The baseless fear of wicked problems: The story of the man from Qi

By Tarjei Brekke, PhD student ERC-MidWay

Exploring the concept of sufficiency in China forces one’s feet to balance atop a crooked, rickety fence. On the one side, asking the everyperson on the street and in the teahouses about sustainability incites hour-long, sometimes heated, discussions about how the West and in particular the US only just started thinking about sustainability and climate change when China just began to grow. This sentiment is not without grounds, either, as expressed in the South China Morning Post (https://sc.mp/e3oyd?utm_source=copy-link&utm_campaign=3270808&utm_medium=share_widget) on the 18^th of July 2024 where they quote Barack Obama’s April 2010 statement to the Australian ABC: “If over a billion Chinese citizens have the same living patterns as Australians and Americans do right now, then all of us are in for a very miserable time, the planet just can’t sustain it”. The colonial gaze through which the European and North American politicians view the rising affluence of Chinese people is not lost on China. On the contrary, it would not surprise me if – as with how 2015 until, well, now has had some sort of Trump-related shenanigans on the front page – these sorts of blunders by Western politicians hellbent on car and capitalist determinism plasters front pages all over Chinese media. What is this – the consequences of a century or so of telling everybody in the world that your 200 square metre house, three cars, everyday meat-consumption, mass-consumerist lifestyle is the best way to live? Good grief!

On the other side of the fence, you have the opposite reaction: Dead silence. This one is arguably scarier than its neighbour, because up until this point in the conversation, you have been sitting there chatting, drinking tea, smiling and laughing. You feel confident – one might even suggest, as Norwegians say, that you have gotten a bit too warm in your shirt – so you decide to blurt it out: “So how about sustainability, huh?” In most cases that I have experienced so far, there is a pause. It varies in length, but it is always there. Up until now, responses to my other questions about salmon consumption, healthiness, practices – all of them have gone without a hitch. Then the pause passes – a small, polite smile has appeared in its presence and the lips part to say something to the effect of: “That’s… A bit of a tough question. (那。。。有点难说 Na… you dian nan shuo)”. The answers become shorter; the eyes dart around a bit more; maybe they pull up their phone for something. The interview was going so well, and now the fog that was broken after the first few minutes has settled once more.

At first it was suggested to me that sustainability (可持续性 kechixuxing) is simply too abstract. It’s not something normal people thing about – it’s not their word. It’s a word of scholarly debate and political speeches; the laobaixing, the regular old Mrs. Wang on the street, does not think with that word. Okay, I thought – then I won’t use that word then. I will ask about their approaches to balancing health, nature and animals with the demands of everyday life instead. However, I quickly realized that my switch quickly began to downplay a critical connotation of sustainability, which is the temporal aspect. Sustainability is a necessarily temporal term: it pertains to the use of resources now and in the future, so just asking people what they think about the healthiness of their meals right now is not enough. I try to ask them what the long-term plan is, what they think the impact of their diet is on the planet. Do they think about where the salmon comes from an the effects there? The pollution it creates? The climate gases expunged by air transport of fresh salmon from Norway to Shanghai?

That was when one of my interviewees told me a story, the story of the chengyu (idiom) 杞人忧天 (Qiren you tian). The story goes that in the historic state of Qi, there was a man who was absolutely terrified that the sky was going to fall on him. His fear disturbed him in his sleep and made him completely lose his appetite. His family was concerned for him and so sent for a learned scholar, who explained to the man through his vast knowledge of astronomy that there was nothing to be afraid of. The idiom Qiren you tian has thus come to mean groundless fear, blind anxiety. 

Had this interviewee only told the story for the sake of the story, it would have been just another snippet of cool Chinese cultural lore that I have had such a joy sponging up during my fieldwork here. The daunting context for the story, however, was that he was painting himself as the man from Qi. Up until now, he has possibly been the one interviewee who has opened up the most about his thoughts on sufficiency and sustainability, but on a somber note, he said that he would never talk about this with his friends and family. The questions were too big; the problems, were too massive. It wasn’t up to normal people to solve them. If he told his friends about these worries, they would ostracise him, claim he was seeing things. He would do the best that he could, which was to eat less meat and more vegetables (as well as a bunch of salmon, he said smilingly), but he would not discuss these issues with others.

I had a flashback back to an interview with a salesman from AKVA Group, a large aquaculture equipment manufacturer. He told me a story about one of his many trips to China during which he had tried to sell Scandinavian aquaculture technologies to Chinese fish farmers, and his Chinese colleague had told him: “I have been flipping through this catalogue more times than I can count, but I have to be honest with you: I can’t afford anything in this.” Now, this was not necessarily a statement claiming that he fiscally could not afford anything in the catalogue; rather, as the salesman surmised, in this particular instance of doing fish farming, he could not afford to buy such long-term equipment. 

Walking down the same street one year or even a few months apart in China feels wildly different. Shops close down and open up like the season’s flowers. Facades change on a dime. Signs are taken down and then re-erected in different colours and characters. In these tense political times, Norwegian commentators are quick to point out the inherent patience of the long-term planning of the CCP. Yet for these “normal people,” the time horizon might not extend beyond the next year – maybe not even the next month or even week. This is not to say that they necessarily live in fear and squalor, but it’s a draining way of life with long workdays, frequent overtime, pressure from expectations and cognitive dissonance. 

From the privileged position of a Norwegian, one where I have been conditioned since middle school to think in time horizons of ten years – to dream big and live carefree – sustainability is an everyday word that one can hardly avoid even if one wants to. And we still live like we have planets to spare! Truly, we are suffering from a baseless confidence in the End of History. If this man was the man from Qi for talking about sustainability, then let Norwegians be the people who opened their arms, a burger in one hand and tickets to Mallorca in the other, and invited Heaven to come crashing down. 

杞人忧天，挪人邀天。