Politics Is Dispute—Starting from the Smoke-Free Campus

I don’t know when the sign “This campus is a smoke-free school” was first hung at Peking University’s gate. I once even saw security guards seriously stop people who were coming in with cigarettes in their mouths. Today, in the midst of the poisonous haze (November 1), I noticed this sign again, so I’ll jot down a few thoughts while I’m at it~

I don’t smoke, and I don’t like other people smoking around me. But I do not support a “smoke-free campus.” In particular, a “smoke-free Peking University” is even worse. Because a smoking ban runs counter to freedom.

Smoking is harmful, and it affects other people’s physical and mental health? That may well be true. But the key question is: first, who gets to set the standard for what counts as harmful? Even if there is little dispute that smoking harms the body, smoking can also increase happiness, facilitate social interaction, and so on; some people will always feel that the harms and benefits cancel each other out, and that smoking is beneficial after all. Second, even if something is universally recognized as harmful, does that mean it can be prohibited? So-called collective life necessarily involves mutual assistance among its members, but also mutual interference; there will always be things you do that cause trouble for the people around you. Trying to distinguish between “necessary trouble” and “unnecessary trouble” is difficult and artificial. A particular kind of trouble may perhaps always be avoided, but what cannot be avoided is that a person must, to a greater or lesser extent, interfere with others.

Since people are inevitably going to cause trouble, and since the standard for measuring the scale of harm is not absolute, how can people possibly get along harmoniously? Thus, living together is always a state of mutual accommodation, mutual confrontation, and ultimately dynamic compromise.

If freedom means being able to do whatever you want to do, then in being able to do it, you are bound to come into conflict with others. Others may accept your actions, may accommodate your actions, may avoid your actions, or may oppose your actions. Whether a society is harmonious or not lies in whether the tension among its people is in some appropriate equilibrium, or, in Confucian terms, whether social harmony is a matter of “joy” (乐). If relations are too loose or too tense, there will not be the proper tension—someone whose actions never interfere with others and who therefore encounters no resistance from others is living on a desert island, and it is hard to speak of freedom there; while if a person’s actions are entirely constrained by others, then freedom is likewise hard to come by. A free person is someone who can move with ease and skill within the tension-filled, elastic net formed by human relations.

But does a healthy society always need some taboos? For example, you surely ought not gorge yourself on beef in the streets of India? For example, you surely ought not be pole-dancing at the gate of an elementary school? … Of course, a free society does not exclude taboos. But where do taboos come from? In many cases, taboos, like etiquette—or rather as part of etiquette—arise through custom and common acceptance. On the basis of tacit custom, further adjustments and codifications give rise to taboos as doctrine or regulation. But the key point is that the conventions behind these taboos are themselves formed through the process in which people with different positions, amid all the collisions of common life, confront, accommodate, and compromise with one another.

Take smoking, for example. Without any legal provisions, without any red-letter official notice, certain forms of etiquette have already taken shape on campus. For instance, teachers and students do not smoke inside the classroom, but during the break, a teacher may go out to a well-ventilated corridor and have a cigarette.

Even under an autocratic system, the implementation of any demand or prohibition is itself the result of confrontation and compromise. Whatever order comes from above—for example, to create a smoke-free school—will inevitably encounter varying degrees of resistance at every stage; indeed, many times the resistance, active or passive, is so great that the order from above is always hard to carry out. And under a democratic system, there is by no means no process of unilateral command from above; of course, there are also all kinds of resistance and confrontation. So where exactly lies the difference between autocracy and democracy?—Precisely in this: autocracy resists “resistance” in an institutionalized way, whereas democracy highlights confrontation and conflict in an institutionalized way. The basic political model of democracy is the election, and the crux of an election is not one person, one vote, but rather the debate and confrontation carried out for the sake of the election—the candidates magnify the conflicts and confrontations within the public and display them in the safest and most orderly form. As for associations, trade unions, student unions, and other organizations, their purpose is likewise to struggle, and their mission is to be able to convey the protest of a particular group in a timely and effective manner. In an autocratic society, by contrast, “confrontation” always appears in the guise of evil; the whole system abhors confrontation and looks forward to “compromise without confrontation”—that is, “obedience.” Thus even if an autocracy has voting, it does not permit debate; even if there is dispute, it tries as much as possible not to let the dispute become public or amplified. As for trade unions, student unions, and the like, their purpose then becomes “to serve a particular group,” and their mission is to cancel out the conflicts and confrontations among the people in a timely and effective manner, doing their best not to let protest be displayed.

Since the time of the ancient Greek city-states, what is called political activity has been activity of dispute; without dispute there is no politics, only “governance.” The aim of democratic policy is to gradually reach compromise after fully displaying conflict, to establish customs through mutual accommodation, and ultimately to form certain laws and norms; the aim of autocratic policy is to promulgate in advance the norms that are to be compromised with, and then slowly dissolve whatever confrontation and conflict may arise.

If our “smoke-free Peking University” merely first put forward an official initiative in order to arouse everyone’s debate and slowly arrive at a compromise plan, then I might still support “smoke-free Peking University.” But what do I see now?—“This campus is a smoke-free school”—I clearly see a predetermined conclusion.

Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.