Beyond *The Crowd*: Other Books That Explain How Groups Behave | Book Recommendations

Over the National Day holiday we asked eight young writers to recommend the books they think are worth reading. Each has made a name in their own field and likes sharing new knowledge and ideas. This is the sixth writer, Fang Kecheng.

It's time for book recommendations again.

This time last year, QDaily asked some of the more interesting people behind the big accounts on Weibo, WeChat and Zhihu to recommend us a batch of books. They included Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan, Guokr founder Ji Shisan, Zhang Wei, founder of the WeChat account "Shixiang", Wu Miao, founder of the WeChat account "Leviathan", and screenwriter Shi Hang. The invitation then was simple: recommend a book from the past year that you thought was good. It might have helped your career, or it might just be good. Chinese or English, no restriction.

This year we decided to change the format a little.

In any era, the professional reader is a scarce resource. What such people judge to be worth recommending, and how they review it, can be an important guide when we choose our own books — and sometimes the review itself is worth reading as a book, as with Tony Judt's Reappraisals.

The writers we've asked don't all brood over 20th-century history the way Judt does in that book. They are younger, more fun, sharp-eyed, and not writers by trade — but they carry some weight in their own fields and like sharing new knowledge and ideas.

We want to introduce them to you through a "book list plus long review" format, and give you a small guide to the small matter of reading.

Everyone's experience differs, so the books and the reviews differ in style too, and chewing over those differences is itself rather interesting. From October 1 to October 8 we will publish one writer's reading list and review each day, and we hope it's useful. If you know other good professional readers, leave a comment and tell us — you may soon see their piece here too.

This is the sixth, Fang Kecheng.

Fang Kecheng is a PhD candidate in communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a former reporter at Southern Weekly, and the founder of CNPolitics. He also started "News Lab," which provides professional information services for the media industry, and he writes mostly about news media and political communication — so most of the books he recommends fall into those two areas. Unlike the earlier writers, though, Fang Kecheng looks at human behavior through a sociological lens, which we hope you find useful.

Book Recommendations

By Fang Kecheng

Thinking the Twentieth Century: The Political Autobiography of Tony Judt

Authors: Tony Judt / Timothy Snyder

Translator: Su Guang'en

Publisher: Sanhui Books / CITIC Press

Publication date: February 2016

After Tony Judt — one of his era's major public intellectuals and historians — died in 2010, his work came into China one book at a time: Chinese editions of The Memory Chalet, Ill Fares the Land and Reappraisals appeared in succession. This year his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, was published in China too. He wrote it after he developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, the disease Stephen Hawking also had), in the form of a dialogue, with help from his friend Timothy Snyder. It is both Judt's own intellectual autobiography and a history of 20th-century thought.

Their conversation sparkles with intelligence and burns with passion. They use no notes and no references, yet seem to remember the contents of every book they have read, and they have something original to say about all manner of 20th-century questions. They discuss the effect of the First World War on intellectuals, why Marxism was especially popular in Catholic countries, the Nazi Holocaust, and Zionism. The main conflict of the 20th century, Judt argued, was not freedom against authoritarianism but how to define the role and work of the state.

Like his other books, Thinking the Twentieth Century shows both the wide picture and the small detail. It tells the history, and it tells the reader why that history still matters today.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World

Author: Mark Kurlansky

Translator: Hong Bing

Publisher: Democracy and Construction Press

Publication date: April 2016

In 1968 China was deep in the whirlpool of the Cultural Revolution, which looks like an isolated event inside one country. Seen globally, though, 1968 was the year the spirit of "revolution" caught fire again in country after country — in the United States, in France, even in Japan. The Little Red Book travelled the world, and although it was mostly misread and misunderstood, it did bear witness to that generation's passion and action.

It was a turbulent year, but one carrying hope. We are now almost 50 years from it, and we have drifted a long way from the spirit of the sixties. Reading that history again today leaves you rueful. As the author says in his introduction, "Writing this book took me back to that era, when people could speak their minds without fear of offending authority — and since then, too much truth has been buried and forgotten."

Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

Author: Gordon Mathews

Translator: Yang Yang

Publisher: East China Normal University Press

Publication date: November 2015

Five years ago, when the English edition of this book came out, it drew wide attention. Its author, Gordon Mathews, chairs the anthropology department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Mainland readers can now finally read it in simplified Chinese.

Chungking Mansions, in Tsim Sha Tsui, is known to most people through the film Chungking Express. It is a cheap place to stay, packed with traders, laborers, asylum seekers and backpackers from across Asia and Africa. Mathews calls it a central node of "low-end globalization," a sharp contrast with the "high-end" globalization that Central represents.

Anthropology's strength is that it can tell good stories. Through close, patient narration, the book lays out the tangled ties between the building's residents and the world's goods, money and ideas. It is so rich in detail that at times it reads almost like a practical handbook for "low-end globalizers." It also suggests a few ways to think about the social problems that borderless migration brings in a globalized world.

I Tasted the Flavor of Things Too Soon: Poems of Ishikawa Takuboku

Author: Ishikawa Takuboku

Translator: Zhou Zuoren

Publisher: Shanghai People's Publishing House

Publication date: May 2016

A literary young person who picks this book up in a bookstore will find the quiet cover design and the two short tanka on the back hard to resist: "You may call it sorrow, if you like — I tasted the flavor of things too soon." "I knew the sweetness of love before other people did, and I, who knew sorrow, grew old before them too."

Only after buying it and reading slowly do you find that Ishikawa Takuboku's tanka are not all laced with that same faint sadness and touch of philosophy. Much of the time he is a fidgety, nervous chatterbox, setting down what he sees and feels in the smallest detail: "Looking for a new mood, today I wander again into a street whose name I do not even know." "Pretending to sleep, forcing a yawn — why do I do this? Because I do not want anyone to notice what is on my mind." "I heard today that the unlucky widower is deep in an impure love affair." …

Reading these tanka is a strange experience, as if you were brought endlessly close to one sensitive mind. I cannot read the Japanese, but Zhou Zuoren's translation truly is a pleasure to read. It is a pity Ishikawa Takuboku died at only 26; otherwise I would gladly read more of his chatter.

Book Review

Communication and Social Influence (English edition)

Author: Gabriel Tarde

Publisher: Communication University of China Press

Publication date: May 2016

Le Bon, Overhyped; Tarde, Forgotten

By Fang Kecheng

A few books sell on and on in the Chinese market and are reprinted without end. Because their authors died at least 70 years ago, the works are out of copyright, so any publisher can step in for a share of the take, and dozens or even hundreds of different editions appear.

The model case is The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, by the French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon. In the first nine months of 2016 alone, at least six houses — Yilin Press, Peking University Press, Posts & Telecom Press, Beijing United Publishing, Beijing University of Technology Press and Modern Press — brought out new editions of The Crowd, a dizzying spread.

It is easy to see why the book is so popular in China. We have lived through eras of collective frenzy, we still watch "mobs" wreck things today, and the madness of the group is something we have felt in our own skin. Le Bon's diagnosis of that frenzy is simple and direct, with no barrier to understanding: the individual is rational, but inside a group he loses his reason. He is "not given to reasoning, yet eager to act," he "exaggerates his own feelings," he is "moved only by extreme emotion." Judgments this crisp and this confident can be picked up at once and used to explain whatever is happening nearby. Easy to learn, easy to apply.

The trouble is that a century of Western research on group behavior abandoned Le Bon's theory long ago. It is fair to say he holds no place in mainstream social psychology today. In a paper by Daniel J. Myers, a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, Le Bon's ideas about the crowd "have been thoroughly debunked" by later scholars. Myers's own work is on how social movements and collective action spread.

Think about it for a moment and the crudeness of Le Bon's theory — its unreasonableness, even — is easy to see. When we step from being an individual into being part of a group, does a switch from reason to unreason really take place? Isn't so sudden a transformation a bit too magical? Look back at the moments you spent inside a group: did you really become a mindless puppet, moved by other hands? Isn't this either-or of the rational and the deranged a bit too absolute?

Another French psychologist lived at the same time as Le Bon. His work on group behavior was forgotten by scholars for decades, and the public never heard of him at all. Over the past ten years or so, though, academics have dug his work out again, and today's professors are startled to find that the insights he set down more than a hundred years ago can still teach us a great deal.

His name was Gabriel Tarde. Tarde and Le Bon both lived in the France of the late 19th century, when society was going through enormous change and unrest. The Third Republic, founded in 1870, had firmly established universal suffrage — for male citizens. Banks and the stock market crashed in 1882. The Panama Scandal, a case of money buying power, broke in 1892. Relations with Germany stayed tense, and bombings and assassinations happened from time to time. The whole of society lived in an atmosphere of unprecedented activity shot through with dread, and the public mood turned impulsive and short-tempered.

Both men were watching the surging collective action in that turbulent society. But where Le Bon called the gathering a "crowd," a mob, Tarde called it "the public."

Mob and public both act collectively, but for different reasons. The first acts because people lose their reason inside the group and follow along blindly, carried by something close to religious feeling. The second acts because the individuals in the group talk and argue with one another, and so come to share the same appetite for taking part, and become a community.

Tarde stressed conversation and argument because he had seen something new appear in French society: the mass newspaper.

A new press law in late-19th-century France let a great many papers aimed at ordinary people come into being. By the turn of the century the largest paper's circulation had passed a million. With newspapers, people who lived far apart nevertheless held the same information and the same base of knowledge, which let them talk to one another without obstruction and share the same appetite for taking part — which in turn kept producing group movements of every kind.

So what France was witnessing, Tarde argued, was not the arrival of an age of mobs but the arrival of an age of the public. People were tied together by conversation built on shared information. They did not turn stupid and obedient the moment they joined a group; they kept their own judgment and their capacity to reflect, and they could deal with one another to some effect.

That is the beauty of interaction. Alone, a person tends to think only of himself. Talking with others, he tends to step out of his own center and consider how other people feel. When we are in a group, are we really all sunk in emotion and blind to everyone else? Or are we, inside the group, still dealing with one another as individuals?

Tarde's view is especially instructive in the age of social media. Every share, like and comment is a real act of conversation, and those conversations are what form the publics that exist online. The gap between Le Bon and Tarde also gives us a way to think about the "mob" on the internet. As more and more "mobs" and "trolls" appear, do we simply file them under "the herd," or do we grant that they have agency, study the information and the shared identity they hold in common, and try to understand how they act on one another? How we understand them will shape how we behave: whether we ignore and scold the "herd," or try to open a conversation and change people through it.

The danger in Le Bon's view lies exactly here. It leads toward contempt and distrust of ordinary people, and toward support for authoritarian policies such as "controlling the drifting masses." Tarde points to another possibility: a better public, reached by raising the quality of information and the quality of conversation.

Le Bon's books are everywhere in the shops; Tarde's, unfortunately, are almost impossible to find. This May, Communication University of China Press put out the original English edition of Communication and Social Influence, which fills in a small piece of the gap. Here's hoping a publisher will translate Tarde one day, so that Chinese readers can hear another voice besides Le Bon's — one that is better worth listening to.

(This article appears here for the first time.)

Cover image via glasstire