Even Fighting Has a History Worth Reading | Some Good Books

Over the National Day holiday we asked eight young writers to recommend the books they rate. Each has made a name in their own field and likes to share what they learn. This is the fifth, Bo Qiao.

It's time to recommend books again.

This time last year, QDaily asked some of the more interesting people behind the big accounts on Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu to recommend books. Among them were Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Guokr founder Ji Shisan, Zhang Wei, who runs the WeChat official account "Shixiang", Wu Miao, who runs the WeChat official account "Leviathan", and screenwriter Shi Hang. The brief then was simple: recommend a book from the past year that you think is good. It might help you in your work, or it might just be good. Chinese or English, either way.

This year we have changed the format slightly.

In any era, the expert reader is a scarce resource. What such readers say about a book can shape what the rest of us choose to read, and the criticism itself can be worth reading as a book — Tony Judt's Reappraisals, for instance.

Not all of our writers brood over the twentieth century the way Judt does, of course. They are younger, livelier and sharp-eyed, and none of them writes for a living. Each carries some weight in their own field, and each likes to share what they learn.

We wanted to introduce them to you through a book list plus a long review, as a small guide to the small business of reading.

Because everyone's experience differs, the books and the reviews differ in style too, and working out why is half the pleasure. From October 1 to October 8 we will publish one writer's list and review each day. We hope you find them useful. If you know a good expert reader, tell us in the comments — you may see their piece here before long.

Here is the fifth, Bo Qiao

Bo Qiao works in the film industry. He trained in a less-taught language and in sociology, concentrating on the sociology of law and social change, and he is a devotee of classical music, history, art history and philology. Outside his job he writes book reviews, music criticism and academic pieces for the press and for scholarly journals, and he translates. His list mixes film, sociology and classical music — a rich spread.

Book Recommendations

By Bo Qiao

Understanding Movies**** (12th edition, full-color illustrated)****

Author: Louis Giannetti (US)

Translator: Peggy Chiao

Publisher: Beijing United Publishing Co. · Houlang Publishing Co.

Publication date: September 2016

Film may be the fastest-growing market for cultural consumption in China over the past dozen years, rising from the bleak years when the annual box office fell short of 1 billion yuan to today's bold march on 50 billion. One question, though, has never changed: why are so many Chinese films so bad? Audiences used to share a diagnosis — Chinese directors cannot tell a story properly — and then go a step further: the screenwriters behind those bad films are simply hopeless.

In truth, a story works for reasons that go well beyond whether the screenwriter plotted it soundly, brilliantly, with twist upon twist. What we enjoy also comes from countless other quarters: cinematography and editing, costume and production design, acting and sound mixing. But for anyone who wants to know film more deeply, the question of how each department makes a film good is genuinely hard. Every trade has its own craft, and getting a grip on every facet of a film is no small feat.

Understanding Movies goes a long way toward helping film lovers with some ambition actually understand movies. The book runs to twelve chapters. The first eleven take up cinematography, mise-en-scène, movement, editing, sound, acting and the rest, and take apart, one by one, the things that make a film good: how Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon used a moving camera to catch fight choreography as graceful as dance; why Nolan's Batman is full of odd compositions that leave audiences puzzled; what the casting director contributed to big-mouthed Julia Roberts's Oscar for Best Actress… Then, in the final chapter, the author turns all eleven of those ways of seeing on a single classic, Citizen Kane. Reading it feels like an anatomy class: first the careful dissection, part by part, then a full demonstration of how the whole system works.

The new 12th edition is printed in full color, which ends the embarrassment of earlier editions, where nearly every still was black and white. In the chapters on cinematography, acting and drama especially, stills as vivid as the day they were shot restore the clips whole. Reading a film book on paper, we no longer have to imagine the color and the light for ourselves; this edition shows us every nuance directly.

The Big Picture: The New Logic of Money and Power in Hollywood

Author: Edward Jay Epstein (US)

Translator: Song Weihang

Publisher: Imaginist | Taihai Publishing House

Publication date: June 2016

Books about film tend to fall into two camps. Some take the films themselves as the subject — director interviews, actor biographies, film history, studies of a genre. Others take the craft — screenwriting technique, lighting and camera work, the principles of editing… Books about the film industry and its history are rarer, though the good ones are very good: Down and Dirty Pictures, on the independent film movement and Miramax, or Exploiting Hollywood, which also looks at the American industry through the lens of independent film. Edward Jay Epstein's recently published The Big Picture helps us understand the more mainstream part of that industry.

The Big Picture is organized by theme rather than chronology: six sections, 30 pieces, each on one small subject. "The DVD Revolution" traces in fine detail how the DVD went from a format the studios resisted to their best money-maker; "Hollywood's Big Six" tells the story of the alliances and rivalries among the early studios in just 15 pages. Epstein is a walking encyclopedia — gossip, anecdotes and odd bits of lore come to hand as if he kept them in his pocket. Even a dry subject glitters when he tells it.

Epstein himself is a curious figure. He took a PhD in political science at Harvard and taught for three years at Harvard, MIT and UCLA, then quit academia and settled into a writer's life at home in New York. He was already a bestselling author while doing his master's at Cornell; his book on the Kennedy assassination set off a furious argument. Once writing became his profession, he played to his strength and took one strong pen across film, politics and the Cold War. Besides this book, he published The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies in 2010 — a title that tells you at once it is another dig into Hollywood's foundations.

The Confucian-Legalist State****:******A New Theory of Chinese History

Author: Dingxin Zhao

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Publication date: November 2015

When Dingxin Zhao's The Eastern Zhou Wars and the Birth of the Confucian-Legalist State came out in China in 2006, it caused no great storm, but his attempt to read Chinese history anew through sociology was genuinely fresh. Chinese historians ignored it as a body; the few who said anything mostly attacked it, above all because a good deal of its historical material and factual claims would not bear scrutiny. Sociologists, on the other hand, praised it warmly, particularly Zhao's habit of measuring "state capacity" along several dimensions — geographic distance, how often states formed alliances, how often they went to war — and using that measure to reread the rival powers of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. For the study of Chinese history it really did open a new path.

The 2015 The Confucian-Legalist State: A New Theory of Chinese History, from Oxford University Press, amounts to a thoroughly upgraded version of the earlier book. A Chinese edition is due from Zhejiang University Press at the end of 2016, and it should touch off a major argument among sociologists and historians. The English is superb in its own right, though, and readers may as well get there first.

The new book goes much further than its predecessor in both depth and range — the 2006 volume is in effect a draft of what are now chapters two through nine. Working as a social scientist, Zhao reads the whole trajectory of the "state" in Chinese history through politics, the military, the economy and ideology, folding in environment, ecology, technology and forms of social organization. With the rise of the new cultural history and the new social history, environmental history, ecological history and the history of technology have flourished in recent years; Zhao takes many of their findings and methods and fits them into a systematic historical frame, then uses that frame on the broader terrain of political and social history. The result is full of novel claims that, on the whole, still hold together. Seen through sociology, Chinese history from the Spring and Autumn period through the Qin and Han and on down to the late Qing looks different. The events are the same events, but behind the political contest of winners and losers and the turnover of dynasties, new lines of cause and effect appear among stories and concepts we thought we already knew by heart.

The idea that China's rulers "used Huang-Lao thought within while displaying Confucianism without" is hardly new. Zhao's achievement is to turn that mechanism into an explanation for a long list of puzzles across two thousand years. Why was the Qin so quickly replaced by the Han? Why did the northern nomads and the Han regimes of the south settle into a long tug of war? Why did the School of Mind reach its height in the late Ming and then fail to develop further? Why did capitalism not emerge in China? Why did China never produce the public space and civil society of Western local self-government? To carry a single macro-theory across so long a stretch of history and still keep it broadly consistent is itself a fine piece of dancing on a knife's edge.

The Burden of Female Talent****:****The Poet Li Qingzhao and Her History in China

Author: Ronald Egan

Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center

Publication date: February 2014

Western sinology on Chinese literature has been gaining ground in China lately. Besides Stephen Owen's early books on Tang poetry, both The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature and The Columbia History of Chinese Literature have appeared here in the past few years. Plenty of Chinese scholars still sneer at the mistakes foreign scholars make in Chinese literary history, but overseas sinologists clearly offer us an angle of our own scholarship cannot. Both histories recruited the field's heaviest hitters to write chapters within their own specialisms. The Cambridge volume has been received well; the Columbia volume has been savaged — Martin Kern of Princeton and Robert E. Hegel of Washington University, both contributors to the former, went so far as to publish a 21-page article attacking it. A few scholars, however, were asked to write for both. To be invited by two works so different in style, format and readership marks a scholar out as a leader in the field, and one of those scholars is Ronald Egan of Stanford, a specialist in Song literature.

Egan's The Burden of Female Talent, published in 2014, exists so far only in English (though it can be found online); a Chinese edition is said to be coming from Shanghai Classics Publishing House at the end of the year. Li Qingzhao's importance to Song literature needs no argument. The scholarship on her may not match the thousand commentaries on Du Fu or the five hundred on Han Yu, but it is vast all the same. Her surviving work, meanwhile, is small, and every generation of scholars has turned the existing texts over and read them to the bone. For a Western scholar to find anything new to say is exceptionally hard.

Egan manages it anyway, and with a good many insights. Take one. Scholars and ordinary readers alike have always read Li Qingzhao's ci as a record of her own life; both interpretation and dating treat the poems as primary evidence for her biography. But most Song ci were written in borrowed situations and borrowed voices, women's voices above all. Men routinely sang their sorrows as a wife pining in her spring chamber or as a courtesan singer, and because we know the author was a man, we take it for granted that the poem is not his life. With Li Qingzhao the genders match, and readers lose their grip on the line between invention and fact.

Then there is her "happy" marriage to Zhao Mingcheng and her later remarriage and divorce, long a focus of attention — or rather, of gossip. For a long stretch, Ming and Qing scholars, working from the moral and gender assumptions of their day and anxious to keep her image spotless, flatly denied that she had remarried at all, and were willing to doctor sources and ignore inconvenient evidence to do it. How her marriages were understood has in turn shaped how her poetry is read. Egan's research lays out a clear reception history: the Li Qingzhao we know may not be the gifted woman of the school textbook and the stereotype. She has richer, bolder, tougher sides than that.

Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory

Author: Randall Collins (US)

Translator: Liu Ran

Publisher: Peking University Press

Publication date: June 2016

Violence is probably the thickest book on this list, and its subject looks the weightiest, yet reading it is a pleasure throughout — because, to put it crudely, this is a book about fighting.

Fighting on a battlefield, racial conflict on an American street, a brawl at a sporting event: we are used to thinking about all of it from a great height — ethnicity, gender, class, nation, the gap between rich and poor. Randall Collins, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, comes at violence from close up instead. Those large social conflicts are real, he says, but they do not have to produce violence. America's racial problem has never gone away, yet set against the hundreds of millions of everyday encounters between individuals of different groups, violence between Black and white people is in fact not that common.

What we need to understand violence, in Collins's view, is the mechanism by which a particular act of violence happens in a particular situation. His research finds that in the moment before violence breaks out, the dominant emotion is not only anger but also an unavoidable tension and fear, and that countless latent acts of violence sit forever on the edge of eruption, held there by that fear, and never erupt. Once enough conditions line up, though, violence becomes hard to avoid: a crowd gathers and eggs the fighters on; rules and institutions apply pressure, as orders and punishments do on a battlefield; one side holds an overwhelming advantage, as in school bullying; or a moral holiday opens a vacuum, as it does when people loot and burn during a city riot. Collins's key addition is emotional entrainment: when the emotional rhythms of a latent conflict fall completely into sync, one side's readiness for violence is drawn out to its limit, and the attacker overcomes his own fear and tension and carries the act all the way through.

Chapter Three, "Forward Panic," revisits the unimaginable violence of the Nanjing Massacre through the same micro-sociological lens. Collins explains the mechanisms behind what the Japanese army did in Nanjing from an almost entirely new angle, using the idea of the moral holiday to account for why the killing eventually ran out of all control. For this writer, a native of Nanjing, the chapter is harrowing to read and, at the same time, pushes one to think harder about how violence comes about.

Book Review

Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos

Author: Izabela Wagner

Translator: Huang Yanning

Publisher: East China Normal University Press

Publication date: June 2016

From Prodigy to Master: How a Soloist Is Made

By Bo Qiao

Classical music may be the field where prodigies cluster most thickly. On television, or at some small public event, the children always look faintly bewildered — until they sit down at the piano or pick up a violin, and their fingers start to fly. After a rough but astonishingly quick passage of Mozart or Paganini, the audience erupts, as though it had just witnessed the birth of another Kissin or Menuhin. At which point the parents are brought on stage to set out, at patient length, the following, including but not limited to:

1. How fiendishly hard the piece we just heard is;

2. That the prodigy loved music before learning to speak;

3. That the prodigy could pick out melodies with no teacher at all, very young;

4. How shocked and impressed the professional teachers were;

5. How unwilling the parents were to let such a gift go to waste…

Same Prodigy, Different Life

This is not a Chinese phenomenon. European and American television carries the same prodigy stories. But think back, and most of those children, hailed as the kind of talent who comes along once in decades, end up buried in old videotape. We cannot recall their faces or their names — only a faint sense of having once heard some legend about a prodigy. Turn around, and there is always a new one on television, with the same dazed look, the same flying fingers, sometimes even the same repertoire.

When we talk about performers who have made it, we fall into an illusion: we assume the masters were already unrepeatable talents as children. We forget conveniently, because plenty of other "unrepeatable" talents were once on every media platform and we chose to forget them. Those briefly famous prodigies became local music teachers, or picked up odd small engagements, or turned up as filler on a variety show, and some left the profession altogether.

How many of them become a Lang Lang, a Kissin, an Itzhak Perlman? What must those raw prodigies go through to grow into soloists? How many are shot down on the road from prodigy to master? What actually happens to the ones who fail? Why are there so many cautionary tales of talent that comes to nothing? Does extraordinary musical gift plus punishing practice really guarantee a place on the classical world's star stage?

Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos, an ethnography by the Polish sociologist Izabela Wagner, may give us the panorama of that journey from prodigy to master.

The Professional Child Musician: A Closed World

Across six countries, Wagner interviewed 90 children training to become violin soloists, ran a statistical analysis of 339 students who entered competitions, collected teaching records from more than 40 teachers, and conducted sociological — more precisely anthropological — participant observation. From this she follows the violin student's whole arc: from schoolchild, to professional student deaf to everything outside the practice room, to a career that ends either in the spotlight or in the crowd.

Professional music education is a closed world. Millions of children take up an instrument in China every year, but the training aimed at a performing career remains invisible to outsiders. One reason is the cost of entry: parents must put in enormous time and money, and supervise and sit through practice besides. Most parents, who want their child to acquire a little artistic feeling and take pleasure in it, never go far in.

The other reason is that the world is small and highly specialized, and everyone in it — teachers, parents, children — faces a steady supply of prejudice (the notion that only students who can't handle academic subjects go into the arts), unwritten rules (competitions fixed behind the scenes) and silent rivalry (students against students, teachers against teachers for students). So they close up in front of outsiders as a form of self-protection: partly to meet prejudice with silence, partly because breaking the trade's private rules would wreck a career.

Wagner plays the piano herself and is the mother of a violin soloist. That gave her both a view of how the solo world works and a felt knowledge of the secrets outsiders half hear and half believe. Participant observation became her sharpest tool. She could watch closely: how teacher and student behave toward each other in a lesson; the different bars teachers set for taking on a pupil; the odd calculations parents make in choosing a teacher; the open and hidden struggles among contestants; the hints teachers drop to parents; how one fabulously expensive violin passes from soloist to soloist.

Taking the child's development as her spine, Wagner shows the relationships — simple and complicated at once — between the student and parents, teachers, classmates and the outside world at each stage. We watch these apparent favorites of heaven make a small local name, survive brutal rounds of elimination, shuttle between masterclasses, and finally arrive at a modest reputation as a soloist by way of competitions, an instrument worth a fortune, a teacher running interference at the contest, parents' connections, constant travel, and, most important of all, that damnable thing, luck.

What Ethnography Sees, and What It Misses

Three things about the book are worth noting academically. First, this is plainly a study of the life course, and such work is usually done quantitatively, because life-course research normally follows a group and needs a large enough sample to trace, over years, how different variables bend a living person's path. Qualitative work yields better interviews and more facets, but the sample is small and stops being representative.

Wagner's unusual position as a musician's parent, and her years of watching the question, let her meet a great many young players and people at every rung of the "industry chain." Her double identity also let her produce, again and again, field notes of a quality most researchers could not hope for. When a teacher went over her child's progress with her, Wagner the mother asked, in earnest, how to keep improving, whether to raise the hours of practice. Wagner the sociologist was watching the same conversation: the teacher's tone and manner, what parents worry about, how the teacher feeds back to them. That firsthand experience goes a long way toward covering the fatal weakness of a thin sample.

Second, the book was translated from a series of Wagner's papers. An English Producing Excellence came out last year from Rutgers University Press, but the Chinese edition is not a translation of it. Assembled from the papers, the Chinese version is a little baggy in structure and keeps far more live detail and vivid description.

Perhaps because of what ethnography is, the thick description it chases has here displaced the theoretical inquiry of a conventional social-science book. Wagner explains her methodology only briefly at the end, and the explanation strikes me as thin. Ethnography did carry from birth a certain revolt against social science's excessive appetite for theory, yet the musical apprenticeship Wagner describes leaves plenty of room for theory: symbolic interaction in particular settings, interaction ritual chains at the micro level — the student's training would illuminate both. But what is lost on one side is gained on the other. Precisely because the book refuses the theoretical tangle, it reads far better as ethnography.

Finally, Wagner leans a bit too heavily on a handful of individual books and memoirs. In a life-course study already short of samples, drawing on so narrow a range of sources when discussing teaching lineages is a pity.

The road to the elite is cruel. We like to describe the High Arts world that classical music stands for as noble, refined, excellent, perfect, generous of spirit, and behind it sits the same calculation, unfairness, insinuation, narrowness and trading of favors as anywhere else. Wagner's book does not set out to expose the darkness and squalor behind the music world. What matters more to her is showing how the profession of the classical soloist is organized and how it runs: hidebound and yet moving with the times, chaotic and yet a world unto itself, full of people who got in through connections and yet now and then favoring the strongest. In a way, it is exactly that ambiguity, that back-and-forth, that uncertainty, which makes the ethnography so good.

(This article first appeared in the Beijing News Book Review Weekly on August 20, 2016, with additions.)

Cover image from: doubanio