In 1986, a Tolerant Society Let The Ugly Chinaman Be Published, and It Made People Confront Their “Ingrained Flaws” | Bestseller Series 8
On one hand this series revisits the stories behind these legendary books; more important, of course, is the other question: why do we have the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we built up, and how did we get here.
On one hand this series revisits the stories behind these legendary books; more important, of course, is the other question: why do we have the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we built up, and how did we get here.
The kind of society you have decides the kind of book market you get.
We picked a number of books that had a major impact in China, tracked down the authors or editors involved at the time, and asked them to tell the story of each one.
On one hand this series revisits the stories behind these legendary books; more important, of course, is the other question: why do we have the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we built up, and how did we get here.
This is book No. 8
Thirty-one years on, Chen Junnian still thinks the problems Bo Yang attacked deserve to be faced head-on. Some have improved a great deal, some have gotten worse, and some new ones have appeared.
On the afternoon of June 6, at Chen Junnian's home in Guangzhou, we talked with him about that super-bestseller of years past — The Ugly Chinaman.
Compared with 31 years ago, when China had only just opened its doors, “the rise of China” is now a hot topic — which is exactly why, Chen Junnian says, it is “very necessary to reread The Ugly Chinaman.” “Even if we become number one in the world, are we going to keep threatening to fight people? Every time we achieve something, do we have to say it 'stunned the world'? Why does the world need to be stunned — wouldn't it be better to let the world feel inspired along with us? Peaceful rise, peaceful development, a community with a shared future for mankind — we Chinese say what we mean and do what we say. Fate has brought us together, and the quality of all humanity has to rise together. By comparing ourselves with others, learning from each other and borrowing from each other, we can examine our own shortcomings and also see other people's. We should carry forward the best of our traditional culture, and we also have to criticize its backward, ugly dregs,” said Chen Junnian, now 68, with feeling.
1.
One morning in the summer of 1986, Chen Junnian, then deputy editor-in-chief of Huacheng Publishing House, walked into the office of the publisher's director, Wang Man. A friend from Hong Kong, Wang Man told him, had given him a copy of Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman, and reading it had shaken him. He handed the book over with one instruction: “This book has quite an influence overseas. Take a look and tell me what you think.”
Back home, the 37-year-old Chen Junnian spent “a day and a night” buried in The Ugly Chinaman. In an essay written later, he recalled: “It made my blood boil at a thousand degrees! Bo Yang's essays cut straight into the ills of the times and carry a uniquely deep sense of history — wide-ranging in reference, cutting to the bone, by turns mocking and furious, utterly cathartic. In all my reading, The Ugly Chinaman was like a huge ideological bomb; reading it was a thunderclap over my head, shaking me to the core!”
But at the time the book's sharpness also left Chen Junnian facing a hard choice. The “Thought Liberation Movement” of those years had produced all sorts of reflection on history and on China, but most of it approached causes and background through political lines and Party infighting, and none of it touched the question of national character the way this book did. Chen Junnian's own reasoning ran like this: the ten years of the Cultural Revolution had been brutal beyond words — was it enough to say only that “Chairman Mao made mistakes in his later years,” and that hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens bore no responsibility at all? During the Cultural Revolution, how many people took pride in joining the Red Guards — yet, strangely, the moment the Gang of Four fell, many of those same people said they had never taken part. Wasn't that uglier still?
“The Ugly Chinaman is a mirror that arrived at exactly the right moment, throwing a harsh light on the sicknesses in the Chinese character. I was certain this enlightening, critical book was what readers urgently needed,” Chen Junnian wrote in that essay.
He quickly reported back to Wang Man with what he thought of the book and how he read the publishing climate. “This book should not only be published — it should be published fast!” he told Wang Man. After hearing him out, Wang Man wrote a single line for him — “Comrade Chen Junnian is to take charge of the final review and approval of The Ugly Chinaman” — and decided to publish it.
2.
Before any of that, on September 24, 1984, the Taiwanese writer Bo Yang gave a lecture titled “The Ugly Chinaman” at the University of Iowa. He attacked the Chinese for being “dirty, disorderly and noisy,” for “infighting” and for their “inability to unite,” and traced the cause to “a filterable virus in traditional Chinese culture that has infected our descendants and from which, to this day, we have not recovered” — what he called “soy-paste vat culture.”
In August 1985 that lecture, together with transcripts of two other talks — The Chinese and the Soy-Paste Vat and Life, Literature and History — an interview piece, Facing Up to One's Own Ugly Side, and several dozen of Bo Yang's essays, was collected into the book The Ugly Chinaman, published by Taiwan's Linbai Publishing House.
In it Bo Yang went after the Chinese people's “ingrained flaws” with real violence: “Dirty, disorderly, noisy, infighting! Put three Chinese people together and you get a pig!”; “We would rather die than admit a mistake; to cover up one error we go to enormous trouble manufacturing more errors, just to prove the first one wasn't an error”; “We love to put on airs, we nurse grudges, we have no tolerance — one fight between Chinese people can leave a grudge three generations can't settle!”; “Arrogant one moment, self-abasing the next — which is to say, no self-respect, no capacity for independent thought, and worse, a fear of it. No sense of right and wrong, no standards, only fits of rage — and in the end everyone smooths it over and lets it go.”
In Taiwan, The Ugly Chinaman sold more than 15,000 copies in its first month. From the first edition in August 1985 to February 1987 it went through 16 printings, with total sales of 110,000 copies. In Hong Kong, the authorized edition had reached its sixth printing by July 1986.
The book became a bestseller overnight across Hong Kong, Taiwan and the overseas Chinese world, and set off fierce argument. The word “ugly” hit a raw nerve in Chinese national feeling. Essays attacking the book and defending it came thick and fast — The Bo Yang Aftershocks, How to Cure the Disease of Never Admitting a Mistake, Jumping Out of the Soy-Paste Vat, The Servile Chinese, The Ugly Wang Yiling — running in the Los Angeles Tribune, Hong Kong's Baixing Semimonthly and Hong Kong Economic Journal, New York's Chinese Express, North America Daily and Overseas Chinese Daily, and the Newsletter of the University of Iowa Chinese Students Association.
The word “ugly” itself came into fashion, a shorthand for attacking bad behavior. “The word was activated. It walked off the page of the dictionary and into daily life, a way of attacking and resisting improper ways of living and improper attitudes — it became a critical value,” Chen Junnian told QDaily.
3.
To get the book to readers as fast as possible, Huacheng Publishing House gave it “a green light at every step,” deciding the manuscript had to go to press by the end of October 1986 at the latest. Handed the job, editor Ye Shuming finished the whole book in a little over a week. At the end of October, Huacheng sent The Ugly Chinaman to print on schedule, and at the same time sent pre-order forms to Xinhua Bookstores across the country. Normally it took half a year to hear back on pre-order forms, three months at the very fastest — but The Ugly Chinaman took orders for one month, and by the end of November the total had reached 2.8 million copies.
That number did not delight Chen Junnian; it frightened him. A Huacheng bestseller at the time started at 100,000 copies at most. Qiong Yao's romances, for instance, had first-edition pre-orders of only a hundred thousand or so; Dai Houying's People, Ah, People had also opened at close to 100,000.
Looking back on how the book got published 31 years ago, Chen Junnian said: “Publishing it back then took a lot of courage,
and it took some strategy too.” First, he picked Ye Shuming as the editor in charge. As Chen Junnian saw him, Ye Shuming was a self-taught young writer and scholar. He had finished high school, gone to the countryside as an “educated youth,” then come back to the city as a laborer; his writing stood out, and he was transferred straight into Huacheng as an editor. Over the next few years he worked in turn on Huacheng magazine, the Collected Works of Shen Congwen and the Collected Works of Yu Dafu — immersed in traditional culture, alert to modern literature, a diligent writer whose short stories were collected and published in Taiwan to some acclaim, and steady and level-headed in his dealings with people. That was more than enough to qualify him to edit The Ugly Chinaman.
After reading the book, the 29-year-old Ye Shuming talked over his impressions with Chen Junnian and “very readily” agreed to take the job. “The title alone was a sudden awakening, because the propaganda education we'd had was all about how great the Chinese were and how outstanding Chinese culture was, five thousand years of history in every other sentence. Even though in real life we saw plenty of ugliness — especially then, with the Cultural Revolution just over and people's memories of the evil in human nature it exposed still fresh. What this book did for me wasn't to start me reflecting on Chinese culture; it was to make me understand that you could say what you thought this bluntly. Set beside the world's other cultures, Chinese culture has nothing especially sacred or transcendent about it. Like any other it has its best and its dregs, and those dregs aren't only in books — they're in the details of daily life, eroding us all the time. If we aren't on guard against them, this nation will not progress,” Ye Shuming, now 60, told QDaily.
Art editor Su Jiajie designed the cover with a spider web across the top half and, below, a stone lion against a dark red ground. Chen Junnian suggested the lion should look as though history had tempered it. Both photographs were shot for the job by the photographer Huang Renda. But “there were no computers then, so all the design work was done by hand” — to get a burned look, Su Jiajie set the photograph on fire and then carefully smothered the flames with a sheet of glass. Compared with the Taiwan original, Chen Junnian said, Bo Yang was “very satisfied” with the Huacheng cover.
“The stone lion stood for traditional Chinese culture, and the burn marks could be read more than one way. He really did set the photo alight. I wanted the burned area bigger, more obvious, so I kept egging him on from the sidelines: burn a bit more. The art editor laughed and said, burn any more and you won't be able to make out the lion. When the book came out the burn marks weren't very visible, which I thought was a pity,” Ye Shuming recalled.
In a sense, Huacheng's hurry was driven not only by the wish to get the book to readers but by potential competition. China had not yet joined the international copyright conventions, most publishing houses had a weak sense of copyright, and plenty of books were rushed into print without the author's permission. Almost at the same moment as Huacheng, Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House was also publishing The Ugly Chinaman. The Hunan edition, Chen Junnian pointed out, was one title in a “Selected Essays” series and had a named compiler, while the Huacheng edition reproduced the original book almost exactly.
For Huacheng, 2.8 million pre-orders was simply an “astronomical figure.” Afraid that “a tall tree catches the wind,” Chen Junnian moved quickly on three fronts. First, Huacheng added a prominent “Publisher's Note” on the back of the title page. It said the book had first been published by Taiwan's Linbai Publishing House; that the essay Facing Up to One's Own Ugly Side had been cut and certain wording changed, with the rest reset from the original edition; and that the book was for internal distribution, for reference by relevant experts, scholars and researchers only. Second, on the last line of the copyright page, Huacheng added four small characters in parentheses meaning “internal distribution,” to underline the point. Third, Huacheng cut the print run to 2.1 million copies and split it across two printings.
Chen Junnian remembers the first Huacheng printing — 800,000 copies — being snapped up nationwide within 20 days. A rush second printing of 1.3 million followed at once, bringing the total to 2.1 million in a single month, a measure of how feverish readers were. Even while the book was still being typeset, Ye Shuming went to the plant to check proofs and found workers eating lunch and fighting over copies of The Ugly Chinaman; he was told that some of them, unable to wait, had quietly carried sample copies out to friends and family for a first look.
Like the Huacheng edition, the Hunan edition was seized on by readers; by the end of 1986 its print run had reached 900,000.
4.
“In the 1980s China was just stepping out of the shadow of the Cultural Revolution and into reform and opening up. The whole society was full of vitality and passion; there was a real force pushing up from below, moving society forward. 'Reflection' was a very fashionable word then — reflect on history, reflect on culture, reflect on what we ourselves had done, reflect on everything, with every value going through a process of reconstruction. To reflect meant learning to criticize, not only to praise. So the moment this book came out it set off a wave — it sold as fast as it could be printed — and the publishing trade filled with imitations: The Ugly Japanese, The Ugly Frenchman, all of it,” Ye Shuming told QDaily.
But as in Hong Kong, Taiwan and overseas, the book drew plenty of criticism on the mainland too. Guangming Daily (page three, March 1, 1987) ran an article titled Are the Chinese Ugly? — A Question for Mr. Bo Yang, attacking Bo Yang's views and his position. It was reprinted by many newspapers and magazines and had considerable influence.
“What set off the people who wanted to criticize this book was those two characters, 'ugly.' That was everyone's first reaction: 'ugly.' Because we'd always said the Chinese were hardworking, brave, great and wise — how could we be ugly? But he was pointing at something specific, and he says so in the book: we've been talking about hardworking, brave, wise and great for years and years, and I'm writing about the ugliness not to attack us, but because we need to face that heap of stinking shoes outside your door — why pile them at other people's doors instead of keeping them in your own house? You're supposed to queue for the bus — why don't you? The whole world queues — why don't you? Why is the urge to cut in line so strong? Can't we change that? This is basic modern civility. The book had a premise, like a special 'democratic life meeting': I raise a criticism today, and that doesn't mean there's nothing about you worth praising. That's all it was,” Chen Junnian told QDaily.
That The Ugly Chinaman sold the way it did, he says, was entirely down to the wider setting after the Cultural Revolution, when China was liberating its thinking — a climate both “lively” and “tolerant.” “Without a social backdrop like that, all this talk of my 'pushing hard' for publication — I wouldn't have dared push. Breakthrough, breakthrough: it means breaking through at exactly the place that looks unbreakable. Things often change necessarily at a moment that looks purely accidental. One kind of change like that is called a breakthrough. It takes seizing the moment and doing everything you can. Put plainly, somebody had to do it. This book really wasn't an attack on our country; it shook our thinking, our souls, our ideas, and it gave our intellectual liberation something else to work with, something that helped us understand ourselves. It wasn't an impulse either — I was still fairly young then. I thought through a lot of ways to do it, thought about a lot of things,” Chen Junnian said.
By 1987, though, a new round of the “Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization” campaign began, and the book was caught in it.
“It started at a small meeting, where several elders of the cultural world criticized the book severely. Then at a national publishing work conference, someone in charge of neither law enforcement nor publishing actually announced: whoever dares sell The Ugly Chinaman, I'll send people to shut down his bookstore! Everyone there broke out in a cold sweat. The editorial department of Book and Periodical Herald, which had reprinted the editor's afterword, rushed a letter to its subscribers admitting that the article and news item it had run that issue had 'committed a serious error,' and asking readers, 'in order to keep the bad influence as small as possible,' to send that issue back as soon as they could. The wind filling the tower before the mountain storm made people feel how serious it was, a sign that some big political campaign was on its way again. The author, the publisher and the editors all turned into criminals awaiting sentence, and the air in Hunan was especially tense,” Mu Hui, a contract editor on the Hunan edition of The Ugly Chinaman, recalled in his essay Two Small Cases of Mass Criticism in the 1980s.
The ruling on the Hunan edition was to “halt distribution” at once, which meant the hundred-odd thousand extra copies Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House had just printed could not be released. Hunan's publishing world at the time had what were known as its “three kinds of people”: Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: Woman and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover — all criticized, all banned.
In Guangzhou, Chen Junnian had to write a self-criticism over a book he had published — the first and only time in his life — and was denounced for it. At 68 he still remembers it vividly.
During the Spring Festival of 1987 he got word that “the ministry has decided to hold a criticism meeting the morning after tomorrow,” and that he would have to “go and deliver the self-criticism on behalf of the publishing house.” In the “day and two nights” before he went, Chen Junnian “couldn't sit still and couldn't sleep at night.” Colleagues who came to his home to comfort him only made him feel the weight of the atmosphere more. His wife told him: “If they lock you up over this, I'll bring you your meals in prison.” It moved him deeply.
The meeting was held in a hall at a provincial Party committee guesthouse on Dezheng Road in Guangzhou. Seventy or eighty people packed the room.
A division chief from the Guangdong provincial Party Publicity Department chaired it. The moment he took the stage he said: “The Ugly Chinaman has had a very bad influence. It is nothing but a slander against the Chinese people and against China's fine traditional culture. Huacheng Publishing House published this book because it puts money above everything else. This criticism meeting is being held on instructions from above. Comrade Chen Junnian will now come up and deliver his self-criticism.”
Chen Junnian was “tense the whole time” and “kept his head down the whole way up.” Fortunately there were none of the terrifying chanted slogans of the Cultural Revolution in that room, and his mind “settled” a little.
In his self-criticism, Chen Junnian said he too felt the book was one-sided, but argued that this was because the whole book was pitched not at “the beautiful Chinese” but at “the ugly Chinese,” and so naturally stressed Chinese weaknesses and failings. Bo Yang had never denied that the Chinese were hardworking, brave, great and wise, he said — but people had been saying that for thousands of years; could he not be given a little time to talk about the ugly side too? Could he not be allowed to attack Chinese faults and shortcomings? Shouldn't the citizens of a great nation have the courage to face their own failings? Then he made his case on the wording: as for the “Chinese” in the book, Bo Yang had stated that the term “is used in the broad sense, and does not refer to any particular region, only to bloodline.” And most of the examples of ugliness in the book, he pointed out, were “Chinese” in Taiwan, Hong Kong and overseas, with very few on the mainland. Couldn't we read it, hold it up against ourselves and take the lesson? Beyond that, Chen Junnian criticized himself for printing so many copies at once. As for the charge that it was all done for money, he still said this much: if that had been the point, we could have printed the full 2.8 million pre-ordered, or more, and sold every one — but in the end we pulled our own hand back.
After the self-criticism, speaker after speaker went up to denounce him for “spiritual pollution” and the like. “But objectively and on the whole, most speakers were going through the motions, touching on the point and stopping there; the gunpowder smell didn't sting the eyes or the nose. Even so, the scene showed that Guangdong, at the front line of reform and opening up, still had a relatively loose and tolerant cultural environment.” Still, after the meeting Huacheng decided not to reprint the book.
“Because the word 'ugly' really does take courage to say, and conviction to say. It isn't self-attack at all; it's self-examination, it's awareness. Everyone hopes for the true, the good and the beautiful, but people can also carry the false, the evil and the ugly. You have to face that. You can't hear someone mention the false, the evil and the ugly and immediately say you're being attacked, that the Chinese nation is being slandered. Loving your country means loving what is fine and excellent in it, and also facing what is ugly in it. That is loving your country in the right way,” Chen Junnian told QDaily.
Fortunately the storm blew over within half a year.
On June 27, 1987, Hu Qiaomu, then the top official in charge of ideology, was touring an exhibition of “illegal publications” and saw The Ugly Chinaman among them. “Bo Yang says Taiwan criticizes his books and the mainland criticizes his books too. Better not to make a big publicity affair of this kind of thing — otherwise Taiwan and the mainland look the same. A book like The Ugly Chinaman can't be called reactionary, but it is very extreme, and we should be careful to distinguish between cases. In fact, Bo Yang and his book are entirely a matter for equal discussion, for a hundred schools of thought to contend over; if there were somewhere to publish it, we could easily write a forceful rebuttal,” Hu Qiaomu said. With that, The Ugly Chinaman was unbanned.
5.
It was also the first collection of essays by a Taiwanese writer ever published on the mainland. After it came Lung Ying-tai and Li Ao, with books such as Wild Fire, Seeing Off《目送》, Fayuan Temple in Beijing《北京法源寺》 and A Memoir of Li Ao. Like Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman, these books worked as a mirror, making Chinese readers examine themselves and the society they lived in.
Worth noting: in 1988, Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House got Lung Ying-tai's authorization to publish Wild Fire. Before that, Current Affairs Press had already published the book under the title Chinese People, Why Aren't You Angry? In the end the Current Affairs edition sold 150,000 copies while the Hunan edition's print run was only 64,500; together the two shaped mainland readers of the day. Essays such as Chinese People, Why Aren't You Angry?, The Mother Who Caught Syphilis, Kindergarten University and Orwell's Taiwan circulated widely for a time.
In November 1988, Chen Junnian read in the newspaper that Bo Yang and his wife had arrived in Xi'an to visit their children. He got on a train at once, carrying 3,200 yuan in royalties, and handed the money to Bo Yang himself. Bo Yang's wife, Zhang Xianghua, gave him a copy of her poetry collection A Thousand Kinds of Feeling《千般是情》, which Chen Junnian took back for Huacheng to publish. Bo Yang struck him as “the sort of person with real grounding in traditional culture, quite refined,” while Zhang Xianghua “came across as gentle and cultivated, with a tenderness like water.”
In 1998 and 1999, in reader polls run by Shucheng magazine and View on Publishing magazine — “The 20 Most Influential Books of 20 Years (1978-1998)” and “50 Books That Moved the Republic (1949-1999)” — The Ugly Chinaman was voted in by a large margin both times. In 2008, when Southern Metropolis Daily chose its “30 Books of 30 Years,” The Ugly Chinaman was on the list as well. “Only a Chinese person brave enough to face his own ugliness can possibly be beautiful — that is the dialectic about the Chinese that Bo Yang taught us. In the 1980s, this book lit the fuse on an enormous shell of self-examination,” read the citation.
“Every era gets the works that belong to it. I think it was the right time, the right place and the right people, all of it coming together — water finding its own channel. Of course that kind of natural outcome still takes everyone pulling in the same direction, pushing society forward. That water, that wave, what people call the tide of the times — everyone has to push the era along before that day arrives.” Chen Junnian, who joined Guangdong People's Publishing House after graduating from the Chinese department of South China Normal University in 1977, spent his whole career in Guangdong publishing, serving as chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Publishing Group, director of the provincial Press and Publication Bureau, standing committee member of the provincial CPPCC, director of the provincial CPPCC Proposals Committee and counselor to the provincial government.
Ye Shuming became a writer and scholar, working mainly on modern Chinese history. His books include At the Scene of Parliament, The Great Upheaval of 1911, Return to the Scene of May Fourth, China 1927: Who Held the Reins and China in the Wilderness.
For Ye Shuming, now 60, looking back at the book today, “what I feel most is that Chinese people have money now, and some of them can't help wanting to restage the old drama of 'reigning over all nations, with the four barbarian peoples paying homage.' Reflection has become a luxury. This so-called 'homage of the four barbarians' isn't submission to your culture; it's submission to your money. We're in the age of Chinese people buying up property all over the world and of books like China Can Say No. If The Ugly Chinaman came out today it would certainly be denounced for smearing China, for talking China down; it might even get branded a 'fifth columnist' or an 'American-paid shill.' 'China is ugly, so why don't you get out and go to America?' — that's about how it would go,” he told QDaily.
As for why The Ugly Chinaman sold the way it did back then, Chen Junnian said: “On the whole it was the tide of the times, the direction the popular will was heading. It didn't happen for no reason.”
Books planned for this series:
The Path of Beauty (1981)
The Modernization of Man (1985)
The Great Tangshan Earthquake (1986)
The Birth of Tragedy (1986)
Wild Fire (1988)
Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)
China Is Unhappy (2009)**and more
Cover image: the Bo Yang Museum and the comic-book edition of The Ugly Chinaman, from: pixnet ; Amazon
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.