A 100-Yuan Piece of Performance Art, and Shanghai's Last 200-Odd Newsstands

The newsstand owners swept into this piece of performance art had no idea they had joined a "special farewell ceremony."

"The artist Yang Yexin visited nearly a hundred Shanghai newsstands slated for demolition and invited the last generation of newsstand owners to put on masks printed with the words 'Not Speaking Today,' and, through a day of collective silence, bid farewell to the once-glorious era of the newsstand."

That is an excerpt from an article published on November 15 that drew a great deal of attention. It also ran more than a dozen photographs of newsstand owners, most of them over 50, wearing blue masks printed with "Not Speaking Today," saying nothing.

After the article went up on the evening of the 14th, websites and WeChat official accounts reposted it widely.

Twelve hours later, the elderly woman wearing a mask in one of those photos was having a terrible morning. First thing that day her daughter-in-law scolded her for being careless — for letting someone photograph her so easily, and for handing over her name and the newsstand's address.

On the day Yang Yexin took the photos, her son and daughter-in-law were out; the old woman was only minding the stand for them. She had not expected that helping would make things worse.

"The two of them have been arguing about this from this morning right through the afternoon," said Li Zicheng, pointing at his wife and his mother standing nearby. "Pull a stunt like that and these stands are going to be in trouble. You think the company won't come after us? We're a state enterprise too — and you went and helped someone badmouth Oriental Newsstands... The bird that sticks its neck out gets shot. You understand that?"

When we came to interview them that afternoon, the old woman was sitting on a low stool in the corner of the newsstand. She said nothing when we arrived, only stared straight at this uninvited visitor. She wanted the whole thing over with, but her son's anger had not cooled.

What angered Li Zicheng most was the article's phrase "farewell ceremony." "Even if there is going to be a farewell ceremony, it's not his place to speak for it," he said. He thought this "artist" was more hypocritical than people realized. "He wrote down the name of every single stand, and the one thing he left out was that he gave us 100 yuan. That 100 yuan is an insult to our stand. He really does look down on us."

His wife added: "If it were just research, fine — we have plenty of time, we're happy to sit and talk. But you paid money to buy material, to serve your own purposes, not to speak up for us." Both of them believed Yang Yexin had, without saying so, sold off his interviewees' information. "Can a method like that actually save the newsstands? Not only can't it, it does people harm."

Li Zicheng and his wife have worked at a newsstand in Shanghai's Xuhui District since 1999. That year the city launched the "4050 Project," aimed at helping the 300,000 to 400,000 laid-off workers in Shanghai — "women at 40, men at 50" — who were not yet old enough to retire and had little formal education. Newsstand clerk became one of the jobs the government used to get them back to work.

Every newsstand still carries an inscription written by a Shanghai city leader of the time. A 2001 media report noted that of all the 4050 Project jobs, clerk at an Oriental Newsstand was the most sought-after: in districts such as Huangpu and Hongkou, applicants outnumbered positions by more than 10 to 1; Putuo District had 121 openings and close to a thousand applicants; Luwan District had 40 positions and more than 700 applicants...

Li Zicheng and his wife were among Oriental Newsstands' first employees. "We've done this a full 18 years, from the very beginning right up to now. We just can't let go, because we've grown attached to it. Honestly, we're old now too," Li Zicheng said.

From the 1990s until now, the number of newsstands peaked at 2,800, each run by two people — work, at one point, for several thousand laid-off workers.

The good years are over. In the past two years the newsstands have begun to disappear all at once. Li Zicheng recently gained a new customer, a man in his fifties who lives in Minhang District. After every newsstand in Minhang closed in 2017, the man went to Changning; after Changning's newsstands shut down completely in July, he moved on to Jing'an; after Jing'an's newsstands vanished in September, he finally found Li Zicheng's stand in Xuhui. He told Li Zicheng that next year he may have to subscribe through the post office instead, "because I can't keep spending 8 yuan on the subway round-trip to buy a 12-yuan magazine."

Most customers at this newsstand on Wuyuan Road are like him: 50 and older, people who have kept up the habit of reading newspapers and magazines for years. Most news has moved online, but they are not used to reading on a phone.

Once the newsstands close, that habit looks unlikely to survive either.

Nobody understands this better than Jia Jinwu, who runs the newsstand at the corner of Middle Huaihai Road and Huating Road and spends his days delivering newspapers and magazines to the other stands. For more than 20 years he has ridden his electric scooter through Shanghai's streets and lanes every morning at 7. "I know every newsstand in Shanghai, and every one of them knows me," Jia Jinwu said.

So he is also the first to know when one closes. What he has seen matches what the reader from Minhang described: first all of Minhang, then Changning, most recently Jing'an. Over the past year his delivery route has kept shrinking. According to Jia Jinwu, inside the Inner Ring Road only Xuhui and Huangpu still have newsstands — about 130 in all — while Pudong has a little over 100, and Yangpu and Hongkou have two or three each.

The stands closed within a single year, faster than anyone could react, and that naturally produced plenty of complaints. But "the government just acts like it didn't hear," Jia Jinwu said, and hardly anyone has taken an interest or written about it.

When Yang Yexin came by, Jia Jinwu felt he had finally met someone who cared. "Whether it helps or not, at least now somebody is speaking up," he said. "The stands have been coming down for more than a year and nobody has ever stood up and said a word. They just tear them down."

He was glad to put on the "Not Speaking Today" mask.

One day in September, delivering papers as usual on North Shaanxi Road, he watched a newsstand be knocked down by force with its owner given no notice at all. The books and magazines stacked inside were hauled away by truck along with the wreckage. "They talk about 'civilized law enforcement.' What is 'civilized' about that?" Jia Jinwu said. The couple who ran the stand called the police to ask for mediation; in the end the 1,000 yuan of books and magazines were compensated at a discount, and they got back 500 yuan.

After that, Jia Jinwu understood that this was something even Oriental Newsstands could not step into, and that saying more was pointless. The mask, as it happened, suited his frame of mind.

Jia Jinwu now lives on edge, afraid his own stand will not escape the same fate. He has, in fact, already been "driven out" once. Three years ago he and his wife ran a newsstand on Xiangyang Road, and then a demolition notice arrived from the subdistrict office. Because he was already 50, Oriental Newsstands let him take over his current stand.

The Huating Road newsstand is now the only one in Shanghai open 24 hours. Jia Jinwu starts delivering papers at 7 every morning, comes back at 3 in the afternoon to take over from his wife, and keeps watch through the night until 7 the next morning, over and over. When he is tired he sleeps on a mat spread on less than two square meters of floor. "I work 24 hours a day. I've poured my whole life's energy into this."

He has no other option. The post office and Oriental Newsstands sometimes deliver the day's papers at 6 or 7 in the morning, on no fixed schedule. He lives in Jinqiao and cannot reach Middle Huaihai Road by 6 every day — at that hour the subway is not even running. Jia Jinwu's son is a college sophomore and his wife is also a laid-off worker. He has kept this up for six years. "One person supporting three. I'm in my fifties — I can't go down. The day I go down, it's finished."

Daytime takings alone, besides, are not enough to keep a newsstand alive. Oriental Newsstands' profit share has stayed at 14% for years: on a 1-yuan newspaper, Jia Jinwu earns 0.14 yuan. But sales are nowhere near what they were, and revenue from papers and magazines shrinks year after year. The only way to make money is longer hours and more things to sell. Jia Jinwu started selling cigarettes, which carry a higher margin, and umbrellas on rainy days, which can return close to 50%. All of it comes to about 5,000 yuan a month.

Whether he can keep going next year he cannot say. "If it lasts another year, I'll drag it out another year. Right now it's all half-hanging in the air, and everyone's nerves are frayed."

On November 14, when Yang Yexin came and told Jia Jinwu that this was hard work, Jia was moved, and he did not take a cent. "Nobody has ever come to ask about us — not even our own company has come to help us," Jia Jinwu said. "The man was volunteering for our sake. How could we take his money?"

Lin Sheng, the 68-year-old who runs the stand at the corner of North Xiangyang Road and Xinle Road, also took Yang Yexin for someone from a charity. The one difference is that he accepted the 100 yuan. Yang Yexin talked with Lin Sheng for about 10 minutes, asked what he thought about the demolitions, and had him put on the mask for photos. When Yang Yexin took out the 100 yuan afterwards, Lin Sheng hesitated. "I asked him where the money came from. He said, we're a charitable fund."

Lin Sheng did not think much about it. He has worked here for nearly 20 years, having taken the stand over from his parents' generation. He is under none of Jia Jinwu's financial pressure: he has a steady pension, and the newsstand is closer to a hobby. He likes reading magazines, and besides, "mainly I've got nothing to do. Sitting at home is just waiting to die, isn't it? Regular customers still come by. How much business I do, I don't care."

As he said this, a 75-year-old man stopped at the newsstand. Before he could speak, Lin Sheng had pulled out three papers and handed them over: Yangtse Evening Post, Xinmin Evening News and Reference News. Three papers a day — the old man has kept it up for 10 years.

Asked why he wore the mask, Lin Sheng mumbled, "They wanted to do an interview. Maybe they needed us covered up a bit." He took it off as soon as the photo was done. Lin Sheng still has not seen the coverage; he has only heard from others that he was in the news.

Lin Sheng thinks what Jia Jinwu thinks: nobody cares that the newsstands are coming down. "What reporter would come for a thing like this? It's not a matter of national importance," Lin Sheng said. And besides, "if the government tells you to close, can you out-argue the government?"

The change they are caught in is the one the newsstand owners kept calling "shoring up the weak links."

In 2016 Shanghai made "shoring up the weak links" a priority research topic, aimed at pushing forward comprehensive environmental cleanup in city districts and a crackdown on traffic violations, and newsstands were listed as one of the weak links. In fact, at the 10th Shanghai Municipal People's Congress in 2015, a number of delegates had already said that newsstands had begun selling drinks, cold treats and other small goods beyond what their licenses allowed, and were taking over narrow sidewalks. Jia Jinwu had no objection to the government's call to give the street back to the people. Later he found that this was not quite what happened.

Where the stands used to be, white lines were painted on the ground and two rows of shared bikes now fill the space. "Is that giving the street back to the people? It isn't given to the people. It's given to the bike companies."

The demolition payments puzzled him more. As far as he knows, the highest was 60,000 yuan and the lowest two or three thousand, much of it promised verbally, with no paperwork. Even stands near each other in the same district got wildly different amounts. "Nobody can account for any of it."

When Shanghai first began tearing down some of the newsstands, Li Zicheng felt a small flicker of pleasure: as other stands closed, their customers made their way to his, and business in 2017 was clearly better than in past years. He never expected the demolitions to be so complete, not one stand left. "That Oriental Newsstands would come to this — none of us saw it coming." Now he does not even know whether tomorrow it will reach him, and his early satisfaction looks rather ironic.

The past stretch has at least been quiet, and Li Zicheng and his wife had settled into a steady life. Then Yang Yexin turned up.

"We'd finally settled down, and a stunt like this may do our stand harm, may push them to shut us down right away," Li Zicheng said. "Who's going to dare say a word to the media next time? I can't even protect my own interests — what do I have to say anything to you with? What can your 100 yuan compensate me for?"

Yang Yexin, the man called an "artist," is a former creative director at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett and now runs his own advertising company. Three years ago he used the same blue masks printed with the same words — "Not Speaking Today" — for a social-creative campaign about autistic children on behalf of the One Foundation.

Cover image: jmtv, Unsplash

(Li Zicheng is a pseudonym.)