Category: Cultural Criticism

Milan Kundera noted in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “The criminal regimes were not made by criminals, but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.” Such examples remain commonplace in everyday life today, except that these individuals have not succeeded—or have not yet succeeded—in remaking society and establishing institutions. These people…

Editor’s Note: This dialogue originated from a recent lecture by Xiang Biao, the text of which was discussed by YZXK and Orcanète. This discussion can also be subsumed under the broader question of “Do we need God?”, but a more precise phrasing would be: Does a meaningful life need to be anchored in the highest…

As is well known, in the 1990s, a hypothesis became popular among Western politicians and social scientists: if the West supported China’s Reform and Opening-up policies and bolstered China’s economic growth through expanded economic ties, the resulting expansion of the middle class would lead to demands for greater civil rights. This, in turn, would lead…

In China, “rights” are not, for many people, a particularly important idea—let alone the right to privacy. Even when people realize their privacy has been violated, it’s hard for them to think, “one of my rights is being infringed,” rather than merely, “my feelings are hurt.” In my view, there are three kinds of privacy…

For people on the Left, nothing seems easier than sitting in one’s study, nightcap on, brooding over the defects of capitalism and posting lofty takes on social media. I could do that too, but playing the cynic isn’t really my style. The dramatic collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—and China and…

One day, I happened to see a WeChat Offical account post a matchmaking ad for a young woman. For various reasons of relevance, I clicked in with interest. Three things caught my eye: first, she required the man to provide a marital home in Shanghai; second, she refused premarital sex. Let’s pause there for a…

What many Chinese people may not know is that the Shanghai Marriage Market is internationally famous, and it’s a spot many foreign travelers to Shanghai make a point of visiting. It has a detailed English Wikipedia entry, yet not even a Chinese one. Several English-language travel sites have written how-to guides for visiting it. There…

The phenomenon of extremely long working hours—more than 40 hours per week—exists in both the United States and China. Yet in the U.S., it is mostly confined to a few “bloodsucking” industries, while in China, it permeates nearly every sector of the workforce. One could say that the U.S. lacks a widespread overtime culture, but…

A “genius” is someone with extraordinarily high creativity. Today, we cannot say there are no geniuses, but they are exceedingly rare. For example, the greatest living philosophers today might be Habermas, Žižek, and Agamben—but compared with Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, who lived in roughly the same historical period, the difference is like night and day.…