Recently, the case of the non-Shanghai girl Zhan Haiter has drawn a lot of attention, especially because it happened in Shanghai, so I can’t help but offer a few comments as well.
Of course, I support Zhan Haiter’s struggle, and I support every citizen’s open expression of his or her demands; but as for the content of those demands, I do not support it.
This matter involves too many questions, all tangled together, making an already complicated issue even more complicated. So first we need to break down the questions involved.
There are two big issues: one is education, the other is regionality. It should be noted that the problem is fundamentally not one of “fairness.” If we start out by raising the issue of fairness, then all the questions will get mixed together—educational fairness involves the equality of citizens’ rights, opposition to regional discrimination, and so on. In particular, since this happened in Shanghai, a place notoriously infamous for regional discrimination, both sides, whether consciously or not, will steer the contradiction toward an opposition between “locals” and “outsiders.” This will inevitably touch a raw nerve among Shanghai locals and outsiders alike, eventually pushing the debate into emotionalism and hostility. It is said that Zhan Haiter’s “challenge debate” was met with disruptions and insults such as “locusts.” I sympathize with what she suffered, but in a certain sense that suffering was already destined from the moment she first aimed her spear at the issue of fairness.
“Fairness” itself is an extremely abstract concept. The key question is not whether something is fair or unfair, but by what means, and by what standard, can something be made fair? What fairness is Zhan Haiter pursuing now? Fairness in the right to education? Then Shanghai people have the right to study in Shanghai, Jiangxi people have the right to study in Jiangxi—how is that unfair? But they are not satisfied; they want both Shanghai people and Jiangxi people to have the right to study in Shanghai. Yet Zhan Haiter is not unable to go to school in Shanghai; she has already completed the nine-year compulsory education stage, and she can continue on to vocational schools and the like. The problem is that she cannot get into a more desirable top high school. But does she mean to oppose any distinction between good and bad high schools at all? Is her target the “inequality” in the sense that some high schools are more desirable while some vocational schools are less desirable? That does not seem to be the case. She wants to attend a good school; she hopes to achieve fairness in terms of eligibility to attend a good school. But this fairness itself comes at the expense of unfairness—if no one else were going to worse schools, it would be impossible for there to be better schools for you to attend.
Of course, some radical egalitarians do in fact demand the fundamental abolition of differences among schools, but they would still acknowledge differences between good universities and bad ones. What they mean by eliminating the teaching gap between high schools is that any high school should have a similar chance of being admitted to a good university. But the final result is still unfair—some people go to good universities, some to bad universities, some to no university at all. Why is it not the case that everyone should have a fair right to attend university? They would say that this is a differentiated selection made through fair assessment under conditions of equal opportunity. Of course, such assessment could also be done earlier; they are able to, and only able to, accept this kind of differentiated outcome selected by fair assessment under conditions of equal opportunity. In short, their hope is that when students are screened, no consideration should be given to household registration or any other innate unfairness, but only to acquired effort—in practical terms, grades.
Grades, this homogeneous and linear scale, are of course a “fair” screening standard. But they are only one standard, by no means an absolute one. Under the same score, my physique is better than yours—shouldn’t that count for something? Or my IQ is lower than yours—shouldn’t that count for something? Because people with lower IQ may have to make much more acquired effort to achieve the same score. The question is: what exactly do we want to measure with “grades”? Do grades measure a person’s developmental potential? His or her degree of effort? His or her level of talent? No matter which ability grades are taken to measure, the result is bound to be one-sided. But if we care completely nothing for content or substance and only care about formal fairness, then why not simply use high jump or weightlifting to determine advancement to the next stage of education?
In any case, starting from the completely abstract principle that “all people are equal” does not allow us to infer the conclusion that “only grades should matter.” Any strategy for maintaining formal equality may be accompanied by other forms of substantive inequality.
In addition, when we speak of “all people are equal,” beyond considering that each child’s acquired effort should be treated fairly, do we also need to consider the fairness of parents and grandparents? Of course, for a certain child, the parental factor may be part of his or her “innate” conditions; but for the parents themselves, it is a real part of their acquired effort. The question is whether children have the right to inherit the advantages accumulated over generations by their ancestors, and whether parents have the right to create a growth environment for their children that is better than that of other people’s children. If Shanghai people’s current superior environment was accumulated for their descendants through the hard work of their ancestors—most of whom were also outsiders who came from elsewhere in those days—then how can those accumulations not have the right to provide better conditions for their descendants?
If we insist that each child is an independent individual, born equal, and therefore their growth environment must be ensured to be uniformly equal, and they cannot inherit certain innate advantages from their ancestors, then is such a situation fair to every hard-striving parent? In particular, for those idealistic migrant workers who went into the city to make a living—whether in the early nineteenth century or the early twentieth century—if they are told that their struggle and effort will not create any advantage for their children, would they feel that this is fair? Or we can ask even more cruelly: you brought your child into the city to study—how is that fair to the children who are still staying behind in the countryside to go to school? Just because their parents did not come into the city to work, or were unable to bring their children along, their children’s educational conditions have to be a bit worse—how is that fair? To say it even more brutally: as more and more young and middle-aged adults and their children pour into the big cities, the educational environment in the countryside will only widen its gap further and further, with labor drained away, no teaching staff, a lack of students, and a vicious cycle set in motion. How is that fair to the children left behind in the countryside? You are pursuing equal access to schooling in the big city, pursuing equal rights of residence, and hoping to live long-term and settle down, even to put down roots, in the big city without discrimination—what about your hometown? Who is going back to build your hometown? And who will safeguard the fairness of the children left behind in your hometown?
Do you think you can drive all the old city residents out of the city through fair competition, and send them back to your hometown to do construction work there? Apparently there really is such a logic. In a denunciatory article about the household registration system reposted by Zhan Haiter, it says:
In this world, there is no proper law, morality, ethics, or tradition that says: wherever a person happens to be born, that person has the right and the qualification to live there forever. If he cannot afford the cost of living, then the government must forbid others from competing with him, or seize money from others to give to him, so as to guarantee that he can continue living in his place of birth. Such a rule is ridiculously absurd. Human beings are human beings, not animals in a nature reserve.
If you were born in Beijing, if you are one of the Beijing hukou population, that only proves that you happened to be born here, or that the government once approved your residence here, and nothing more. If you yourself are incompetent or not hardworking enough, and cannot compete with those who were not born here, then you have no choice but to pack your bags and leave; don’t continue living in Beijing anymore. You can go live in places where you can afford the cost of living.
That’s right—they just want to drive out the people who settled in the city earlier. Fine, but have they thought about what happens if these people are really driven back to the countryside? The rural people who are left behind—what about them? The city people who have been pushed out still retain at least some accumulation of wealth, whereas those left behind in the countryside are precisely the ones who were never able to break into the city in the first place. Don’t expect them to have much competitiveness. If the city people who have been driven away by those so-called winners in competition charge into the countryside and begin competing with the people who stayed there, what will the result be? If, out of revenge—or simply out of a lust for power—they crowd out and scramble for the already inadequate material conditions in the countryside, then what are those people left behind supposed to do? If they cannot compete with city people who were not born there, then do they also just have to pack their bags and leave?
Those who leave home and wander far in pursuit of ideals are, for the most part, worthy of respect. But if their ideal happens to be to make more people leave home, to raze to the ground the homes and livelihoods that others have guarded for generations, then even calling them “locusts” may not be too much, because the only thing they believe in is the law of the jungle: competition, slaughter, elimination. As long as the competition is fair, the losers ought to perish by their own hand. But human beings are human beings, not animals in the jungle. Not every person should be a warrior who seeks only ruthless struggle; living peacefully and steadily in one’s own homeland is of course every person’s right. I have not heard of any country’s laws or ethics that do not support each person’s right to live an ordinary life, quietly and properly, in his or her own homeland. You pursue ideals and brave the struggle, and that is fine—but you do not thereby become superior to your contented, down-to-earth fellow villagers who remain in their homeland.
What makes a human being human is not only the pursuit of competition and struggle, but also the pursuit of holding fast and passing on. That descendants can enjoy the blessings left by their ancestors is precisely the glory of the ancestors, the Chinese ideal. Compared with the American Dream of starting from scratch and getting rich overnight, it is rising above the ordinary, bringing honor to the family name, blessing one’s descendants, and benefiting posterity that is the quintessential Chinese Dream. Of course, in the United States, social welfare and the protection of private property are actually more comprehensive, and Americans of course receive enough social security to continue living in their place of birth.
But after all, we feel that America’s education system and household registration system are better than ours. Where exactly does the problem lie? Am I trying to defend China’s household registration system? Not at all. The key is that from the outset we took the wrong path by insisting on discussing “fairness.” If you want to talk to me about fairness between outsiders and Shanghai locals, then I will talk to you about the fairness between those who leave home and those who remain behind; if you want to talk to me about the fairness of children’s individual effort, then I will talk to you about the fairness of the hard-won accumulation of ancestors… and so the issue is forced into a deadlock.
However, from the very beginning, the issue was not one of “equal competition,” but one of “freedom of choice.” What Americans call freedom of migration is not achieved because newcomers can drive away the native residents through equal competition. The native residents not only have the priority right to inherit their ancestors’ property, they also have the right to maintain the traditional community order through spontaneous organization; the Amish are an extreme example. You have the freedom to migrate, and I have the freedom not to migrate; you have the freedom to compete, and I have the freedom not to participate in competition.
If you ask me whether outsiders have the right to compete equally with local residents, I must reserve judgment. Local residents of course have priority rights and certain privileges to continue living locally; this is true not only of Shanghai people or people in any big city, but even more so in the countryside. A group of outsiders, by virtue of their wealth and clout or their strategic means, can entirely crowd out the countryside’s land, even radically change local customs and ways of life, seize and destroy the homeland and way of life that local people have guarded for generations (especially in ethnic minority regions), and even make it so that local people can no longer afford to live in their own homeland. At such a time, we certainly cannot allow simple, honest locals to compete on equal terms without conditions against cunning outsiders.
But if you ask whether outsiders in Shanghai should have full freedom to choose schooling, then I certainly support that. Where is the difference? Of course, so-called equality and freedom are both relative rather than absolute; we are always pursuing something more equal or more free. Yet when we pursue greater equality, our spearhead is aimed at privileged locals, and our pursuit can very easily turn into the stripping away and destruction of privilege. But when we pursue freedom, this pursuit has no direct relation to the local residents’ landlord advantage, unless the locals’ privileges have formed some stubborn monopoly.
The current situation is that outsiders in big cities lack freedom in schooling, and their range of choices is extremely narrow. This narrowness is not caused by local schools being insufficiently fair, but by local schools being insufficiently open. “Open” is a constructive rather than restrictive pursuit: we hope to open more channels, present more possibilities, and provide more diverse options, so that everyone can obtain as much room for comprehensive development as possible. Therefore, of course, allowing some children to have only vocational and technical schools to choose from is clearly too closed off, but opening up their range of choices does not mean that local students’ priority rights must necessarily be stripped away. At the same time, we also hope for greater freedom in school operation, including the increase of private schools and the freedom of private schools in school governance; this is also a necessary path toward increasing the freedom of school choice.
At times, questions of equality and questions of freedom are intertwined, but at other times these two pursuits are mutually exclusive. For example, if you over-pursue the equality of examinations and place too much emphasis on exam scores as the standard of evaluation, then you will instead suppress each student’s diverse development and freedom to choose his or her own interests and direction. So from the very beginning we should make clear what exactly it is that we are pursuing.
Of course, the issue of regional discrimination will not be easily resolved merely because we shift our thinking from fairness to freedom, and I do not intend to resolve this issue either. In my view, we should first distinguish contempt and discrimination from arrogance and prejudice. For example, the prejudices we commonly see toward “Japanese devils,” “Korean bastards,” “Indian 阿三,” and the like belong more to regional discrimination, whereas Shanghai people’s arrogance toward outsiders is more a kind of regional contempt. In my view, discrimination as prejudice is something that still needs to be resolved, but contempt as arrogance is, to a certain extent, defensible. I’ll talk about this next time.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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