1996: *Being Digital* and the Internet's First Steps in China | China in Bestsellers ⑦
We look back at the stories behind these legendary books — but the bigger question is why we ended up with the society we have today. What have we lived through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?
We look back at the stories behind these legendary books — but the bigger question is why we ended up with the society we have today. What have we lived through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?
A society gets the book market it deserves.
We picked a number of books that changed China, tracked down the authors or editors who made them, and asked them to tell each book's story.
We look back at the stories behind these legendary books — but the bigger question is why we ended up with the society we have today. What have we lived through? What have we gained and lost? What wealth and what consensus have we accumulated? How did we get here?
This is the seventh book.
1.
In the spring of 1996, two people walked into a room at the Beijing Institute of Information Engineering (now Beijing Information Science and Technology University), on the middle stretch of Beijing's North Fourth Ring Road in Chaoyang District, to pick out books. The room was a studio rented by Bardon, a Taiwanese rights agency, and held two long rows of shelves stocked with the newest English-language titles.
In that pile, Hu Yong, a reporter for Sanlian Lifeweek, noticed a black cover that "popped": Being Digital. He opened it and found the dedication on the flyleaf: "To Elaine, who has put up with my digital life for a full 11111 years." The author, Nicholas Negroponte, had written the number in binary rather than the usual decimal, and that alone hooked Hu Yong. After a quick flip through, he decided to put aside the book he was writing, The Net Is King, and translate this one first.
A few months earlier, on January 30, Sanlian Lifeweek had run a Hu Yong feature titled "How Far Is the Internet From Us?" At more than 10,000 characters, it was one of the first comprehensive accounts of the internet published in China. That same year, China's earliest internet company, Yinghaiwei — the name a transliteration of "Information Highway" — had just been founded. Its founder, Zhang Shuxin, built a Yinghaiwei Science and Technology Museum in Weigongcun and set about selling internet access to the general public. Yinghaiwei also put up a street billboard at Zhongguancun's zero-kilometer point: "How far is the internet from China? 1,500 meters north." Those 1,500 meters led to the museum. The billboard is where Hu Yong got his headline.
Hu Yong had first gone online only the previous October, at 30, in a computer lab at Tsinghua University. It left him "absolutely stunned" and "very excited," convinced the internet should spread across China at once. As a journalist he could not wait to tell Chinese readers what the internet could do, and that it was "not as mysterious or as far away as everyone thinks." Hence the long piece "How Far Is the Internet From Us?"
At that point the internet had no large-scale commercial presence in China. Only a handful of people, at universities and research institutes, could get onto the education network; ordinary people knew little about it. Even so, a few cases of people successfully "seeking a diagnosis" online were already widely retold. A young woman in Shandong named Yang Xiaoxia had a baffling disease that was rotting her muscles; an appeal posted online turned up a way to treat her. Zhu Ling, a student at Tsinghua University, also fell mysteriously ill; her friends appealed over the internet, and the answer came back as thallium poisoning.
Stories that sound utterly unremarkable now landed hard in China at the time. After the article ran, Hu Yong got a call from Ouyang Huan at Hainan Publishing House, who wanted him to expand it into a book about the internet. That became The Net Is King, published in 1997. Ouyang Huan also asked Hu Yong to help work out which foreign books Hainan should translate and import.
Which is how Hu Yong came to be standing in that room full of books. He told the editor beside him to publish it, fast. "Negroponte's book is this era's The Third Wave," he said. The Third Wave, by the American futurist Alvin Toffler, had been a bestseller from SDX Joint Publishing in the 1980s; it divided human society into an agricultural stage, an industrial stage and an information stage, and its ideas shaped a generation of Chinese who grew up in that decade.
Liu Yi, deputy editor-in-chief at Hainan Publishing House, thought Negroponte's arguments were fresh, and Hu Yong was keen, so the house decided to publish. Hu Yong and his wife, Fan Haiyan, finished the translation in three weeks. They did not own a computer yet, so they wrote the whole thing out by hand and sent it to the publisher to be typed up.
2.
Being Digital came out in China in December 1996 and became a hit almost at once. Two decades early, the book made bold and largely accurate predictions about what digital technology would do to our lives, our work, our schooling and our entertainment, and raised the questions worth sitting with. Bits, the "DNA of information," were fast replacing atoms as the basic element of human society. Information would no longer be "pushed" at consumers; people, or their digital butlers, would "pull in" what they needed and take part in creating it.
Hainan Publishing House repackaged and redesigned nearly everything — title, cover, jacket copy, table of contents, synopsis. The original had only a chapter list; Su Bin, Hainan's editor-in-chief, turned it into a reader's guide with content summaries, closer to what a general audience wanted than a purely technical book.
The title deserves a note. Hu Yong insisted on rendering Being Digital as 《数字化生存》— "digital survival" — rather than borrowing the Taiwan edition's 《数位革命》, "the digital revolution." The cover carried a line to match: "Computing is no longer only about computers; it decides whether we survive." "You can't let yourself be left behind again, or you won't stand among the nations of the world. If you don't do this, you may lose even the possibility of survival," Hu Yong told QDaily. That framing played directly to Chinese nationalist feeling at the time — grab the new knowledge fast, before you fall behind. Phrases like "expelled from the planet" were in circulation then, out of the same sentiment.
In the end Being Digital sold 600,000 copies. "Counting pirated editions, it must be over a million," Hu Yong said. "China's marketization sped up across the board after Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in 1992, and in the middle of that violent transition I think there was a group of intellectuals, a knowledge class, who were genuinely hungry for business and for new technology. They knew that in a new social transition you have to renew your whole stock of knowledge to survive better in that society. Books like this met that need," Hu Yong told QDaily.
More than that, "what the book did, fundamentally, was enlightenment. For ordinary readers it was pure enlightenment — it told them the tide of the world was running this way. And plenty of people in the internet industry entered the field because of this book, and built their work around it," Hu Yong added.
Hu Yong recalls middle-school teachers recommending Being Digital to their students as outside reading. The writer Han Han put it into Triple Door, the novel that made his name. "She was the youngest teacher in our school, and she left a strong impression on me. I remember that in her first class she said she didn't encourage us to read our Chinese textbooks, and then she talked to us about Gao Xiaosong — the one who made campus songs. She sang us 'Youth Without Regret' in that first class, and told us not to settle for the dead, useless material inside the exam syllabus but to fill ourselves up outside it, so our youth would be without regret. Then she recommended Whitman to us, and Kobayashi Takiji, and a book about the knowledge economy, and Being Digital...," Han Han wrote.
Han Han was hardly the only one. "For people who had only just learned what 'seek truth from facts' meant, only just understood what it was to respect objective laws, only just grasped why scientific forecasting, scientific decision-making and scientific management mattered, the line 'the best way to predict the future is to invent it' was a thunderclap. It was an entirely new view of the future, and, more than that, a ringing declaration of activism," wrote Duan Yongchao, chief strategy officer of SEEC Media Group, in an essay titled "From 'Digital' to 'Survival': Rereading Being Digital".
Wu Bofan, a professor at the Cheung Kong School of Journalism and Communication at Shantou University, read it in 1996 and then "talked about it and quoted it on every occasion," growing "more and more certain that I had understood it." As he sees it, "since Being Digital was published in China, its ideas and its vocabulary have passed through second- and third-hand transmission until we use them daily without noticing. Anyone reading the book for the first time today cannot imagine the jolt it gave the first generation of Chinese readers." Wu Bofan was once editor-in-chief and publisher of 21st Century Business Review, and ran the business talk show "Dong-Wu Relativity" with Liang Dong, the well-known former Phoenix TV host.
Liu Jiuru, editor-in-chief of the Publishing House of Electronics Industry, says Being Digital changed his work and his life. Under its influence he became convinced that the IT industry would move from specialists to the mass market, and that the internet and digitization would run our future. He threw himself into launching magazines and papers including Computerworld, Computer Fan and IT Manager World, wrote a stack of articles, and organized many events on the theme.
The book had an even more direct effect on China's first cohort of internet founders. Charles Zhang, who founded Sohu, was both Negroponte's student and one of his investments: Negroponte put a total of US$75,000 into Zhang, the earliest venture money to go into a Chinese internet company. From ideas to action, Negroponte shaped him.
Wang Xing, who founded Renren, Fanfou and Meituan, read the book in his second year of high school, and it stayed with him. It was this book, he recalls, that convinced him that "every industry the internet has not yet changed is about to be changed by the internet."
Charles Zhang, for his part, became both an evangelist and the most dazzling star of the internet world. He turned up on fashion-magazine covers and rollerbladed in Tiananmen Square. "He was out there talking about this stuff everywhere. He had founded Sohu, and he had the halo of an MIT returnee, so in a sense a lot of people were spurred on by Charles Zhang," Hu Yong told QDaily.
At a salon on January 31, 2013, Charles Zhang claimed that both Robin Li's and Pony Ma's companies owed something to him: "In 1998 I went to Silicon Valley to hire people, and I asked Robin Li whether he wanted to come back to China and do the internet. He said, there in Silicon Valley, that Sohu had made it in China — and some Silicon Valley investors gave him money. In 1999 I was extremely hot. I went to Shenzhen and got a rock-star reception, and among the 700 people in the audience was Pony Ma. He heard my story, got worked up, went home and made OICQ."
In 1997 Hainan Publishing House also brought out Hu Yong's The Net Is King, the first book-length introduction to the internet written for Chinese readers. Hu Yong says that Edward Tian of AsiaInfo bought several thousand copies to hand out to officials in the provinces, because he thought it was the best primer going for getting the internet adopted in China. The buzzword then was "information superhighway." Tian remembers going to remote provinces to talk to senior local officials about how to speed up construction of the information superhighway — and being told to go see the transportation department.
China's internet companies all arrived one after another in these years: NetEase (1997), Sohu (1998), Sina (1998), Tencent (1998), Shanda (1999), Alibaba (1999), Baidu (2000). Over the next two decades every one of them profited from the digital age and the knowledge economy Negroponte had predicted, and took up positions at the very front of Chinese business.
Among them, the portals — Sohu, NetEase, Sina — were the emblem of Chinese internet companies at the time. They turned enormous numbers of Chinese people into netizens, and the internet spread fast. By 1999, three years after Being Digital appeared, the internet had "basically gone completely mainstream."
In a sense Being Digital also changed the course of Hu Yong's own life. He went on to commission, publish and translate a long run of books about the internet.
Some of the books on digitization that Hu Yong commissioned, published or translated (Note: some were co-written or co-translated, but for readability that is not marked case by case.)
1997
Published The Net Is King, Hackers: Cowboys of the Computer Age and Heroes of the Age. The Net Is King was the first book to give Chinese readers a full introduction to the internet, and later appeared in Taiwan from Jieyou Publishing. Hackers went into the "Cyberculture Series" he commissioned. Heroes of the Age grew out of his articles for Sanlian Lifeweek.
1998
Translated Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age.
1999
Published Alternative Space and We Are the Uglies and the Lusers, and translated City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Alternative Space and We Are the Uglies and the Lusers went into the "Digital Forum Series" he commissioned.
2008
Published The Rising Cacophony: Personal Expression and Public Discussion in the Internet Age. Adapted from his doctoral dissertation in political science, it was one of the earliest Chinese studies of private and public space online. It went into the "Thought @ Internet · China" series he commissioned, took second prize at Beijing's 11th Outstanding Achievement Awards in Philosophy and the Social Sciences, and won an excellence award at the 6th Wu Yuzhang Prize for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
2009
Translated Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (reissued in 2012 under a new Chinese title, The Age of Everyone). The book was named one of the "30 Best Books Worth Reading in 2009" by CCTV's reading program Ziwu Shujian and China Book Business Report, and one of the "Top 10 Business Books of 2009" in a joint selection by the Blue Lion Reading Club, Sina Finance and Yicai.
2011
Translated Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, and published No Two Clouds Are Alike, on cloud computing. Cognitive Surplus won the 2011 Hexun Chinese-Language Business Book Award and a place on the 2013 most-followed booklist in Business School magazine's annual report on managers' reading tastes.
2012
Translated Macrowikinomics.
2014
Published Information Wants to Be Free, Cyberpolitics: Choices of Action in Contemporary Chinese Society and Media and New Media Empowerment and the Rise of the Internet of Meaning, and translated Too Big to Know.
2015
Translated Another Earth: Internet + Society.
2017
Edited After Connection: Rebuilding Public Space and Redistributing Power, the first volume in the "Commons" series.
On top of all that, at the end of 1996 Hu Yong started a column in Sanlian Lifeweek called "Being Digital" and filled it with explanatory pieces. It was the magazine's second regular column, after the writer Wang Xiaobo's. In 1997 he wrote a special issue, Heroes of the Digital Age, the first systematic introduction for Chinese readers to 15 leaders of the American digital era — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove and others. He followed it with a string of influential cover stories: "The Future Races Reality," "The Silicon Era," "The Sun Has Set on the PC," "Year One in Zhongguancun," "Cisco > Microsoft?" Sanlian Lifeweek became a stronghold for the cause of digitization and the internet.
To spread the word about digitization and the internet, Hu Yong did more than publish books and write articles; he took part in and pushed a series of events. In 1998 he helped found China's first nongovernmental internet think tank, the Digital Forum. The next year he helped organize the China Internet Contest, and in the same year he helped stage a "72-Hour Online Survival Test": volunteers were recruited in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, shut into hotel rooms, and watched to see whether they could survive using nothing but the internet. E-commerce and O2O services did not exist yet; many volunteers went hungry and dropped out partway.
Hu Yong is now a professor at Peking University's School of Journalism and Communication, still working on questions of digital existence. Even the tagline on his personal WeChat official account reads "a design for living in the digital age." But where he once worked mainly to popularize the internet and digitization, much of what he does now leans the other way, toward examining them critically.
3.
In 1990s America the economy boomed, high tech rose fast, and internet companies were founded, grew and listed one after another — Netscape, Amazon, eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, Netflix, Google. New Economy theory was in fashion at the same time: globalization and better information technology, it held, would let the economy keep growing with inflation and unemployment both low.
The media business felt this too. In 1992 Negroponte, then an MIT professor and director of the Media Lab, became the first investor in Wired. The magazine launched a year later, built to cover technology's effects on culture, the economy and politics, and from that year Negroponte wrote a monthly column for it. The columns kept coming back to one line: "Move bits, not atoms." Two years after that, Being Digital was published in the United States, edited and reworked out of those columns. It arrived at exactly the right moment, and soon became a New York Times bestseller, translated into 30 languages and published across countries and regions.
In China and in America alike, most of the book's first readers came away shaken by Negroponte's arguments. "Part of it was the shock of the ideas. The other part was the science-fiction scenes he described — you read them and thought it was pure fantasy," Hu Yong told QDaily.
Take one example: "he talked about the contrast between bits and atoms. He went to visit a company carrying an Apple laptop. The receptionist said the computer had to be registered before he could go in. He said the computer was priceless, worth US$2 million. The receptionist said that was impossible, your computer cannot be worth US$2 million, and wrote down US$2,000. Negroponte tells that story to say she would never understand: bits are priceless, atoms are worth only that much. Then he tells another one. He was going to a conference in Canada, and PolyGram, a record company, had the discs it had brought seized at customs; the inspectors said the discs could not be taken across. But at the same time, I was sending those same bits back and forth from my hotel, and customs could do nothing about it," Hu Yong recalled to QDaily.
Hu Yong also remembers Negroponte's discussion of friendly device interfaces: your grandmother has to be able to use it; the agent program should be as attentive as an English butler; your car, once stolen, tells you it has been stolen, and sounds frightened when it does. All of that was science fiction then. To Hu Yong, all of it has since come true — it is exactly what we now call touchscreens, artificial intelligence and voice technology.
For Americans, too, an era was just opening. The world of bits that the internet stood for had formally begun. A crowd of upstart internet companies hammered at America's old business and value systems, and genuinely changed how people live.
For Chinese readers, this really was the 1990s' The Third Wave. The third wave Toffler had described — information civilization — had finally found a concrete means of realization in the internet. And the book's success carried forward the mood and the mental habits of 1980s China: after long isolation, a thirst for every kind of new Western knowledge, a conviction that "to lag behind is to be beaten" and that "if we don't catch up now, we'll miss the world again."
"When I picked up Negroponte's book, I thought of Yan Fu's Evolution and Ethics. It was not a particularly outstanding book in England at the time, and Thomas Henry Huxley was hardly a heavyweight among English thinkers. But when Yan Fu brought Evolution and Ethics to China, China happened to be at a crucial moment of fighting for national survival, and the idea that 'species compete and the fittest survive' plucked a string in Chinese hearts — so the book became instead a 'bible' that every high-minded patriot had to read," Hu Yong wrote in a translator's note published 20 years after Being Digital came out.
In 1992, the year Negroponte invested in Wired, China joined the Universal Copyright Convention, and rights deals became a crucial part of publishing books. Early on, many publishers had not yet grasped how much overseas rights mattered, or how to go about negotiating for them; Hainan Publishing House got there first and licensed a batch of bestsellers through the Taiwanese rights agencies Big Apple and Bardon. To use Beijing's contacts and information to produce fashionable books at scale, it set up a dedicated editorial office at Zizhuyuan in Beijing and gathered a group of publishing talent there — including the writer now known as Tujia Yefu, who served as director of the house's Beijing editorial center.
"They had money then, and they dared to make the call. The whole process, the whole mechanism, was very flexible. I think Hainan back then was a bit like CITIC today. Its governing idea was to import the West — but to import books of new Western knowledge. They did Buffett, Soros, The Whiz Kids; all of that was very new at the time," Hu Yong told QDaily.
Huang Mingyu, once assistant to the editor-in-chief of Hainan Publishing House and general manager of its Beijing publishing center, also recalls: "Hainan Publishing House's Beijing editorial office had room to maneuver under the rules. The industry called it a '1.5 channel' operation: a publishing house on paper, a private book packager in practice. The team based in Beijing worked hard at honing copy and at marketing, and it had some very skilled operators. It was a case of the times making the heroes."
In the late 1990s and early 2000s Hainan also put out a run of influential bestsellers: The Diary of Anne Frank (1996), Warren Buffett Speaks (1998), The Soros Whirlwind (1998), The Alchemy of Finance (1999), Liar's Poker (2000), Security Analysis (2004), The Glory and the Dream (2004), Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (2007), The Whiz Kids (2008). The year 1997, when Being Digital was a bestseller, was also called the "Hainan year" in Chinese publishing.
"Twenty-five years ago I was convinced the internet would create a more harmonious world. I believed it would build global consensus and even advance world peace. It has not — not yet, at least. What is actually happening: nationalism is rampant, controls are tightening, the gulf between rich and poor is widening. I also used to hope that China, given its scale, its resolve and the advantages of socialism, could play a bigger and better part in leading the global internet. And how has that gone? Very simple: globalization has become localization. For all the explosive growth of intellectual, economic and electronic backbone infrastructure, digitization everywhere has not brought the world together," Negroponte wrote in "Been Digital," an essay marking the 20th anniversary of the Chinese edition of Being Digital. From Being Digital to "Been Digital": at 74, Negroponte calls this "the biggest misjudgment of my life."
It is Hu Yong's strongest feeling too, at 52, 21 years after the book came out. "If you take the digital revolution at the level of technology, you can say that many of the things Negroponte predicted back then have come true today. But in fact the problems after digitization may be bigger than the problems during it," Hu Yong told QDaily.
The most pressing question now, Hu Yong thinks, is "whether the internet is a global internet, a real one, with no borders and no barriers."
When the internet was born, most people firmly believed it was a wholly open, free system. So far, the barrier-free flow of information they imagined looks like an illusion. Every country has its own internet; it is not one whole. The free movement of information runs into enormous obstacles.
"The internet created a brand-new possibility for us, and that possibility, at bottom, is letting information move without barriers and letting the people who hold information connect and talk to each other without barriers. Only under those conditions can the internet do its most useful work. If it turns into all sorts of separate internets, then the free flow of information and the free exchange between people who hold it will both, I think, run into enormous obstacles," Hu Yong told QDaily.
In 1997, at the invitation of the State Council's information office, Negroponte came to China for the first time and held a small, fairly technical seminar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Charles Zhang, not yet famous, interpreted for him. Zhang Shuxin of Yinghaiwei paid for the whole thing, and it made little impression. The Chinese government had only recently finished laying the domestic backbone networks, the infrastructure of China's internet — which did a great deal for the internet's later growth.
By 1999, when Negroponte came to China a second time, everything was different. The venue had moved to the China World Hotel. "The whole hall was full. I'd guess that room held 1,000 people. It really felt like a star making an entrance," Hu Yong recalled to QDaily.
This time Sohu was the sponsor, and Sohu gave Negroponte the honorary title of "Sohu Angel." "I remember it perfectly. Just before I went on stage to formally appoint Mr. Negroponte chief adviser to the Digital Forum, I heard someone behind me mutter: 'A great big foreign fellow — what kind of angel is that?'" Hu Yong recalled in an essay titled "Acknowledging and Celebrating the Human Condition". The internet was spreading by then, but plenty of Chinese people had no idea what "angel investment" was. And then as now, the internet companies that followed — Sohu among them, at that point still called ITC — were essentially all raised on venture money. The "angels" delivered them.
"A remarkable combination of national will and grassroots innovation gave the internet a very good start in China," Hu Yong told QDaily.
Books planned for this series:
The Path of Beauty (1981)
The Great Tangshan Earthquake (1986)
The Birth of Tragedy (1986)
The Ugly Chinaman (1986)
Wild Fire (1988)
Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)
China Is Unhappy (2009)**and more
Cover image: a still from the film Ex Machina. Source: Douban.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.