All Sages Bookstore Founder Liu Suli Has Spent 20 Years Trying to "Read Books for Other People." Now He's Pinning His Hopes on Luo Zhenyu

Liu Suli wants to hand as many people as possible an index — something that points them toward more knowledge. He tried a magazine before; now he's doing paid audio. The advantage of the latter: it actually got made.

On October 30, Luo Zhenyu posted on Weibo: "Eight months ago, I asked @LiuSuli to come out of retirement. Today the product is finally here. Without Mr. Liu Suli's and All Sages Bookstore's standing in the intellectual world, a cultural project this big would have been impossible — asking leading scholars in every field to retell the classics of human thought for a modern audience. This is a project that will take many years."

Luo Zhenyu is the founder of the paid-content app Dedao and the host of the show Luoji Siwei (《罗辑思维》), a celebrity with more than ten million followers who helped set off China's paid-knowledge boom. Liu Suli is a scholar and the founder of All Sages Bookstore, the most influential privately run academic bookstore in China; more than 400,000 book titles have passed through his hands. Since it opened in 1993, the store has been known for its unusual standards for choosing books and for its humanist streak, and has long been both a spiritual landmark for countless readers and a cultural landmark of Beijing.

The two men look like an odd pair. Yet on October 30 — the day before the shared birthday of All Sages Bookstore and Liu Suli — they joined forces to launch a product on Dedao: Liu Suli's Master Class (《刘苏里·名家大课》). Liu Suli has invited 50 eminent scholars and translators who, over the coming year, will walk Dedao subscribers through 52 classic works.

The course runs six days a week: one day is Liu Suli's own introduction to a classic, the other five are his retellings of scripts written by the scholars. Each day's audio runs about 10 minutes, which works out to roughly 2,500 characters of script. It costs 199 yuan.

These scholars and translators cover three generations of Chinese academics since 1978. The first generation includes Chen Jiaying, Deng Xiaomang, Xu Youyu, Liu Xiaofeng, Zheng Yefu and Zhou Guoping; the second includes Xu Ben, Wei Sen, Zhao Tingyang, Feng Keli, Yan Kewen and Liu Qing; the third includes Zhou Baosong, Wu Fei, Li Kang, Liu Yu, Wang Jianxun and Bao Gangsheng. The classics on the list include Critique of Pure Reason, Philosophical Investigations, Democracy in America, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Being and Time, The Social Contract, The Prince and The Republic.

"This is an attempt without precedent — nothing like it has come before, and it will be hard to repeat. It carries on the work of sorting out human knowledge and ideas that began in the 1980s and has run for nearly forty years; it is also an interim summing-up of that work, and a new attempt to bring its benefits to more lifelong learners," Liu Suli wrote in his Inaugural Statement.

Liu Suli: "I've Been Turning 'Reading Books for Other People' Over in My Head for About 20 Years"

The collaboration dates back to Chinese New Year in 2017. As Luo Zhenyu put it at a livestreamed event on November 1, the aim was "to bring the heavyweight intellectuals who lead every field of mainstream Chinese scholarship onto Dedao." Only one person could do that: Liu Suli.

The talks took about 20 minutes. They went that fast, Liu Suli told QDaily, because he had been thinking about something like this for at least 20 years.

As early as 1996 and 1997, Liu Suli put out a print publication called All Sages Reading Space (《万圣阅读空间》), which ran for four or five years. Then one day between 2009 and 2011, he bumped into Li Ling, a professor in Peking University's Chinese department, at the bookstore. Li Ling told him there was one thing he found genuinely enjoyable — something that served him and served other people at the same time. He called it "reading books for other people."

"That hit me hard. What we'd had in mind 20 or 19 years earlier wasn't nearly so sharp. 'Reading books for other people' lays bare what the thing actually is, in very few words," Liu Suli recalled to QDaily.

Li Ling did in fact go on to publish a run of "reading books for other people" titles, among them Walking Downhill (《人往低处走》), The Only Rule (《唯一的规则》), Only by Setting Aside the Sage Do We Get the Real Confucius (《去圣乃得真孔子》) and Life and Death Are Fated, Wealth and Rank Rest With Heaven (《死生有命，富贵在天》), explaining Chinese classics such as The Analects, Laozi, The Art of War and The Book of Changes.

By 2012, Liu Suli and Xu Yang and Li Nan of the magazine Xinrui (《信睿》) had raised "reading books for other people" again. They planned all of it — how the money would be spent, who would staff it, how the articles would be structured and what they would contain, which authors to pick — and then it went nowhere. Liu Suli's explanation for why: "There was heavy smog all over north China, so it wasn't a good time to start a magazine."

Three years later, Liu Suli published a book of conversations called 1+12: The Road to Common Sense (《1+12：通向常识的道路》). In it he talks with twelve scholars — Liang Wendao, Xiao Han, Gao Quanxi, Yan Kewen, Jin Yan, Qian Yongxiang, Zheng Yefu, Liu Xiaofeng and Wu Si among them — around the theme of "revisiting the classics," on figures including Thomas Paine, Max Weber, John Maynard Keynes, Machiavelli and Laozi.

This year he also made a video book-talk show, "Suli on Books," for the app Dushuren. Each weekly episode runs 50 to 60 minutes and covers 15 to 20 new titles.

To Liu Suli, all of these are simply different concrete forms of the same thing: "reading books for other people." So when Luo Zhenyu proposed a product like Liu Suli's Master Class, "in principle we barely discussed it at all." He said yes on the spot.

"I'd worked this through ten or twenty years ago. The whole line of thinking was second nature to me. So half of it is that Fat Luo 'conned' me, and half of it is that I fell into a way of thinking I'd been stuck in for a long time," Liu Suli said.

The Argument Over "Reading Books for Other People"

Luo Zhenyu is known for "reading books for other people" too.

In 2016, the first episode of the first season of Xu Zhiyuan's video interview show Thirteen Invitations (《十三邀》) had Luo Zhenyu as its subject. Over three hours, Luo talked freely, making no attempt to hide — in fact insisting on — his identity as a businessman.

This is how Xu Zhiyuan described his impression of Luo: "Over three hours of conversation, he was honest to a degree that astonished me. At times I felt he was too 'honest,' laying out his intensely practical, utilitarian side in full. I half suspected that this 'honesty' also contained a kind of resistance — that he was deliberately negating some of the things I have tried to champion. But there was a 'Li Sao' moment, and another side of him showed through. At one point he said that if a repairman in Guiyang tried to subscribe to Principles of Economics because of his show, that alone would be a great achievement. In that instant he became an enlightener rather than an 'agitator.'"

One common criticism holds that a paid-knowledge product like Dedao merely peddles opinions: it simplifies knowledge, never shows the act of thinking, and is of no use at all in building a complex body of knowledge. Its real effect, the critics say, is to give you the illusion of having read many books and to soothe your anxiety about knowledge in a fast-changing era. Anyone who actually wants to read would never listen to a course like this. And a great many of Dedao's courses amount to "success literature" and "chicken soup."

The rebuttal is no less confident: Dedao is just a product that meets some people's needs, a step up toward deeper knowledge for some of them. You can't use an elitist frame to demand that everyone study the original texts.

That is Liu Suli's view too. "Someone gets to know a book through 140 characters. So what? What's wrong with that? Someone wants to read 2,500 characters — why shouldn't he? If you think that doesn't explain it, go provide 10,000-plus characters, or 50,000 — nobody's stopping you. But you can't be good at providing 60,000 characters and then sneer at the person providing 140."

The argument feels a bit like a return to the fight over Lecture Room (《百家讲坛》) around 2006, except that one was television and this one is audio. Before that, plenty of guides, digests and companions to the classics came out in book form. The originals have always been something only a few people are willing to open.

"People Who Long for Learning but Aren't Out to Specialize in the Field"

Liu Suli thinks that Luo Zhenyu's comparing him to Hu Shi, a hub figure of the intellectual world, is a case of "killing with kindness" — praise so heavy it does damage. Still, his experience and contacts in publishing and scholarship plainly give him an edge over most people. Liu Yu, an associate professor at Tsinghua University, calls him "a bridge between China's cultural circles, academia and the book trade."

At the start of the project, Liu Suli already carried a rough list of two or three thousand, maybe three or four thousand, authors and translators in his head. In practice he began with a list of 203 books and just over 50 scholars. Then, over three afternoons, working by phone and WeChat, he reached 53 people and commissioned 67 pieces. Only two didn't work out: one was too busy, the other wasn't confident about writing in this particular style.

For the books, each scholar first proposed two or three titles he wanted to interpret, and Liu Suli then checked them against his list. In the end 51 scholars picked 67 books, and nearly all of them were already on the list — only two fell outside it. After the calls, Liu Suli sent all 51 a formal commissioning letter setting out why he had asked them and which direction the piece should take.

To keep each piece aimed at the right reader, every commissioning letter spelled out a profile of Dedao's users. But Liu Suli says he doesn't actually know Dedao's real user profile; he was simply going by what Dedao told him — "drawing a tiger by looking at a cat," as he put it — so he can't say who the audience for Liu Suli's Master Class really is. The only customers he knows well are All Sages's.

Dedao, for its part, describes the intended audience on the product page like this: "1. People who want to grasp the essence of several centuries of political, philosophical, legal and economic thought; 2. People who want to read 52 world-changing works of thought all the way through, and understand contemporary China and the world clearly; 3. People who want to follow eminent scholars, raise the level of their thinking and ideas, and go further in the future."

Liu Suli has a term for them: "the knowledge public," people who "long for learning but aren't out to specialize in the field." Luo Zhenyu thinks this is exactly the crowd both All Sages and Dedao want to gather.

Figures Dedao released in March 2017 showed the app had more than 5.58 million total users and more than 450,000 daily active users on average. Its columns had sold 1.44 million subscriptions in total, with a weekly open rate of 63.1% and a daily open rate of 29.3%. Subscriptions to Xue Zhaofeng's Peking University Economics Course (199 yuan) alone topped 200,000 — which, if the figure is accurate, means that single column brought Dedao more than 40 million yuan.

By 8pm on October 30, Liu Suli's Master Class had passed 5,000 subscribers. By November 12 it had topped 15,000, with revenue above 3 million yuan. At 50 yuan a book, that is the equivalent of selling 60,000 books — close to the number of book titles All Sages Bookstore carries (about 70,000).

Liu Suli's Views, Worth Reading in Full

Q = QDaily

L = Liu Suli

Q: How do you see the value of Liu Suli's Master Class? The marketing copy says the course will draw a complete map of human thought and help you build a systematic view of history, politics, culture and other fields.

L: That's nonsense. Dedao already agreed to change it. It started as an ad line written by someone on Dedao's promotion team, and I told them it didn't square with the facts. We never set out with any idea of drawing a map. Even if you did have that in mind, would you dare claim you can draw the map of human thought? I flagged this twice. The last time, one of Dedao's core team told me herself, "Don't worry, Mr. Liu, it's already been fixed." The day before yesterday at noon, right after we finished recording, we ate together at 1:30. I raised it again, and she said it had been changed. Then I looked in the small hours the day before yesterday, and again yesterday during the day — and there it was, drawing the map again. Ridiculous. I don't like using hype to do anything. Exaggeration and so on — there's no need for it. If what you have is good, the people who want it will buy it. If they don't want it, you can shout all you like and they still won't. This isn't really their fault; it must be some small hitch somewhere in the technical process. I believe that young woman on the core team wasn't lying to me. She had no reason to.

Q: But there's a line in the Inaugural Statement that you presumably do stand behind. You wrote: "This carries on the work of sorting out human knowledge and ideas that began in the 1980s and has run for nearly forty years; it is also an interim summing-up of that work, and a new attempt to bring its benefits to more lifelong learners."

L: Right, I put that sentence together myself. But the idea behind it first surfaced when the four of us — me, Fat Luo, Tuo Buhua and my wife — were talking. Of that 20-minute conversation I mentioned, we spent at least three to five minutes on this topic. He was trying to describe what it was we were doing. He brought up the Towards the Future book series from the 1980s. You know, that kind of concrete reference. He probably hadn't thought about it as long or as deeply as I had. He was trying to spark something in me. And I thought, you're trying to spark something in me? I've turned this over from every side. The Towards the Future series, the 1980s boom in privately published books and series, this notion of "sorting out" — those concepts. When I wrote the Inaugural Statement, I organized all that into one sentence, the sentence you're looking at now, composed entirely by me. Fat Luo was delighted — I'd given his grand idea an abstract summing-up. It lifted the commercial venture Dedao and All Sages are running up a notch. And I think that lift, that description, squares with the facts.

Q: Not an exaggeration?

L: Not in the least. Because the key figures here, myself included, lived through that intellectual movement, took part in it and witnessed it. And for more than 30 years, none of these people has stopped. Plenty of people fell behind — went home, died, went into seclusion, all sorts. These people are still on the front line. The ones I made a point of inviting range from 30 years old to 47 or 48 — students of that generation, who inherited its mantle. I didn't just pick young people at random. I had this in mind at the time. When I got that sentence into shape, I was rather pleased with myself (laughs). Only joking.

Q: So in choosing people you were thinking specifically about continuity — about representing the history among Chinese intellectuals over these past few decades?

L: Right. The form this thing takes may look pretty ordinary, but that layer of meaning is in it.

Q: That is genuinely interesting. Looking at the reading list, it's mostly Western thought in the humanities and social sciences, and it leans toward political science and philosophy. Those are also the subjects Chinese intellectuals have cared most about over these forty years.

L: Right. They are.

Q: Is there any logic behind the order of the 52 episodes?

L: The order itself doesn't mean much. When we commissioned the pieces, apart from the first month or two — where we put a bit of pressure on the people scheduled to run early — the rest followed whenever each author finished. They'd tell us their timing first, and we'd draw up a schedule from that. I'm the one being managed here, in fact: the whole All Sages operation has one coordinator and commander-in-chief, my wife, who is also the boss at home. Once we had it laid out, if two people's timing collided we'd talk to one of them about moving up or pushing back a little. That kind of adjustment.

Q: Who is Liu Suli's Master Class aimed at?

L: I can't give you the user profile. And in truth I don't really know it myself. What I can tell you is who All Sages's users are, because I know them so well — I'm among them every day, I watch them come in. Why won't I make guesses about Dedao's users? It's not exactly that I think it's a trade secret; it's that I'm afraid I'd get it wrong. I have friends who describe Dedao's users, and they aren't describing the same group of people. Which one is right? You tell me. I have no way to judge.

Q: What about All Sages's users?

L: On age, there's a big difference between the five, six, seven years before 2012 and the five years after. In the five to seven years before 2012, our customers started at about 40 and ran up to people in their 80s and 90s. The core group was mostly in their 50s and 60s. What kind of middle-aged people? Mostly the sort you see in the papers and on television — elites from every walk of life. Plenty of journalists, senior bank staff, businesspeople, a good number of party and government officials, and all kinds of people based overseas. That's the occupational spread. Geographically, roughly one-third Beijing and the area around it, one-third the rest of China, one-third overseas.

Q: Very international.

L: All Sages was absolutely international. Why did the turbulence in the domestic book market never touch us? Apart from SARS, no disaster, natural or man-made, has done us much harm. SARS was severe. Once Beijingers had come back to life, people from outside still didn't dare come. Everyone else's business had recovered and two-thirds of mine still couldn't get here. A lot of businesses recovered in June; we only started recovering the following January, when people quietly began coming back into the village again, feeling Beijing was no longer dangerous.

Q: And after 2012?

L: At the end of 2012 we moved to where we are now, and all at once a crowd of stylish, good-looking young people poured in. You could tell from how they dressed that this was a well-educated generation that "didn't lack for money." A lot of young, attractive women came to buy the books All Sages sells. The most conspicuous were the ones wheeling suitcases; I later asked a few of them, and it turned out they were either about to catch a flight or had just got off one. Most were graduates of the universities nearby who had made something of themselves a few years on and had come back to "repay" All Sages. They said that in the days when they couldn't afford books they'd spent years reading in the store, and we never chased them out, we treated them well; now that they had money they were making good on a wish from back then — to own the classics they couldn't afford. After 2012 the age structure of All Sages's readers changed enormously. Young people became a large share, nearly the reverse of the old ratio.

Q: Why do you think that happened?

L: The only thing I can point to is the internet. At the time Weibo was still at its peak and WeChat was rising, and the All Sages move drew a lot of attention. A batch of young people seemed to learn of All Sages's existence only then; when we reopened, they found there was a bookstore this close by that they hadn't known about, and I suppose that's when they took to it.

Q: As the operator of an independent bookstore, you've spent more than twenty years spreading knowledge and ideas mainly by selling books. With Liu Suli's Master Class you're spreading knowledge and ideas through a new medium, a paid-knowledge audio product. Does it feel different?

L: First, selling books is only one of my many methods. Let me tell you about another — a separate line where I put in effort and made a difference. For a long stretch, a lot of the book-prize judging in this country had something to do with me. You can see that's an important channel too: when people won't listen to what you say, in the end you let the work speak, and that's a method as well. There are too many methods to get into. As for the internet specifically, in essence I see no difference. But in technique there's a huge difference. I don't understand those techniques myself, yet however much you keep reinventing technique, the thing you are doing is something I understand; I've been doing it for decades. On anything to do with technique and method, I defer entirely to Dedao. "Unluckily" for them, our team also has an internet heavyweight, so they can't just say whatever they like either. I listen to both sides and decide whose view makes more sense. Honestly, the two sides have worked together for a long time now and we've never once argued about a matter of principle — it's always technical detail.

Q: So at bottom you think the two aren't different — both are just a means of transmission?

L: Right, it's a means of transmission. But the more modern the method, obviously the more effective it is and the wider it reaches. Once the Heidelberg press appeared, the Middle Ages were over, because a Heidelberg press could print many books in a day where it used to take many days to print one. Once the internet arrived, autocracy should have vanished from this world — because you don't even have to print anything now; information can reach every corner of the globe in seconds. I fully recognize that progress.

The question, then, is this: if humanity could invent this method and many people took to it, there is naturally a reason it was invented and a reason people like it, and I don't think that reasoning needs questioning. Who are you to question it? Don't be misled by the fact that I sell paper books. I'm in favor of the so-called new methods — Kindles, iPads, reading on a computer, all of it. I have no power whatsoever to hold back this historical tide; anyone who tries is a clown, a mantis blocking a chariot. So I'm in favor of the method across the board. What I honestly don't understand is the effect it produces; I don't have a clear sense of it, even though I use these things myself. How does it actually work out? For my own part, I need to watch. Until then, given that my grasp of this is incomplete, I trust the experts. There are plenty of internet experts around me.

Q: In this era, how do you think a person acquires new knowledge? What's the best way? Is something like Dedao a better form, for instance? Why?

L: This will sound like a joke, and other people probably won't believe it. Aren't I supposed to be technically illiterate — internet-illiterate? And yet, hard as it is to imagine, back in 2006 I had already worked out a concept for internet-based publishing. It's still ahead of its time today. I'd say the electronic publishing you people are doing now is all nonsense. So why would someone who doesn't understand technology try to build something on top of a thing he doesn't understand? Because I understand, in nearly every respect, the more basic thing underneath it.

Isn't producing books just producing content? It can be on paper or paperless. What is a library? We know that inside out — it involves collecting, lending and selling books. Nobody understands it better than I do. As for reading, I'm 52 years in this year; I started reading at five and never stopped. What is a book as a consumer product? What about a book as a gift? Very few people ever stop to think about these things.

Which is to say, when it comes to books, I doubt anyone in this world has thought about it more than I have. Thinking every day about how to sell them, how to make them more beautiful, how to make them more convenient — I've thought about these things a great deal. In the end it all comes down to how you present good content in the most convenient and least costly way. That's the essence of it. The internet is one way of presenting it. And on the basis of the internet, I worked out a model for the publishing of the future. It's grand, practical and workable.

Q: So why did nothing come of it?

L: Because all I did was think. On this front I'm the thinker type. But the kind of thinker who does real things, not the kind who leafs through documents — these are all things I've handled and been through, with actual practice behind them. I'm an empiricist, so I lived it and I thought about it. Because I thought about the future forms of publishing back in 2006, what Fat Luo had in mind turned out to be what I'd call the third tier of content presentation in internet publishing.

I have a six-tier classification (a theory) of content. The first tier is "140" characters — which at the time meant Weibo. From here on plenty of people will write Weibo posts, and if you can't make someone understand a 500,000-character book through the 140 characters you write, then don't write them at all; it means you never understood the book. That's the standard I hold people to. I won't object if you write 150 characters, but over 200 doesn't work. The second tier is roughly 2,000 to 3,000 characters. The third is a bit over 10,000. The fourth is close to a third or a fifth of the whole book. The fifth is the original text. The sixth is a work thicker than the original — an annotated edition.

Of the people who read the 140 characters, in the end about 2% to 3% go on to read the original. To let someone get by without reading a book, the length you need is roughly a fifth to a sixth of it; the ceiling is no more than an eighth. What does that mean in practice? For a 400,000-character book, you'd need roughly 30,000 to 40,000 characters to make it clear.

So, as I just said, you have a coordinate system here. The second case of "reading books for other people" that we wanted to do is very close to the third case in my internet-publishing scheme — otherwise I'd have had to discuss it with Fat Luo, or ask his advice. How do you present something in a bit over 10,000 characters? That's a question I'd normally have. So why didn't I have it? Because what he described was exactly my second tier of "reading books for other people," and basically identical to the third tier of my internet-publishing theory. So there was nothing at all to discuss at the level of principle. It landed straight on the two coordinates I just mentioned. I have zero doubt that a bit over 10,000 characters can convey the content of a 400,000-character book. Without that groundwork, "fussy" as I am, this is the kind of thing I'd have spent days arguing with him about. How can 10,000-odd characters possibly make clear something that runs several hundred thousand?

Q: You'd already thought it through beforehand.

L: Right. I say the extreme case is that "140" characters can make a book clear, so 12,000-odd characters can certainly make a book clear. If you can't manage it, you're an idiot. That's my logic. But those 140 characters have to be written very tightly — able not only to sum up what the book is mainly about but even to convey its technique. I've written 140-character pieces myself. The most extreme time, I compressed a 1,600-character article, a short book review, down to 140 characters. I tried it once. None of the main content of the 1,600-character piece was lost. I've forgotten the book's title. So I'm very much in favor of Dedao spreading the classics by modern means. But how effective is it? As for the market side of it, I don't much care.

Q: You mentioned listening to Fat Luo's 60 seconds for seven or eight months, almost every day. What was that like?

L: Think about it — if it were hard to listen to, I'd probably have quit after two goes. It ran maybe nine months, which is a very long stretch. Later, for reasons I don't fully know, it stopped being convenient. When it was convenient I'd just tap and listen — maybe over breakfast, maybe before a midday nap. It wasn't that I was trying to extract some method from it; I had no reason to study those 60 seconds, and I didn't even know who Luo Zhenyu was at the time. I only found out later that he was selling things. What does a man selling things have to do with it? None of it. In fact Fat Luo was selling ideas. In those 60 seconds he'd sell one or two ideas, one or two keywords. That was his main technique. I stopped keeping up because it stopped being convenient. If it had stayed convenient I'd have kept listening.

What Fat Luo says fits exactly with something else I've thought about for a long time: that a person's socialization, his formation as a citizen, isn't a matter of lecturing him about freedom, happiness or political rights. It's how you tie your tie properly. How you get on with colleagues at work. How you treat the waiter at a restaurant. What your family relationships look like when you get home. What attitude you take when you're handed a task. What you do when something goes wrong. It's these details that determine whether a people can take on a democratic era and a democratic system and hold it steady. That's what Fat Luo is actually doing — how to save paper, how to save water, how to step politely aside when someone's coming toward you. All of it is that. Of course he sometimes peddles big words and pulls out lofty examples too, but I think this is his main work.

Q: How do you see Dedao's and Luoji Siwei's products? I've heard a lot of criticism of them — that a paid-knowledge product like Dedao merely peddles opinions, simplifies knowledge, never shows the act of thinking, and is of no use in building a complex body of knowledge. That its main effect is to give you the illusion of having read a lot of books and to soothe your knowledge anxiety in this fast-changing era. That anyone who really wants to read would never listen to a course like this. What do you think?

L: Why can a philosopher become a philosopher? Ordinary people can't become philosophers; ordinary people are ordinary people. Including that passage you just read out — the person who said it never once stood in front of his own words and quietly thought about what he was saying. You're free not to read the 140 characters. Who's making you? To me this whole line is simply absurd. If you want to read the original, be part of the 2%. I am part of that 2%. In fact I'm not even 2% — I'm a fraction of a percent; I read 1,200-page and 2,100-page books. If you want to be a "fool," go be one. I've never stopped myself from being one. But for you to call yourself a "fool" and demand that everyone in the world be just like you — there's no logic on earth that works that way!

Someone gets to know a book through 140 characters. So what? What's wrong with that? Someone wants to read 2,500 characters — why shouldn't he? If you think that doesn't explain it, go provide 10,000-plus characters, or 50,000 — nobody's stopping you. But you can't be good at providing 60,000 characters and then laugh at the person providing 140. It runs the other way too: a person writing 1,500 characters shouldn't laugh at a person writing 50,000. Same principle. If you demand that someone list his sources within 140 characters, you're not asking too much of him — you're being a fool. In 140 characters all you can do is summarize.

So what I mean is that a genuinely rich, many-colored world is one where some people specialize in providing 140 characters (and 140 characters isn't simplification, it's a complete fragment), some 1,500, some 15,000, some 50,000, some 200,000, some 400,000 — and there's even a sixth tier, which I have as well: an original text of 250,000 characters that ends up with a 750,000-character annotated edition, the annotations three times the original. Look at this book beside me, Carr's What Is History? — the notes are longer than the text. You say you've read the original and you're bragging; I say I've read the annotated edition. If it comes down to bragging, that's what people should fear most, because in this world there is always someone stronger, always a mountain beyond the mountain, a tower beyond the tower. Don't try to out-brag anyone: the truly formidable people don't even know where you are and wouldn't give you a glance. People need to know themselves.

Q: Do you have any expectations for the first season? Will there be a second? If so, any ideas for it?

L: I haven't had the head space to think about it yet. Let's do the first round well first.

Q: Do you know how many people have bought the column so far?

L: They said the subscription numbers were extraordinarily gratifying. I looked at them and felt nothing of the sort. Because I have no frame of reference, you see? On that front I don't think about it much — the rest of the team thinks about it. I'm putting everything into the content. As of about 8pm yesterday (October 30), we were at 5,000-odd, maybe 6,000-odd subscribers.

Q: That's quite a lot.

L: What kind of number is 5,000-odd subscribers? Very few, in my view.

Q: What number do you think would be about right?

L: I have no idea at all. They say Dedao is exceptionally good at selling things. Honestly, there's one phenomenon where my view and my observation differ from a lot of people's. For years now, plenty of people have said Chinese people don't read anymore. That's one view. Another is that there are no good books published each year. Those are two especially typical opinions, and every time I run into either, I denounce it. My judgment — and I was saying this before WeChat existed — is that if Chinese people today don't read more than people did in the 1980s, they certainly don't read less. That's my most basic assessment. After WeChat, reading grew several times over. Don't treat Chinese people like fools. As for the second point, that there are no good books each year: I say you have no standing to raise the subject. I have standing. If there were no good books, All Sages couldn't have survived. Readers today are extremely discerning. They may not match you experts, but they are by no means ignorant. Put out a bad book and they still won't buy it. We still carry a great many genuinely good books.

Cover image: All Sages Bookstore, via the Luoji Siwei WeChat official account