In 1981, The Path of Beauty Got China Talking About Freedom, Human Nature and the Value of the Individual | China in Bestsellers ⑨
Can you imagine a time when talking about “beauty” was not allowed?
Can you imagine a time when talking about “beauty” was not allowed?
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 ninth book.
Li Zehou is 87 this year. He lives in Colorado, and ended his career at a school few people have heard of, Colorado College.
He will not give interviews either. He says he is “tasteless as chewing wax” — meaning he has nothing left to say — and “repulsive to look at” — meaning he isn't good-looking.
Liu Yuedi, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and a close friend of Li's, told QDaily that sometime in his seventies or eighties Li had an MRI of his brain done in the United States. “The doctor said his brain was still like a 40-year-old's. His mind is still very quick,” Liu said.
In the 1980s, Li Zehou was an idol to a great many young Chinese.
While reporting this series on bestsellers, we found that almost everyone we interviewed had read one particular book.
That book is The Path of Beauty.
A work of aesthetics becoming a bestseller is a strange thing. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy; in any culture it has nothing to do with bestsellers. In China, this one became one anyway.
1.
In 1979, Li Zehou, then 49, spent a few months writing The Path of Beauty and handed in the manuscript that autumn. But “the thinking took a long time,” he said. “Take the section ‘From Sentimental Literature to Dream of the Red Chamber’ — I had been thinking about that back in the 1950s. Most of what is in ‘Literary and Artistic Trends of the Ming and Qing’ I had already said in articles in the 1950s. ‘The Sound of the High Tang’ began in the 1960s, when I had been sent down to Hubei to work in the fields. ‘The Bronze Taotie’ was written in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution. Years of on-and-off thinking, years of notes jotted down bit by bit, came together in a short stretch of time to finish The Path of Beauty.”
Asked why he wrote it, Li said: “For a long time, most scholarly work took lively artistic and literary creation and froze it into something rigid. Many histories of literature and art chopped creative work into fragments. I believe that art, literature and aesthetics can never be separated from human fate, or from history. Having watched the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, I was even less satisfied with the rigid, fragmented histories of philosophy, thought, literature and art of that time.”
In 1980, the book's first three chapters appeared under the title “Notes on Ancient Chinese Art,” in the second issue of Aesthetics, a journal published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. The book itself did not come out until March the following year, from Cultural Relics Publishing House.
Liu Yuedi told QDaily that Li once told him the publishing house had not expected the book to sell at all — they took it for a thin pamphlet with nothing much to read. But the editor of the first edition insisted on putting it out. To everyone's surprise it sold extraordinarily well, and became a bestseller overnight.
QDaily tried to reach that editor, Shen Hui. Zhang Qingling, an editor at Cultural Relics Publishing House, said Shen had died. How the house came to publish the book is now unknown.
The Path of Beauty owed much of its success to the “aesthetics craze” of the 1980s.
In 1977, after Mao Zedong's death, the poet He Qifang (1912–1977) published a posthumous piece, “Song of Mao Zedong,” in issue 9 of People's Literature. In it he recalled a conversation with Mao in the 1960s. Mao had said: “Every class has its own beauty, and classes also share a common beauty. As the old line has it, ‘when it comes to taste, all mouths have the same likings.’” This shook China's intellectual world. It meant that the no-go zone the Cultural Revolution had built around human nature and humanism had been breached. It turned out you could talk about “beauty” and “human nature” after all.
“If you had talked about a common beauty during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s, you'd certainly have been called a bourgeois theorist of human nature — that got you savagely criticized, labeled one of the ‘eight black theories’ or whatever. Mao himself talked about a common beauty, but he was clearly talking about a common human nature,” said Zhao Shilin, a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Minzu University of China.
In 1979, Zhu Guangqian published an essay, “On Human Nature, Humanism, Human Warmth and Common Beauty,” in issue 3 of Literature & Art Studies, hoping to reckon with the Cultural Revolution, loosen people's thinking and defend human nature and humanism. Articles on these questions poured out. Aesthetics broke through the ground the Cultural Revolution had fenced off, and gradually turned into a hot subject.
“The whole Mao era, and the Cultural Revolution above all, was an age of asceticism. Love the battle dress, not the red dress — the mere mention of beauty made people turn pale. You couldn't talk about human nature, you couldn't talk about beauty, you couldn't talk about any universal question of human life. You could only talk about revolution, only about class struggle. In that era people's material lives were poor and their spiritual lives were a desert. During the Cultural Revolution you could only watch the eight model operas; every fine work of literature and art, Chinese or foreign, ancient or modern, was branded ‘feudal, capitalist or revisionist’ and banned — far more thoroughly than the First Emperor's burning of the books and burying of the scholars. People lived in that era in anguish, a kind of ascetic monk's life. And just then Li Zehou's The Path of Beauty appeared. From the highest level, in a vivid and lasting form, it led a liberation of the senses, and carried it through into a liberation of thought and spirit. Literature and art led the change. The tide of intellectual liberation in the 1980s began when the aesthetics craze set off a culture craze, when the liberation of the senses set off the liberation of thought,” said Zhao Shilin, Li Zehou's first doctoral student, now 63, speaking to QDaily at his home in Beijing.
2.
In March 1981, The Path of Beauty was published and sold in waves. College students seemed to own it “one copy apiece.” Final sales, by “conservative estimate,” came to “over a million copies.” “Shock,” “excitement,” “thrilling,” “beautifully written,” “fresh,” “enlightening” — these were the words people most often used about the book, which left a deep mark on that generation of young people.
Recalling how it felt to read it for the first time, Zhao Shilin — then 27 and a junior in the Chinese department at Jilin University — told QDaily: “Reading The Path of Beauty shook my whole inner world; it was an utterly satisfying aesthetic experience. After I read it, the collision of ideas, the excitement — I can still see it today, still fresh. The idea that even the ferocious and terrifying could be beautiful, that savagery could be turned into wild vigor; the chapter titles alone — ‘Dragons Flying and Phoenixes Dancing,’ ‘The Bronze Taotie,’ ‘Li Bai and Youth.’ I read it closely several times over.”
“We were the ‘new three classes’ right after the Cultural Revolution, the cohorts of 1977 to 1979, and we had been surrounded by the language of the Cultural Revolution for years. When we read his writing it was a completely new language. The shock was enormous, and there was a lot of imitation. Imitating Li Zehou's style in The Path of Beauty became the fashion; plenty of people writing essays liked to borrow his prose, his tone, even his rhetorical turns. His language had some very ornate elements in it, some very romantic ones, but more than anything I felt it was full of a personal style — wisdom and talent — that showed us things we had never seen or heard before,” said Peng Fuchun, now 54, a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Wuhan University.
Li Zehou also became the most important force behind the 1980s “aesthetics craze.” The craze, he recalled, was “a mass phenomenon that came from the bottom up — young people in particular had a fervent interest in aesthetics at the time.” Even women working in factories wanted to buy books on aesthetics to read.
Li himself, though, “didn't think much of it — writing it hadn't been hard — and never expected it to have that kind of impact,” Zhao Shilin told QDaily. “At his home he showed me the manuscript and the material he'd gathered for The Path of Beauty, and said it was such a shame that so much of it never went in. But he himself never thought the book was all that important,” Liu Yuedi said.
In 1980, the first National Conference on Aesthetics was held in Kunming, and the Chinese Aesthetics Society was founded. Zhou Yang, who had served as vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and deputy head of the Party's Propaganda Department, became honorary president and was “very supportive of aesthetics.” Zhu Guangqian was president, with Li Zehou, Cai Yi and Wang Chaowen as vice presidents. The conference pushed the craze further along, and newspapers and journals ran article after article joining the discussion.
Around the same time, scholars published a run of important books on aesthetics: Zhu Guangqian's Letters on Beauty, Jiang Kongyang's German Classical Aesthetics, Zong Baihua's A Stroll Through Aesthetics, Gao Ertai's On Beauty, Cai Yi's Principles of Aesthetics, Wang Chaowen's edited An Introduction to Aesthetics, and more. Nearly every one was a bestseller.
Peng Fuchun explained the craze to QDaily this way: “Aesthetics is a discipline within philosophy, but it is one that can shed a lot of intellectual constraint, a lot of the stale old language we used to use. Our philosophical arguments used to be materialism versus idealism, dialectics versus metaphysics. Aesthetics doesn't discuss any of that. It discusses what freedom is, what human existence is, what human feeling is. That is what drew so many people in. Through it people could think about what beauty is, what freedom is, what life is, and how they themselves ought to live in this world.”
Li Zehou saw it this way: “As society changed, questions of beauty in daily life came to the fore too. Were bell-bottoms, shoulder-length hair, denim and big sunglasses beautiful or not? Beautiful or ugly? These questions set off wide argument, and they touched nearly every young person. The rise of the aesthetics craze was bound up with the social mood of the time. It matched the tide of social progress, and it was a sign that society was waking up. Society had just come out of the Cultural Revolution, and people's pursuit of beauty, their normal desires and hopes for life, had been suppressed and twisted for far too long.”
That Li Zehou stood out in this craze had much to do with the fact that he had been working on aesthetics all along. Back in the “Great Debate on Aesthetics” of the 1950s and 60s, Li, in his twenties, had already founded a school of his own, in a different camp from older figures like Zhu Guangqian and Cai Yi. In 1979, as the craze took off, the Aesthetics Research Office of the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences began editing and publishing Aesthetics, the first professional journal on the subject in contemporary China, roughly one issue a year. The whole editorial office was Li Zehou alone.
3.
For China, the 1980s was an age of enlightenment. The Cultural Revolution had just ended; life was monotonous and goods were scarce, but “everyone dreamed of the future, full of hope, full of passion. Every student was a young person full of questions, giving off the scent of youth and a hunger for ideas,” Li Zehou recalled.
The Path of Beauty stirred a great many of them. Aesthetics became the field students most wanted to study. At Peking University in the early 1980s, aesthetics was always near the top, both in graduate admissions and in university-wide electives. Whenever a well-known scholar of aesthetics came to lecture, “a thousand-seat hall would fill to capacity and beyond, the crowd stirred up, surging like a spring tide.”
“I sat the graduate entrance exam in 1982, for Peking University. Aesthetics had the most applicants of any field, and admitted the most students. I remember Peking University took 8 that year, at a ratio of something like ten-plus to one. That was the lowest admission rate of any graduate program at the time — very hard to get in,” said Zhao Shilin, who studied aesthetics at Peking University from 1982 to 1984.
Peng Fuchun had a similar experience. In 1985 he applied to be one of Li Zehou's master's students in aesthetics. “There were probably about 50 applicants, and 5 were admitted,” Peng told QDaily.
Many of Li Zehou's students became scholars in their own right. Besides Zhao Shilin and Peng Fuchun, they include Liu Dong, a professor at Tsinghua University's Academy of Chinese Learning, and Zhao Tingyang and Teng Shouyao, both researchers at the Institute of Philosophy of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
Many of the young people he influenced back then are now prominent in academia: Yi Zhongtian, a professor at Xiamen University; Huang Ziping and Liu Xiaofeng, professors at Renmin University of China; Chen Sihe of Fudan University; Cui Zhiyuan of Tsinghua University; Chen Pingyuan of Peking University; Xu Jilin of East China Normal University.
It wasn't only academia. Media figures such as Liang Wendao, Qin Shuo and Wang Luxiang were influenced by him too. Qin Shuo, who studied journalism at Fudan University in the 1980s, thinks “Li Zehou is the kind of scholar who examines the boundary between heaven and man and makes a school of his own — a scholar who brings everything together. The Path of Beauty is thin, easy to carry around, and the prose is both brisk and ornate; the way it is built and broken into paragraphs makes it a very good read. In a sense, a lot of our scholars today should learn from Li Zehou's writing,” he told QDaily. Qin, now 49, was once editor-in-chief of Nanfengchuang and China Business News, and now runs the independent media outlet “Qin Shuo's Circle of Friends.”
All of which is why Li Zehou was called a “thought leader,” a “think tank,” a “mentor to the young.” He was an idol to countless young people and an awakening for many. Zhao Shilin put it in an old phrase: the sort of man “whom bold, high-minded youths loved and admired, and whom younger students followed as if mad.” Once, when Li went to Peking University's philosophy department for a discussion and then ate in the school canteen, the rest of the campus emptied out: students packed the long tables in the canteen three rows deep, inside and out.
4.
The Path of Beauty had an enormous impact at the time, but the bigger influence may not have been the book. It was Li Zehou himself.
He had become a figure who stood for the era: both the “aesthetics craze” and the “culture craze” of the 1980s ran through him. Of the three big independent cultural institutions of the culture craze, he was a member of the Academy of Chinese Culture and sat on the editorial board of the Toward the Future book series. Before Culture: China and the World launched, its founders talked it over with him, and it was Li who settled on the name.
Whenever a new book of his came out, young readers rushed to buy it. A Critique of Critical Philosophy (1979), On the History of Modern Chinese Thought (1979), The Path of Beauty (1981), On the History of Ancient Chinese Thought (1985), On the History of Contemporary Chinese Thought (1987), The Chinese Aesthetic Tradition (1988), Four Essays on Aesthetics (1989) — nearly every one was a bestseller.
In 1988, Li Zehou was elected a member of the International Institute of Philosophy in Paris. He later published Anthropo-Historical Ontology, An Outline of Philosophy, A Response to Sandel and Other Essays and Is It Time for Chinese Philosophy to Take the Stage?, all still carrying his fierce concern with the present and his depth of thought.
The ideas he put forward — the “dual variation of enlightenment and national salvation,” “Western substance, Chinese application,” “farewell to revolution,” the four-stage sequence of “economic development, individual freedom, social justice and political democracy,” “ideas receding and scholarship coming to the fore in the 1990s,” the “ontology of emotion,” the “philosophy of subjective practice” and the “theory of psychological sedimentation” — have all shaped Chinese society, culture and thought over the past three or four decades.
The aesthetics craze and the culture craze also made the 1980s an age of enlightenment. “The eighties were China's second great enlightenment movement, a grand intellectual movement. It was mainly about reflecting on tradition — including the modern revolutionary tradition — and about the awakening of the individual,” the scholar Jin Guantao told Economic Observer. Jin, together with Li Zehou, Wen Yuankai and Fang Lizhi, was regarded as one of the “four great mentors to the young,” or the “four great enlightenment mentors,” of the 1980s.
Li also enjoyed a degree of “official recognition” at the time. “In the eighties thinking was being loosened up and the political climate was relatively relaxed. Li Zehou was a National People's Congress delegate in that era, and a member of the NPC's Education, Science, Culture and Public Health Committee. Hu Qiaomu, Deng Liqun, even Kang Sheng, all thought highly of him. But Li held to a scholar's backbone: you may admire me, Hu Qiaomu, Deng Liqun, but I am not going along with your ‘leftist’ line. At one point they wanted him to be vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and he turned it down,” Zhao Shilin told QDaily.
As a senior figure, Li also gave strong backing to what young people were trying to do.
Poets including Bei Dao, Shu Ting, Mang Ke, Jiang He, Gu Cheng and Yang Lian founded the unofficial literary journal Today in Beijing, worked at new forms of poetry, and created what came to be called “Misty Poetry.” Li Zehou read the mimeographed copies of Today and was “deeply moved, because there was such a strong sense of self in it.” Misty Poetry was at that point being attacked as “a countercurrent in the development of socialist literature and art in the new era”; Li praised it as “the first swallow of the new literature.”
“When the voices of intellectuals, and of the young above all, poured out like a flood after the Cultural Revolution, the flood was registered most acutely in literature and art. Everything called the May Fourth era to mind. The enlightenment of the individual, the awakening of the individual, humanism, the return of human nature — everything turned on the theme of the individual of flesh and blood demanding release from being trampled by a deified, alienated reason. The cry of ‘people, people’ was heard in every field and every direction, painting included,” Li recalled.
Around the same time, a group of young artists including Huang Rui, Ma Desheng and A Cheng mounted the “Stars Art Exhibition.” The show, a landmark of contemporary Chinese art, caused a sensation and was shut down. Li Zehou wrote in its defense. In “Talking About Beauty in the Gallery,” published in issue 2 of Literary Gazette in 1981, he wrote: “In those distorted, twisted, ‘incomprehensible’ forms, aren't we looking at the counterpart of shattered minds that lived through a decade of turmoil, that saw every kind of misery and darkness at the top and the bottom of society, that tasted the sour and the sweet of rebellion, power seizures, factional fights, armed struggle, being sent down to the countryside and waiting for a job? Isn't all this inexpressibly complex and chaotic thought and feeling being expressed here, and to some degree in certain novels, essays and poems of recent years as well? Are they beautiful? They carry the voice of a young generation that has been through countless hardships.”
5.
Liu Yuedi, 43 this year, and Li Zehou, 87, are friends across the generations. They have known each other 14 years.
The two of them now “discuss things by email almost every day,” Liu said, mostly philosophy and society. “I say arguing with him is the only truly equal thing in this world. No rank, no padding, just the problem itself. What does it mean to sharpen something? He can sharpen the sword of your thinking until it gets keener and keener. Forget the material — what is the substance of this question? What is at the core of it? That is the soul of philosophical thought,” Liu told QDaily.
The older Li Zehou gets, the larger the questions he cares about. “He thinks from the standpoint of the human species, and attends to the fundamental questions of the species — where humanity is going, what humanity's future will be, and what cultural answers can be offered from that angle,” Zhao Shilin said. Hence Li's championing, in his later years, of the “ontology of emotion.” China's structure of reason and feeling is unlike the Western emphasis on reason; it leans toward feeling. China's is a tradition in which reason and feeling are fused, in which what is right is also what feels right.
The 1980s was an era of “liberalism marching forward in triumph.” Radical young people had a strong bent toward rejecting tradition and denying everything wholesale; Li Zehou criticized these radicals, and affirmed parts of the tradition. At the same time he refused to “bend to pressure and cater to the authorities,” and would not go along with the “leftist” line.
“Against the orthodox ‘Left’ I kept up a tenacious struggle; against the radical young I gave as good as I got, and spared them nothing. I worried that irrational feeling would run wild and turn into disaster, so I called for scholarship to stress micro-level research and rigorous training in reason. I said that China today needs reason, not unreason, because the main problem is the feudal bureaucratic system. If the culture craze went on with empty, abstract discussion indefinitely, it would come to nothing. If you push every problem off onto ‘culture,’ as if China's backwardness were all the fault of ‘culture,’ all a matter of national character or the defects of tradition, you actually cover up and cancel out the real obstacles to reform. It becomes ‘everyone is a little bit to blame,’ which does reform no good at all,” Li recalled.
A position like that was bound to please neither side. He held to it anyway. One of his essay collections is titled Walking My Own Road.
“I was probably the person in my work unit who spent the longest sent down to labor and work. I took a great deal of physical and mental damage from it. But there was one benefit: I learned to keep my thinking free of outside influence. I have held to my convictions, and walked stubbornly and silently down the road I believe I should walk. Praise or blame leaves me unmoved; honor or disgrace I do not count. It is enough that I myself know the value and the meaning of my existence,” Li Zehou wrote in the essay “Walking My Own Road.”
In 1992, at 62, Li Zehou was granted permission to emigrate to the United States, and left China.
(Sources: Conversations With Li Zehou: The Eighties; Conversations With Li Zehou: The Twenty-First Century, vol. 2)
Books planned for this series:
Becoming Modern (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: a still from the 1987 television adaptation of Dream of the Red Chamber. Source: Douban.
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.