals were not part of the original five black categories, but during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong expanded them into nine with intellectuals at the bottom.]
Then suddenly they were very free, discussing subjectivity, human rights, and all these ideas associated with a new Enlightenment. What was it about that era that left you unsatisfied?
Xiang:
When I was a high school student, from age fourteen to eighteen, I was very excited to read all kinds of things: discussions about alienation, discussions of property relations, discussions about the essence of Chinese culture. Some of these topics were carried over from the May Fourth Movement: a radical rethinking of the nature of Chinese civilization.
Even as a high school student, I felt that this discourse was quite removed from what I saw and heard from my parents, neighbors, and teachers—my parents were middle school teachers, my grandmother was an illiterate housewife, and my grandfather, a retired factory worker.
Their primary concerns at the time were inflation and food prices, because in the 1980s the rationing system was gradually being replaced by a market system. [NB: in the late 1980s, inflation spiked 20 percent nationwide, one of the destabilizing conditions that fueled the Tiananmen protests.] I remember very vividly how they talked about going to the food market. The state-run stores had hardly any food. It was very cheap, band you had to queue for a long time to buy things according to ration coupons. At the same time, peasants would bring their own produce to sell. That wasn’t entirely legal, but it happened anyway. The prices were much higher, but the quality was also much better.
So people were discussing these very concrete questions: high quality but high price, or low quality but more affordable. But when I read all these books, and when I listened to discussions at school, nobody told me how to think about the kinds of questions my neighbors were asking. That probably indicates my greatest dissatisfaction with the 1980s intellectual atmosphere—its elitist tendency.
And this also explains why I was particularly fascinated by illiterate peasants: how they could travel so far to Beijing, the capital city, overcome all kinds of obstacles, and create their own businesses.
Chang:
When you talk about 1980s intellectuals and your criticism of them, you remind me of the way American right-wing—or MAGA-aligned—intellectuals talk about the liberal intelligentsia or technocrats. You’ve told me before that since the Cold War, you feel that intellectuals have grown increasingly out of touch.
You’ve described Western academia—fields like postcolonial studies and race and gender criticism—as important and valuable, but also as speaking in the language of radical systemic critique that became “abstract, repetitive, and disconnected from life.” Are these similar criticisms?
Xiang:
There is some similarity. First of all, we should talk about the post-1990s academic world—why post-1990s? Because after the Cold War, there was no longer a real debate about which path human society should take. The “end of history” thesis meant that socialism was no longer seen as a viable alternative.
As a result, political economy and class questions were no longer central topics of debate. Questions became narrower, turning toward identity politics and symbolic gestures rather than larger policy questions.
At the same time, universities became increasingly managerial institutions. They became producers of credentials, capital, and certificates, rather than spokespeople for social consciousness. Tenure-track positions and academic career trajectories became more competitive. Young scholars had to spend more time on narrow, technical work. That’s the background explaining why academia after the 1990s became removed from real life.
Yet within their own system, academic discourse became increasingly radical in its rhetoric and language—to the extent that people not only felt alienated, but sometimes even scared, because the language sounded very revolutionary.
Second, you mentioned whether my impression of the 1980s resembles contemporary populist resentment and criticism. I do see the connection. But we must remember that populism has a long tradition. The progressive movement in the nineteenth-century United States laid the ideological foundation for Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. Without that populist movement, the Democratic Party would not have had its social base.
That populism brought universal suffrage, public education, libraries—it also laid the groundwork for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. So if we take a long historical view, populism has often been a positive force.
The problem today is that populism in the Trump era has become a crude, raw resentment, without articulating a progressive alternative, and it plays into strongman fantasy politics. That is a serious issue. The real question is how to rescue the progressive elements of populism under current conditions.
So what I want to say is populism itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The question is how to speak a language that touches the public soul, mobilizes collective capacity, builds a united front, and focuses not on the most progressive or maximalist ideas, but on feasible action plans to begin with. That was the strength of nineteenth-century populism.
Chang:
Do you think elites affiliated with the Democratic Party before Trump—people like Joe Biden or Jake Sullivan, these meritocrats—were disconnected from the American people?
Xiang:
That comparison might not be entirely fair, because in the U.S. case these people hold real political and military power. They can make a phone call and order a bombing.
Chang:
So maybe the correct analogy would be academics.
Xiang:
Yes, that comparison can be made—and it’s valuable precisely because the Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s and U.S. intellectuals after the 1990s and 2000s are often very committed and sincere scholars. They believe in what they are saying. They see real enemies, and they devote their careers to their causes.
As I mentioned, the university system exacerbates certain unhealthy research practices, but that is a secondary issue. What is more interesting is how should we take their sincerity seriously? Their sincerity is real. If they were simply lying, we wouldn’t need to worry too much. But they are sincere intellectuals who position themselves as representatives of social consciousness and believe they are speaking truth to power.
Yet they face such a backlash now. We must learn some lesson from that.
Chang:
Let’s move on to youth problems—something you’ve been grappling with over the past few years. The first thing I want to say is that young people are quite unhappy–
Xiang:
Everywhere.
Chang:
Yes, haha. It’s not just a China problem. Surveys show alarming levels of anxiety, depression, neuroticism, and loneliness among youth in developed Western societies as well. You focus mostly on Chinese youth, but to what degree do you think this reflects global unhappiness, and how much is specific to China?
Xiang:
Obviously its both. Chinese youth are part of a global picture, but with specific Chinese characteristics.
What’s interesting is that if you look at objective criteria—economic and material well-being—Gen Z and those slightly older are the most materially abundant generations in history.
In China, there are also tensions across generations, which contribute to confusion and anxiety about how to live with and communicate with parents. Historically, however, Gen Z and those born in the 1990s actually experienced the smallest generational gap since the nineteenth century.
Think about people born in the 1940s and their children born in the 1960s or 1970s—the worlds they lived in were completely different. The older generation was often illiterate; some women still had bound feet.
My parents’ generation experienced enormous change. They never imagined having passports or traveling overseas as tourists. For my generation and the next, their lifestyle, material conditions, and expectations about how the world works are largely the same.
Yet psychologically, the gap is the largest. I bring up this paradox to shed some light on the current unhappiness. Why are they so unhappy when they are materially well-off and they actually are continuing their parent’s lifestyle?
It indicates that their unhappiness is not their fault, its that in society, the old model of organizing the economy and society is no longer sustainable. It has to change. Yet young people don’t know how to live through this transition. That’s the real question: what transition means, and how individuals should live within it—or even lead that transition.
Chang:
I think what you’re pointing to is that: on an absolute level, you’re right that financial conditions have improved, but many young people feel they can’t move forward or do better in the future.
Xiang: Right.
Chang: We’ve seen youth protests across Southeast Asia, Mexico, Madagascar, Bulgaria, it’s remarkable how widespread this youth discontent is. Factors like job scarcity, inequality, and cost of living are common everywhere. But you’ve also said the Chinese case is unique or more extreme. What makes it different?
Xiang:
I wouldn’t say it’s unique. I’d say the Chinese case manifests general contradictions in a particularly sharp way.
Chang:
I personally feel like it’s just more extreme.
Xiang:
Yes. In some aspects more extreme so therefore it really deserves our attention. It’s not unique in a sense that it is isolated from the world, but more representative, casting a sharper light. There are many contradictions [that characterize the youth problem in China]. One key contradiction is between heightened self-consciousness— produced by longer education and material abundance—and the lack of accumulated lived experience and practical tools to handle the reality that the economy cannot continue to grow at the rate that their parents experienced, and also that their parents taught them to expect.
Chang:
I thought you were going to say that in the 1990s and 2000s, there was a clear template for becoming wealthier. But the contradiction is that this didn’t necessarily lead to a satisfying well-lived life. It’s not just about getting rich. So economic accumulation advanced faster than social life—which is the idea of the “nearby,” as you call it.
So I think the contradiction is between material accumulation and young people’s need for something beyond material goods. Is that fair?
Xiang:
That’s part of it, but for me the question is more practical. It’s not that people hafe money and then ask “What’s the meaning of life?” The immediate cause of unhappiness is people are going:
“I have studied for twenty-two or even twenty-five years. I studied hard. My parents told me that if I behaved well and studied hard, I would find a middle-class job in the city and live better than they did. I fulfilled my part of the promise. What do I get? No job—or no quality job. That’s not the life I was promised.”
And this problem is not only a question of bad luck. It is structural, right? If the whole society can no longer provide as many good job opportunities as the parents once enjoyed. And it’s not like I’m going to die immediately, because I can still find some precarious job. My parents still have savings. They can still give me a roof. If you look at life in China, things still appear quite normal for most people on the surface.
And materially, the world is actually suffering from overcapacity and overproduction. So we are not short of goods. There is enough to keep everyone fed and clothed. And then people start to think: what have I been doing? Why did I follow that kind of promise? What did that promise mean? And what kind of promise should I look for now—or should I stop looking for promises altogether?
It’s not that now you have to convert to some transcendental faith to satisfy a spiritual need. But what you need instead is a new type of practice—a new way of relating yourself to neighbors, to colleagues, to your neighborhood—and a rethinking of how everyday life should be organized. I think the solution will come from this kind of practice, combined with reflection, but not as a purely spiritual or mental exercise.
Chang:
Let me give you a more conventional—or perhaps a popular—view of why youth are disillusioned in China today. One view is that after Deng Xiaoping, the economy opened up, became more marketized and privatized, and society grew very quickly.
During this period, there was a lot of optimism about the future. There were studies showing that many Chinese believed their hard work would lead to economic security and rewards—that a kind of American Dream, so to speak, was operating.
Then the question becomes: who ended that dream? One view is that it was the Communist Party. Beginning around the mid to late 2010s, society started to contract. Xi Jinping began to crack down on civil society as well as the marketplace, prioritizing security over economic growth. Jack Ma and the tech titans were jailed. [NB: Sorry, they weren’t jailed. Many were quietly disciplined; some detained.] Relations with the West worsened. China began to close itself off.
For many people who hold this view, the crystallizing moment was the pandemic—when, during the lockdowns, the Party chose an extreme form of control, rather than the kinds of debates that took place in Western societies about keeping the economy going. After the lockdowns, we entered a period of stagnation that China is still in today.
So the Party clearly had a hand in this downturn. Why isn’t youth disillusionment tied more directly to the responsibility of China’s political leaders?
Xiang:
I think definitely youth unhappiness is tied to the general situation in Chinese society and the economy, and Chinese society and the economy are directly tied to the Party–
Chang:
Political leaders steer the economy and politics.
Xiang:
But my contribution would not be to make a normative assessment, because a normative assessment is something everyone is entitled to make. My work is to think more analytically: how does this structural condition emerge?
Empirically speaking, the Party has always had control of the economy, since 1949, but at different phases it manifests itself very differently, with different consequences. How should we understand that?
If you look at the last forty years as a whole, it is largely a story of success—with lots of problems, of course. But by and large, if you look at poverty decline, increases in living standards, infrastructure, and technological advancement, it is a story of success. And in my thinking, the Chinese success comes from something that is an important lesson for many third world countries: very strong state capacity—state capacity to organize the economy and society, a coordinating power.
This connects to another issue. In the academic world, so-called liberal thinking often starts with the question of how we can resist public power, because public power always has a tendency to abuse—which is absolutely true. But if you go to Africa or Latin America, the biggest question is often: how do we have more functional, better public power—public power that can organize the economy and society more effectively?
China organized very efficiently, but with a lot of inequality and control. Yet for a long time there was enough energy coming from society, bubbling up here and there—especially in Shanghai and Guangzhou, but also places like Chongqing and Chengdu. You could see a match between a rigid top-down framework and bottom-up energy. There were tensions, but they matched, and the whole thing grew.
What has happened now is that the bottom-up energy—the content that generates from society—is really declining. But the framework that coordinates this energy itself has become more rigid, more powerful. So society is left with a huge, very sophisticated framework of monitoring and coordinating, but without enough real activity to coordinate. Very often it becomes control for the sake of control, monitoring for the sake of monitoring–
Chang: Are you talking about the surveillance system?
Xiang: That’s part of that yeah, but there are many other mechanisms: fiscal transfers, how resources are redistributed, how the banking system is managed. These are less visible, but in some ways more powerful.
Chang:
And you see that happening both in China and other places as well?
Xiang:
In this regard, I think other places are quite different. Elsewhere you also see declining growth rates because the previous models are not working, but in many places there is still a lack of basic coordinating power.
So society becomes chaotic. In China, unhappiness is not so chaotic, and people say this is partly because it is controlled. That’s true—it is controlled. But in other places, which don’t have that capacity, unhappiness can lead to uprisings. And I must say that uprisings contain very valuable potential energy. But uprisings themselves are not going to lead to anything substantial. We have to work on that.
Chang:
Let’s make this more concrete—or to start using your own vocabulary. In 2019, you appeared on this very popular celebrity TV series Thirteen Invitations (十三邀). You’re in Wenzhou, your hometown, being interviewed by an intellectual named Xu Zhiyuan, who also runs the bookstore that we’re in. In that conversation you were toying with this idea of “the nearby.”
And I think this connects to what you were saying about grassroots energy. This concept went viral. It was viewed around sixty million times on the main platform. It was shared everywhere on Little Red Book [China’s instagram] and other places. People started using “the nearby” in art exhibitions in China. There was a bookstore was named after “the nearby,” so it clearly resonated. What is “the nearby”?
Xiang:
First of all, when I proposed the idea, it was associated with an observation: the disappearance of the nearby. It’s a kind of negation.
What is the disappearance of the nearby? Young people’s perception of the world is increasingly occupied by two extremes. One extreme is the self: my academic scores, looking for a job, my romantic relationships, relationships with parents, even health. Now there is a lot of anxiety about health and the body—very near.
And then, at the other extreme, you have social media. Every day you’re glued to it, receiving all kinds of dramatic messages about incidents happening in different parts of the world—events you don’t have direct access to. You don’t really know what’s going on, but you receive them packaged in emotionally charged, and sometimes ideologically divisive ways.
This is what I observed. Young people’s emotions become very unstable. One day you receive certain messages and you feel very low. Tomorrow you see something different and you suddenly feel high. So you swing constantly. The mind is occupied by the very near and the very far.
What is in between? Who are your neighbors? Who cleans your street? How is your condominium managed? Who lived here before—and where did they go when they were asked to leave to clear the land to build these apartments that you now live in? These people and activities disappear from your consciousness.
That is the disappearance of the nearby.
Why did it go viral? Partly because it described a reality people recognized. But I think that’s only a small part. The real reason people wanted to talk about it is that they wanted something they could hold on to in their lives. It evoked a desire. It wasn’t only naming an existing truth. People feel their lives are suspended—everything becomes uncertain, feeble, abstract. They want something concrete—something they can see themselves in, something they can put their hands on, and act on.
Chang:
I also felt it became especially popular after the pandemic. You’ve described Chinese society very vividly in this respect: you once told me that Chinese people often don’t want to be where they are now—they always want to go somewhere else.
The pandemic lockdowns crystallized that problem, because everything was severed. You couldn’t leave your house. You relied on delivery for everything. I remember in Shanghai during the lockdown, I got to know my neighbors for the first time. Before that, why would I need to know my neighbors? I could just order what I needed. I took the train, I didn’t talk to anyone next to me.
But during the pandemic, it became a realization for many people in China that we need some connection to our surroundings. Otherwise, what happens in a crisis? That’s when I heard a lot of people saying they appreciated your work. That’s when I heard “Xiang Biao” everywhere—after the pandemic.
Xiang:
Yes—two things. First, absolutely, during the pandemic, people suddenly realized how much their lives relied on delivery. This also explains why there was hunger in places like Shanghai during the pandemic. Partly the system didn’t manage it well—that’s the main reason. But also, many young people didn’t keep much food at home because they relied so much on instant delivery. That made everyone vulnerable.
But I think the deeper reason the pandemic made people more aware of the nearby is that people wanted more control of their lives. The pandemic disrupted a particular way of managing your life, the virus made you no longer the master of your daily activities. So there is a desire to come back, to be more grounded.
Chang:
When I mention your work to my editors in the U.S., they tend to associate you with Robert Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. Putnam is the well-known political scientist at Harvard who argued that in the second half of the twentieth century in America, social organization declined significantly.
He looks at many metrics: church participation dropping, bowling clubs—people literally bowling alone, which is his metaphor—unions deteriorating, and political organizing slowing down. Putnam became, in a way, the poet laureate of declining civil society in the United States.
And you now seem to play a similar role in China—though I know you may not want to use the phrase “civil society.” But your Thirteen Invitations interview evoked the kind of hunger you just described: a hunger for deeper connection and control—similar to what Putnam’s book evoked when it first came out.
First, are you familiar with Putnam’s work? There are similarities in the structural forces. For example, Putnam talks about technology—television—as one driver of social deterioration because it’s enormously attention-absorbing. In China, smartphones and the internet are enormously attention-absorbing too, right?
Xiang:
There’s no longer one screen shared by families. Everyone has their one small screen–
Chang:
–which has probably made things even worse right? But China has been an enormously capitalistic, market-oriented society since the 1990s. From the 1980s to now, what you see in China is a kind of accelerated version of a process of urbanization and the expanding role the market plays in a society.
What I think is different is that Putnam tends to focus on communal gatherings—groups of people: Bowling leagues, unions. You don’t really evoke that. You focus more on seeing, on encouraging young people to look at local society differently, to interact one-on-one with people. Your work isn’t Mahjong Alone or Sipping Tea Alone in the teahouse, right? So why this difference between you and Putnam?
Xiang:
We are facing some fundamental issues of modernity. But I think, partly from Tocqueville, American democracy is really about associational life. That idea is very attractive, but it’s also a description. The idea that democracy doesn’t come with one single system; it comes with many associations, and public issues emerge from below. That is a U.S. characteristic.
But when you ask why (laughter) I don’t go in the direction of “mahjong alone,” it’s because I’m more interested in Chinese young people’s thinking agency. I’m not simply describing how lifestyles changed. This is not just a descriptive project.
Putnam’s work is empirically very rigorous and very solid. He describes how television, women’s participation in the workforce, suburbanization, and middle-class migration to suburbs weakened public life—no public transport, no neighbors.
Some of that may be relevant in the Chinese context, some not. But what really urged me to talk about “the nearby” was not to say that life is declining or decaying, or to feel nostalgic. I felt that young people themselves are actively unhappy.
They actively say: why am I constantly in the swing of emotion? I feel lonely. I’m so sensitive. I want to be a nice person, but precisely because of that, I don’t dare to talk to people anymore. I’m constantly worried I might offend someone or drag my interlocutor into discomfort. There is a lot of hypersensitivity involved.
That is the problem I wanted to tackle. I want not only to describe what is going on, but to provide some tools—some handles—that people who are already conscious, or half-conscious, of their dilemmas can use to move forward.
Chang:
Putnam can easily evoke a kind of nostalgia—for the church or the union. You don’t really evoke a nostalgia. Is there something in the past you imagine returning to when you think about "the nearby”?
Xiang:
I don’t. But my readers often bring up nostalgic reference points themselves. They talk about neighborhood life when they were young—how you could easily enter a neighbor’s home without appointments. You would meet neighbors, eat together, even sleep over.
Nowadays, children are picked up by parents, put into cars, and driven from one tutorial class to another. So there are nostalgic reference points. But nostalgia is not analytically important for me.
First, many young people can’t even feel nostalgia because they never had those experiences. They grew up without a nearby.
Second, going back is not a practical solution. In China, you cannot imagine returning to a 1970s-style neighborhood. So the challenge is we have to be creative—to think of new ways to organize our life.
Chang:
There’s another motivation in your work on the nearby. You often push back against national-level discourse—debates about the “China model,” China’s relationship with the West, these grand national questions that young people scroll through on social media. You don’t seem to like these overly nationalized discussions.
You sent me an email a couple weeks ago about the Nobel Peace Prize. I think you were disillusioned by the results this year. You were referring to Donald Trump wanting to win the prize and how instead it went to the Venezuelan opposition leader [María Corina Machado] and many people in the MAGA world discredited the results. [NB: This interview took place less than two weeks before the U.S. captured Nicholés Maduro.]
You wrote to me saying:
Society can no longer rely on heroic slogans and icons to build consensus. We are reaching the point that the specific selection [referring to the Nobel Peace Prize] is not only biased but also discredits the general principles and values altogether. These selections appear to prove again that universal values are little more than empty words. I believe universal values do exist, but need to be articulated differently from what is done now in order to make them real in public perceptions.
That stuck with me, because it suggests a retreat from some kind of public square where universal values are articulated, professed, pronounced and fought over. And there’s a fatigue there, that I can read in your email, one I feel maybe is relevant to our moment as an American. The populist era is very much characterized by this fatigue. Can you elaborate on what you meant?
Xiang:
Yes. That is precisely what you said: the question is how we rebuild the public. What is “the public”? We tend to think of the “public” as represented by thinkers, heroes, activists—people who articulate general principles on our behalf. And what institution is more powerful in representing a global public consciousness than the Nobel Prize committee?
But if you look at some decisions, for example, giving a prize to someone who openly called for foreign military intervention—that can be given a Nobel Prize? [NB: Machado didn’t call openly for U.S. military intervention before the U.S. captured Maduro, though she implied it. Then she praised Trump for Maduro’s seizure and gave him her Nobel Peace Prize. I initially thought Xiang didn’t like the way Trump politicized the Peace Prize, but he clearly objected to Machado’s selection.]
The post–Second World War global architecture for building public consensus has been dismantled. That architecture was based on universalism and elitism—you have some heroes and institutions who know the best way to articulate certain principles. But now I think the situation is changing.
First, the West itself is declining. The U.S. and Europe face serious domestic challenges, showing that the cherished principles based on the European and U.S. practices can no longer manage the social contradictions today. Therefore it does discredit these universal claims which is coming from Western history.
Second, global geopolitical tensions have intensified, partly because of the rise of the Global South, just the population growth and economic growth in places like India, Indonesia, and China. So it means that there’s such a large population, whose lives cannot be defined, articulated by ideals originating in a small corner of the world.
Third, you have technological change and the rapid massification of higher education—especially in the Global South—meaning many young people in Nigeria, Kenya, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Nepal, Bangladesh, as we witnessed, they want to articulate their lives in their own ways. These voices are by definition very diverse, by definition they are not coherent, and cannot easily be accommodated into some standard universalistic claim which originated in the 19th century.
What does this mean? It means that the old consensus is not necessarily wrong in its content, but it probably can no longer capture the most important concerns that people on the ground have today, nor the way those concerns are expressed.
I simply don’t understand how the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee could make that kind of decision, and the way they select representatives of the global ethos, for me, is very questionable. Therefore, the message of my email is that we need to find a new way of engaging in global communication.
Chang:
I also feel like we don’t have a consensus one a national level either.
Xiang:
Oh yeah yeah. In Europe and the U.S., that’s very obvious. Sometimes the divide within countries is more frightening than divisions between countries.
Chang:
Your focus on the nearby makes me wonder whether this concept can be applied, for example, in the United States. I’ll give you a very concrete example. Thanksgiving has become a horrific time in America these days, because national debates—around abortion, gun rights, whether you’re for Trump or against Trump—have moved into the home. There was a time when that was not the case.
When I was growing up in Michigan, national politics were not so toxic. But now a lot of my friends say they hate going back to their hometowns for Thanksgiving, because we’re always talking about politics, always talking about national politics.
Local politics has deteriorated. Local journalism is very weak.
Xiang:
Precisely.
Chang:
This isn’t really a question. It’s more a thought—that your idea of the nearby also resonates with me as an American who has lived through increasing political polarization. There’s like an “involution” in national politics, the more effort you put in, the less you feel you get back. There are too many people participating, and very few seats of power.
Basically, it all comes down to the presidency. Everyone is fighting over the presidency, and people place all their hopes for how society should behave on who the president is.
Xiang:
No, I would be very happy to explore this further. I think the recent election in New York probably gives us some sense of hope, and also a reference point for thinking about the applicability of the idea of the nearby. [NB: I think Xiang associates New York City, despite how big it is, with his preferred brand of local, touch-the-grass style politics, while debates at the national level often become more abstract and elitist.]
That election was genuinely political, in the sense that people made decisions, took risks, and took responsibility for their own votes. They participated in debates and actions that would shape their shared future.
There is a sense of a shared future: I participate, I make a decision, I take responsibility, and I care about the consequences—rather than simply declaring my position in order to distinguish myself from my enemies.
That is a future-building, community-building kind of politics. And that, I think, is very much the spirit of the nearby.
Chang:
I personally see a lot of similarities between young Chinese disillusionment and young American disillusionment. In fact, here’s a quote for you. This is from Patrick Deneen. He is one of the leading intellectuals of what in America is called the New Right—the intellectual wing of the MAGA movement. He’s describing the disillusionment among his students. He says:
“Far from feeling themselves to constitute the most liberated and autonomous generation in history, young adults believe less in their task at hand than Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the mountainside. They accede in the duties demanded of them by their elders, but without joy or love—only with a keen sense of having no other choice. Their overwhelming response to their lot…is one of entrapment and “no exit,” of being cynical participants in a system that ruthlessly produces winners and losers ” (Why Liberalism Failed 2018)
Xiang:
Hahaha wow. I’m very surprised by the similarities. Do you think it’s quite accurate?
Chang:
I think it really reflects the meritocracy in America. Deneen is a professor at Notre Dame University, so he’s talking about people trying to enter elite universities, trying to become part of the American elite or meritocratic system. The way he describes it—the cutthroat competition—feels very similar to what we call “involution.”
Xiang:
Yeah yeah yeah
Chang:
But my point is that while the symptoms are similar, what’s very different about America is that there’s a tendency to pull disaffected people into politics—into a different kind of politics. That doesn’t really exist in China. The Party is not very good at organizing young people, and so instead you have people…like you, [Xiang laughs] who are pushing them toward practices outside the political space.
So let me ask you this: disaffected youth exist everywhere, right? In America, many of them have begun to vote for Trump and the MAGA movement. In other places—Nepal, Mexico, Madagascar, Bulgaria—they go out onto the streets and protest.
This is a familiar pattern of thinking for me: my situation is bad, so clearly there’s something wrong with political leaders, and therefore we should replace them or criticize them. This happened in China in the 1980s. Why aren’t Chinese youths thinking this way today, do you think?
Xiang:
There is a reason: they just see that practically, there’s no such possibility, obviously unattainable. But there is also a very big social difference between the way disenfranchisement is felt in the U.S., China, and other parts of the world.
In China, development over the last forty years—and probably even since the 1950s—has been very inclusive, which may sound paradoxical. Chinese society has become very unequal, that’s true. Inequality has increased dramatically. But it is still a society where families at the bottom feel that if they invest a lot of money in their child’s education—now most families have only one child, at most two—there is still a chance to move up.
So nobody really feels directly excluded from the game of growth. That inclusiveness was real, I would say, at least up to the 2000s, because in my work on migrants, for example, I could see life had changed. And even now, at least ideologically and in terms of perception, they feel they are part of the game.
But now the future feels very uncertain. There is a sense of fatigue and disruption, and this feeling is widespread. I would say that the young people who feel this most strongly are actually relatively well-off, urban, middle-class, and educated—especially in tier-one and tier-two cities. They are the ones who feel the most disappointed. People at the bottom face much greater hardship, but they feel this disillusionment less intensely. So disillusionment is widespread, but it has a different character.
But I understand that in other societies like the U.S., the feeling that you are thrown out of the game—that you are excluded—that feeling is stronger. People who vote for Trump are not saying, “I’m gaining less than others.” They feel that they were totally screwed, that they are no longer part of the system at all.
That sense of being victimized and excluded produces deep resentment, and a particular kind of political energy and agency that we don’t see in China. This is not only because of political control. So this means we need different intellectual strategies on how to talk to young people in China—people who don’t feel completely excluded.
They are still in the game, but they are exhausted. They no longer want to carry on. That’s the situation.
Chang:
That’s a good segue into my next question. What do you think intellectuals should be doing in this era, specifically for young people? In the past, there was a very different group of intellectuals who believed democratization was the path forward for China. You clearly don’t feel that way. So what is the role now?
Xiang:
I think the role of intellectuals must change with reality. The biggest change, in my view, is the rapid massification of higher education in China. It began in 1999, so it’s very recent—only about twenty-five years.
This year [2025], more than 60 percent of high school graduates can go to college, something unimaginable forty years ago. These students are materially supported by their families, and their capacity for reading, thinking, and writing is no less than people like me, even though I’m older.
And so they ask all kinds of very deep and relevant questions. So in this era, if intellectuals still think their role is, first, to offer a systemic critique of the whole society; second, to act as truth-tellers revealing truths that others supposedly cannot access; and third, to set a clear direction for the future and ask everyone to follow it—I think that no longer works.
And even if everything you say is correct, young people don’t want to hear that. They want to be autonomous thinkers, to be sovereign in defining and understanding their own lives.
So intellectuals should no longer be preachers or teachers. They should become facilitators. You listen to young people, really understand what they are worried about, in very concrete and diverse settings. Then you analyze and offer tools—concepts, theories, perspectives, questions—that can travel back to them and help them think about their situation in their own way, but in a way that will be more productive and clarifying.
Chang:
Maybe we can be a bit more concrete about your prescriptions. You’ve participated in curriculum reforms at Chinese universities. My understanding is that you encourage students to engage with local figures they interact with every day—for example, the security guard near their apartment, or the person who sells them breakfast in the morning. [NB: Xiang sees “the nearby” as a new framework for young people to engage with their surroundings differently and he wants to “facilitate” this.]
These are people who, in an earlier era, when everyone was busy working and making money, tended to be ignored. Now you want students to engage with them and develop relationships. Is that right? Could you elaborate a bit?
Xiang:
Yes, this is part of a whole set of curriculum experiments. We want students to try to understand the people around them whom they hardly don’t pay attention to.
Many students say they can’t do this because they are so shy. They describe themselves as having what Chinese call “social phobia,” shekong –
Chang: –a widespread problem in China.
Xiang: yeah so we say: okay, don’t worry. If you really can’t talk to them, if you’re too scared, then first ask yourself why you find that person interesting. You can observe from a distance if you can’t speak to them. Pay attention to their way of talking, their actions, and how they affect you. Reflect first on your own feelings—fascination, nervousness, confusion.
Then we come back to discuss it. Teachers play an important role, and classmates also need to act in particular ways. This is intellectual work. It’s not just social work. It’s about learning how to analyze and narrate your experience, and how to make your experience more generative.
Chang:
Many young people since your interview on Thirteen Invitations have taken this idea and made it their own. I’ve spoken to young people who said that after your interview, they started filming their hometowns—especially after moving back because they couldn’t afford rent in big cities—and posting videos on Douyin or TikTok.
Others have started keeping notes or diaries about local malls, about conversations they have with people, and they feel their lives have been enriched by this. So here’s my last question: where do you think all of this is leading? What’s the end game?
Xiang:
I don’t have a clear vision or goal, but I know we shouldn’t stop here. As you said, people are developing a feeling for the nearby. That’s important because it gives you a sense that you are living in a concrete world—one where you can act and talk to people. You feel less powerless and vulnerable.
If another pandemic or crisis were to happen, people might be better able to organize quickly, help themselves, and resist unreasonable demands. In fact, much of China’s reform history worked this way—shang you zhengce, xia you duice [“When there are policies from above, there are countermeasures below.”]—so there are official policies, but there are always unofficial responses and people know how to circumvent real rules and regulations.
Still, formal policies are still important because they maintain the general framework and enable the coordinating capacity by the state. But below, many things happen. Right now, that bottom-up energy is weak. The idea of the nearby is, first of all, about rebuilding subjectivity—the feeling that I can do something, I can talk to people, and I know how to protect myself.
Then what are the next step? There’s no roadmap. But my idea is that when people engage in more activities like that, they may begin to develop some demands at the local scale. When we were together in Beijing, you saw the urban design program at Beijing universities. [NB: In December, Xiang and I visited a mental health support group led by rank-and-file bureaucrats at Peking University. They shared with us some guerilla-style tactics on how to convince their superiors to change local traffic design and other ways to better their community.] Students were making very concrete proposals—redesigning traffic lights, for example. These are very technical, but they are already acting effectively, and grassroots governments do respond within their scope.
Chang:
And these are people within the system—within the university system. [NB: In Chinese, this is called tizhinei, “within the system”]
Xiang:
Yes, we have to build alliances. The idea of the nearby is to cross the boundary between inside and outside the system. This is not an era where you can build a space completely outside the system and push from there—it won’t work. [NB: Xiang is effectively saying the only way to change China is from within]
I can’t prescribe where this will lead, but I do believe it’s important to follow these activities. I hope I can continue proposing ideas that make people feel more powerful than they think they are, at least in everyday life.
And gradually, it becomes hard to say whether the system itself is changing. If everyday life on the ground is already changing, can the system really remain exactly the same?
Chang:
So basically, co-opting the system from the bottom up, to do things that serve people in local communities.
Xiang:
Some people may empirically disagree about the feasibility of working with grassroots actors inside the system. But from my observations, it is entirely possible—and in fact necessary. Grassroots officials need to get things done. They want orderly, relatively happy communities, but they lack language and tools. If we can offer new language and programs that they can show the upstairs—ways of doing things differently—then there is a real possibility of changing the grassroots landscape.
Chang:
The perennial optimist, Xiang Biao. I think that’s a good place to end. Thank you so much.
Xiang:
Thank you
Read with immense interest! Amazing to hear so intimately from someone of Biao Xiang’s caliber. Thank you for this. I live and teach in Beijing, and am going to be responsible for a “fieldwork primer” for our 10th graders in the new semester - a new curriculum adjustment we are making. I will definitely be using some of the ideas in this piece for that course. I’m always looking for the nearby in my own life, and am always surprised by the places it is and isn’t here. Your commentary in relation to Biao’s provides a very critically-minded counter point - you have a new dedicated fan.
I think the interview would have been more interesting if Chang didn't steer Xiang towards particular frameworks or to try to put words in his mouth. Let him talk. Do more listening instead of pushing your own narrative and key concepts. You can clearly see him wanting to go into other directions from where you want to lead him, so follow him and follow through on his turns instead of bringing it back to you.