From 1980 On: Shen Changwen and the Hundred-Plus Books That Freed Chinese Minds | What Kind of China Do Best-Sellers Show Us? ⑤
Part of this is a look back at the stories of these legendary books. The larger question, of course, is this: why do we have the society we have today? What have we lived through? What have we gained and what have we lost? What wealth and what consensus have we built up? How did we get here?
Part of this is a look back at the stories of these legendary books. The larger question, of course, is this: why do we have the society we have today? What have we lived through? What have we gained and what have we lost? What wealth and what consensus have we built up? How did we get here?
As a society is, so is its book market.
We picked a number of books that made a deep mark on China, tracked down the authors or editors behind them, and asked each to tell the story of one book.
Part of this is a look back at the stories of these legendary books. The larger question, of course, is this: why do we have the society we have today? What have we lived through? What have we gained and what have we lost? What wealth and what consensus have we built up? How did we get here?
This is the fifth book.
At 49 — an age when many people today are already thinking about retirement — Shen Changwen began a publishing career like no one else's: head of the SDX editorial office and of Dushu (Reading) magazine.
Five years later he published a best-seller, The Third Wave, by the futurist Alvin Toffler. Then he took the advice of Li Shenzhi — a former deputy head of Xinhua News Agency and a famous "big Rightist" — and decided to "look backward." A book like The Third Wave was good, Li thought, but "too new." It was said to be the first look Chinese people got, after the Cultural Revolution, at how far technology abroad had come; the idea of the "global village" spread in China through this book. Set against unheard-of things like the "global village" and "electronic mail," "looking backward" was more a matter of "laying a foundation for readers" — spreading the basics of liberal and democratic thought.
Shen Changwen went through the catalog of the publishing house Ba Jin had translated for and run, then through the whole of Shanghai's translation lists from the 1930s and 1940s, and settled on Tolerance, by the Dutch-American writer Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882–1944). The translators were two SDX editors, Ze Wei and Jin Cuiwei.
"Here the author traces the history of human thought, argues for freedom of thought, urges tolerance of dissent, and condemns the reactionaries who suppress new ideas," the SDX Joint Publishing editorial department wrote in the book's afterword.
Tolerance shook the publishing trade. It sold from the day it appeared — "we printed 500,000 or 600,000 copies at one go." The book was later even taken into Chinese high-school textbooks, and now exists in more than a dozen translations. Wang Yan, a former head of Dushu's editorial department and its executive editor, told QDaily: "Tolerance is a mark of a civilization's breadth of mind. In the history of thought, many people believed they had grasped absolute truth, and it turned out afterward to be nothing of the kind. We need to keep a certain magnanimity toward opinions unlike our own. China has in fact already become a society of plural interests, and plural interests bring plural ideas; that single-track political thinking does not fit what is coming."
Shen Changwen had not expected the book to sell. Back in 1985 he was far more careful: "The Cultural Revolution stressed intolerance; now we were for tolerance — which amounted to criticizing the Cultural Revolution. But we didn't say so out loud."
Now 86, Shen Changwen puts it this way: "One very important rule in the publishing world is to make your point and stop there, never spell it out."
Shen Changwen spent most of his life in publishing. At the time SDX Joint Publishing had not yet been restored as a separate house — that came in 1986 — and belonged to People's Publishing House, which is why it was called an "editorial office." China had just come out of the "ten years of turmoil" of the Cultural Revolution, had only recently adopted the strategic decision of "reform and opening up," and had not yet entered the era of the market economy. Shen Changwen, his SDX Joint Publishing and Dushu magazine caught the 1980s tide of thought emancipation and "culture fever" — and helped shape it.
"Introducing democratic and liberal thought" became one of the guiding ideas behind the SDX editorial office's list. In 1986, the year after Tolerance, The Right to Heresy, by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), also came out in China. Its subtitle was "Castellio against Calvin: A Documented Account," and it tells the story, from more than 500 years ago in the West, of the scholar Castellio, who opposed Geneva's supreme ruler, Calvin, with the courage of "a fly fighting an elephant." Calvin had once been a hero of the Reformation; by then he had turned into a tyrant.
Shen Changwen went on to publish Zweig's Decisive Moments in History, Joseph Fouché: Portrait of a Politician and The World of Yesterday. The translation list grew more ambitious: "my mind even went to work on foreign embassies in China and the like." That is how he came to publish the American Library (10 titles), the American Culture Series (27 titles), the German Culture Series (12 titles) and the Japanese Culture Series (6 titles), bringing in classics from one country after another.
The American classics among them came partly from World Today, a Hong Kong publishing house of the 1950s. Its director was the Hong Kong writer Tung Chiao; its editors and translators included Eileen Chang and other famous names. Shen Changwen came to know the house through the writer Lo Fu, once chief editor of the New Evening Post under Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao. Lo Fu had helped Jin Yong and Liang Yusheng write their martial-arts novels — he was called "the midwife of the new school of wuxia fiction" — and was close to many Hong Kong writers, among them Cao Juren, Ye Lingfeng and Xi Xi.
Shen Changwen is a Shanghainese. At 14 he was apprenticed to a Shanghai gold-and-silver jewelry shop; he also studied wireless telegraphy at a Shanghai night school, and his final qualification was two unfinished years in the reporting program of the Shanghai Minzhi Journalism College. When China's political campaigns of the 1950s began, he was no more than a proofreader at People's Publishing House in Beijing.
That background, though, won him the stamp of "politically reliable." In the 1960s he joined the work of organizing translations of "imperialist, revisionist and reactionary material" under the central "anti-revisionism group," and through it came to know Li Shenzhi, Dong Leshan, Lo Fu, Liu Renjing, Feng Yidai, Pan Guangdan, Fei Xiaotong and other well-known intellectuals — Dong Leshan would later translate Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Most of these men had been knocked down as "Rightists" and members of the other "black five categories," and Shen Changwen was one of the very few people allowed to talk to them. Their thinking shaped his own work for decades afterward.
Later he gathered these translations — Tolerance, The Right to Heresy, On Love — into a series called the Culture and Life Translation Series (46 titles), which also took in García Márquez's The Fragrance of Guava, Kundera's The Art of the Novel, Woolf's A Room of One's Own and André Maurois's Five Great Questions of Life.
Whether it was The Third Wave or Tolerance, The Right to Heresy and On Love, the times being what they were, none of these translations escaped being cut. What came out was mostly whatever opposed Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, plus anything "explicit" about sex.
Even so, the shock these books gave Chinese readers was enormous, and the new ideas did a great deal to free people's minds. The 1980s are seen as China's second enlightenment, after the May Fourth New Culture Movement. "The unofficial and semi-official enlightenment of the 1980s answered the thought-emancipation movement inside the system and laid the intellectual foundation for reform and opening up. Without the thought emancipation and enlightenment of the 1980s, China's rapid economic growth today would be unthinkable," the scholar Jin Guantao told the Economic Observer. Jin Guantao was himself one of the leading figures of that New Enlightenment; the "Toward the Future" series he edited ran to 74 titles and was one of the sets that mattered most to young readers at the time. Two of its editorial board members, Dong Xiuyu and Wang Yan, came from SDX.
Plainly, from the moment he took charge of SDX in 1980, Shen Changwen — along with the hundred-odd titles he published, Dushu magazine and SDX Joint Publishing itself — was part of that New Enlightenment.
In 1986 the "Culture: China and the World" editorial board, as famous then as the "Toward the Future" board and the China Culture Academy, brought out Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy at SDX Joint Publishing. Over the next three or four years this board — edited by Gan Yang, made up of young scholars and devoted mainly to Western humanities and social sciences — oversaw more than a hundred publications: the Modern Western Academic Library (35 titles), the New Knowledge Library (78 titles), the Humanities Research Series and the Culture: China and the World journal (5 volumes). Among them were Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Political Order in Changing Societies.
"Books like Being and Time were red hot — the first run sold 70,000 copies, Being and Nothingness 100,000. They became fashion items. Owning them was fashionable, a badge you wore if you were young," recalls Dong Xiuyu, then deputy editor of Dushu and, in the 1990s, Shen Changwen's successor as general manager of SDX Joint Publishing.
Dushu itself ran essays that mattered — "Reading Knows No Forbidden Zones," "The Sun of Man Will Surely Rise," "Achieving Freedom of Publication Is an Important Question" — and printed a great many scholars, old and young: Lü Shuxiang, Jin Kemu, Zhang Zhongxing, Shu Wu, Lao Zude, Gu Zhun, Wang Meng, Ye Xiushan, Tu Weiming, Gan Yang, Zhang Rulun, Liu Dong. It shaped a generation of intellectuals and students. Each issue sold well over 100,000 copies.
These books and essays also owed a good deal to the thought-emancipation movement inside the system. The ideological establishment was at that point promoting the "three leniencies" — tolerance, generosity and relaxation.
Shen Changwen published one Russian-language best-seller, On Love (《情爱论》). It came out in 1984 in a run of 1.2 million copies, SDX Joint Publishing's biggest seller of the decade. In it the Bulgarian Kiril Vasilev sets out what Marx and Engels thought about sex, arguing that "Marx never denied carnal desire, because carnal desire is the materialist basis of love." For Chinese readers who had come through the era of "taking class struggle as the key link," who had been permitted feelings but never bodies, the shock was enormous.
Besides translations, Shen Changwen worked hard to bring in books by Chinese scholars from Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas: Tsai Chih-chung's comics, Jin Yong's martial-arts novels, Lin Yu-sheng's The Creative Transformation of Chinese Tradition, Kwang-chih Chang's The Chinese Bronze Age.
The short version of the old man's résumé: ten years as general manager of SDX Joint Publishing — Life, Reading, New Knowledge — chief editor of Dushu in its most influential years, and the man who proposed founding Sanlian Lifeweek. People call him, respectfully, "Shen Gong," Venerable Shen.
In 1996, at 65, Shen Changwen retired from SDX. He did not slow down for a moment.
He first joined forces with Yu Xiaoqun of Liaoning Education Publishing House, and together they put out Panorama (《万象》) magazine, the New Century Universal Library, the Bookish Delights series and more. From 2000 he began working with Rex How and joined the Taiwanese publisher Locus Publishing. He sums up this second editorial life in twenty characters: "Eating, drinking and playing; making love; embezzling and stealing; selling intelligence; sitting around waiting for the cash."
When we met him in the café on the second floor of Beijing's SDX bookstore at the Art Gallery, he looked very much like the cartoon Shen Fan (granddaughter of Shen Congwen) drew of him: a cheerful old man with a big book bag — only without the two fat bundles of books in his hands. The drawing later became the cover of his memoir Neither Storm Nor Shine (《也无风雨也无晴》), and it catches the old man's temper exactly.
"I have to get online every day," Shen Changwen told QDaily. He loves the internet, subscribes to at least five newspapers, and "always spends 5,000 yuan a year on magazines."
He is also, in his own phrase, a "knower." "I hide away in my room, but I do very little 'reflecting'; I just still want to 'know' what is going on outside. I spend several hours online every day, and that is how I know what people in the world are doing. 'Knowing' is, right now, the whole of my life," he writes in his memoir.
We have set down Shen Changwen's story in his own spoken words, so that you can meet him more directly.
Spoken account | Shen Changwen
"Looking backward" turned up what China's society and politics most lacked: Tolerance and The Right to Heresy
Tolerance now has more than a dozen translations, and it all came from one idea of Old Li's — Li Shenzhi's: "look backward."
Li Shenzhi was a big Rightist, the most famous Rightist at Xinhua. The people above wanted me to keep an eye on him, and instead I made friends with him. I listened to him closely, especially after reform and opening up; the two of us were very close. So after he died, when his books still could not be published on the mainland, I got them out in Hong Kong for him. He was my elder. But at the start it was the Party Central Committee that sent me to be the liaison with these Rightists. That is how I came to know Li Shenzhi and Dong Leshan, both at Xinhua. Li Shenzhi was deputy head of the agency, branded a Rightist. Dong Leshan ran the foreign department, branded a Rightist. Other people were not allowed to mix with them; the Propaganda Department named me as the one who could, because I was politically reliable, of working-class origin. A great many of my ideas came from them, especially after reform and opening up.
(In 1983, after The Third Wave came out,) Mr. Li came to talk to me. He said: the books you publish are very good, but they are too new-fangled, Chinese people can't keep up yet. He was a liberal. He said Chinese people had to take in liberalism from its roots, so you should find a way. And he gave me a fine slogan: "look backward." These are America's newest books, he said; you should be translating America's older ones. That influenced me enormously. After that we rarely did new-fangled books of the kind we had been publishing — they were hard to translate and had few readers, while the "look backward" books had more impact. So we changed course. After that one Toffler book, The Third Wave, we did perhaps one or two more and then stopped, and turned our eyes to the past.
For "look backward" I went hunting for books. I searched and searched, went through a great many, and in the end settled on Van Loon. So Van Loon's first book, Tolerance, got published. We had been through the Cultural Revolution, which stressed intolerance; now we were for tolerance — which amounted to criticizing the Cultural Revolution. But we didn't say so out loud. One very important rule in the publishing world is to make your point and stop there, never spell it out. So the book interested me greatly, and I found the original. Oddly enough, the original turned up in America. Then I found an old translation, and finally we translated it ourselves, with SDX's own staff. Both The Third Wave and Tolerance were translated by SDX staff. Who would have guessed the impact once they were out.
Tolerance later became a secondary-school textbook. Everyone read it at the time; the impact was enormous. Then Van Loon himself interested me, so I collected a lot of his books — The Story of the Bible, The Story of Mankind, Van Loon's Geography — and kept publishing them. That was an important sign of putting Li Shenzhi's "look backward" into practice, and it worked on a huge scale.
Starting from Van Loon, I hunted for anything connected to Van Loon, any writer connected to him, and I found another one: Zweig. First, his thinking was very advanced as far as China was concerned; second, his language was plain. So that thread led me to Zweig, and Zweig's subjects were more pointed still — almost unthinkable in China — which is how The Right to Heresy came out too. The Right to Heresy sold quite well. All of them were cut, though not much. That word, "heresy," could not exist in the Cultural Revolution; now heresy was allowed rights. Zweig's books were thought emancipation as well, but their impact was a little smaller than Van Loon's.
I first came across Zweig in the books translated by Ba Jin and by old Shanghai, and later in books translated in Taiwan, so I translated a good deal of him: four titles, Decisive Moments in History, The World of Yesterday, Joseph Fouché: Portrait of a Politician and The Right to Heresy. The Right to Heresy was not translated by SDX staff, but it was still a private translation. Since these things had to carry a heretical idea in public language, I was always careful. And who was the translator? The younger brother of the boss I apprenticed under, and that man's son — Zhao Zhenyao, and his son Zhao Tai'an. Zhao Tai'an is still in America. Because I meant to make cuts, and to peddle heretical ideas under a presentable name, I had to use a translator I knew. Otherwise, if he had complained about me, I'd never have survived it.
On Love, on Marx and Engels's views of sex, became SDX's biggest seller of the 1980s
(In 1983 the SDX editorial office brought out On Love, printed 1.2 million copies, and it sold enormously.) This book was unusual. It was a Russian-language book by a Bulgarian author. A gentleman at the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau had a copy and showed it to me; later I found one myself. After reform and opening up, books about sexology had already started appearing in China — thick reports on sex, all of them. Some of our authors, and the organs above us, felt such books were not quite respectable. So at first I hesitated. Then I checked, and found that before 1949 SDX had discussed questions of sex a great deal. That gave me courage, and I had the book translated.
What was good about it? It set out what Marx and Engels thought about sex. Our Communist Party at that time held that on questions of sex you could not talk about the body, only about feelings; Marx and Engels held that this was idealism, and that materialism ought to talk about the body. So the author used that view, and cited a great deal of material. Where did the material come from? From Marx and Engels's correspondence of the time, all collected in volume 10 of their complete works. Their complete works are that thick, and the bureau translated all of it. Yet very strangely, the explicit passages about sex in those two men's letters had never been translated: they were in French. The two of them wrote to each other in French. Luckily I had the bureau translate this book, and they had a way to get all of it into Chinese. There was some cutting, of course, but not much.
On Love had an enormous impact. With The Third Wave the authorities could say it was for internal distribution only, but who would dare say Marx and Engels were for internal distribution — Marx and Engels on sex! Of course I cut a few things. And who was the editor in charge of the cutting? Wu Bin. All I said to Wu Bin was: the explicit passages don't go in. Who would have thought that after the cuts, once it was out, the impact would be so great. I changed the title to On Love myself, to make it more refined; the original, On the Question of Love, was too crude. It was SDX's biggest seller of the 1980s.
The translation resources from the "anti-imperialist, anti-revisionism group," and the Culture and Life Translation Series they produced
I put the translations together, and that became the Culture and Life Translation Series. Many of them had already been translated in pre-1949 Shanghai or in Taiwan. I did several things at the time: I took in the translations Ba Jin had directed, and the Taiwanese ones too, selected among them and reprinted them. This also began with Van Loon — I realized there was a great fortune here. These books freed people's minds and were easy to understand.
Why publish translations? At the time SDX was probably the house in China that cared most about them. One reason was probably that translations were easier to handle, easier to justify. The other was personal: I had a special relationship with translated books. Why? After the Cultural Revolution, during the anti-revisionism campaign, I was transferred to the anti-imperialist, anti-revisionism group as its secretary. What was my job there? I was of worker stock, yet I was said to know foreign languages, and to know many of them. I did know many foreign languages — but only their articles and prepositions, nothing else. So in front of those Propaganda Department leaders I could perform: they would hand me a book and I would say, this is Romanian, it's called such and such, I can read it — when in fact I couldn't understand a word. Anyway, because I was of worker stock, I got promoted into that job.
The work I did there was very strange. The task handed down to me was to go find people with political problems to translate books — a politically reliable person was to do the finding. So I came to know many people with problems who later became major figures: Dong Leshan, Feng Yidai. The biggest man I handled was Liu Renjing, a delegate to the Chinese Communist Party's First Congress; it was laid down that I alone could contact him. Because I was politically reliable I kept in touch with him — and what did I ask him to translate? Trotsky. He had known Trotsky and could translate him. He was allotted 90 yuan a month; I gave him the money and he gave me 15,000 characters.
So by the time I was running SDX Joint Publishing I had a particular interest in translations, and the old translators had all been rehabilitated — Pan Guangdan, Fei Xiaotong, all of them had been in that position back then — which made my work very easy. And why the Compilation and Translation Bureau? When I was doing secret work, I lived inside the bureau. I lived with the leftists there, because the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau was trusted by the Party Central Committee. I was inside it; I can speak Russian, nothing else. I got on very well with the bureau. That's the whole story — and that's why there were so many translations.
"I came out of trade — how could I let money pass me by?": how the strange book Dianetics got published
My relations with the American embassy grew closer and closer because of all this. The embassy was delighted to see me publishing these things. They wanted to fund me, to give me money. But I had asked around: their money could not be taken.
Still, I came out of trade — how could I let money pass me by? I found a way fast. Here was my scheme. Every time I published one of their books, the market edition was a paperback; I would give them 1,000 hardcover copies, sold to them at American market prices, and they would pay me several thousand US dollars — which came to about the same as if they had simply handed me the money. And where did my hardcovers come from? The paperback's inner sheets with a hardcover binding put on; the inside was unchanged. When the book was printed I told the printer to run me extra sheets. They still display those hardcovers now — there's a display room on the east side. So I made a fair amount out of them, and I'm rather pleased with myself about it.
It was not only the American Culture Series but the American Library as well. Later I found the Germans and did the German Culture Series. Then I wanted a British culture series, and the strange thing was, the British ignored me. I wore out the road to the British embassy and they ignored me; I never learned why. The Germans did take me up. My German is poor, but they even had me over to Germany several times, and that's how that set came out. I made the most money from the Americans, and the books were big — each one a fat volume. I was very pleased, and to tell the truth I made quite a lot. They probably knew perfectly well that it was a subsidy, but on paper it was called buying books: a Special Edition.
The American Library had the greatest impact. America's historical documents were all in it, one fat volume. And the other reason I made money is that, besides their purchases, I paid no royalties or fees at all. Why? Apart from the manuscripts I commissioned myself, most were books World Today had already published. That house was set up in Hong Kong after 1949 by a group of pro-American intellectuals. Tung Chiao was one of its leaders. And who were its editors? Let me tell you: Eileen Chang, among others. So its books were excellent. I later published Eileen Chang's books too, all for nothing.
That way Tung Chiao and I grew close too. Roughly every week or two I went to Hong Kong to talk with them, and here I talked with the American embassy. These past couple of days I have been writing a piece remembering Lo Fu — Old Lo did a great deal for me. Old Lo was a strange one: we were old friends, but I was not allowed to call him "Old Lo," it had to be "Old Fu." He lived in Zhongguancun, and I often changed buses across town to go and see him.
Dianetics (《戴尼提自我心理调节技术》, 1988) was one of my big moves at the time. Back then the Propaganda Department had a Foreign Political and Academic Works Office under it, and that office brought me in; I counted as its secretary. Through it I learned that Comrade Deng Xiaoping and other central leaders had a high opinion of the man then running the book's publication on the American side. So I was very interested. And when I talked with them, they were willing to come here and do the selling — in one go they sent a dozen or so people to China, all at their own expense.
When the book went on sale, their American girls stood at the bookstore doors in miniskirts, singing and pitching it; the impact was huge. But before long Reader's Digest in America ran an article calling it pseudoscience. Shanghai translated that article and used it to attack us. So I stopped. There was nothing political in it at all; it was entirely about psychology.
"There are things Taiwan does better than us culturally" — hence Tsai Chih-chung's comics and an authorized Jin Yong
I like running a briefcase publishing house: everything is in my head. When I see a good piece of writing I don't show my hand; later I slowly arrange a book for the author. Setting up an editorial board, having to put forward plans and guidelines — I can't do that, and the moment you do, it all gets complicated. So my method was a small outfit, just me jumping around, with people thinking I'd gone mad — when in fact there was a guiding idea behind it, a guiding idea I did not dare say aloud, because saying it might get me criticized. What is right today gets you criticized tomorrow; that's what class struggle taught me. So I always put it in other words. As for the guiding idea, I believed in two men: Chen Yuan and Li Shenzhi. It was liberalism, in fact.
That is why, whenever I talk about unification with Taiwan and cross-strait questions, I still hold the same view to this day. Even now I think there are things Taiwan does better than us culturally. Back then it was because the Cultural Revolution had made things worse; now, however many years have passed since the Cultural Revolution, things are still controlled too tightly. They have many good things over there, so I very much hope for unification across the strait — we should learn from Taiwan and talk to it.
I got on particularly well in Taiwan. Why? I understand old China, and I talked to them the old-China way; that always worked. The new-China way doesn't. I came out of old China. It was even more so then — why? Many of Taiwan's publishing people in those days were book dealers from Fourth Avenue in pre-1949 Shanghai, and I spoke their language, so I had especially good relations with Linking Publishing, San Min Book, China Times Publishing and the rest.
Since I retired I have mostly worked with one Taiwanese publisher, Rex How's. I have a special feeling for Taiwan, because I think its cultural resources are richer. For original writing or for translations, with many of my books I wanted to go to them first. Tsai Chih-chung was the same. Before Tsai Chih-chung I looked in a lot of places, including Japan and Hong Kong, and it all felt too Western. Tsai Chih-chung is wholly Chinese. His comics tell the Chinese classics, the Chinese canon; Hong Kong and America cannot do that. He and I are good friends now. He no longer lives in Taiwan but in Hangzhou, and I've been to his home several times — we get on.
So even now I hold this view: Taiwan is more Chinese than we are. We are still like me, shaped by the Soviet Union, while Taiwan has kept a good grip on the national essence. I admire that, which is why I'm so willing to look for Taiwanese books. That's how I found Tsai Chih-chung, and I was right. Chinese readers appreciate him; he understands Chinese things. What he draws now is still Chinese.
(In 1993 SDX brought out nearly 40 of Tsai's titles at once.) That did a great deal for my finances, because he left all his royalties with me and never collected them. By the time I retired there was said to be 4 million yuan. I used all of it to buy staff dormitories in Fangzhuang. And how much did housing cost per square meter when the staff bought theirs? Eighteen yuan a square meter. What would it cost now? So on the surface I never took a cent from him; in fact, with inflation, several million yuan sat with me all those years and I only handed it over when I retired. It moves me. He is a genuine Chinese — more genuine than I am.
Any other comics I wanted to publish then were a problem: the Japanese and Hong Kong ones all preached the West, and China's Ding Cong was all politics, cursing America, whereas Tsai Chih-chung purely put across Chinese thought. The odd thing is that even I, a Chinese, did not know those Chinese ideas of his at the time. Chinese people held views like that! Only on seeing his comics did I understand. His classics were not just the Four Books and the Five Classics; much of it was folk literature. I admire that. He really is a strange man — these days he sometimes draws calculus and the like into comics. An eccentric.
Lo Fu introduced me to Jin Yong, and in January 1989 I made a special trip to Hong Kong to see him. Dong Xiuyu later took over my job, and it was she who published Jin Yong's books. I wanted to publish them at the time, but because... it couldn't be done, and it was shelved until Dong Xiuyu's tenure. But the introduction at the start was Lo Fu's. Jin Yong was very straightforward about it, since Lo Fu had made the introduction; he admired Lo Fu enormously.
The books we plan to write about:
The Ugly Chinaman (1986)
The China That Can Say No (1996)
Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)
Wild Fire (1988)
The Birth of Tragedy (1986)
The Path of Beauty (1981), and more
Cover image: a still from the film The Wave, from Douban
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.