Yan Xuetong: A Realist Scholar Clinging to Scientific Prediction
GROWING UP
LU XIN: Your parents were both intellectuals. What kind of environment did you grow up in?
YAN XUETONG: I am marked by growing up in an intellectual household. My mother lectured at Hebei University and so I grew up in the university dormitory. In that environment, what people valued was not what social class you were in but your scholarship. This had a great influence on me. What I saw and heard around me made me from early on think that scholarship was the only thing worth doing.
LU XIN: Were your parents particularly concerned about your studies?
YAN XUETONG: No. In fact, they left me to my own devices. In the environment I grew up in there was a lot of competition among children. Those who did well kept their noses to the grindstone with stubborn intensity. I was of average ability and my grades were middling. From primary school until I earned my doctorate, I think, I never won a prize or came in first in class. I never even thought of being first.
LU XIN: What were your expectations for the future?
YAN XUETONG: I had no idea. Ever since I was young I just assumed that one studied at school and after graduation became a teacher and there was really nothing else.
LU XIN: You would never have thought that at the age of sixteen you would be sent to a construction corps in Heilongjiang and remain there for nine years.
YAN XUETONG: Correct. Although I was surrounded by other secondary school pupils, my whole way of life changed. I built houses and worked on the farm. The hardships we had to put up with then are more than you could imagine today. A lot of pupils were sent into the construction corps and descended on the villages, which were quite unprepared for them. For one village to house more than 150 people was beyond its capacity. There was nowhere to live. The local people turned the cattle out of their stalls, swept away the dung, and put mats on the floor. We slept in the cattle shed. One winter heavy snow cut off the roads and we were without salt or vegetables for three months. We had only boiled beans and steamed corn cakes. Since there was no firewood, we dismantled some of the houses and in the end we even dismantled our own shed, leaving only one tiny stall, and that had a hole in the roof.
At that time, the Leftist ideology was in full swing. In May, water in Heilongjiang still turns to ice. When we pulled the sowing machine, we were not allowed to wear boots. We walked barefoot over the ice. Our legs were covered in cuts. We carried sacks of seed that could weigh up to eighty kilograms [about 176 pounds]. We carried them along the raised pathways around the paddy fields. These were not level; make a slight misstep and you fell into the water. You just thought of climbing out and going on. When you at last struggled to the end and lay down, your eyes could only see black and you just could not get up. The construction corps changed me so that I can put up with any form of hardship. Previously I could not stand even the least suffering.
LU XIN: At sixteen young men are full of life and usually curse and swear.
YAN XUETONG: Of course. In the construction corps, if you did not curse or swear you would soon stand out as odd and you could hardly live in such a group. Someone who cursed other people and did so in the vilest possible way and used dirty words would easily be accepted by the group. Naturally, compared with the others, I used less dirty language and did fewer bad things than the others because, having grown up in an intellectual household, I knew those things were not so good. For instance, in quarrels I was generally only among the supporters and rarely took the lead myself.
LU XIN: I expect you found it hard to live in such a terrible environment.
YAN XUETONG: People are very adaptable. Most people survived in that environment. During the Cultural Revolution we saw people being beaten to death, so you became somewhat immune to it. My father was sent to do manual work by those opposed to academic authority. At that time many people experienced this hardship. Moreover, they showed that in the midst of hardship they were courageous. At that time we engaged in fistfights, put out fires, worked to prevent floods, sowed seed, repaired roads. You never knew what you would have to do each day. Still less did you know why you had to do it. At the time, my main feeling was that life was hopeless. I could see no future for the world. I could not even hope that tomorrow would be better than today.
The government of the time wanted us to put down roots in the border regions. At the time I was one of the few so-called cadres who resisted saying that I wanted to stay in the countryside forever. I am a person who likes to keep my promises and so I kept quiet. This may be one feature of an intellectual. I could avoid telling the truth but I could not tell lies. This maybe reflected the influence of my intellectual home, a kind of arrogant superiority.
In 1969, Lin Biao died in a plane crash trying to fly to the Soviet Union. The Voice of America predicted that war would break out on the Sino-Soviet border. When we young people learned this, we were particularly happy. We hoped that a massive war would improve the country, or at least change our own lives. Today people fear war, but at the time we hoped for immediate action, even to wage a world war. That way we could have hope. In that frame of mind, there was no difference between life and death. There was no point in living.
LU XIN: What was the greatest influence of the construction corps on your life?
YAN XUETONG: It changed my character. When I was a child, my main characteristic was that I was very fearful and did not dare to quarrel with others. I would always retreat into my own shell. In the construction corps I changed because you had to survive in the midst of hardship. The construction corps meant hardship first and then anarchy. Disputes broke out all the time. The youth of the construction corps formed a group that feared nothing. In that environment people became bold and dared to do anything. They held that there was nothing in the world that they could not overcome. So sometimes we did what was very daring, such as getting on a train without a ticket. When the conductor came we ran away. When we had no money to stay in a hotel, we went into the hospital and slept in a bed. When the nurse came along we slipped into another room. Just to survive we did this kind of thing. This way of life completely changed my previous character. Now I have two sides to my character. Sometimes I am afraid of nothing; at other times I am very timid. If I had not gone down to the countryside I would be a very timid person. I think that the sense of superiority I received as an intellectual is in my bones and cannot be removed. The personality changes wrought by my experience in the construction corps mean that I cannot allow that sense of superiority not to influence my whole life. For instance, my father is a real gentleman. Even if there is no one around, he will not cross the street against a red light. He insists on keeping to the principles of a gentleman. In no circumstance whatsoever would he infringe the norms of society, but I am less sensitive in this regard.
LU XIN: How long did you go on living like that before anything changed?
YAN XUETONG: In 1973 young people were permitted to join the army or go to university and so by then we began to have some hope in life. I used to study in secret. I would hide in a haystack and study English, in a place where no one could see me. This was also due to the influence of my intellectual background. I thought I should go to school and study. I never thought about what I would do after university, however. At the time we thought that policies came and went and so after graduation we might well be sent back to the countryside to teach. At the time I had not seen the great shift in the state of the nation. The government adopted the policy of reform and opening in 1978, but I did not realize that, given the educational reforms, the state was undergoing a radical transformation. I did not expect that the basic nature of China could change.
LU XIN: Was your mind already somewhat numb?
YAN XUETONG: Not numb, just afraid. That kind of fear was with me right up until 1988, one year after I went to the United States to study for my PhD. For more than ten years I had the same nightmare: that I was in a village and applying to return to the city, and for various reasons the work unit would not let me go. From 1973, when we young people had the hope of returning to the city, this nightmare was always with me until 1988, fifteen years later. I would often wake in the middle of the night just because of this nightmare.
WORK AND STUDY
LU XIN: In 1978, you fulfilled your dream and went to study at the Department of English in Heilongjiang University.
YAN XUETONG: At the time we tried to study twenty-four hours a day, resenting the time taken for sleep, but at last I had reached the required age. I was already twenty-five but not in a position to do what I wanted to do. At university I studied at least a little English. I just thought of studying and was not particularly interested in what went on around me. It was the time of the Democracy Wall and scar literature, which had a great influence on society, but I was not the least bit interested. I thought that study was all that mattered. Besides study I thought that nothing mattered or was of any significance.
LU XIN: Were you able to read many books in the original English as well as in translation?
YAN XUETONG: No. To be honest, I liked science and was not particularly interested in literature. I was not interested in literature, history, or art. I read only textbooks and learned English. The only outside subject that interested me was linguistics. I felt that linguistics was scientific and logical. My graduation thesis was on linguistics. It was about how sounds through the hearing mechanism formed a system of meaningful symbols. On graduation I took an exam for an MA program in linguistics directed by Lü Shuxiang, but was unsuccessful. I liked doing things related to science. This is in line with what I was interested in later.
LU XIN: After graduation you were assigned to the Institute of Contemporary International Relations to study Africa.
YAN XUETONG: Yes. People ask me why I got into the field of international relations. In fact, it was not that I chose the subject. Rather it was the government that assigned me to that work. At the time all graduates were assigned where they went, like tools sent to different work sites. At the time in my class many people opted for practical jobs. Nobody wanted to go into research. Before it was always politically unreliable people, like Rightists, who went into research. But I asked to be sent into research. Those who assigned posts asked me what I wanted to study: America, the Soviet Union, or Japan. At the time I knew nothing about international relations. My sole interest was to be able to do some kind of study and I did not mind in what field. At the time I saw other people publishing articles, on any topic whatsoever, and felt admiration for them. I really wanted to study and publish an article and earn that sense of satisfaction.
LU XIN: In 1984 you began an MA at the Institute of International Relations. Did this period of study have a great influence on your later work?
YAN XUETONG: At the time the school did not have good classes, so basically it was a matter of self-study. I made no progress whatsoever in the field. To tell the truth, once I had completed the MA I still did not understand anything about the nature of international relations.
STUDY ABROAD
LU XIN: In 1987 you won a scholarship from the Sino-American African Association to begin work on a PhD at Berkeley. This must have been an important turning point in your academic career.
YAN XUETONG: Yes. I had a half scholarship, so my financial situation was very tight. In the summer I had to work, and without a job I could not have lived. But compared with my time in the construction corps, the hardships of life then were nothing. The real hardship was that I understood nothing in class. After class I kept on listening to the recording and still could not get what the lecturers were talking about. For instance, if the lecturer referred to “realism,” I had no idea what school of thought that was. If he said “Keohane,” I had no idea who that person was or what he did. Still less did I know what school of international relations theory he represented. My education in China simply did not match what I was being taught at Berkeley. There was too great a gap in the knowledge taught in the two educational systems, and I had to make up for that by teaching myself.
The requirements of a PhD program at Berkeley were very rigorous. After the first year there was an evaluation and only after passing that was one allowed to continue on to complete forty credits. After completing the forty credits there were three qualifying exams before one was permitted to take an oral exam, the equivalent of submission of a dissertation proposal. Only after this were you accepted as a prospective PhD candidate and could begin your dissertation. At each hurdle students risked being eliminated. On average, a third of the students would not get a doctorate. My wife was quite prepared for my failing to qualify and having to go back to China. But I felt that if I failed to get a degree I would lose face going home. As we say, “Once you ride a tiger, it is hard to get off!” Having been through the trial of the construction corps, I thought I was very strong, but in the first semester I did cry once at Berkeley. I really regretted coming to America to study because I did not know where it was all going. But overall this time at Berkeley was to have the greatest influence on my life. Each semester I had to read dozens of books, so many I hardly had time to sleep.
LU XIN: After such a rigorous process, did you finally understand what international relations studies is about?
YAN XUETONG: At first I was all in a muddle. In the first semester I understood nothing. In the second, I understood but could not take notes. Only by the fourth semester did I really catch on. It was just as I felt I finally understood that the classes came to an end. The qualifying exam was a real help to me in understanding international relations studies. To prepare for the exam, I organized the knowledge I had gained in the previous two years and in that way began to understand and appreciate what international relations studies and political science are about. Strictly speaking, it was only after passing the qualifying exam that I began to enter into the field of international relations.
LU XIN: How did the immense difficulties you faced in studying for a PhD influence you?
YAN XUETONG: The main influence of this process was that I entered into the scientific method. This is what was later to earn me some academic success. Scientific method helped me to know how to do research. This is crucial to scholarship.
I think that doctoral studies is a process of alienation. It is the same in China. People who have really studied for a doctorate will find that their academic interests change their way of looking at life. Just as work in the countryside changed me before, so the five years studying for the PhD in America also changed me. First, it reinforced my previous formation as an intellectual. Second, there was a change in what in life I was interested in. I not only admired study, I made study my hobby. If I discover something through study, then this will give me a special joy. Doctoral studies are a formation as a specialist whereas previous studies are simply the basics. Doctoral studies give one a distinct professional bent. This period of doctoral studies clarified my academic interests. Previously, I just thought of studying but did not know why. After my PhD, the purpose of my reading became clear, namely, I read only books related to international relations. Moreover, my range of interests became increasingly narrower. I studied only questions dealing with China’s security and nothing else. Before, I thought that any kind of research was fine and I had no specialized focus. That was because I did not know what international studies were.
LU XIN: From your own experience, how do you rate the influence of the different educational systems on scholars in China and America?
YAN XUETONG: I think that social science education in Chinese universities still lacks a true scientific bent. Scientific education stresses methodology. China is rather weak in research methods. We need to put more effort into learning methodology and then combine this with our excellent scholarship. Only then will we be better than America. In the field of international relations, those who return to China after earning academic degrees in the States put more stress on scientific methods. It is because we have learned them that we realize that these methods are useful. Some people who have not studied methodology are opposed to giving science any role in method. I think their ideas cannot be followed.
If PhD programs in China and America are compared, from a purely educational point of view, in twenty years Chinese institutions cannot hope to match the famous American schools. If it may be said that modernization requires two generations to be effected, then top university education will be reached in the third or fourth generation. The biggest weakness of our university education is not a lack of buildings or money but that we lack first-rate professors.
LU XIN: At the time did you have any ideas about your own future? Many people chose to stay in the States, and at the time your whole family was there.
YAN XUETONG: I also thought of staying. But it is very difficult for Chinese scholars to earn any status in the social sciences. Political studies cannot wholly be separated from one’s own political stance. That is a special feature of this field. Back in China I could work in a government research institution. At the time I thought this was well worth doing. Moreover, it may be that my sense of nationalism was stronger. This was not something I developed only in America. All people will naturally have some sense of nationalism. It is a sense of collective identity. I chose to come back not because of nationalism but because my desire for material possessions was not so great. At the time, in the United States you could earn three thousand to four thousand dollars per month. But in China you could earn only three hundred to four hundred Chinese yuan per month. Most people chose to stay in the States for economic reasons. Money also lures me, but not so much. Unlike most people, I prefer work to life. When I go abroad for meetings, I rarely go sightseeing. After the meeting, I simply go straight home. For me, the meetings are more interesting than tourism.
ACADEMIC PURSUITS
LU XIN: How did you set yourself up academically on your return? Why did you not continue to study Africa?
YAN XUETONG: Before returning I had a talk with my PhD advisor. He was the founder of African political studies in the United States. He was very disappointed that his life’s work had not had any practical effect on Africa. He said that he had originally chosen Africa because he wanted to help the continent, to help African countries modernize, but his hope was in vain. This made a great impression on me.
When I came home, the purpose of my study was to encourage study of China’s foreign policy. In the States many people study China’s foreign policy, but almost nobody did similar research in China itself. There was only some research done by the relevant government departments and research into the history of China’s foreign affairs. Even today, Chinese scholars have written textbooks only on the history of China’s foreign affairs and there is still no textbook on China’s foreign policy. At the time nobody in China studied what the motives for China’s determination of foreign policy were, or how China’s foreign policy worked, or the reasonableness of foreign policy organizations, or what the relationship was between domestic politics and foreign policy. Even now I have not been able to do this. But I have always tried to open the door. In 1993 I wrote “Zhongguo de Anquan Huanjing” (China’s security environment), and in 1995 “Zhongguo de Anquan Zhanlue” (China’s security strategy). Before then there were no published articles on those topics. I have always held that Chinese scholars should assess the successes and failures of our own policy and come up with the reasons for this. Otherwise, China will never reduce the proportion of its failures.
LU XIN: During the long time you have worked at the Institute of Contemporary International Relations, what is your greatest achievement?
YAN XUETONG: The most important thing I have done is to unite academic research and foreign policy research. Without the right environment I could not have done this. Henceforth my research will tend toward scholarship and less toward policy. I am very satisfied with what I have achieved during this time in policy research. I suggested that the national interest is the starting point for foreign policy, and my book Zhongguo Guojia Liyi Fenxi (An analysis of China’s national interest) had some influence on society. In the year I wrote that book, the term national interest was taboo. I took part in promoting work on multilateral security cooperation. In 1993, I criticized American security views for growing out of a “Cold War mentality.” Later this idea was picked up by the media and used widely. Besides this, I spent a long time studying the Taiwan question. From 1994 on, I challenged the effectiveness of “using the economy to promote politics” and constantly maintained that it was necessary to adopt a policy of repression toward Taiwanese separatism. When on May 17, 2004, the Party Central Committee adopted a resolution declaring that the repression of Taiwan independence was the key task, the momentum of the movement for Taiwan’s independence began to be curtailed.
In 1996, I argued that the post–Cold War international configuration had already been settled as one of “one superpower and many strong states.” Although this view has been accepted by society, it is still debated in politics. The idea of one superpower with many strong states is clearly at variance with multipolarization. Again on the question of the structural contradiction between China and the United States, after I had proposed this idea, some people did not accept it. Later I wrote a book on the issue of the rise of China, published in 1988 as Zhongguo Jueqi Guoji Huanjing Pinggu (Assessment of the international environment for China’s rise). There were also people who did not accept the idea of China’s rise. Nowadays, however, it would seem that more and more people use the idea of structural contradiction to talk about Sino-American relations and there is increasing discussion of China’s rise.
LU XIN: What do you think of the many scholars who advocate founding a Chinese school of international relations theory?
YAN XUETONG: The level of China’s own research in international relations studies lags far behind that of some developed countries. I think that at present the focus should be to make learning the basis for creation. International relations theory is created on a foundation of accumulated knowledge. A new theory is created by a given person, but on the basis of the accumulated learning of the whole discipline. The foundational knowledge of our international relations theory is already plentiful, but I agree that any creation in China’s international relations theory must be on the basis of our ancient, traditional culture and thought. On the basis of traditional Chinese cultural thought we should mirror the experience of foreign theories and in that way we can more quickly create a worthwhile theory.
LU XIN: How do you look on the development of China’s international studies over the past few years? What do you think is lacking or what areas are there for improvement?
YAN XUETONG: If we look at the past twenty years, China has made great progress. But what is surprising is that our progress is very slow. We are basically repeating America’s rate of development of fifty years ago. America took twenty years to go from a traditional to a scientific approach. We should not need twenty years to take the same step.
From an abstract point of view, our academic environment is not good. Concretely speaking, we lack really meaningful academic criticism. This is a question of the setup in China. International relations studies can hardly avoid being related to politics. When ideas do not conform to the current political view it is hard to publish them. There is also the influence of the official bureaucracy. Most people in authority are leaders of their work units, and criticism of these leaders is rather dangerous.
Meaningful academic criticism must be grounded in the critic’s full understanding the other person’s point of view and logical basis. The premise for critiquing other people’s scholarship is that the critic knows how the point of view being critiqued has been arrived at; if not, the critique is meaningless and of no value to academic research.
ACADEMIC STANCE
LU XIN: You have always been an out-and-out realist. What led you to this stance?
YAN XUETONG: Realist logic is clear, simple, and easy to understand. Personally, I like logic that is clear and a form of expression that is rigorous. I do not much like very complicated speech, where no one can really understand what it is all about. Dialectic method needs a premise. There is no sense in a form of dialectic by which any form of explanation is possible. Take constructivism, for instance. It stresses the mutual interaction between the environment and human behavior. That kind of explanation cannot provide us with any new knowledge because it does not tell us if human beings change the environment or if the environment changes human beings.
LU XIN: Are you not even more concerned with the usefulness of realism?
YAN XUETONG: I am more concerned with how real life and real political behavior can verify explanatory theory. I do not like what cannot be verified, because there is no way of knowing if its conclusions are valid. For instance, in making predictions I like to set a timeframe: within five years, or within three years. I do not like referring to the “long term,” the “medium term,” or the “short term.” That way of speaking is too vague. We have no way of knowing how long the time span is: one month, a year, a decade could all be seen as the short term; ten years, a hundred years, or a thousand could all be seen as the long term. I think that kind of prediction is a form of magic. In international relations studies there is a lot of magic already. When positing an international trend, some people propose three to five possibilities. The development of anything can give rise to many possibilities, but the question is which is the most probable. To produce a lot of possibilities and to say that none of them can be ruled out amounts to saying nothing at all.
LU XIN: Many of the people who went through the Cultural Revolution are like you in being confirmed realists. Could one reason for this be that there was too much pessimism, and once pessimism goes beyond a certain point people feel that practicality is what is most reasonable? What do you think?
YAN XUETONG: The experience of the Cultural Revolution and the experience of the Movement of Going to the Countryside were not the same. People who once went to the countryside are not pessimistic. Rather, they are very sure of themselves. The latter experience gave people the confidence to overcome all obstacles. And this confidence is built precisely on the basis of an estimation of the difficulties faced, on the basis of always preparing for the worst case. Hence, many people who went down to the countryside are realists with regard to life.
People who have not experienced hardship are more liable to adopt an optimistic attitude toward international politics. I think that the experience from the gate of the university to graduate school and that of practical hard work such as in reform through labor are very different. Young people who have learned constructivism in China cannot possibly arrive at a consensus on terrorism with young Palestinians engaged in armed struggle. When I was studying for my PhD in Berkeley, we had one Palestinian auditing the course. After class I asked him privately why people should want to get involved in terrorism. He asked in reply why Chinese people engaged in guerrilla warfare during the Japanese occupation. That left a deep impression on me. This is a case of someone who lives without knowing what it feels like to have a sore back.
Because in my academic work I insist on scientific method, I think theory must be based on reality. A theory removed from reality may sound fine, but it is in fact not objective. It cannot help us to really understand the world. Indeed, it may lead us to misunderstand. If you look at the current Chinese scholars engaged in studying international trends, you may well find that a high proportion of them make their assessments based on theories. If we constantly reflected on the mistakes in our prediction of international trends, it would assist in ensuring the progress of our international relations studies. Since many people are not accountable for any mistakes in their predictions, they take an optimistic view of the international situation. It may sound great, progressive, civilized, or moral to be optimistic about the international situation, but I think that to make assessments of the international situation that do not conform to reality and then to fail to verify them is not worthy of a scholar.
LU XIN: Some people describe you as a specialist in making predictions on international questions. Which are the occasions you are most proud of?
YAN XUETONG: I predicted that Lee Tenghui would go from covert to overt support for a policy of independence for Taiwan. I predicted that the Kuomintang would be defeated and Chen Shui-bian would be elected. I predicted he would be reelected for a second term in office. I predicted that Pakistan would certainly carry out a nuclear test in response to India’s. In 1997, I predicted that the Clinton government would not agree to restoring reciprocal state visits between China and the United States. In 2005, I predicted that Sino-Japanese relations would continue to deteriorate. When I moved to Tsinghua University, I began to make quantitative predictions and the percentage of my predictions that were correct rose.
I think that predicting is especially enjoyable and very challenging. A forecaster must constantly keep an eye on shifts in circumstances, always worrying what to do if he is wrong and ready to analyze why he is wrong, so people are always kept on their toes. It is a little like playing the stock market. The difference is that there is no material benefit involved, only mental enjoyment. Using scientific, quantitative prediction methods allows us constantly to increase the accuracy of our predictions. Our current quantitative predictions have already reached world-class level, especially in our method of quantitative assessment of bilateral relationships. Our work can stand alongside that of others in the world.
LU XIN: You seem to be particularly enthusiastic speaking about this issue. Maybe it has something to do with your personality. You like being challenged.
YAN XUETONG: This may be wherein the special feature of international relations studies lies. To study international relations means to predict the developing trends in the international situation. Everybody judges you on whether your predictions are accurate or not. The predictions are objective and are a most plausible proof. Making public predictions is a risky business. Making public predictions about the international situation is a bit like adults playing games———it is real and enjoyable. Especially so when we use scientific methods to make a prediction. According to the results we can summarize the experience of our method and improve our method of prediction. It is especially meaningful to invent a method of research, just as interesting as inventing a new weapon.
LU XIN: But at the same time you have many critics and opponents.
YAN XUETONG: That is because our study of international relations is still at the same level as the big debate in America in the 1960s, namely, a debate between science and tradition. Currently, the traditional school is mainstream in China and the scientific school is subsidiary. There are not many people who can use quantitative methods, and those who can make quantitative predictions are even rarer. Yet I think that the development of this field in China will be like that in the States. There is no getting away from the increasingly scientific way of studying international relations. The scientific school will become mainstream. Knowledge lacking predictive power cannot become a science. Faulty predictability simply shows that the scientific nature of this science is not yet strong. Predictive power is an important criterion in judging whether a given discipline is scientific or not. Philosophy has no predictive power, so philosophy is not science.
In making predictions we do not simply rely on our minds to think. Our current quantitative predictions achieve an accuracy rate of 65 percent or more. If to this are added predictions that are not so risky, then our accuracy rate is more than 80 percent. We do hear criticism, but this criticism is meaningless because it is from laypeople. For instance, people say that even if we reached a prediction accuracy of 99 percent, we still could not rule out the 1 percent of other possibilities. It would still amount to two possible outcomes, which is not substantively different from predicting two possible outcomes. Of course, prediction accuracy can never reach 100 percent. What attains 100 percent accuracy is a law, which does not need prediction. Predictive science progresses step by step. For instance, accuracy going up from 65 percent to 75 percent is a sign of progress in knowledge for humanity and an improvement in the strength of prediction. It should not be said that an accuracy rate of 80 percent is essentially the same as a rate of 50 percent. Our predictions cannot possibly be 100 percent accurate. The accuracy of our predictions cannot reach 100 percent, but our accuracy rate is more than 70 percent, which is much higher than a rate of 50 percent.
The use of scientific method also carries an important social significance. It shows people that international studies need the scientific method. Not just anybody can do it. Before studying the method, most students imagine that anyone can do international relations studies, but after studying the method they learn that the study of international relations is a specialized science.
LU XIN: In fact, in China more weight is given to the tradition of the arts. Have you sought to find a point of meeting between the sciences and the arts?
YAN XUETONG: Yes, but it is very hard. To combine scientific method and traditional Chinese thought requires a good foundation in classical Chinese. There are very few scholars of my age in China whose knowledge of classical Chinese is good. We have even regressed in our ability to read classical Chinese. It is very difficult for people of my age to combine ancient Chinese thought and modern social sciences research. My own knowledge does not extend that far. I once thought of combining the Eight Trigrams and scientific prediction, but after trying I realized I did not know what the principle of the Eight Trigrams was.
LU XIN: Some people say that you are a hawk.
YAN XUETONG: This is said with regard to my views on Taiwan. I think the issue of Taiwan touches on China’s very existence, so it is essential to maintain a hard line. One of my colleagues sums up my views as “Republican in foreign affairs and Democrat in domestic affairs.” That is not quite accurate, but I do find that I am inconsistent in my views of foreign and domestic policy.
LU XIN: How are you a nationalist? Some scholars avoid talking about this.
YAN XUETONG: I think I am a rather typical nationalist. Some people think that nationalism is a bad word. I disagree. Nationalism and patriotism are just like surplus value and profit: different names for the same thing. Patriotism and nationalism in fact refer to the same thing.
LU XIN: What influence do you think your strong nationalism has on your scholarship?
YAN XUETONG: A great influence. For example, hegemony is a perennial issue in international studies. American scholars concentrate on studying how to maintain a durable hegemony, and many Chinese scholars also study hegemony from this angle. I advise my doctoral students in studying how to replace one hegemony with another. My nationalism affects my choice of research topic and the aspect of the topic I study. I choose topics in international relations that are strongly relevant to China. Among these relevant questions, I choose to study what is most relevant to China’s core interest. I do not think that a feeling of nationalism leads me to say what is not true. As I said before, my principle is that I can keep silent rather than telling the truth, but I cannot tell lies or say something against my conscience.
LU XIN: How do you cope with the relationship between academic research and actual politics?
YAN XUETONG: Previously, Chinese international relations studies was more inclined toward policy and tended to overlook theory. Only now are there some people engaged in theoretical research. Research work should be allocated out. People engaged in theory should keep to theory without getting into policy; people engaged in policy need only to understand theory and should apply themselves wholly to policy. They do not need to bother much about creating theories. The third kind of person works on getting theory and policy to cooperate. The study of international relations is like other disciplines: it is becoming more specialized, more normalized, and more compartmentalized. I think the main problem faced by China’s international relations studies is not that of combining theory and policy, but that it is not yet sufficiently specialized. Many people lack their own specialized research direction. They write articles in many fields and fail to enter into any area in depth. My suggestion is that one should concentrate on one’s own specialty and say little about what lies outside one’s own area. Specialization in small areas is a measure of whether our study of international relations is becoming more scientific. When we find that there are more and more small areas of special study within the discipline of international relations, when the specializations are more finely defined, that will be a sign that we have developed.
INFLUENCES ON YAN’S ACADEMIC CAREER
LU XIN: How do you see the personality of a scholar and his particular interests influencing academic research?
YAN XUETONG: People’s personalities differ and what they are interested in differs, so they are inclined to study different things. This contributes to diversity in scholarship. For instance, I like hard issues such as power, war, peace, and security, but some people prefer soft issues: culture, ethics, guidelines, and international norms.
I tend to be fairly direct myself and so my articles are also quite direct. I do not like going around corners. Also, I prefer things that adhere to strict logic. Some people say I simply adhere to formal logic and do not care for dialectical logic. I do not like dialectical logic because it lacks an objective standard. Formal logic admits objective verification, whereas dialectical logic does not. Formal logic is rigorous. If there is a problem with any step in the argument, then the conclusion does not stand. But dialectical logic can make any kind of argument correct with no logical steps. Anything can make a conclusion reasonable. Using dialectical logic, all conclusions can be rendered correct or incorrect. From a scientific point of view, what is reasonable depends on there being what is not reasonable. If there is nothing that is not reasonable, then how can we know what is reasonable?
Some people think my colors are too definite. This is a personal matter. I am prepared to admit mistakes in scholarship. In Shijie Zhishi (World Affairs), I published an article stating where my predictions had gone wrong. I think there are two reasons why people make ambiguous predictions. The first is that they have not yet grasped their own field of knowledge. Their knowledge is inadequate to make a judgment about a particular issue. The second is that they are concerned with political gains and losses. I am not afraid of making a mistake. This is related to my scientific approach. All scientists know that research is a process of constantly making errors. Research is to find where the errors are and to analyze them. The individual stance and point of view of someone who upholds a scientific approach are definitely clear. People who think that the study of international relations is politics rather than science have difficulty adopting a clear stance. I never posit two very different possible outcomes because I reckon that amounts to saying nothing.
International relations are complicated. It is difficult to arrive at an accurate conclusion. Even using scientific method it is hard to be very accurate, but at least the use of scientific method will increase our knowledge more than not using it. For instance, we suppose that when the trade of a given state with another amounts to 10 percent to 30 percent of its total trade, it is in a situation of dependency. The range 10 percent to 30 percent is not precise, but it helps us to know the upper and lower limits of dependency, namely, that if one state’s trade with another state is more than 30 percent of the first state’s trade, the first state is clearly dependent on the second, whereas if it is less than 10 percent, that does not constitute dependence. This is better than a notion of dependency that does not rely on figures. Using scientific method does not necessarily mean that we can define the critical point at which things change in nature, but it can allow us to summarize the critical area. This is better than not knowing the critical area at all.
LU XIN: How to you understand the term scholar? How do you define yourself?
YAN XUETONG: First, a scholar is not the same as a literatus. The difference is that a literatus writes articles to express his thought whereas a scholar uses scientific method to argue for a logical idea. A scholar may think of many things but not commit all of them to writing. A scholar does not write articles about what he has not studied. A literatus writes articles on anything he has an interest in. A literatus’s writing is not constrained by his specialty. A literatus is bold enough to express his opinion on any matter beyond his specialty, whereas a scholar make remarks only on his own specialty. A scholar always restricts himself to a very narrow area of knowledge.
Furthermore, a scholar is not the same as a specialist. A specialist is someone who has very independent views in one particular field of knowledge. His level of specialization must go well beyond that of common scholars. I think that being a scholar is a mark of a person’s character, including features such as being hard-working, careful, and serious and not drawing rash conclusions. A specialist has reached a high standard for a scholar in a particular specialty. There can be only a very few specialists in any given field. It cannot be that all scholars are specialists, just as not all actors are artists. I think that I am a scholar and only on a very few specific questions can I claim to be a specialist.
LU XIN: Because of the special characteristics of international relations, many scholars in the field belong to think tanks. What do you think about this?
YAN XUETONG: A think tank serves to provide professional advice on policy. I do not think that I myself have any direct impact of China’s policy makers. I just reckon that my articles have some influence on a few people who work in the relevant government departments. Maybe they have an indirect influence on policy, but I do not have a direct influence.
The influence of a scholar comes through his published articles. In the Chinese political establishment there is no system of think tanks, strictly speaking. In France, by contrast, the government provides every minister with a sum of money to hire policy advisors. This is rather like the old Chinese system of personal legal assistants. These policy advisors constitute a think tank. Since the founding of the new China in 1949, the state has not allowed high officials to have their own personal advisors or to rely on nongovernmental advisory organizations. Even their secretaries are strictly limited to the government departmental staff. Scholars may take part in conferences and air particular views, and they may influence the way other people think, but this does not mean that they play the role of a think tank. To exist, a think tank requires a clear and definite organized channel of communication. Advisors who are unpaid are not part of a think tank in the proper sense of this term.
LU XIN: Do you think a scholar could be part of a think tank or be a policy advisor?
YAN XUETONG: Not only can he, he should be. Giving advice on policy is the responsibility of the intelligentsia to society. I think that if we were to revive the personal legal assistant system and establish a system of think tanks it would enable policymaking to be more scientific.
I want to be both a scholar and a policy advisor myself. The term intelligentsia means someone who has received an education in the humanities, has a sense of responsibility to society, and undertakes criticism of the government. So it is said that the allotted task of the intelligentsia is to critique government policy. The intelligentsia are not those who have merely studied or are professionally engaged in study. The meaning of intelligentsia is primarily people with a sense of social responsibility. Nobel Prize winners do not necessarily belong to the intelligentsia. The term comes from Russia and refers to those people who met in cafés to discuss affairs of state. They constantly critique the government and take on society’s burdens. They are not people who have made great scientific discoveries. The use of the term in China tends to obscure the true nature of the intelligentsia, because it refers merely to people who can read. Moreover, the genuine intelligentsia are not just critical of the government; they also tell the government what to do and how to do it. The standard of good policy advice is that it is practical, effective, and less costly.
LU XIN: According to your definition, does China today have a system of think tanks and, if so, would you be willing to take part?
YAN XUETONG: If there were, I would take part. The research institutions attached to our government agencies are not think tanks in the strict sense. Their main task is to carry out policies, not to furnish ideas. To undertake the work of a think tank is to exercise social responsibility. This kind of work influences academic research but it has a broader social significance. Academic research alone cannot have such a direct social role.
LU XIN: Scholars of your generation have a marked sense of social responsibility. Unconsciously you have a sense of “being concerned for all under heaven.” In my view, important historical events leave an indelible mark on people of the generation that experienced them. A scholar, then, will naturally be influenced as to what he produces. How do you see the matter?
YAN XUETONG: The Cultural Revolution is without a doubt the greatest and most influential historical event people of my generation in China experienced. This is something all people of my generation experienced. The Cultural Revolution gravely damaged China’s traditional culture. I think that the greatest social danger in China today is hypocrisy. The Cultural Revolution destroyed the millennial ethical tradition of China: its sincerity. People of my generation still have some degree of sincerity because before the Cultural Revolution we had lived in traditional Chinese culture, which valued sincerity in all fields. From the Cultural Revolution onward it has not been so. In politics, people were obliged to say what was false. It was clear that no one wanted to go to the countryside, but every young person was required to say that he desired to stay on the farm for his whole life. It was clear that there was a severe lack of household necessities but each work unit glossed things over and said how wonderful life was. It was clear that a professor knows more than a peasant, but professors were obliged to say that they wanted to go to the village to learn from the peasants. The government forced people to tell lies. You were punished if you did not do so. At the time, I did not say I wanted to stay in the countryside forever, so my recommendation to go to university was annulled by the political instructor of our farm.
This spirit of telling lies left by the Cultural Revolution has had a very bad influence on our study of international relations. The reason why international relations studies is viewed as a form of magic, in which the phenomenon of telling lies is particularly serious, is largely because we lack an overall environment of sincerity. To tell lies now not only does not result in punishment, it even wins society’s approval. In the Song Dynasty, China already had a silver check that was like today’s personal checks, but now we dare not practice the system of personal checks because of a lack of honesty in society. If China wants to resolve the problem of counterfeiting, it must start by opposing the telling of lies.
LU XIN: How do you assess the state of your knowledge?
YAN XUETONG: I have two serious shortcomings in my knowledge. The first is that, because of the Cultural Revolution, I did not receive a proper secondary education, with the result that my knowledge of the natural sciences is very poor. I do not have the necessary knowledge of mathematics, physics, or chemistry. This severely restricts the scope and depth of my research. Second, because the May Fourth movement denied traditional culture and because in the 1950s China promoted simplified characters and educational reform, people of my generation are very poor in their knowledge of classical Chinese works. We find reading the old classics very difficult. Inadequacies in knowledge of the natural sciences and of traditional Chinese writings mean that the foundations of my scholarship are narrow; hence, I cannot hope to achieve great academic success.1