Lan Xiaohuan: Looking Back, Moving Forward

For the third episode of the podcast Signal and Noise, we invited Lan Xiaohuan, a professor at CEIBS and author of Inside the Chinese State.

He's a bestselling author who says a million copies sold was pure accident. He's spent seven or eight years doing fieldwork but never rushes to "form opinions." He's an academic who never treats "scholar" as a boundary on his identity.

From the classroom to the field, he's carved out an unplanned path that pulses with vitality.

In this conversation, we discuss: In an age where anxiety is the default backdrop, how do individuals maintain perceptiveness and agency? When "planning" dominates our choices, do we miss out on life's accidents? And why do the most important things in life tend to happen unexpectedly?

After listening, may you too find your own rhythm of "looking back, moving forward" — and your own way of acting and living.

If anything resonates, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation that we found particularly illuminating, presented here in article form.

Enjoy

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Lan Xiaohuan: Since you work in investing, you're oriented toward the future. So let me ask something more fundamental: what's the point of pessimism?

I think caution is always necessary. If you invest without caution when you're optimistic, you're just waiting to blow up. Be careful and prudent in your decisions, but macro-level pessimism — I don't think it serves any purpose.

First, the world won't get worse because we're pessimistic, nor better because we're optimistic. We can't change the world. Second, assuming we can't change it, I genuinely don't see what purpose a pessimistic view of it serves.

Oasis: If pessimism is pointless, isn't that just burying your head in the sand?

Lan Xiaohuan: There's a Chinese idiom I find quite telling — qi ren you tian, "the man of Qi who worried the sky would fall." The mockery in that story is that this guy, paralyzed by fear that the heavens would collapse, did nothing. I'm simply saying: when it comes down to your actions, what actual impact does this kind of worry have on what you do?

I find it hard to imagine that as a Chinese person, you could escape China. It's like an enormous gravitational pull — wherever you go, you're still caught in its field. I'm extremely cautious about all kinds of things around me, but when it comes to the macro future, I simply don't hold pessimistic views. It's just a process, cyclical ups and downs.

Because if you're in investing, you surely understand cycles intimately. When you're pessimistic, there are actually many opportunities — valuations are low, borrowing costs are low. People are future-oriented, and actions taken now build capabilities for the future. The cost of building future capabilities is currently low. Everyone goes through cycles. Who isn't scared off during pessimistic times? Those who invest in the future then — they may find themselves ahead when the next upswing comes.

Lan Xiaohuan: Once social media became accessible, there was no closing that door. It's something that can't be shut. You realize people's anxiety, their irritability, all kinds of behaviors get reshaped by it. Faced with this torrent of information, you feel utterly helpless.

Simple example: your office has a dozen or so colleagues. You deal with them on Monday, it's the same people on Tuesday — there's a sense of stability. But if someone invented a machine that connected your brain directly to those dozen colleagues' brains, you'd lose your mind within half a day, because what's in their heads changes every minute.

Now you just sit here, and within an hour you know Beijing had a downpour, Russia had an earthquake, there was a shooting in New York... how much information is that in one hour? The exhaustion this creates — in that mental state, it's very hard to look at things positively.

Oasis: So social media is really what's driving this narrative.

Lan Xiaohuan: In the 1990s, besides the evening news, you had one newspaper a day, at most. Most people didn't even have access to a newspaper; they didn't know about so many things. But objectively speaking, were there fewer bad things back then?

Because reality is always a subjective projection. It's impossible for one person to know the state of 1.4 billion people — it's all projection in your mind. So these things projected into your mind... to put it pessimistically, this may never get better. Even if the economy improves, your anxiety, your emotions...

Oasis: They're actually unrelated to the economy, to facts.

Lan Xiaohuan: Already unrelated. How much does a bad economy really affect elementary or middle school students? But how do you explain their anxiety? If you say academic pressure, how do you explain American students' anxiety? One of the defining behavioral traits of adolescents is not communicating with parents — so how does parental transmission work? They go back to their rooms, open their phones, and it's all there. It's not parental transmission; it's social media. This is universal. No one escapes it.

Oasis: During those two years of running around doing fieldwork, what was the most memorable scene or experience?

Lan Xiaohuan: The first thing that springs to mind is that both industry and government work incredibly hard — constantly in meetings until one or two in the morning, endlessly meeting people, endlessly in meetings. Sometimes in hotel lobbies, lights turned off, cleaners out vacuuming carpets. Because there's another meeting the next day, there simply isn't time.

This is something you can't get from books, but it's not any single incident — it's quite normalized.

Lan Xiaohuan: There's a huge difference between reality and books. When you buy a book, you roughly know in advance what it's going to say, or at least what it's about.

But reality — if you don't go, you never know what will happen. Once you're there, things always turn out differently than you imagined. Maybe today everyone knows what a company does, but when you actually visit, meet different people, what they discuss varies — different ranks, different departments, all different.

But if you don't go, you never know, and you never know in advance what you'll learn.

Lan Xiaohuan: You travel a thousand, two thousand kilometers to get somewhere, and you only know this person's name — you have no idea what they think. Most of the time they're strangers. So doing this takes enormous time, completely different from sitting in an office writing or reading papers. But you also know that in the office, no amount of head-scratching will conjure up what might happen.

The trade-off becomes crucial.

So I eventually just decided: every opportunity I get, I take. Even if I'm reading on the road, catching up on other things — if I can get there, I go.

Oasis: You're giving yourself more opportunities to be "present."

Lan Xiaohuan: "Presence" is extremely important. Look at Inside the Chinese State — everything in that book is on paper. I didn't incorporate any private conversations between us; it's all public information or published works. But the book has a strong sense of being there, right?

Oasis: It even feels like chatting with you.

Lan Xiaohuan: You roughly know what's going on, write it down, then supplement with extensive references. Because social science has developed over so many years, anything you say, someone has surely said before. I'd check if anyone's addressed this content — of course someone has. Then you cite it, so if someone wants to dig deeper later, they can start from the references.

But no one would say: read all these references, then write something like this.

Oasis: On one hand, Inside the Chinese State is on Douban's top 100 bestsellers list, which is mostly classics from world history, with novels dominating in recent years. For a recent book, especially this kind of so-called macro study, making that list is extraordinarily difficult and rare.

So from that perspective, you've certainly achieved something.

Lan Xiaohuan: The book. The book achieved something.

Oasis: The book achieved something, and it surely brought you material and other benefits. But on the other hand, you don't emphasize this — it's not as if you were pursuing it.

Lan Xiaohuan: Accident.

We pulled in our editor; marketing budget was 2,000 RMB, that was the allocation. During the pandemic, what could you do? In 2021, group gatherings weren't allowed; you couldn't do bookstore promotions.

First print run: 10,000 copies. That was already giving me enormous face — normally it's three to five thousand, because books are a tough business. The 10,000 sold out in about three days. Then reprints, but the pace was controlled — they didn't dare print too many, because book inventory is real, solid cost. All understandable. But what I'm saying is this was completely unimaginable.

Lan Xiaohuan: I didn't do fieldwork to write this book. How would I have known I'd write a book? Without the pandemic, there'd be no book. I wrote that book 9–10 hours a day, for 9 months. Without being locked down during COVID, who has that kind of time? You wouldn't even have the thought. Just thinking about writing that long makes your scalp explode.

But there was genuinely nothing else to do — you couldn't do fieldwork, had no idea when it would end. The second half of 2020 was relatively normal, lots going on, but by then I was halfway through. A shame not to finish, so I gritted my teeth and pushed through, absolutely miserable.

Oasis: You see this as narrative, not rigid logic — all accident, right? Many scholars recognize this was accidental, but then continue performing as if it were rigid logic.

Lan Xiaohuan: I think this is actually rare. Take Yu Hua — he jokes "I live off To Live" right? He surely had no conception that it would sell like this for so long, and he's quite candid about it each time.

When facing yourself, you know much is accidental. I don't think acknowledging luck is humility, because luck factors into everything. Suppose I hadn't written this book — could I have survived to today as an ordinary teacher? Also luck. Your health, your safety, all of it. Having a functioning brain, being able to eat, being able to sleep at night — this is all luck, isn't it? Sleep problems plague many people, digestive issues plague many people, all kinds of problems plague countless people. That's just luck. What does this have to do with my effort? I can try hard to sleep and definitely fail.

So I think you have to acknowledge that luck plays a large part in daily life. In a sense, the luck of these everyday things is even greater than the luck of writing a book.

Oasis: Because (reading inspirational books) that's the positive side. I see you have another side — writing yourself a will every year.

Lan Xiaohuan: This genuinely makes you feel better. You do need to settle some matters. Traveling constantly for work — who knows what accident might happen? It has its functionality.

I discussed this with Li Dan. You have to imagine what the world looks like without you — writing a will, settling affairs. You know this abstractly, but without actually doing it, you can't enter that state, and you have to be completely serious. You can't write platitudes like "live life happily" — absolutely no鸡汤话 [chicken-soup sentimentality], no summing up of yourself as a person, no heirloom wisdom. It's genuinely settling matters, walking through the process — this is very helpful.

Oasis: Having done this for three or four years, has it yielded any personal insights?

Lan Xiaohuan: I think the writing process, finishing — it gives you a sense of lightness. But how much life revelation can it provide? What revelation? Whether you have revelations or not, you die, right? This is objectively true.

Like writing it on the morning of New Year's Day, feeling calm that afternoon, then plunging back into the mortal world the next day — living as one must. I don't think it has lasting effects. For lasting effects, you'd have to write every day.

Oasis: Then it becomes a meditation script, a mindfulness guide for yoga.

Actually, look — you accept this randomness, this helplessness. I made a small effort, but it doesn't last long anyway. I'll just go with the flow, so I might as well accept it, right?

Lan Xiaohuan: What choice do you have? You can't refuse and make it stop being this way.

Other people's stories are clear; your own is always pitch black — who knows? Just inch forward.