From 1983 On: the Toward the Future Series as Enlightenment, and the Future of Modern China | China in Bestsellers ⑩

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?

The tenth book isn't a book at all. It's a series.

No single volume could stand for what this series did as an act of enlightenment and introduction, or for the ambition packed into the name "Toward the Future." And the dozens of editors and authors who made it went on to such wildly different fates that no one editor, one author, or one book could stand in for the rest.

The enormous hopes for the future built into that name were acted out, in one form or another, across the decades that followed. In nearly every period since, one or another of the series' editors has been treated as a vessel for hope about the future — and has supplied either hope or disappointment — until, between them, they helped shape the China we live in now.

The one thing we can say for certain is that we and the people we interviewed are careful even about how we voice our feelings on it. That is surely not what those editors once hoped for.

In 1984, unfamiliar faces kept turning up at the gate of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing's Dongcheng District. Most were ordinary people from out of town, though they came from all walks of life: middle-school teachers from Sichuan, Guizhou, Shaanxi and the Northeast; local officials; "sent-down" educated youth; factory apprentices; reporters and editors at small provincial papers; people who had been labeled "rightists." They had no business cards, no ID, no letter of introduction from a work unit. They simply asked the gatekeeper whether they could go in and see a man named Ding Xueliang, because they wanted to talk over some problems with him. To take down what was said, they brought along "a stack of elementary-school exercise books." Back home from Beijing, they would copy out the conversations by hand and pass them around.

"Sometimes it moved me. Their income was so low, and they paid their own way, eating nothing but the food they'd carried from home. They came a thousand miles just to meet you once, to work through a problem with you. And the problems had nothing to do with them personally. What should China do? What should modernization look like? Where does the Chinese nation's future lie? Why did the Cultural Revolution happen? If Chairman Mao was so great, why did so much go wrong under him? Chairman Mao himself said China's biggest problem was one-party rule. Should we move on from one-party rule? These were all big questions," Ding Xueliang told QDaily.

Ding drew that kind of attention because he sat on the editorial committee of the Toward the Future series (《走向未来》).

Among college students in the 1980s, almost nobody had not heard of Toward the Future.

Qian Gang, then studying in the literature department of the PLA Art Academy, "saw with my own eyes" how fast the books went. "Every one of those little white volumes was snapped up the moment it came out. I bought them all," Qian said. Zhao Shilin, then in Peking University's philosophy department, remembered much the same thing: "How did they sell it at Peking University? Not in a bookstore. They piled the books up by the road next to the sports field and you picked your own. Almost everyone bought one. You could say every student had a copy."

Published by Sichuan People's Publishing House, the series was planned at 100 titles and stopped at 74. Sales came to roughly 18 million copies. Every title was a bestseller: a book hit the market, readers everywhere rushed it, it sold out, and it went back to press again and again.

The series' editors and authors became a driving force in China's intellectual liberation in the 1980s, enlightening and shaping a whole generation. The fates of these young intellectuals, among the finest China had, became bound up with the fate of modern China itself. Even now, the generation they influenced — and the younger one after it — still face the questions those editors and authors were wrestling with and trying to answer.

"You have to be what Liang Qichao was in his day"

"We hope this series can show the fast-changing face of natural and social science today; reflect the winding path by which human beings come to know and pursue truth; and record this generation's thinking about the fate of our country and the future of humanity. Marx has a famous line: 'When the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous soil of the people, the emancipation of the Germans into men will be accomplished,'" the series' preface said.

In 1982, Hunan People's Publishing House approached Jin Guantao, then an editor at the Journal of Dialectics of Nature, and several of his peers, hoping they would "plan and publish a series of books to inform and cultivate young readers." The house had already brought out the hugely influential Toward the World (《走向世界》) series, edited by Zhong Shuhe — a collection of the accounts, travelogues, diaries and reportage written by Chinese people who went abroad between 1840 and 1919, a record of Chinese intellectuals first opening their eyes to the world.

Jin Guantao and his colleagues weren't satisfied with the brief. They wanted a series with "enlightenment" in it, and real ideas. Around then, through an introduction from Zhang Liqun, head of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of Youth Studies, Sichuan People's Publishing House came to them instead; Liu Maocai, the uncle of Jin Guantao's wife Liu Qingfeng, was head of the Sichuan Provincial Party Committee's propaganda department at the time. The two sides hit it off and decided to go ahead.

Sichuan People's Publishing House agreed that Jin Guantao and his colleagues could set up a separate Toward the Future editorial committee and editorial office in Beijing, running on an editing budget the publisher allocated, with the publisher taking no cut of the profits. That arrangement — outsiders choosing the titles, reviewing the manuscripts and doing the editing, while the publisher kept nothing but formal sign-off — counts as one of the earliest privately organized publishing ventures in China after 1978.

Even so, publishing meant first finding an institution to be affiliated with. Tang Ruoxin, son of the writer Tang Tao, pulled the right strings, and Zhang Liqun and Zhong Peizhang — the director and deputy director of the Institute of Youth Studies — arranged for the series to sit under the institute's name. Both men then became advisors to the series. So did a group of eminent older intellectuals: Yan Jici, Du Runsheng, Chen Hanbo, Hou Wailu and Qian Sanqiang were its first advisors.

Bao Zunxin, deputy editor of Reading magazine and a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of History, became editor-in-chief, with Jin Guantao and Tang Ruoxin as his deputies. Ding Xueliang, a member of the editorial committee, told QDaily that Deng Pufang, son of Deng Xiaoping, took part alongside Bao Zunxin.

Shen Changwen, general manager of SDX Joint Publishing and editor-in-chief of Reading, recalled that the first money behind the series came from Wang Qishan, then one of its editorial committee members, who put in 5,000 yuan.

All of this shows how close the series was to official reformist circles. Its influence ran through both officialdom and the street.

When the editorial committee was formed, it set one rule: members had to be young or middle-aged, nobody over 50. Bao Zunxin, the editor-in-chief, was the oldest at 46 in 1983, and the committee used his age as the ceiling. Most members were around 30.

There were no mobile phones then, Ding Xueliang recalled, so Bao Zunxin could only reach people through their work units. Ding, who worked at the Academy of Social Sciences, was one of those he reached. "There were so many people to contact that they had to interview candidates, and quite rigorously too. There wasn't a cent in it — not like today, where you invite someone and offer them something in return. You got yourself there by bus, a ride of several hours, purely as a volunteer. I remember it vividly: those exhausting stretches, talking for hours, tired and hungry, and the man who'd invited you had no money either, so everyone would take half an hour off. In that half hour you went outside, drank some tap water, bought a steamed bun. It felt like it mattered. Otherwise nobody would have done any of it," Ding told QDaily.

Jin Guantao remembered a committee that was fiercely idealistic: internally, nobody talked money or ran the numbers. Had they wanted to, they could have made a great deal of it. In the end each standing committee member got a monthly stipend of 30 yuan, ordinary members 20 yuan and staff 20 yuan; most people were volunteers in all but name.

Ding Xueliang, one of those volunteers, felt that what kept him going was simply "enlightenment" — "enlightening the whole Chinese people, top to bottom." That was what all the series' editors and authors were after; "enlightenment" was the common pursuit of everyone involved.

These editors were not running on enthusiasm alone. They had a real eye for new ideas, and they caught the moment.

Zhang Meng, one of the series' authors, thought the 1980s, after the Cultural Revolution ended, were "an era of thawing and waking up." "Everyone's nerves had gone numb. Then suddenly someone waves something new in front of you, pulls out a whole pile of it, and it's thrilling, exciting, and most of it you've never even heard of. Take someone like Max Weber. For you today, whether or not you've read him, you know the name. For us he was completely new. Back then we knew Karl Marx; who had heard of Max Weber? So it really was exciting — bang, all of it at once. They were even discussing Keynes. Later, in the fourth batch, Steven N. S. Cheung became one of our authors, with The Orange Seller's Words (《卖桔者言》). We really did gather all sorts of people," Zhang Meng told QDaily.

In 1983, Ding Xueliang's master's thesis, An Overview of Marx's Concept of Man's All-Round Development, won first prize in China's first "Young and Middle-Aged Scholars' Social Science Award," and the next year he secured a place to study in the United States. Before he left, Bao Zunxin came to see him one last time. Ding described the scene to QDaily:

"I was about to leave for America. Bao Zunxin came to find me and said: you're going, and the committee has asked me to give you a job. What should I do once I got there? First, send word back to us about a few good books. Again, not a cent in it, but it had to be done. By the time he'd finished it was five in the afternoon. Nutrition was poor back then, so by four or five your stomach was already growling, and there was no expense account, and our incomes were very low besides. Bao Zunxin really felt he'd wronged me — I'd done so much work for the committee and he'd never even bought me a cup of tea. Could we find somewhere to eat? There were no proper restaurants then, so the only place we could go was a small roadside place. I remember it vividly. We walked into a little alley by the zoo and found a small restaurant. Bao Zunxin was in a generous mood and said the drinks that afternoon were on him. Everyone was poor. We ordered a plate of braised pig's head meat, with the bristles still on it, a dish of spiced peanuts and a bottle of erguotou at 56 percent alcohol. The two of us drank every drop, full of bravado, our spirits soaring, our resolve reaching the heavens. Bao Zunxin said he was seeing me off on behalf of the committee. You're the first of us to study in the West, he said, remember that. Your mission is enormous. You have to be what Liang Qichao was in his day."

"What's going on in the world?"

From late 1983 to 1988, Toward the Future put out roughly one batch a year — five batches, 74 titles, around 18 million copies sold.

Titles such as The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, GEB: An Eternal Golden Braid (on Gödel, Escher and Bach), Behind the Appearance of History: An Exploration of the Ultra-Stable Structure of Chinese Feudal Society, Let the Light of Science Illuminate Itself: Why Modern Science Did Not Arise in China, The Modernization of Man, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and The Keynesian Revolution each sold hundreds of thousands of copies, some more than a million. The series covered the newest Western work in physics, sociology, economics, biology, philosophy and history.

For young people then, these books were new knowledge, new concepts, new ideas. Interviewed by QDaily, readers of that era kept reaching for the same words: "exciting," "thrilling," "it opened me up," "it opened my third eye," "enlightenment," "cutting-edge," "avant-garde."

Liu Qing was then a second-year master's student in the chemical engineering department at Donghua University. At 21, he watched a teacher pull several volumes of Toward the Future out during a lecture and found them "captivating at first sight." He set about collecting the whole series. "I bought practically every one. I still have them at home. For us, all of it was brand-new knowledge," Liu Qing said.

Hu Yong remembered it the same way: "When I first saw this stuff I'd never come across any of it. It was completely new knowledge. The basic feeling was of a third eye opening. Put another way, you'd never realized there were this many people in the world studying this many fascinating things. It was a bit like being ravenous and walking up to a stall heaped with food. You'd greedily eat everything in sight — like at a buffet, you pile on far more than you can finish."

Qin Shuo called the series "sweeping," "ahead of its time," something that left him completely "opened up." Qian Gang, almost excited, put it this way: "We were all starving for it. It was a hunger for ideas."

Jin Guantao, who took over as editor-in-chief from Bao Zunxin in 1987, summed up what made the series what it was: "Putting modern art on the cover was a Toward the Future first. More important, the contents had to carry new ideas — not pure academic knowledge boxed into a discipline. Specifically, there were several requirements. First, it had to have real ideas in it and speak to the questions of the day. Second, it had to cross disciplines. Third, it had to be thin enough to fit in a pocket, so it was easy to read. Fourth, we needed a mix: translations from the West, original work by young Chinese scholars, and books tied to the realities of China's reform."

The editors and authors included Wang Qishan, Mao Yushi, Zhou Qiren, Steven N. S. Cheung, Zhu Jiaming, Liu Dong, Qian Chengdan, Li Yinhe and Dong Xiuyu. Cui Zhiyuan (born 1963), Zhang Meng (born 1959) and Gu Xin (born 1963) were only in their twenties — very young, and bursting with energy. Zhang Meng, Gu Xin and Zhang Jizong wrote The Genesis of Man in under a week. "I went three or four nights without sleep," Zhang Meng said.

But because everyone was in such a rush to bring new knowledge from abroad to Chinese readers, and because editors and authors varied in skill, the quality of the series was uneven. Zhang Meng said The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis were not very faithful to their originals; the translating and editing were not well done.

The series owed much of its commercial success to China's reform and opening after 1978. After decades of isolation, with almost no picture of conditions abroad, the Chinese government was now calling on the country to understand "the mainstream of world development" and to pursue the "Four Modernizations" — of industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology.

Toward the Future did a great deal to help Chinese readers work out "what's going on in the world." Its popularity and influence also "owed" a great deal to the decades of closure that came before, decades sealed off from the outside with no idea what anyone else had been doing.

"Take The Modernization of Man. China's Four Modernizations left out the modernization of the person. If people don't modernize, how can a country or a society modernize? Or Why Has Japan "Succeeded" — the Chinese assumption then was that modernization was a Western package, so would modernizing mean wholesale Westernization? Japan's route combined the best of the West with the best of its own tradition. Modernizing didn't have to mean giving everything up. Or The Keynesian Revolution, which argued that the roles of government and market aren't absolutes," Ding Xueliang said.

"Toward the Future had a bright, upward, rather progressive temperament. Just as the name says, it faced the future. After we came through the Cultural Revolution, the world had changed enormously in those ten years — so much new thinking, so much new knowledge out there. And it wasn't only during those ten chaotic years that we didn't know about it. We didn't know during the previous 17 either, meaning 1949 to 1966. So one of the series' most striking features was this: in our thinking and our knowledge, Chinese people had to get in step with the world, and face the future. In that sense it was a crucial act of enlightenment — it opened up a world and its wisdom that we had never seen," Liu Qing told QDaily.

The series thus became an important player in the intellectual enlightenment movement that rose in the 1980s, feeding an era-defining wave of "reflection on tradition, the modern revolutionary tradition included, and the awakening of the individual." "Back then you'd have been embarrassed to oppose reform," Qin Shuo said.

The Toward the Future editorial committee, the Academy of Chinese Culture and the editorial committee of the Culture: China and the World series were the three great non-official cultural institutions of 1980s China. The Academy of Chinese Culture enlightened the public mainly by teaching classes, with instructors including Liang Shuming, Feng Youlan, Ji Xianlin, Zhang Dainian, Jin Kemu, Tang Yijie and Li Shenzhi. The Culture: China and the World committee, with Gan Yang as editor-in-chief, brought out more than a hundred titles in three or four years: the "Modern Western Academic Library" (35 titles), the "New Knowledge Library" (78 titles), the "Humanities Research Series," and five issues of the Culture: China and the World journal. Among them were Western classics such as Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, The Birth of Tragedy, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism and Political Order in Changing Societies.

Together these three lit the "culture fever" of the 1980s and became the source of the intellectual currents then running through China's humanities and social sciences.

Beyond the moment it caught, Toward the Future also used marketing that looks shrewd even now. Its covers carried black-and-white modern art by Dai Shihe, then a student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts: stylish and new. The books were printed in a distinctively narrow, small format. Abridged translation kept each volume short. All of it drove the cost per book down, within reach of a student's budget.

Even at a low price, in an era of scarcity the more common practice was for one person to buy a few titles, a friend to buy a few others, and for everyone to swap. "Two or three classmates, four or five classmates, would get together to argue about them constantly. There were even discussions across universities, with young teachers reading along with us. It went on all the time. And back then the books seemed to be a kind of cultural badge — if you were seen reading the series, it proved you were someone with ideas," Liu Qing said.

The future they brought

In October 1988, at an academic conference in Chengdu, Sichuan, titled "Chinese Scholars Looking Toward the 21st Century," 25-year-old Liu Qing met 41-year-old Jin Guantao. Liu was then only a contributing reporter for the Shanghai magazine Contemporary Youth Studies; Jin Guantao was already famous, ranked with Li Zehou and Wen Yuankai among the "four great mentors of youth" — or "four great mentors of enlightenment" — of the 1980s.

Liu Qing, who describes himself back then as a "newborn calf that doesn't fear tigers," got into an argument at the dinner table with Jin Guantao, to him "practically a god," over a point about Karl Popper. At the conference many people had trouble following Jin Guantao's paper, and Liu restated it brilliantly in "a very short time, a few minutes." "I explained it very clearly, and everyone found it quite interesting to listen to," Liu said. Both moments stuck with Jin Guantao. And since both men had come up through science and engineering, "we could really talk and understand each other." They agreed that Liu Qing would study under Jin Guantao as his first doctoral student.

"He already treated me as his student. He came to Shanghai in November to give a talk and take part in some academic events, and he brought me along to some private engagements too. That time he came to Shanghai for another journal run by Wang Yuanhua, called New Enlightenment. I met Wang Yuanhua and a few other scholars there," Liu Qing recalled.

But the whole arrangement was interrupted, and it never happened.

Jin Guantao went to work in Hong Kong. With Liu Qingfeng and Chen Fangzheng he founded Twenty-First Century magazine, a variant of the earlier Toward the Future magazine the series' editorial committee had once published — though with the original intellectual community scattered, it had become more purely an academic journal.

Liu Qing went to study in the United States and took a PhD in political science at the University of Minnesota. In 1999, at Jin Guantao's invitation, he moved to Hong Kong, where he helped edit Twenty-First Century and ran the academic website "Century China," among other projects.

Liu Qing is now a professor of political science at East China Normal University and one of China's most influential public intellectuals. His books include An Age of Contention: Tracing Contemporary Western Thought, The Undecided Moment: Western Thought in the Discourse of Modernity and How Special Is China; his translations include The Legacy of Isaiah Berlin and The Irony of Free Speech.

Qin Shuo became editor-in-chief of Nanfengchuang and China Business News. In 1997, at 29, he took over Nanfengchuang and turned it into China's most influential and best-selling political and economic magazine, with nearly 660,000 copies an issue. Time called it "a current-affairs publication for China's senior intellectuals." Today Qin Shuo runs his own media venture, Qin Shuo's Friends Circle (《秦朔朋友圈》).

Hu Yong was a reporter at Sanlian Lifeweek. Besides writing extensively to introduce the internet to Chinese readers, he commissioned, published and translated a string of books about it, including Being Digital, The Web Is King (《网络为王》), A Cacophony of Voices (《众声喧哗》), Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everybody (《未来是湿的》). He is now a professor at Peking University's School of Journalism and Communication, still studying digital life and thinking hard about digitization and the internet.

Qian Gang wrote first-rate reportage: The Great Tangshan Earthquake, Sea Burial: A Centennial Elegy for the Qing Empire's Beiyang Fleet, Reform: Autumn 1987 in the Soviet Union. He worked in turn for PLA Daily, China Earthquake News (later renamed China Disaster Reduction News), Sanlian Lifeweek and CCTV's News Probe. From 1998 to 2001 he was executive deputy editor-in-chief of Southern Weekly. Since the autumn of 2003 he has directed the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, working mainly on the history of Chinese journalism and on discourse analysis of People's Daily and PLA Daily.

Their own futures

As for the series' advisors, editors and authors, Ding Xueliang said: "I am now the only person from Toward the Future who still has 100 percent freedom of speech. The others have lost it. Some have died. Some were locked up. Some were arrested. Some have disappeared. And some became officials."

Chen Yizi left China in the late 1980s and never came back; he died in the United States in 2014. Bao Zunxin, Yue Xiucheng, He Weiling, Jia Xinmin and Deng Yingtao have also died.

Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng carried on their scholarship, holding posts at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and National Chengchi University in Taiwan among others, and publishing A Study of the History of Ideas, The Origins of Modern Chinese Thought and Ten Lectures on the History of Chinese Thought (Vol. 1), among other works. Ding Xueliang, after a PhD in sociology from Harvard under Daniel Bell, became a scholar too. He is now a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Tang Ruoxin served as deputy party secretary of Qinhuangdao, mayor of Handan and deputy director of the Hebei Provincial Planning Commission, then as party secretary and general manager of China Export & Credit Insurance Corporation — and in 2012 was sentenced to 14 years for bribery and abuse of power. Yin Lantian was a vice president of the China Agricultural Development Trust and Investment Corporation, known as Zhongnongxin, and was sentenced to 16 years after the company became caught up in a criminal case.

Looking back at the series, Hu Yong, now 52, thinks that "by today's standards it was still pretty green. A lot of it saw things in twos, without much inquiry into how complicated the world is. Put kindly, it was Chinese intellectuals opening their eyes to the world again. So we kept a lot of the marks of an age of innocence: plenty of it was naive, plenty of it childlike, but plenty of it was also very sincere. Of course we can't go back to that age of innocence now. You have to grow up. So what we probably need today is a new Toward the Future series, one that looks at China and the world with a more complicated eye."

"The eighties were a time when Chinese people had confidence, conviction and faith. It was not an era of fakery, of coercion, of terror, of distortion, of corruption. Of course there was corruption. But the important thing was that we had confidence in the future. Nobody made us have it. We simply had it," Ding Xueliang said.

(Reference: My Life and the Eighties (《我与八十年代》))

Previously published in this book series:

The Path of Beauty (1981)

The Toward the Future Series (1983)

Tolerance (1985)

The Great Tangshan Earthquake (1986)

The Ugly Chinaman (1986)

Being Digital (1996)

China Can Say No (1996)

The Grassland Tribe Series (1998)

Rich Dad Poor Dad (2000)

Who Moved My Cheese? (2001)

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014)

Cover image from: Kongfz.com