1998: He Xiongfei and the 34 Books He Called "Dark Horses" | What Kind of China Did Bestsellers Show Us, Part I

Partly this is a look back at the stories behind some legendary books. More than that: why did we end up with the society we have? What did we live through? What did we gain and lose? What wealth and what consensus did we accumulate? How did we get here?

A society gets the book market it deserves.

When the paperback revolution that began in the United States in the 1940s turned the book into a cheap commodity, bestsellers became a barometer of public mood and public thinking. The Japanese literary critic Nakajima Azusa once put it this way: "The structure of a bestseller is the structure of its age, and at the same time a reflection of the state of knowledge among that age's readers."

In China, bestsellers in any real sense begin only after reform and opening in 1978. As publishing turned to the market and a mass reading public appeared, bestsellers arrived in wave after wave. They are a miniature of our era and our society. From the "culture fever" of the 1980s — a direct descendant of the May Fourth movement — through the imported ideas, the rising and falling intellectual currents and the shifting public moods of a social transformation still underway, China and the Chinese have changed enormously. Consider how the runaway sales of China Can Say No and China Is Unhappy displaced The Ugly Chinaman. The Chinese were no longer "ugly." They were saying "no," and announcing that they were "unhappy."

We picked a number of books that made a large mark in China, tracked down the authors or the editors who worked on them at the time, and asked them to tell the story of each one.

**These books include:**The Ugly Chinaman (1986)

China Can Say No (1996)

Rich Dad Poor Dad (2000)

Who Moved My Cheese? (2001)

Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)

China Is Unhappy (2009)

Wildfire《野火集》 (1988)

The Birth of Tragedy (1986)

Tolerance (1985)

The Path of Beauty (1981), and others

Partly this is a look back at the stories behind these legendary books. More than that: why did we end up with the society we have? What did we live through? What did we gain and lose? What wealth and what consensus did we accumulate? How did we get here?

In 1991, He Xiongfei, then a student at the Beijing Institute of Economics, sought out the poet Wang Guozhen and told him: "I want to do a dialogue with you." Wang Guozhen, 35 at the time, was "very excited" and said yes. He Xiongfei was 23. Out of it came his first published book, Youthful Elegance: A Dialogue with Wang Guozhen《年轻的潇洒：与汪国真对白》, which sold more than 300,000 copies.

A "Wang Guozhen craze" was then sweeping young people across China. They read his poems and recited them; lines like "Having chosen the far horizon, I care only to press on through wind and rain" and "I hoped to gather a thread of spring breeze, and you gave me the whole of spring" passed from mouth to mouth.

For He Xiongfei, though, what mattered about Youthful Elegance was that it opened a publishing career now 26 years long. By the time he graduated in 1991 he had put out 41 books. But China was still a planned economy, and on graduation He Xiongfei was assigned back to his home region, where he became a secretary in the General Office of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government.

A civil servant's life was "regimented" and "dull," and the young He Xiongfei found it "pointless." Around then Hainan, newly made a province, was in the grip of "Hainan fever." Roughly 100,000 people poured onto the island every year chasing a fortune. He Xiongfei went too, to the Yangpu Development Zone. Over three years in Hainan he sold dumplings and hand-pulled noodles on the street, ran a restaurant, opened an auto-parts mall and fought a lawsuit with his landlord over renovations. He came away with more than 100,000 yuan. In 1995, having "dug up his first pot of gold," He Xiongfei went back to Inner Mongolia. "Young people then were full of passion and always wanted to do something. I went in a daze and came back in a daze," He Xiongfei told QDaily.

On March 8, 1996, in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, He Xiongfei founded the first independent creative studio in Chinese history — the Grassland Tribe Studio. "It was the first because before that nothing was called a studio; it was all individual effort. What a studio stresses is teamwork," he said. Counting him, it had four people.

In the 1990s, Chinese publishing loosened its restrictions on private book businesses. Independent dealers still had to buy book numbers from state publishing houses, but they could now help plan and produce books. Private bookstores, the "second channel," began supplementing the main channel of the state-run Xinhua Bookstores.

At first He Xiongfei's Grassland Tribe put out bestsellers: The Age of the Confucian Merchant《儒商时代》, The Art of War for Husbands and Wives《夫妻兵法》, Business Strategies of the World's Ten Top Brands《世界十大名牌经营策略》, Life Strategies of the World's Ten Richest Men《世界十大富豪处世韬略》. These fit what Chinese readers then wanted from a book — something useful — and each had a print run above 80,000 copies. But in He Xiongfei's own view they "had no depth of thought."

In 1998, Sun Yu — then a reporter at the Beijing Daily, now dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China — recommended to He Xiongfei a Chinese-department student at Peking University named Yu Jie. Through Yu Jie, He Xiongfei met Mo Luo and Kong Qingdong; add the manuscripts he had already gathered from Zhang Jianwei, Mao Zhicheng and Xie Yong, and "all of it had passion and ideas, and it carried the character of enlightenment," He Xiongfei said. "Reading it excited me, because there was blood in that thinking, and an edge, and passion, and a sense of caring about the country and its people."

The culture fever of the 1980s and the reckoning with China's own traditions were rising again at that moment, together with a hunger for modernity and an embrace of liberalism — praise for human reason, a call for human liberation, an argument for the spirit of enlightenment. That, too, became an important voice of the era.

He Xiongfei timed it well. He brought out three Grassland Tribe series — the Dark Horse Series, the Best of Famous Newspapers and Magazines, and the Intellectuals Collection — 34 books in all, and they caused a sensation. Yu Jie, Mo Luo, Kong Qingdong, Zhu Xueqin, Qin Hui, Xu Youyu, Qian Liqun and Xie Yong became famous. Fire and Ice《火与冰》, Notes of the Humiliated《耻辱者手记》, Room 207, Building 47《47楼207》, Revolution in the Study《书斋里的革命》, Problems and Isms《问题与主义》, Discourses on Freedom《自由的言说》 and Refusing to Forget《拒绝遗忘》 were the bestsellers of the moment. Each sold tens of thousands; Yu Jie's Fire and Ice and Kong Qingdong's Room 207, Building 47 passed 500,000 copies. "Their influence then was the same as Han Han's or Guo Jingming's later on," He Xiongfei said.

In his preface to Mo Luo's Notes of the Humiliated, Qian Liqun called Mo Luo a conscious heir to Lu Xun's line of "warriors of the spiritual realm." The pen name Mo Luo comes from Lu Xun's essay On the Power of Mara Poetry《摩罗诗力说》. In it, Lu Xun set out to rebuild values and ideals for twentieth-century China, arguing that "the first task is to establish the human being; once the human being stands, all else follows. As for method, one must honor individuality and raise up the spirit." One must pursue "the freedom of the individual spirit," and that took the work of "warriors of the spiritual realm."

Mo Luo and the others wanted exactly to carry that tradition forward, and they opened a fierce attack on traditional history and culture — and on intellectuals themselves. Many young readers found it shattering; they felt they had been "enlightened." Mo Luo and his peers "became double beneficiaries of that delicate era: on the one hand they all called themselves Qian Liqun's students, a new generation taking up the liberal tradition; on the other hand they were symbols of the market mechanism then coming into being," the writer Xu Zhiyuan wrote in his essay Friends《朋友们》.

He Xiongfei used that market mechanism well. He toured 60 universities with Yu Jie, Mo Luo and Kong Qingdong, and the talks "detonated" the Grassland Tribe Dark Horse Series among students overnight. His Best of Famous Newspapers and Magazines series lifted journals like Tianya, Beijing Literature, Shanghai Literature, Yellow River, Literary Contention and Shuwu, and helped open up an atmosphere of free argument. The symposium he organized for the Grassland Tribe Intellectuals Collection set off a wave of liberal thinking.

But its reach grew too wide, the relevant authorities took notice, and the Grassland Tribe's "boom" ended after three years. He Xiongfei stopped publishing books about "ideas" and turned to literature. Between 2000 and 2010 he published Yang Xianhui (Chronicles of Jiabiangou《夹边沟记事》), Liu Liangcheng (One Man's Village《一个人的村庄》), Bao'erji Yuanye (Snow Melting in the Palm《掌心化雪》), Yan Lianke, Bei Cun, You Fengwei and Li Rui, among others.

He had also long been studying Jewish culture, and had published books on it. From 2010 he turned to education. He has now founded the first school in Chinese history to combine Chinese and Israeli wisdom — the Wuta School of Innovative Wisdom. He Xiongfei believes the core of Jewish culture and the core of liberal thought are the same — democracy, freedom, equality: "In essence there's really no difference." "Those universal values we couldn't realize in ourselves, I believe the children will realize," he said.

We recorded He Xiongfei's story in his own words, so that you can meet him more directly.

As told by | He Xiongfei

Mo Luo and the others had the influence back then that Han Han and Guo Jingming had later

To be honest, I don't like remembering this period. Looking back always brings some pain and sadness, because it marks the end of an era.

I published my first book, Youthful Elegance: A Dialogue with Wang Guozhen, while I was still in college. Wang Guozhen's book sold more than 300,000 copies at the time. It was the second book of the "Wang Guozhen craze": the first was Youthful Wind《年轻的风》, the second Youthful Elegance, the third Youthful Thoughts《年轻的思绪》. His poems were fresh and understated, they comforted people, they were easy to follow and easy to say aloud, so they sold.

In 1991 I graduated from the Beijing Institute of Economics, having published 41 books. I was assigned to the General Office of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government as a secretary. After a while it felt pointless — government work was dull, tedious, regimented. "Hainan fever" was rising just then, so in 1992 I went to Hainan to try business. In the end I made more than 100,000 yuan, which amounted to my first pot of gold.

In 1995 I came back from Hainan to Inner Mongolia. On March 8, 1996, I founded the first independent creative studio in Chinese history, called the "Grassland Tribe Studio." I'm from Inner Mongolia, and "grassland" is a symbol of freedom. "Tribe" is far away, a symbol of the solitary thinker, the one who doesn't join the crowd. There weren't many of us then: three people working for me, four in all.

At the start we mostly did bestsellers — The Age of the Confucian Merchant, The Art of War for Husbands and Wives, Business Strategies of the World's Ten Top Brands, Life Strategies of the World's Ten Richest Men, all social-science titles, but with no depth of thought. Later I did a series called Hundred Angles《百角丛书》. In the 1980s, Shanghai Joint Publishing had done a series called Five Angles《五角丛书》. My Hundred Angles meant a hundred angles on the world, a hundred angles on life. Doing that series, I published a string of well-known people: Yan Lieshan, chief editor and reporter at Southern Weekly; Yang Dongping, then producer of CCTV's Tell It Like It Is; Jie Xizhang, the veteran reporter at the Beijing Evening News.

After that I turned more and more toward ideas. There was a reporter at the Beijing Daily, now dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China, named Sun Yu. He's a Lu Xun scholar, and he recommended a young man's book to me — Yu Jie's. At the time Yu Jie had mimeographed it at his own expense; he was still a Chinese-department student at Peking University. Reading it excited me, because there was blood in that thinking, and an edge, and passion, and a sense of caring about the country and its people.

Through Yu Jie I then met the young talent of the day, Mo Luo. He had written a book called Notes of the Humiliated. Later I met Kong Qingdong, then a young lecturer at Peking University, and Zhang Jianwei, a reporter at China Youth Daily, and Mao Zhicheng. The manuscripts from that handful of people all had passion and ideas, and carried the character of enlightenment.

And it happened that in 1998 China's liberal intellectuals were also rising — the people we later name, Qin Hui, Zhu Xueqin, Xu Youyu, Qian Liqun, all came out of that era. So I got excited, and I published three series back to back.

The first was aimed mainly at the young, and was called the "Grassland Tribe Dark Horse Series." It included Yu Jie, Mo Luo, Kong Qingdong and others. "Dark horse" stood for new blood in the literary world. Before this, Yu Jie, Mo Luo and Kong Qingdong were all newcomers, all publishing first books. So they were "dark horses" — they were young. And since Grassland Tribe itself came from Inner Mongolia, there ought to be horses running on the grassland. The horse stood for passion, for a state of being alive, for ideas. Mo Luo, as it happens, graduated from East China Normal University, not Peking University, but people later called them "the three sages of Peking University" anyway.

Then came the "Grassland Tribe Intellectuals Collection": mainly Revolution in the Study by Zhu Xueqin, a professor at Shanghai University; Refusing to Forget by Qian Liqun, of the Chinese department at Peking University; Problems and Isms by Qin Hui, a professor at Tsinghua University; and Discourses on Freedom by Xu Youyu, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. That was the series. Later I published Li Ming's book and others. Add the "Grassland Tribe Best of Famous Newspapers and Magazines," which covered journals like Tianya, Beijing Literature, Shanghai Literature, Yellow River, Literary Contention and Shuwu. All of it appeared against that background.

Once they were out, the response was enormous. They became bestsellers right away. Every book sold tens of thousands of copies. Fire and Ice and Room 207, Building 47 both broke 500,000. I've forgotten the exact print runs — we just kept reprinting, three thousand, five thousand, printing constantly. Hundreds of thousands, anyway. I don't remember the number.

Their influence then was the same as Han Han's or Guo Jingming's later on. Han Han and Guo Jingming only appeared after Grassland Tribe. Yu Jie stood for the young people born in the 1970s; Han Han and Guo Jingming stood for those born in the 1980s. Each of them represented an era.

At the end of December 1998, I organized a speaking tour of 60 universities with Yu Jie, Mo Luo and Kong Qingdong, called "Treading Snow in Search of Plum Blossoms." It caught fire at once. Media everywhere swarmed in, and the books became bestsellers among students.

The students were so worked up back then — every stop drew six or seven hundred, seven or eight hundred people, and every stop made a stir. Some of the reporters who later worked at Southern Weekly became journalists under our influence. Even now, I run into people who say they grew up reading my books. Anyone who went to college between 1970 and 1975, anyone with a bit of education, had almost certainly read a Grassland Tribe book.

Our talks were mostly about what was in the books. Yu Jie talked about rethinking tradition, about criticizing the university, about the humanist spirit. Mo Luo talked about his Notes of the Humiliated, which most people couldn't really follow; he wrote deeply, and his prose was beautiful. Kong Qingdong was funnier by comparison, playful, entertaining, reminiscing about the good times of college. I wrapped up at the end and asked everyone to buy the books. I spoke only for the last five minutes, because the authors could hardly hawk their own wares — I was the publisher, after all. Afterward Kong Qingdong and Yu Jie told me: Old He, talk less, don't hog the mic; your education isn't up to it and neither is your scholarship, better to listen and let the rest of us talk. I said, if I don't talk, who's going to sell your books?

My series put their liberal school on the national map

From picking a book to publishing it took a long time. It usually took seven or eight publishing houses before one dared take it. The first, Fire and Ice, went through five or six. Cries from the Iron House《铁屋中的呐喊》 later went through about ten. Every book had to make that journey. Except for Kong Qingdong's, Mao Zhicheng's and Zhang Jianwei's — those three didn't — every book made the "manuscript's tour."

Mo Luo was at the Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication then, fairly marginal there. He is a reserved man with a rich inner life, and probably wasn't good at handling people. In part he was pushed aside at the Institute because of his ideas; his thinking was, after all, not mainstream. In part it was his temperament, because writers tend to be proud and sure of themselves. Later I invited him to ride on the grassland — in 1998, when I held a Grassland Tribe book fair. On horseback he looked rather dashing.

Kong Qingdong's book came out at almost the same time. His writing wasn't heavy on ideas; the language was playful, funny. Kong Qingdong was the big brother of the group then, being a teacher.

In 1998 I was expanding from Inner Mongolia into Beijing. Packaging, printing, design and distribution in Inner Mongolia were all remote and behind the times. In Beijing there was a studio run by Jiang Hong, a young man with a little ponytail and a little goatee, who had some creative flair.

After that I played up the strangeness. The first book was Fire and Ice, and its subtitle was "The Drawer Literature of a Peking University Maverick." First, it put Peking University up front — a Peking University maverick, that draws people in. "Drawer literature" played on a concept: this writing could not be published, so it sat in a drawer, for the author's eyes only. Now that it was out, it had the feel of a secret revealed. Mo Luo's was Notes of the Humiliated, because he kept chewing on humiliation, and the man who chews on humiliation is the humiliated one — an intellectual who feels he has no rights, no standing, no dignity of life, living as neither man nor ghost. There's an abstraction in it, a cultural quality. That the humiliated one wrote it down in his own hand gave it the feel of a secret revealed, and of truth, like an author's private notebook. Its subtitle was "A Grassroots Thinker's Experience of Life." Kong Qingdong's Room 207, Building 47 was written with some humor, some ease, some wit. Mao Zhicheng's was called The Souls of Days Gone By《昔日的灵魂》 — something of an elegy, of remembrance, like a tin of preserved memories and thoughts. Zhang Jianwei's was Deep Breath《深呼吸》, which stressed reportage, a sense of the real and of being alive. Each person's style was different.

The Intellectuals Collection, by contrast, put the person up front. For Zhu Xueqin, Qin Hui and Xu Youyu we used a photographer we had found, now quite famous, named Bao Kun. He gave each of them a large head-shot portrait, which stressed their value as subjects. As for the titles, I mostly went by feel. Zhu Xueqin's, for instance, was originally called Revolution in the Study, and the Funnel, after one of his essays. I thought "the funnel" made it wordy; his thinking was critical of the ivory tower, so I just called it "revolution." With Qin Hui, Problems and Isms comes from a line of Hu Shi's: discuss more problems, talk less about isms. I thought the line worked well, so again I went by feel. Xu Youyu's was originally The Discourse of a Liberal Scholar; that seemed wordy, so I changed it to Discourses on Freedom. Refusing to Forget was Qian Liqun's own title.

These intellectuals already carried some weight in China at the time, but the main thing was that my series put their liberal school on the national map. Scholars like Qin Hui were first-rate by domestic standards, but not widely known then. China has a lot of scholars, and nothing set them apart from the rest. The same thing happened later with my "Blue Bookshop" series — Yang Xianhui, Yan Lianke, You Fengwei, Bei Cun and others — which at a stroke separated them from ordinary writers and put their thinking in the foreground.

Because the Chinese had been silent for ten years, and there weren't many people with ideas. I once wrote an essay called The Four Types of Chinese Literati: the leisure literati, the reactionary literati, the frivolous literati and the progressive literati. Most were leisure literati, writing about small moods, wind and flowers and snow and moon, eating and sleeping and the rest of it — not worth much. We argued for rethinking and criticizing China's history and culture, keeping what is good and discarding what is not, and for taking in Western culture in an organic way. The idea was to let China look at the world with open eyes — a new enlightenment, more or less.

They sold then because of the enlightenment current of that moment: the rethinking of tradition, the criticism of autocracy. Before that, people's thinking had gone impotent — no blood, no edge, nothing but writing that neither hurt nor itched.

When I published these books I wasn't thinking about the market at all. It was pure excitement. I was out in a fairly remote part of Inner Mongolia, and the first bestsellers I did were the ones I mentioned, The Age of the Confucian Merchant, The Art of War for Husbands and Wives. Before that I'd had almost no contact with ideas. Those essays woke up my own passion and my dreams, woke up an intellectual's conscience. Of course, at the time I didn't really count as an intellectual. It was just excitement.

"The greatest hope of my life was that it might be possible to stop one intellectual from sinking into worldliness"

On January 8, 2000, I held a symposium for the "Grassland Tribe Intellectuals Collection" at the Cannes Bar in Beijing's Chaoyang district. Li Shenzhi, Li Rui, Mao Yushi, Cui Weiping, Zhou Shi, Jiang Zidan, Wang Xuetai — nearly every well-known liberal intellectual in China came. There were too many, seventy or eighty people. The impact was large.

After that meeting, by April… not one publishing house in the country would work with me. Everything I published after that went out under pen names — Abraham, Pastoral Song, Tian Yuan, that sort of thing. Later books couldn't be published officially at all, because the moment you used the Grassland Tribe name, or my name as editor, it wouldn't get through.

Now even Mr. Qian Liqun has SDX Joint Publishing bringing out his collected works. Qin Hui gets published everywhere. Back then their books were sealed off, not allowed out. Even their names were sensitive.

Mr. Li Shenzhi, the intellectual leader of that time — Li Shenzhi was a vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences — said we should relight the flame of enlightenment. Enlightenment was still the main task: opening people's minds, teaching people to think. This enlightenment carried on directly from the enlightenment of the 1980s.

The end of the 1980s was a watershed. It cut the thread that had run through the 1980s — looking at the world through foreign thinkers, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre. After the break, things slowly revived: first the soft sentiment of Xi Murong and Wang Guozhen, then Wang Shuo, cynical, mocking the world, then Yu Qiuyu, who dared only to sigh over history, not to criticize it. Then Wang Xiaobo, who used a witty, humorous mockery but still wouldn't criticize head-on. In between came the "Cloth Tiger" series, pure literature, very influential, though essentially ideological stuff. By the time you get to Grassland Tribe, it is pure reckoning and criticism, ideas in the foreground, with passion, with reason, with presence.

In effect, in the 1990s, after the upheaval, Chinese intellectuals were held down for eight or nine years. Then, from 1998, our work stood for a current of thought — a liberal current: a comparison of Chinese and Western culture, a reckoning with China's own tradition. And this group of young scholars had passion and reason and edge, and they were sharply critical. It was a miniature of an era.

Nearly twenty years on, looking back at those bestsellers, what strikes me most is that these books still couldn't be published today. Of course some of them, on the theoretical side — especially translations, books by Hannah Arendt, books by George Orwell — weren't allowed out back then either. The Grassland Tribe books may not be as deep as those. But in Chinese scholarship, while things may well be more sophisticated now in academic and theoretical terms, in edge, in critical force, in the punch of the prose, today's books don't reach that level. If these books were reissued today, they would still sell.

Kong Qingdong and Mo Luo both changed later on. I published a book for Kong Qingdong called Unspoiled at Forty《四十不坏》. I wrote the afterword, quoting a line from Kierkegaard: "The greatest hope of my life was that it might be possible to stop one intellectual from sinking into worldliness." In truth, human nature wants fame and money and the world. So once you choose to be a thinker, as Qian Liqun put it, you choose a lonely road, you choose a rich kind of suffering. If you refuse to swim with your era, with history, you are bound to be alone. But from an ordinary person's point of view, everyone also likes to enjoy life. So an intellectual sinking into worldliness is a law of things too. It's only that Kong Qingdong later went further left. He curried favor with politics and became a figurehead of the left. That probably chimed with ideas he had accumulated early on: he wanted to be a leader, he had a leader complex. Mo Luo turned into a pure nationalist, writing things like China Stands Up《中国站起来》. He no longer chews on humiliation. He asks himself whether he is happy; he wants a happy life. I think that is fear, softness, cowardice — and even a bit of currying favor with those in power. Yu Jie never compromised; in the end he turned to Christianity and went to the United States. Three men, three roads.

Others, by comparison — Xie Yong, say — took the academic road in the universities, going on with his research into the Southwest Associated University and the question of intellectuals. Some became first-rate, master-class figures: Qin Hui, Xu Youyu, Qian Liqun all ascended to the "shrine."

Cover image: Chen Yifei's oil-painting series Lu Xun《鲁迅组图》, and the film Dead Poets Society.