Interview with Liang Jie
The Search for Public Life in a World of Shifting Lives and Knowledge

Editor's Note: From the alleys of Shanghai to universities in Australia, from a Go “child prodigy” to an economics scholar, Liang Jie’s trajectory reflects the intellectual journey of a Shanghai-born intellectual of the 1980s generation. Navigating between academia and public engagement, the local and the global, specialization and cross-disciplinary exploration, he continually tests the boundaries of thought. His experiences are not only a record of personal growth but also mirror the transformations and dilemmas of contemporary Chinese intellectual life. Amid increasingly specialized academic systems and increasingly superficial public discourse, Liang strives to maintain a delicate balance—neither abandoning scholarly rigor nor losing touch with the real world.
 

By Liang Jie; Yun Chen

Memories of Shanghai: An Eighties Childhood

Liang Jie’s childhood unfolded against the backdrop of Shanghai’s rapid transformation in the 1980s and 1990s. His mother, an educated young woman who had returned from rural labor in Chongming, was resilient by nature. She worked her way up from a job in grain transport to a position as a civil servant in the municipal government, before boldly breaking her “iron rice bowl” to “plunge into the business world” in the early 1990s. His father, once a high school chemistry teacher, later transitioned to working in a school-run factory and eventually moved into the corporate sector.

The family’s first home was a traditional shikumen [石库门] residence inherited from his grandfather. During the cultural revolution, the property was confiscated, leaving only one room for the entire family. Later, they were allocated a simple, makeshift dwelling on Middle Jianguo Road, built on the vacant site of an old garden—a structure that might even be considered an “illegal addition.” Liang was born and raised there, and the alley life around Tianzifang became his earliest social classroom. He attended Chongqing Road South First Primary School—his classmates came from the nearby lanes, with a variety of family backgrounds. This environment gave him an intuitive understanding of social diversity from a young age.

As a child, he was an average student. Both his parents were severely nearsighted, so they never pushed him to study excessively. Interestingly, it wasn’t until fourth grade, when he got a new math teacher, that “something clicked”—his academic performance improved dramatically, placing him at the top of the class. Yet he understood even then that this sudden illumination and success came more from intuition than rigorous practice—a trait that would reappear throughout his intellectual journey.

When it came time for him to advance to junior high, his mother chose Bile Middle School, a nearby institution, even though his scores had qualified him for a more selective school. Reflecting on this decision years later, he saw it as revealing something deeper about his family’s temperament: “We always lacked that all-or-nothing courage and leaned toward the safer path.”

Go and Mathematics: The Genius’s Epiphany and Limits

From an early age, Liang began learning the game of Go. Every day after school ended at four, he would take the bus alone to the municipal sports club on Nanjing Road for his lessons, and his father would pick him up in the evening.

At first, he progressed rapidly—within just six months, he surpassed players who had been studying for three years and was hailed as a child prodigy. But after his own three years of study, he was overtaken by newcomers who had only been learning for half a year. The genius faded; there was always a higher level of genius. He struggled painfully in the arena of competitive Go, putting in effort yet still failing to break through even in the Shanghai milieu. “The despair felt utterly real.” 

It was at this time that his homeroom teacher, recognizing his talent in mathematics, recommended that he join a contest training program. Seizing the opportunity, he proposed to his father that he shift his focus to math and leave Go behind. Looking back years later, he felt no regret, but rather relief. “Go taught me that talent exists in layers. Just when you think you’re good, there will always be someone better.” These early experiences with success and failure went on to shape his understanding of competition and personal limits. 

His journey with mathematics followed a similar pattern. In middle school, he solved problems intuitively, reveling in the romantic thrill of “individual brilliance.” But after entering the science track at Shanghai High School, he encountered a completely different approach: high-intensity, systematic, and built on rigorous procedure. The pace was relentless—the entire three-year high school math curriculum was compressed into a single year, followed by intensive practice for the college entrance exam. His physics teacher used calculus to explain concepts, leaving Liang utterly bewildered. 

On his first exam, he ranked in the bottom five out of forty-five students. While others played soccer in the afternoon, he stayed behind to grind through practice problems. Yet after three months of effort, he still failed his tests and remained at the bottom. What puzzled him most was how those who spent their days on the field could casually score in the nineties. It was only later that he understood: it wasn’t a matter of effort but of mindset. “In that system, intuition was useless. You had to operate by their logic.” 

After being reassigned to a regular class in his final year of high school, he scored over 140 out of 150 on his first math exam. Although encouraged by the result, he also felt a sense of absurdity: “What was all that suffering for in the previous two years?” That extreme experience—of having been both the best and the worst—became a profound resource in his later reflections on education and human nature.

The Fudan Years: Self-Enlightenment Between Freedom and Confusion

After freeing himself from the constraints of mathematics, he achieved outstanding results in the college entrance examination through relentless practice—especially in chemistry, where he had memorized nearly every challenging problem available on the market. In the end, his choice to major in economics was almost accidental: “I detested math and science, yet the options in humanities were limited. Economics accepted students from both streams, and the cutoff score was relatively low.”

Upon entering Fudan University in 1998, he experienced unprecedented freedom. He spent large amounts of time immersed in the library and various internet forums. At the time, the internet was still without the Great Firewall，Google had just entered China, and Yahoo was at its peak. More importantly, there were intellectual platforms that are almost unimaginable today—websites that aggregated articles from publications like Dushu [读书 Reading], Shucheng [书城 Book City], and Wanxiang [万象 Panorama], featuring thinkers such as Qin Hui, Gan Yang, Wang Hui, Zhu Xueqin, and Xu Youyu … Perspectives from scholars across the board were placed side by side for comparison and exploration. 

One site, in particular, called The Realm of Ideas [思想的境界], profoundly influenced him in those early days. It collected works from both left- and right-wing scholars—several articles from each—allowing readers to grasp the essence of their views after just a few pieces. He described that period as “suddenly facing a feast after a long intellectual famine.” Although the overall landscape remained unclear, he followed clues excitedly—chasing references from online articles and booklists all the way to the library’s dedicated collections. 

“I was basically self-taught,” he admitted. “The influence of my teachers was probably no greater than that of a single lecture.” Thus, the construction of his intellectual world was almost entirely an independent endeavor during these years.

The Dupin Era: The Beginning and End of a Public Life 

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 2002, Liang was reluctant to enter the workforce, yet uncertain about his future path. He later met economist Wang Dingding, who invited him to Hangzhou to assist with research while preparing to study abroad. However, owing to his low GRE scores, his plans to go overseas fell through. In 2004, Wang urged him to stop delaying and introduced him to two professors from Fudan University: Zhang Rulun from the Department of Philosophy and Wei Sen from the Department of Economics. Liang decided to return to Shanghai to prepare for the graduate entrance exam, and, in 2005, he was admitted to the School of Economics at Fudan.

That same year, he co-founded the journal Dupin [读品] with a group of friends—including Cheng Qing, Wang Xiaoyu, Li Huafang, Nie Riming, and Zhou Mingzhi. It was a fully independent e-zine, distributed via email groups in PDF format. With no funding, editorial discussions took place over MSN, layout was done in-house, and contributors were mostly friends or young scholars they recruited. “The content covered everything—politics, economics, literature, and art,” Liang recalled. They experimented with thematic issues but soon found that open submissions brought more vitality. Zhang Dinghao’s essays, later included in his book Since I Have Already Seen You, My Lord [既见君子], first appeared in Dupin. “No publisher was willing to take it at the time. I thought it was excellent, so we published it ourselves.”

Starting in 2006, Dupin began hosting monthly lectures at Jifeng Bookstore [季风书店]. At first, members of the group served as speakers, but as its influence grew, figures like Liu Qing, Liang Wendao, Zhang Yihe, and Yang Kuisong were invited to speak. Liang Wendao’s talk drew a crowd of over two hundred; another event featuring He Weifang also sparked lively discussion. Yet as the environment gradually grew more restrictive, events were often shut down—for instance, a planned talk by Qin Hui was abruptly canceled, and Liang could only accompany him on a trip to Chongming Island instead.

Dupin operated without stable financial support, sustained largely by passion. “Publishers occasionally offered some backing, but it was very limited. When we invited scholars to speak, the most we could offer was a meal—almost no honorarium. Thankfully, no one minded.” 

In 2009, Liang went abroad and handed Dupin over to Zhou Mingzhi. She aspired to expand its scope and even invited international scholars like Peter Hessler and Michael Sandel, but by then conditions had become considerably more severe. With core members drifting apart, Dupin eventually ceased publication. Plans to publish the final issues as a collected volume through Jiangsu People’s Publishing House also fell through.

Journeys Afar: Australia, India, and the Real World

At the end of 2010, Liang went to Monash University in Australia for postdoctoral research. Life there moved at a relaxed pace: the workday started at 10 a.m., and the office emptied out by 3 p.m., with people often heading to the beach to enjoy the sun. He spent his time writing papers, reading, engaging in discussions, and attending lectures—under little pressure, yet perhaps too at ease. He didn’t focus deeply on his research projects, something he later felt rather guilty about toward his advisor. 

In Australia, he witnessed the remarkable breadth of knowledge among foreign scholars—they could speak fluently about India, Ethiopia, or Mexico, even if it wasn’t directly related to their research. He met an Indian scholar who was studying China; although his understanding may not have been particularly profound, he spoke with confidence and ease. Meanwhile, Liang, as a Chinese academic, knew almost nothing about India. 

This contrast spurred him to turn his attention to the broader world, especially the rising nations of Asia and the Global South. In the summer of 2012, he traveled to India for fieldwork with an Indian researcher and a French doctoral student. Although he had anticipated challenges, the reality far exceeded his expectations: fraud was rampant in Delhi, transportation was difficult, the infrastructure was underdeveloped, and it was common to see cows and goats roaming the streets. Public sanitation was poor, monkeys scrambled across university campuses, and frequent power outages even led to data loss. 

From Delhi to Kolkata, and then to Darjeeling, conditions gradually improved, yet the overall experience remained intensely challenging. Although the academic output was limited—only one paper in Chinese was published—Liang regarded the experience as invaluable. “No book can ever truly make you understand an Indian slum,” he reflected. “You have to see it for yourself.”

After Returning: Academia, the Public, and a Changing Media Landscape

In 2015, Liang formally joined Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Returning to a noticeably more restrictive cultural environment, he realized that platforms like Dupin could no longer be revived. The age of serious writing was waning, replaced by the rise of public WeChat accounts and a steady decline in cultural discernment, where the pursuit of “100,000+” reads and clickbait titles became widespread. Amid these shifts, he never launched his own public account and rarely shared anything on his social feed.

Seeking intellectual stimulation outside institutional confines and experimenting with new forms of practice, he participated in the Dinghaiqiao [定海桥] art project, opening himself to more non-mainstream forms of knowledge. This type of knowledge from the “city’s margins” was, in his words, “an important form of education—both for us and for our audience.” 

“Between 2015 and 2018, I was truly content—I wasn’t fixated on publishing papers or chasing professional titles but devoted significant energy to Dinghaiqiao. After 2019, things clearly got tighter. Then the pandemic arrived, and everything changed.”

At the end of 2018, at the invitation of Liang Wendao, he recorded an economics program for Seeing Ideals [看理想]. “I never actively pursue these opportunities—the vast majority of writing invitations and events come to me,” he remarked. Although he resisted the culture of paid knowledge and remained skeptical of the podcast medium, he gradually adapted to this new mode of working, attempting to find a foothold for public engagement within an increasingly constrained society. Being an independent content creator in the declining podcast industry perhaps amounted to another form of column writing—only more subject to audience preferences. 

Reflecting on Dupin and podcasting, he observed that the nature of public discourse had subtly transformed. He never sought the spotlight, preferring to be recognized first and foremost as a scholar, with public engagement as only a secondary role. To capitalize on popular interest, media outlets often framed him as an “expert on pensions and social security,” but he openly admitted he had neither interest nor expertise in these topics. 

“I’ve always been more drawn to theory and ideas. Practical knowledge is important, of course, but it doesn’t need to be packaged as ‘premium content.’” 

To him, real-world experience remained indispensable. “It was only after going to Australia and India that I truly understood the distance between books and reality.” Just as his involvement in Dinghaiqiao underscored the value of grounded practice, he hopes his readers and students will learn to integrate theory with reality—and turn their attention to everyday issues in a broader world.

Travel, Memory, and the Road Ahead 

In the wake of the pandemic, with international exchange largely hindered, he felt a stronger urge to travel. “There are places I must see before it’s too late, like South America. India is now out of reach … The years from 2010 to 2020 really were a window that suddenly opened and then closed.”

Yet some experiences demand that you be there in person. He plans to continue his research on South America and has already begun teaching himself Spanish. Although aware that podcasting and similar industries are in decline, he still occasionally takes part in producing programs. 

Reflecting on the past, he describes himself as “not particularly proactive, yet fortunate enough to have caught each phase of positive interaction between knowledge and the public sphere.” From the early open internet to Dupin, then to Dinghaiqiao and podcasting, he has consistently sought to build bridges between academia and the public. Between an increasingly specialized academic system and increasingly shallow public discourse, he is still searching for a path befitting of an intellectual. 

Looking ahead, he will continue writing and researching, though he readily acknowledges fluctuations in motivation and mood. In an era of economic downturn, cultural restrictiveness, and scattered attention, sustaining knowledge-based public expression has grown more difficult. Yet he seems long accustomed to seeking balance within a shifting world—never abandoning scholarly rigor, nor losing touch with reality.

THE INTERVIEWEE

THE INTERVIEWER