From Public Intellectual to Running a Business Show: Leung Man-tao on What's on His Mind

Leung Man-tao, now running a startup with a band of arty middle-aged friends, is not without contradictions, though he carries them very calmly.

"I say my ultimate goal is to become a Buddha. To you that sounds laughable. I don't like to talk about it."

Leung Man-tao is 45 this year. He leans slightly forward as he talks. Just before sitting down with QDaily, he had finished a trip through Germany with his sister. German towns differ a great deal and lie far apart, so they drove, spending one night in one town and moving on to the next the following day. "But in the end my sister found me annoying. Every new place I went, I treated it like a field trip rather than a holiday. I'd read, write, dig into the origins of every sight, as if I always had to be doing something."

Between travel and short retreats, Leung gives himself nearly 20 days off a year, during which no one can reach him. To many people in mainland China, where the cultural and creative industries are only just getting started, he is a cultural star from Hong Kong. People are curious about his family life, what he earns hosting shows, even his views on events in Hong Kong.

The last time he made the news was when he left Phoenix Television. After leaving, he teamed up with a group of "arty older men" on a cultural video program. Before that he had hosted Phoenix's Open Book in Eight Minutes (《开卷八分钟》). In that program, which ran for eight years, Leung introduced one book to viewers every day in eight minutes. Yet he did not know when it was taken off the air. He had recorded episodes in advance and was traveling in Antarctica, checking his phone only once every few days, when a text from a colleague arrived: "Open Book has been cancelled. The bosses said to tell you when you're back from your trip."

Of course, nobody ever formally told him afterward, but by then it no longer mattered. He had already left Phoenix, and Open Book was being hosted in rotation by him and a few friends. "Around last year I began to sense that public television no longer had room for niche content. Cultural programs on TV, once so glamorous, were being squeezed out and had grown stale."

In early 2014, Liu Ruilin, editor-in-chief of Imaginist, suggested to Leung that they make a video program together. She wanted to put Imaginist's existing roster of authors to use, but the format of the program, company registration and partners had not been worked out. Mainland video sites are fiercely competitive, and online programs are not scheduled in a linear lineup the way television is; they are organized by category. The upside is that video sites serve audiences for particular kinds of content, and the more precisely targeted the niche audience, the more loyal it is, and the more likely it is to pay for that content. By the end of the year, Leung felt the logic held up. He left Phoenix and put more of his energy into developing the new program.

Figures from the cultural world come and go from a three-story building at the far end of the Hepingli chemical industry compound. This is the office of Guangxi Normal University Press's Beijing Beibeite Publishing Company, which became a major force in publishing a few years ago when it launched the Imaginist brand. Lung Ying-tai's Watching You Go and Yang Kuisong's Revolution both set off public debate, and Chai Jing's Seeing was a publishing phenomenon.

Leung's collaboration with Imaginist began six years ago. Besides publishing books, he took part in Imaginist's salons. After deciding to make a video program, they kept debating its form. Then in June this year the cultural program Looking at Ideals (《看理想》) went online on Youku. Leung Man-tao, Chen Danqing and the Taiwanese music host Ma Shifang appear in it, covering reading, painting and music respectively. In Leung's own show, One Thousand and One Nights, he wanders the city in a black cloak and, to a somber score by music director Zhang Yadong, tells the camera the stories of Fitzgerald, Duras and Wang Guowei.

The three programs of Looking at Ideals — One Thousand and One Nights, Listen and Speak and Details — are released in seasons and have three different directors. Ma Shifang is a well-known music host in Taiwan but little known on the mainland, while Chen Danqing at least has a base of readers. In Leung's words, this lineup of two veterans and one newcomer is "our first introductory gift as a startup."

Ma Shifang's Listen and Speak

Ma Shifang's Listen and Speak

Chen Danqing was nervous while recording the first few episodes and only gradually found his footing. Compared with the other two hosts, both used to talk shows, he follows no set rules and comes with a built-in talent for wisecracks. In one episode he said, "I often tell people who study painting, people with advanced degrees: if you haven't produced a painting of your own by this age, you're finished."

Talking about Wang Ximeng, who painted A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains, he showed a fine feel for language: "I can clearly see a beautiful young man. He could never grow old; he was exactly eighteen. A few years older, a few years younger, and there would be no Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains. He seemed to know this, and a few years later he died."

In fact Chen Danqing was very nervous on camera. He was not used to speaking into thin air at a movie camera and kept looking down at his script. While the first few episodes were being recorded, Leung stood to one side saying, "Good, good, Teacher Chen, well said!" He kept encouraging him like that until Chen relaxed, and now and then even let slip a "damn it."

Chen Danqing's Details

To plan and produce the program, Imaginist set up a new company to handle the legal and copyright matters. But the new company hired few people, mostly video managers. Filming, animation and music were all done with outside teams. That is how Leung brought in the musician Zhang Yadong and the designer Lu Zhichang, who contributed plenty of ideas while the program's form was being worked out.

Leung now spends a third of each month in Beijing, and he wants to rent a place there. Of the three hosts, his program has the most episodes and the longest recording time, and moving from hotel to hotel is a bit of a hassle.

Under the original plan of three episodes a week, getting through all 1,001 episodes of One Thousand and One Nights would take seven years. He says he keeps a certain distance from many things and can step outside at any moment to see what he is doing. "Looking at Ideals is not about chasing what's current. What I think about is where we'll be two years from now." Telling us about his vision for the program, Leung touched on many other things too. Here is what he said.

Promotional poster for Details

Promotional poster for Leung Man-tao's One Thousand and One Nights

Still from One Thousand and One Nights

Q: QDaily

L: Leung Man-tao

Q: How long had you been thinking about leaving Phoenix Television?

L: I've left Phoenix twice, and my relationship with Phoenix has always been fairly loose. My first connection with Phoenix was around 1998, when I went on Qiangqiang Sanrenxing. The first episode was about Japanese anime. After two episodes, the show's producer asked whether I wanted to work with them long-term, because I didn't look the least bit nervous. Other people were adjusting the lights and fiddling with the cameras, and I wasn't nervous at all. Still, I never go back and watch a program once it's done. Later I made guest appearances on other shows too. Around 2000 I became a full-time employee, left in 2003 to run a radio station as its director, and returned to Phoenix in 2005, staying until I left last year.

In all those years at Phoenix I never really felt like a full-time employee, because I was rarely at the station. I basically finished a program and left. I didn't even know all the station's executives; some I only vaguely remember. I started planning the Looking at Ideals series last year, and that's when the idea of leaving took shape. By the time Open Book in Eight Minutes was cancelled I had actually already left, and several people were taking turns doing the program.

Q: So Fitzgerald and Wang Guowei matter more than the station's executives?

L: Of course, much more! No... what I mean is, the executives matter because they are real people in real life. I get along very well with some of them because the occasion arose. But I wouldn't go out of my way to seek such occasions.

Q: How long did you spend developing Looking at Ideals?

L: I've worked with Guangxi Normal University's Imaginist for more than six years, and our relationship goes deeper than the usual one between an author and a publisher. I used to help with the topics, planning and even copywriting for some of their salon events. It was probably the year before last that Liu Ruilin, their editor-in-chief, proposed making video together. I didn't think about it very seriously at the time. Last year I came to understand what it could be and started working out the program, its direction and how the company would run. What you see online now is only the first stage of the program, and it will keep changing.

Video is a very important vehicle and means of communication, but video isn't our ultimate goal. What we want to build in the end is a community around cultural knowledge. I want to know who is watching the program, what kind of people they are, and what their relationship to me is. Video is one channel for reaching those people, and there will be other channels and other tools. We have some plans, but I can't talk about them yet. I prefer to take things slowly.

First, we do have to make money. That's so the program can keep going. But making money isn't the biggest goal. The biggest goal is to build a visible community of people who love knowledge. There's great value in that community being seen, and it matters for China's cultural and creative industries as a whole. If this group becomes visible and solid, television stations will eventually make cultural programs again, and art-house films will have a clear audience to aim at in order to survive. That matters enormously, commercially and socially. We're taking a very long view of this.

From a business standpoint, China's market is changing. The old way of turning out cultural products quickly and cheaply may no longer be the only path. Grassroots self-media can still survive, but I think the era of fast money is mostly over, the next few years will be full of tests, and there will be a shakeout. Cultural programs need a long development cycle, and I don't like doing things too fast. The few episodes everyone has seen so far were all shot early this year. Our pace isn't fast: when I read from books in the programs I'm still wearing winter clothes, because those were recorded at the start of the year.

What I'm thinking about now is next year's camera work and techniques, and how much advertising we can sell.

We talked about business

Q: Do you consider yourself someone with a head for business?

L: I don't know. I haven't been put to the test yet. But I feel I have a sense for trends. Of course, that sense doesn't make me a trendsetter, and I have no interest in riding the waves.

I keep a distance from many things and can step outside at any moment to look at what I'm doing. Looking at Ideals is not about chasing what's current; it's about where we'll be two years from now.

Q: Do you discuss the programs' format with Tudou?

L: Of course. We're very close partners. Besides the three programs out now, more will follow. In the upcoming programs I want to move away from the "lecture" format. You can't just find some very cultured, very articulate people to talk at a camera and call that a "cultural program." When people praise the show now, they say "Teacher Chen Danqing speaks so well," so the emphasis falls on the "speaking." I want to change that.

A cultural program should have rich visual elements and should be driven by a concept.

Next season will still bring in masters who are heavyweights in their fields. "People" matter a great deal, at any time. But for the third stage of programs we will have a very new form. I hope what people remember is not "who presented that program" but "what that program was doing." I hope viewers remember its model.

Q: What kind of model? More segments and clearer game rules?

L: I can't say yet... Let me give an example. What shaped my idea of a "cultural program" was one I saw more than ten years ago. It came from a public broadcaster jointly run by Germany and France whose strength was cultural programming, and its programs opened my eyes. This one ran about an hour and a half and looked at the use of "hands" in cultures around the world: how hands were painted in the history of Western painting, the positions of the hands in ballet, how a sculptor holds a chisel, and so on. The series was fascinating.

You wouldn't remember who hosted it, but you would remember its idea, its concept, its model. I think those three things are what drive a cultural program. With a model like that, a program can travel across regions. Our programs can't do that yet. A Russian certainly wouldn't want to watch them, because he couldn't understand them.

People matter, but you can't depend entirely on people.

Q: Will a more complex format mean the team keeps growing?

L: That comes down to how you manage a team.

Any company that wants to create culture needs a core team. Beyond that, you can form alliances with other people. Future cultural programs will each cover a different professional field, so it shouldn't just be outsourcing one stage of production; there should be an alliance. Our relationship with music director Zhang Yadong, for example, is an alliance. I can't afford to hire him... there's no salary I could offer that would bring him on staff. But we are partners, we help each other, and we cooperate on projects. That's the approach I lean toward.

Q: Why were you, Chen Danqing and Ma Shifang the presenters for the first season? Because you know each other well?

L: I know a lot of people... (laughs) We needed people with some name recognition and some audience base to put out first. Chen Danqing and I have something of an audience, so the two of us were paired with one more: two veterans and one newcomer. Ma Shifang is less well known on the mainland. We chose Ma Shifang for music because he talks about Taiwanese pop, which gives the show a popular element, unlike classical music, which is too lofty. We also wanted a combination of "books, painting, music." Now each of the three of us takes one direction, and we hope that makes it a bit more artistic.

Q: How are shooting and editing divided up?

L: Chen Danqing's Details, my One Thousand and One Nights and Ma Shifang's Listen and Speak have three different directors. Ma Shifang is in Taiwan and has a Taiwanese crew, while Chen Danqing and I share a crew.

Q: Are you happy with advertising sales so far?

L: The programs have only been out for a month, and it's mainly Youku Tudou handling those talks. It seems they've already signed several advertisers. Advertisers are very practical; they want to see how people respond once your work is out. So far the audience is highly educated, high-income and highly loyal, and their comments are quite substantive. As a niche program, it meets the needs of certain kinds of clients. We aren't really like a fast-moving consumer product. That is both our weakness and what sets us apart, and in market terms our position is quite clear.

Q: So far, which stage has been the hardest?

L: The next stage will be harder. On one hand we need to consolidate the audience we have; on the other, new things will be launched.

But when we launch new things, it may be exactly when China's market is in very bad shape. The market is already very bad. News a few days ago, for example, said BMW's mainland sales fell for the first time in ten years. China's high-end luxury market is declining more and more steeply. And the market our programs correspond to may well be the very people who buy luxury goods.

In the past money came too easily. The bosses of those companies would say, "Man-tao, make a program, name your price and we'll pay it." Money was practically falling from the sky. That's no longer the case.

Third, video sites and programs are going through a reshuffle. Not many players with real strength and staying power will be left. Youku Tudou has been very sincere and has ideas; they know why they want to make this program. They are very focused, and for the next two or three years at least they will do well. In business you still need stable partners.

Q: Who is the audience now? How different is it from the audience of Open Book in Eight Minutes?

L: Quite different, I think. Television revenue is falling across the board, and by next year or the year after, China's provincial satellite channels will turn into traditional local propaganda outlets; no more than five or six will survive on a large scale. Television is in decline. For Open Book in Eight Minutes, we never had a clear report on its audience.

Our audience now does include students, but more of them are people five to ten years out of university.

Q: Will new people join in the next stage?

L: Yes. In the next stage Jia Zhangke will come. So will the architect Zhang Yonghe, and we'll invite well-known Taiwanese musicians to speak, as well as heavyweights from design and the arts.

We talked about making the programs

Q: I feel Chen Danqing's program gets more effort in post-production, while yours is rougher.

L: Right. One Thousand and One Nights was always a program focused more on the shoot itself. My program has the most episodes, three a week, so there isn't much time for post-production. And that was in fact our original plan: I wanted it to have a street-level style of talking about books, done in a single take.

From the development stage, we wanted to put great effort into the post-production of Chen Danqing's program. It was very carefully planned.

Chen Danqing didn't come up through broadcasting. He can't talk fluently to a camera lens, and he really does need a script. And since he talks about painting, his program needs a lot of visual material to support it. For about four-tenths of the time the camera is on him, so the remaining six-tenths has to be worked on in post. I don't like it when Chen Danqing talks about Guernica and a Guernica floats into the frame. I don't like that method, which everyone uses. So we used a lot of animation, explaining pictures with pictures, taking images apart and reassembling them. We put in a great deal of effort and ran quite a few experiments. In the episodes released so far, the animation isn't at its best yet; it will get better.

For my own program, the original idea was this: I get on a bus and talk about a book, and when I finish the book the bus reaches the stop and I get off. I wanted to do it that way because many of our viewers watch while commuting.

But the idea turned out to be unworkable, because the bus companies wouldn't let us on unless we filmed secretly, and then there'd be no point. We then applied to the subway, and they refused too. The final format is me talking as I walk along the street.

Q: Does shooting on the street cause trouble, like passersby turning to stare at you?

L: That's not trouble. It would be strange if they didn't look at all. We never cut those shots, unless someone too curious sticks their head in front of the camera and blocks the lens.

Our crew on site will say, "Please go ahead, it's fine." The people passing by are part of the scene. I want to bring those things in, and from here we'll add more elements and variations.

Q: I like watching the people passing by. The street corner where steamed buns are sold, the street cleaners, Beijing in winter... it feels like a group portrait of the city. Seeing a person talking about a book by the roadside gave me goosebumps. Not bad goosebumps, but a feeling I can't put into words.

L: Yes, yes, yes. We discussed this many times at the start, and a lot of people thought talking about books by the roadside was ridiculous. Design director Lu Zhichang and I kept talking it over: we shoot on the street because we want to bring in the city, society and its crowds. In fact we are taking a position, expressing how we feel about this city and what we think of it. A person talking about books in this place is clearly set apart from the city, yet is also inside it. What state is that? It's fun. There are many possibilities. Precisely because it's on the street, there is a lot of room for it to change and expand.

Next we can move around and travel across the country, and viewers will recognize landmarks in different regions. We may well have a live audience, or what would it feel like to cut between four cameras? We're still experimenting.

Q: Chen Danqing's program is a lot of fun.

L: Yes. He really dislikes being in the public eye, which I completely understand. But on the other hand, it's something that should be done. He has the ability and the opportunity to do it well, so he should make some sacrifice, but we try not to make that sacrifice too painful for him.

He's natural now and is gradually finding his groove. He and Ma Shifang each choose their own topics. Once the programs are recorded, what comes to us is mostly technical questions, like how to edit.

Chen Danqing is one of the few truly frank people I know. I'm lucky: I've met a few very close friends, and they are all astonishingly candid people. In person he really is that frank, that kind, a little naive. But in this day and age, his frankness is exactly what people can't understand. Their first reaction is that he's performing, that he's being pretentious. He truly loves art, and people think he's just showing off... I find that very interesting.

The best contrast is Dou Wentao. Wentao is one of the few candid people I know. In fact he is deeply interested in Chinese painting and calligraphy, spends most of his time at home reading and listening to music, and is a very quiet person. But on a program he talks about Uniqlo. He hides his love of art, and people think that's what being candid and down-to-earth means. In my view, Wentao is actually putting on a bit of false familiarity; he conceals the part of himself that loves art.

So in China today, genuine refinement is taken for pretense, while hiding your love of art passes for being down-to-earth. Funny.

We also talked about life

Q: What role does religion play in your life?

L: Now I go on retreat for more than twenty days a year. I cut off all my usual habits: no smoking, no eating after noon, no news or information of any kind. On retreat I usually get up very early. Practitioners in Myanmar, for example, rise at 3:30, and even where people get up later it's 5:30. After getting up, you spend the whole day on practice: watching the breath, doing various kinds of Buddhist insight meditation and self-reflection. There's no unease or fear at all.

Because watching your own emotions change is better than watching a movie.

As a believer, being a Buddhist is a very important part of who I am, and I hope to have more time for practice and reading scripture in the future. I've actually always wanted to become a monk, though for now that looks very difficult. Even if I can't, I hope to spend more time at home, living as a monk at home.

My family actually had a Catholic background, but I left Catholicism in high school. I wanted to study philosophy in junior high and kept at it through high school, until I could no longer persuade myself to accept a theistic religion, so I left the Church.

I came to Buddhism in the reverse order from other people. Others may ask a god to bring them peace and wealth, but Buddhism doesn't care about gods at all. I didn't study it in order to become a Buddhist; I came in through its method.

For anyone, putting yourself in another person's shoes doesn't come naturally. It takes work on yourself. You have to restrain and transform certain things in yourself. At the time I was curious about this kind of "inner work" and wanted to learn it. I wanted to work harder on myself. Reading books alone is no use for that kind of work; you need a method.

I chose Buddhism then because it has a practice tradition that has gone unbroken for 2,500 years. I studied philosophy, so I was drawn to systematic things. I studied Theravada Buddhism, also called the Hinayana, which is mostly practiced in Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and among the Dai people. Its method is quite concise and clear, and later I came to accept its whole philosophy and took refuge.

Q: You left Catholicism for Buddhism. Are you someone who has always needed religion?

L: Today people pursue religion for peace, health, wealth and freedom from the fear of death, but to a large extent religion exists to resolve a kind of crisis: the crisis of "how can I go on living as a person?"

When you reach the age I was then, around thirty, people assume you've already achieved something, and that's the most dangerous time. You get too used to the spotlight on you, used to flying first class to events, used to being called "Teacher Leung," used to earning that kind of money. It seems as if you have all these things, but what are they, really? What do they have to do with being a person? As a human being, I had not solved my fundamental problem at all.

In sixth grade I began wondering what life was for, and I've always been curious about philosophy. In my thirties, if I had kept going like that, I would have become worse. I'm not saying I'm so good now; I'm bad now too, and petty. But going on that way, I would have drifted even further from what I thought of myself as a child. To me that was a very serious crisis. If you want to call that crisis a religious need, you can.

I still haven't escaped that so-called crisis. It isn't that practice means I'm fine. All the way to today, it has felt like walking on thin ice at the edge of an abyss.

How could there be no crisis? You face it every day. I'm not someone with strong emotional reactions, but as a public figure I'm often criticized, and those criticisms contain deep misunderstandings. When criticized, you instinctively feel wronged, but to me, as long as even a trace of that feeling remains, it means I haven't yet arrived, haven't reached the Way.

Q: What kind of thin ice? For example, as you rode here today, what was on your mind? Is there a problem you can never get around?

L: That's hard to say... But the troubles of being human come down to three things: greed, anger and delusion. They are the source of all my problems. You may find it a bit funny when I say this: the ultimate purpose of studying Buddhism is to become a Buddha, and every Buddhist is in the end aiming to become a Buddha. What you learn is a kind of awareness. The moment you get angry, you immediately realize you're unhappy, and then you trace it to its root and see which of greed, anger or delusion you have fallen into.

Q: Do you still watch movies? Can you recommend a few that interest you?

L: Yes! How could I not? I love movies that much. One I liked recently is Hedi Schneider steckt fest (Hedi Schneider Is Stuck), the story of a woman who suddenly falls into depression. It's different from the German films we've known. The other is Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition. I've watched the first part, and there are six in all. I want to keep watching it through to the end.