Writer Yi Zhongtian: I'm Good at Controlling the Rhythm of Reading, and I Still Think Lu Xun Is Great | The Study

The Study is a new QDaily column for 2018; it is concerned with how people structure what they know.

This column is called The Study.

For someone whose profession is reading and writing, a study gives away his tastes, his teachers, and perhaps the shape of what he knows.

Our interviews unfold around those questions.

Our hope is simple: that this unfolding will widen our readers' view.

This installment, we interviewed Yi Zhongtian.

Thanks to television, Yi Zhongtian became a famous and wealthy writer early. In 2006 he lectured on the history of the Three Kingdoms on CCTV; before the program had finished airing, more than 30 publishing houses were already fighting over the manuscript. In those two years, rumor had it that Yi Zhongtian earned more than 20 million yuan a year. In 2007 he made the China Rich Writers List. An elderly couple on a street in Hong Kong could call out his name.

No writer suits television better than Yi Zhongtian. He lacks a writer's self-absorption, and his scripts strip out written language almost entirely. His Hubei accent is the last coat of paint on history, sharpening the pleasure of "listening to a storyteller." He likes hard questions, even takes a certain glee in them, because he is good at finding the hole in an opponent's logic and leaving him with nothing to say. The Yi Zhongtian lines that circulate through television are either sharp-edged or plainly playful and opportunistic.

Yi Zhongtian has a dark mole in the middle of his forehead; his eyebrows are faint but tilt upward, his eyes droop at the outer corners into a triangle with the pupils cut on a slant, often carrying a look of disdain, and of slyness too. With age these features have grown more pronounced. They are easy to recognize — photogenic, even. However you look at it, Yi Zhongtian is an enormously gifted television star.

In the years when he was at his height, criticism of Yi Zhongtian was abundant. Part of it concerned whether his historical narratives were rigorous enough; part of it was aimed at the value judgments he was selling. Yi Zhongtian defended Cao Cao, for instance, arguing that "Better that I wrong others than that others wrong me" was honest rather than vile. Altruists could not accept that.

Less criticism is not a good sign; it usually arrives together with less fame. Yi Zhongtian went on to write many books, books whose ambition ran far past a single dynasty; he took on an enormous project to write a general history of ancient China, and he also showed, unexpectedly, how much he knew about the U.S. Constitution drawn up in Philadelphia in 1787. But what people remember most sharply about Yi Zhongtian is still his television lectures on the Three Kingdoms, more than a decade ago.

As a lecturer and as a writer, Yi Zhongtian is fascinated by form. Form holds enormous power to steer people. Unlike some writers, he uses it without hesitation and without any moral burden. And he uses it well.

We interviewed Yi Zhongtian in his study. He lives in a two-story house in Jiangsu, very quiet, ringed by plants two and three stories tall. Yet it is only a 40-minute drive on the G50 expressway to Shanghai's Hongqiao transport hub. Yi Zhongtian no longer remembers exactly what year he moved here.

Yi Zhongtian has lived in many cities. He was born in Hunan, grew up in Wuhan, Hubei, and at 18 went to work and live with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps for 10 years. After the country resumed graduate admissions in 1978, Yi Zhongtian was accepted into the Chinese department at Wuhan University to study classical Chinese literature. After graduating he stayed on to teach. In 1992 he left Wuhan University and began teaching in the Chinese department of Xiamen University's School of Humanities, where he stayed until retirement.

Guomai, the publisher Yi Zhongtian works with, sent a driver to bring us here. Whether by seniority, by learning, or by his ability to make the house money, the publisher respects him and values him highly. Lu Jinbo, the company's chairman, told Yi Zhongtian that this place makes an excellent base for writing.

He lives here with his wife, a gentle, cultivated woman who sometimes doubles as his assistant. At home they wear cloth shoes with patchwork soles, and they cross the wood floors and the marble without a sound. They also have a dog with bad eyesight that keeps losing its bearings and bolting into corners. They are endlessly patient with it.

That afternoon Yi Zhongtian had just seen off a few people who had come to discuss a podcast (he had released an audiobook on Zen Buddhism in April) and taken a short nap. When we met he looked well rested. He works at an enviably wide solid-wood desk in his second-floor study, with a good view: a balcony in front of the desk, and beyond it what looks like a stand of bamboo. His schedule is still full; there is always something someone wants "urgently."

At one point Yi Zhongtian built a book storeroom in the basement, but the plum-rain season in Jiangnan left every book damp. They could not go back on the shelves and now sit stacked in boxes. The books he uses often are on the shelves of his second-floor study: complete sets of histories, the Selected Works of Mao, and books other people have written about him. Within arm's reach are Homo Deus and Sapiens. On his right he has set a photograph of himself with his daughter.

Yi Zhongtian says he spends most of his time at home and goes out only on "the rarest of rare occasions." Yet he is clearly still itching to try things; the pull of anything new is strong. Last year he wrote a stage play, Model Prison (《模范监狱》). The publisher advised him not to, because it would not make money. He wrote it anyway. Talking about the play he seemed a little mischievous, and a little pleased with himself.

Behind him is a tatami platform of about five square meters; an open suitcase shows he has just come back from a trip.

What Strikes a Reader First Is Form, Not Content

Q: What made you think of doing an audiobook?

They wanted me to. (Meaning Guomai.)

Q: Do you feel your writing rhythm has been thrown off? You'd said you'd write six volumes of A History of China a year.

Nothing to be done now. The plan for A History of China has been knocked to pieces. Can't be helped. The Yuan volume is just finished. It comes out April 26. I haven't started the Ming yet.

Q: A general history is a huge undertaking. What's your working method? You've mentioned Jeffery Deaver's The Stone Monkey — you said you learned your way of filling in the squares from it. How do you fill them?

It isn't filling in squares. First you have to read, read a great deal. Build a frame. You could say I write the way you build a house. First the groundwork: level the land, lay the roads, run the water, run the power. Get the groundwork done, get the material sorted out. Then the frame. Once the frame is up, you put in the walls, then you do the finishing.

Because A History of China follows a fixed format. Every page of mine is 21 lines, and every line is 26 characters.

That format was set at the very start of publication. I don't know whether to call it a format or a layout. The first page of every section has 12 lines of body text. And the end of a section can't be a full 21 lines — 21 lines is too crammed, it looks bad. Every one of my sections is 6 pages. Now that there are illustrations you can't tell anymore. But the body text is always 6 pages.

Q: What's that for? A sense of reading rhythm?

Right, reading rhythm. We worked it out, and this gives the best rhythm. And if it's ever made into an audiobook, a section this long comes out to exactly 15 minutes.

Q: Someone said reading one of your books takes exactly three hours.

Right. The whole thing is balanced — I care a lot about balance. So when I write I set myself a frame. The frame is 26 characters a line, 21 lines a page. I write inside it. Except in a very few cases — the section on Song ci poetry, say, where so much poetry is dropped in that I stopped enforcing it — everything else is 6 pages. Every manuscript I hand Guomai is 6 pages a section. I fixed the format at the start, and the editor-in-chief runs through it with every editor before they start the job. So when I turn in a manuscript, the editor can already work out how many pages the book will run. The notes can't be predicted in advance, so they calculate the notes separately first: how many pages the notes take.

Say a book of mine has five chapters, 6 sections each, 30 sections. Each section is 6 pages. Six times thirty is 180 pages. If the notes run 20 pages, the book is 200 pages. Add the illustrations and the editor knows exactly how many pages the book will be, and how many print sheets.

The print sheet matters a great deal for a physical book. In binding, every eight pages is one unit. Eight to a handful. So if you check, the page count of every printed book is a multiple of eight. Eight pages to a sheet; one turn of the rotary press gives you three thousand copies, and the machine folds them eight pages at a time. Then it's bound and trimmed on this side. Trimming is the last step, then the cover goes on. I know all of it.

Q: How long had you been writing books before you learned the whole process?

I knew it very early. My belief is that if you're in a trade, you master every step of how it's made. Only then can you guarantee efficiency. A lot of people, Lu Jinbo included, objected to this at first. They said, you're the author, don't bother with that, it's the editor's job. I said sorry, but I'm the one author in all of China who is one of a kind — back when I was doing television, I learned every step of the television process too.

I can even cut footage. So much so that when Li Xiaomeng of News Reception Room interviewed me, she asked, is there anything in our line of work you don't understand? I said: non-linear. Non-linear editing. Apart from that one technical skill, I said, I understand your whole industry. That's why what I produce comes out so efficiently.

When I first went on Lecture Room (《百家讲坛》), they told me, you just talk, we'll do the cutting. I did it that way at first. I'd lecture for over an hour and they'd cut it down afterward. That was wrong.

It was wasteful. The broadcast slot is 45 minutes; strip out the opening, the closing and the interstitials and the lecturer's own footage is 33 minutes. So after that, when I recorded Lecture Room, I recorded exactly 35 minutes each time, two of them set aside for sipping tea and coughing. And I always knew where they'd need to cut and drop something in. At those spots I'd take a sip of tea and leave them a gap. Being my director was an easy job. They'd drop something in wherever I coughed and it was done. It saves everyone trouble — isn't that better?

Q: Don't you find form a constraint? It sounds like you feel you have to follow it.

You don't know my view of art. Form comes first. Form determines content. I don't know whether you've studied literary theory, but the old theory always said content determines form. I turn it around: form determines content.

I believe a true artist always works from form to content — that's what makes an artist. A Chinese ink painter lays a sheet of white xuan paper on the felt, picks up the brush, and — splat — a drop of ink lands on the paper, and only then does he decide whether to paint a fish or a hawk. A sculptor sees an unusually fine piece of stone, and only then, from the stone's grain and material, decides what to carve. That is art. Ancient China worked the same way: with ci poetry the tune pattern comes first and you fill in the words after. The tune pattern is there first — "Qingping Yue," "Qinyuan Chun."

Of course this still takes craft. You still have to make the content good.

Q: Why do you think form matters so much? Because it has such a strong hold on people?

I'll tell you: every reader, everyone who looks at a work of art, is struck first by form, not content. When you look at a painting, what moves you first is the mood. You can't take in the detail that fast; only afterward do you go and see what it depicts. That's the whole point of abstract painting. What is abstract painting? Pure form. Untitled music — pure form. Sonatina No. 52 in C major — what's the content? You ask what the content is? It's Sonatina No. 52 in C major.

Writing is the same; the sense of form in language matters enormously. Without an ear for language you can't be a writer. Ah, an ear for language matters so much.

So when I write I have to find the first sentence. Otherwise I can't go on. Often, once I have that first sentence, I don't know what comes after it and I start writing anyway.

The language leads me. It is always the first sentence. The first sentence of my Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms (《三国纪》), for instance: "The year Emperor Ling of Han died, the whole city of Luoyang was thick with menace." That pulls the reader straight in — the whole city thick with menace — and then I say the menace was coming from inside the palace, and the reader is in. Whether it puts you in the scene, that feel of it — it matters so much.

Q: If you hadn't become a writer, what would you have done?

In middle school my dream was to be a theoretical physicist.

Q: The beauty of form?

Because I especially loved physics and plane geometry, though I probably didn't like the rest of mathematics. I like logic, and physics and plane geometry are both logical reasoning. Even now I follow some of the natural sciences — quantum mechanics, black holes.

The books I just bought, Homo Deus and A Brief History of the Universe (《宇宙简史》) — that's what I read.

Q: Do you feel cutting-edge science has something of magic about it?

How could cutting-edge science feel like magic?

What you're describing isn't magic. Magic is in fact very close to science. Magic is the mother of every pattern in human culture — every one of them. From the day humanity became human, its mark was culture. Culture makes you human; without it you're an animal. The first pattern of culture is tools, the second is magic. Religion, science and art all came out of magic.

So I call magic the science before science. Magic and science share the same three beliefs: first, that things change according to laws; second, that the laws by which the world changes can be grasped; third, that once you've grasped those laws you can change the world. On all three, magic and science are identical. The one difference is that the laws magic finds are wrong.

Once the right laws are found, it becomes science. That's the difference. What magic couldn't solve, science solves; what science still can't solve becomes religion. That's how religion arises. Religion exists because science cannot solve, or cannot explain, a great many things.

So you can't say new science is magic. If new science is inexplicable, it comes closer to religion. And once you're into quantum mechanics — (clicks tongue) — a great deal can't be explained at all. And we exist only in three dimensions; there are four-dimensional worlds, five-dimensional worlds, many-dimensional worlds. To beings in a many-dimensional world we look ridiculous. The way they'd look at us is the way we in three dimensions look at something in two. Both are ridiculous.

Q: Is the appeal that when you see this, you feel how small human beings are?

I don't feel small. It's just interest. I've loved science since I was a child; going into literature and history was a wrong turn.

To This Day I Still Think Lu Xun Is Great

Q: Why did you leave the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps to sit the exam for a Chinese department?

Because I couldn't get into a physics department anymore. The lost time couldn't be won back, so that road was closed.

Q: What did you read in Xinjiang?

What was there to read?

Q: What books were around?

Not much to read, basically nothing. The Selected Works of Mao, the Selected Works of Marx and Engels — Marx and Engels were allowed, Lu Xun was allowed. And I'd brought along some Tang and Song poetry that I kept hidden, and when things loosened up I could sneak a look at it.

Q: What was your favorite book then?

Lu Xun, of course Lu Xun. And Lu Xun really is good. To this day I still think Lu Xun is good.

Q: For the ideas, or the writing?

Both the ideas and the writing.

Q: If you loved Lu Xun most back then, did you ever think of writing something like his work?

No. That can't be written. Lu Xun was a genius. (laughs)

Q: We had Lu Xun in our textbooks too. Back then I couldn't see what was good about him; only when I read him again later did I find him good.

That may have to do with temperament. I came to love Lu Xun on my own in middle school, but I didn't like Dream of the Red Chamber; I didn't read it until graduate school. Once I did, I saw that nothing in classical Chinese literature reaches what Dream of the Red Chamber reaches. It's the greatest.

Q: What makes Dream of the Red Chamber good?

Hmm. I can't put it into words, I just think it's good. How to say it? Everything else is mortal; this is a god, and a god can't be described. People are strange. I think it's perfectly normal that you didn't like Lu Xun as a child. I just liked him — I liked Lu Xun in middle school.

Q: What did you see in him?

Hard to say. Literature and art are a kind of flavor. Take some of Lu Xun's doggerel — his jab at the First Plenum: "The First Plenum is so very busy, / of a sudden debating who sold out the country" (laughs). I find that kind of language great fun: everyone's shouting the roof down, and then someone smooths it over — "if we sold out, we all sold out; if not, then none of us did." (laughs loudly) I really like that language of his. His Old Tales Retold is wonderful, the piece in it called "Curbing the Flood." Read "Curbing the Flood" today and it reads a lot like today's internet fiction. There's a flood, and the intellectuals are carried off to a "Culture Mountain," with flying cars coming down from the sky to deliver bread, everyone greeting one another with "How do you do!" "Good morning!" "OK!" That's how he wrote the legend of Yu the Great taming the floods. All those years ago, that's how Lu Xun wrote it.

Q: I remember you saying that before you went to Xinjiang, you wanted to write a book like Courage (《勇敢》).

Ah. I've said too much about that, it isn't interesting.

Q: By the time you left Xinjiang you surely didn't want to write Courage anymore?

... Hard to say. Who knows, maybe I'll write it one day. Ha ha. I don't plan my writing. Apart from A History of China, which has a plan, nothing does — including that play, which I wrote on a sudden flash too.

Q: I haven't seen it. Has it been staged?

It's been performed in Shanghai.

Q: Sorry, what's it called?

Model Prison.

Q: What's it about?

It's about the New Life Movement. In February 1934, Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement in Nanchang, built around "propriety, righteousness, integrity and shame," aiming to improve the citizenry's knowledge and morals by changing the way people lived. It's quite interesting. Its one core was those four virtues. Its two basic aims were the citizenry's knowledge and the citizenry's morals. Its three standards were making daily life artistic, productive and militarized. That kind of campaign in ideology and morals.

I set the play in the autumn of 1936, two and a half years into the New Life Movement. To let the world understand China and show off what the movement had achieved, the Nationalist government decides to invite prominent journalists from various countries to form a "Friendly Nations Press Corps" and come inspect China, and picks a certain prison as the site — the reasoning being that a prison is a den of filth, and convicts are people who do evil; if even a prison could be turned into a patch of pure ground and its convicts into perfect gentlemen, wouldn't that prove the propriety-righteousness-integrity-shame New Life Movement a great success?

So, to make sure the press corps' inspection goes well, the Nationalist government sends special commissioners to supervise. In my play three commissioners turn up at once. As soon as they arrive they find these prisoners are entirely beyond reform, and one farce follows another. Of course it does — they're criminal convicts, every one of them. They ask a thief, for instance: do you know what the New Life Movement is? I made the thief a Wuhan man: "Course I know. We were doing it before the Generalissimo ever brought it up!"

The guard standing there says, don't talk nonsense — then tell me what the New Life Movement requires. The movement has six standards you're measured against, and one of them is promptness. The thief says: promptness? That's a basic requirement in our line. How else would you get your hands on the goods?

So the farces pile up. And once they do, the corruption inside the prison gets peeled back layer by layer, until the whole thing is blown wide open.

Q: Why did you want to write it?

Because it's fun, that's all.

The actors have a great time with it too. People even die later on. The whole play runs over two hours straight through, no scene breaks, one continuous stretch. The actor playing the warden gets especially worn out — once he's on stage he never leaves it.

But it's a great time. It's fun.

I Hate How Chinese People Reach for Motives at Every Turn

Q: You presumably don't accept that the traditional Confucian toolkit can shape people into "new citizens"?

Heh. If it could shape them, would we be where we are today? Wouldn't it have worked long ago? Of course I don't accept it. How could it shape anyone? It can't.

Q: Then why do the ruling party, or people in general, keep going back to ancient wisdom to look for something new? It's being promoted again now, isn't it?

Right, and we have to affirm one thing: Chinese civilization is a great civilization. Be sure to write that sentence down.

Q: Great in what way? Be specific.

It's one of the earliest world civilizations. I divide civilizations into several kinds. One kind is ethnic — Slavic civilization, say, which isn't bounded by borders. Russia and the other Slavic countries are all Slavic civilization. Another kind is regional — Indian civilization, for instance. Indian civilization actually contains a great deal: many races and groups inside India with different cultures, and all of it is Indian civilization. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism — it's complex, but it's all Indian civilization, a regional civilization, and it never got out of India. Japan is both ethnic and regional. And then there's a kind that can influence the whole world, which I call world civilization.

Today there are three world civilizations: modern Western civilization, Islamic civilization and Chinese civilization. Of the three, in world terms Chinese civilization is now the weakest; it doesn't have much influence on the world. Its influence was greatest in the Tang and the Song, when Japan, the Korean peninsula, Vietnam and the rest all used Chinese characters, spoke Chinese, used chopsticks — everything learned from China. That's why it counts as a world civilization. The earliest was Han civilization; Han civilization and Roman civilization were the earliest world civilizations. Then in the Tang it was Tang civilization, alongside Byzantine civilization and Arab civilization.

For an ancient civilization like this there is naturally a certain — a hope that the civilization being built today keeps its own ethnic character and traditions. That state of mind is normal. Islamic countries don't want wholesale Westernization either; that's entirely normal. But to think you can save China by hauling out traditional culture whole is absurd. The foundations are different. Traditional Chinese civilization was, after all, built in an agrarian society, and you are living in a globalized commodity economy. It would be strange if the civilization and cultural traditions of an agrarian people from an agrarian age didn't collide with the present. So what we have to work out is how to combine the world and the ethnic. That takes thinking.

Q: Do you have an answer?

I'm still thinking about it too.

By writing A History of China I'm first trying to trace the road we came by: over 3,700 years, how did we get here, where were the turning points, how did we arrive step by step at today.

Q: Hadn't the "Empire" series you began in 2005 more or less given an answer already? No?

How to put it — that was still broad strokes. A History of China goes finer, and there are some new findings. We always used to say, for instance, that the Song was chronically weak and poor. Writing this history, I found it was neither weak nor poor.

And it kept its wealth among the people. "The people" in the broad sense includes the rich, and it includes officials too — officials had plenty of money. It was the treasury that was empty; the country as a whole wasn't poor. I still think the Song had it right. What does a government need all that money for? My view is that the people should get rich first — put that first, let the people prosper first, keep the wealth among the people.

So the Song was neither poor nor weak. What finally destroyed it was simply that the Mongols were too strong. Nobody in the world could beat them at the time. They wiped out the Arab empire, and fast; Baghdad was destroyed. The Song, by contrast, held out for 50 years. How is that weak? It was the strongest resistance in the world at the time, wasn't it? Write in fine detail and you make new discoveries.

Q: Do you think Wang Anshi didn't need to carry out his reforms at all?

No. Not reforming really wasn't an option, because the treasury genuinely had no money. And there was nothing wrong with his ideas for reform either. Given the conditions of his time he had thought it through about as well as anyone could. The trouble is that the Song was not a modern state. Take Wang Anshi's Green Sprouts loan law: it was a good law, you can't call it a bad one. The logic is simple, isn't it? Farmers are worst off in the lean months before harvest, but the crops in their fields will be harvested eventually, so borrowing against the growing crop from someone with money to lend — the idea is sound. We still have secured lending today. But the key problem was that there were no banks then, no neutral commercial banks. The moment you borrow from the government, with officials carrying it out, problems start.

But Wang Anshi couldn't have come up with anything else. None of the apparatus of a modern commercial society existed — banks, securities and so on. People in the Song did speculate on something like stocks: trading ordination certificates, which worked much like trading shares. But that too was because this whole system — capitalist institutions, to be precise — did not exist.

Q: What's your view of reform generally? Liu Daoyu, the former president of Wuhan University where you taught, also wanted to reform the university system in the 1980s. Did your leaving Wuhan University have something to do with that? How do you feel about reform yourself?

I don't simply believe reform is a good thing. I don't accept sorting people into reformers and conservatives. I think the lesson of Wang Anshi's reforms is that you have to be clear about three things: why you're reforming, or rather for whom, who does the reforming, and how you reform. If you don't settle those three, reform can turn into a disaster. Wang Anshi didn't settle them — or rather, he got all three wrong — and so he ruined something that could have gone well.

For whom? For the people, for the people's wellbeing. Who reforms? The people. How? Step by step, gradually; you can't rush it.

Wang Anshi had another problem: he was in a hurry. He was an extremely impatient man. How impatient? As chancellor he had to sign off on memorials with the character meaning "will do." He was too impatient even to write that one character; he'd scrawl two strokes instead. That impatient. Far too impatient. Think of it: a country as big as China is like a huge ship, and when it turns it can only turn slowly. It can't turn sharply; a sharp turn capsizes it.

He didn't see this. He wouldn't hear a word of opposition, and that was bad. Even Su Shi's suggestions, which were fairly middle-of-the-road, fairly mild, he couldn't accept.

Of course Sima Guang was exactly the same; the two were identical. Only their positions differed, their temperaments were the same. When Su Dongpo put things to Sima Guang, Sima Guang wouldn't listen either, and Su Dongpo ended up on the outs with both sides.

They were all good men, all of high character. So I hold that reform has nothing to do with morality, and least of all with private morality. Don't drag reform into questions of morality. But unfortunately (sighs), traditional historiography is all about pinning moral labels on things.

Q: Because in traditional historiography the two can't be separated — from cultivating oneself and ordering the family to governing the state and bringing peace to all under heaven.

If it insists on bringing that in, there's no saving it. A technical problem is a technical problem, a question of method is a question of method. What has that to do with morality?

Q: But Sima Guang and Wang Anshi disagreed on one point: Sima Guang thought people mattered more than reforming institutions.

Right. Sima Guang's line was, however good the system, it won't work if the people are bad.

Q: What do you make of that?

Each side has its own logic. What you need is a whole set of measures that keeps both the people and the system from going wrong.

But keeping people from going wrong also takes the guarantee of a system. That's what my book on the U.S. Constitution, Storm over Philadelphia (《费城风云》), is about — exactly this idea.

There was nothing noble about the Americans drafting their Constitution. The war debts from the Revolutionary War simply had nobody to pay them, so a government had to be set up; only a government could repay the debt and protect everyone's interests. So they haggled. The basest of motives produced the best of outcomes.

Which is why I hate the way Chinese people reach for motives at every turn. It's foolish, extremely foolish. Take an example: a corrupt official is detained by Party investigators, and to get his sentence cut he informs on other corrupt officials. Is his motive good? His motive is bad! So are you not going to investigate what he reported? The problem with Chinese thinking is that it doesn't deal in facts or in logic, it deals in motives. (sighs) It always has to reach for a conspiracy — "American imperialism will never give up trying to destroy us" — here we go again.

Q: Another thing I found interesting in your books is your reading of "When all under heaven rises or falls, every commoner shares the responsibility."

To be precise, it should be: when the state rises or falls, the commoner bears no responsibility. That was Gu Yanwu's own view. For him, the fall of a state and the fall of all under heaven were two different things.

Q: You've said that when all under heaven is doing well, the commoner has no part in it.

To be precise, when the state is doing well, the commoner has no part in it.

So when the state does badly, what responsibility does he bear? Duty and obligation match rights. If I have no rights, why should I be responsible? That's why civil litigation has a principle: whoever makes the claim carries the burden of proof.

Q: That's the principle, but you've also brought up Ruan Ji, who chose to withdraw, to drink, and whose temper eventually mellowed so much he seemed a different man. You seemed to feel that wasn't necessarily a good thing.

I never said he wasn't good. I've never said Ruan Ji wasn't good. That was his choice. It got in nobody's way, so why interfere? Whom does it bother? Same with kids today, the post-95s and post-00s: if what they do isn't getting in your way, why interfere? Let them live as they like. What is there to interfere with?

Q: Which books influenced you most? Lu Xun, whom you just mentioned, counts as one?

He does. And 1587, A Year of No Significance. Reading that book, I saw for the first time that a history could be written that way, so I thought, let's write it that way too.

Q: Do you read Jonathan Spence?

I read Spence too, but he hasn't influenced me much; I keep forgetting him. If I'm going to read someone, I go to Qian Mu first. I may not accept Qian Mu's view of history, but his scholarship is sound. Qian Mu really does have his own particular insights. On first hearing you may think they make no sense, but think them over and you find (draws a breath) that he has a point. He said, for instance, that the biggest problem with traditional Chinese culture was that it was too equal. How could that be? It sounds like nonsense.

Later I found another way to put it: at least in the Ming and the Qing, apart from the emperor, everyone else was the same.

In the Ming and the Qing, even if you rose to something like chancellor, you could be beaten or killed on a word. Isn't that rather equal? Well, you can't call it equality; you call it sameness. In the end this kind of society has no middle layer at all.

When I'm Anxious I Just Stop Working and Go Read Keigo Higashino

Q: You've said the Xinjiang years were very dull, but they were also your twenties, when your values were forming. What did your values form on?

I don't think they'd formed yet. Back then people didn't talk about worldview and outlook and values. Who talked about that?

But that experience did lay down the base color of my writing: a common-people's sensibility. Everyone around me then was ordinary working people. Ordinary people don't fuss about worldviews; they carry a lot of plain, unadorned things.

Q: Did detective fiction influence you much?

Logic, intuition, evidence.

Q: When did you start reading detective fiction?

In high school. It wasn't called detective fiction then, it was called counter-espionage fiction, catching spies. Including the Soviet ones, which were about catching American spies, and the mainland Chinese ones about catching Taiwanese spies. Same formula as detective fiction. So a good detective needs three things: intuition, logic, evidence. I study history the way you crack a case — intuition, logic, evidence, and in the end it comes down to the evidence.

Q: So sometimes, when people don't accept a conclusion of yours, you say it was reached on the basis of common sense and logic.

Right, common sense and logic.

Q: Who's your favorite detective or counter-espionage novelist?

Keigo Higashino. I love Keigo Higashino. Though that's recent; the earliest was certainly Sherlock Holmes.

Q: Why Keigo Higashino these days?

Because Higashino writes well. Though not every one of his books is good. There's one I've never read, about a car crash after which the wife's soul enters her daughter's body. I can't accept that premise; I think that's Japan being too twisted.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun is still the best. And I especially love the Kaga books. Kyoichiro Kaga is a wonderfully drawn detective, smart and full of human warmth. I think Kyoichiro Kaga is his most successful creation. He writes science fiction too — Paradox 13.

Q: Do you read someone like Graham Greene? This kind of counter-espionage fiction was very popular during the Cold War, and some of the novelists had actually worked in British intelligence, like John le Carré. Do you read him?

Nobody's ever recommended him to me, so I don't know his work. Among Western writers I like Jeffery Deaver. Further back I like Queen, Ellery Queen — Queen's The Greek Coffin Mystery. Queen was two brothers; The Greek Coffin Mystery, The Tragedy of X, The Tragedy of Y and The Tragedy of Z are his best-known books.

I like Agatha Christie too. She's the only writer whose slow pace I can sit through. Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express. Her novels take their time, opening with a heap of seemingly irrelevant material. Hers is the only writing like that I can get through; if anyone else wrote that way I wouldn't read it. You need someone to die at the start, you need a case from the start.

Q: Do you read your own books once they're out?

No. There's no time, I don't have time to read them.

Q: Is there a book you find yourself wanting to reread?

Can't think of one. Higashino, I suppose.

Q: What are your reading habits?

I used to read a book straight through. That's impossible now; now I read a bit each day, a bit each day. I used to have to finish it in one sitting, but now...

Q: Do you feel talking with like-minded friends helps you grow? You're close with Deng Xiaomang, for instance.

Of course it does.

Q: You two talked a lot in college. Roughly what did you talk about?

Academic questions. Philosophy — Kant, Hegel.

Q: Wasn't Sartre the fashion then?

Sartre was the fashion. I don't follow fashions.

I read only classical philosophy, not modern philosophy. I feel Kant and Hegel settled every philosophical problem worth settling; the rest is nonsense. I don't read it. With Kant and Hegel in hand, why read the others? I don't read modern Western philosophers at all. Heidegger — oh, back then Heidegger was wildly popular with young people.

Q: But you said just now that once the first sentence is down the language seems to lead you. That sounds very Heideggerian.

Wouldn't know. I don't read him. Ha.

Q: Over all these years, have you kept up the habit of trading ideas with friends in academic or cultural work, past or present?

No, not anymore.

There's no chance for it. We don't see each other. Now and then, if something comes up, I might call Xiaomang, but sitting down together to hash things out is beyond all of us now. We're not in the same place, and everyone's busy. If we run into each other on a work trip there's no unhurried discussion of anything; you say hello, catch up, chat about this and that, and it's over.

Those talks when we were young were good. And it was our student days, after all, we were young, we had energy and time to spare. Now time and energy are luxuries. We can't afford to spend them, can't afford it.

Q: What are you most anxious to get done right now?

Finishing what I want to write, ha ha ha ha. A History of China still isn't done, this is just... (pats the desk)

Q: But new things you want to write seem to keep coming up.

Yep — that's exactly my trouble. Look, I've gone and made a Zen audiobook.

Q: New things keep stimulating you and you want to work them out, at least to the point of being something like an expert. How did that habit form?

I don't know. Nobody knows how their own habits formed, all right?

Q: You're writing A History of China, and suddenly the Zen audiobook seems interesting too and you want to do it. Doesn't that make you anxious?

Anxious, of course I'm anxious, how could I not be?

When I'm anxious I just stop working altogether and go read Higashino. Drop it, empty my head out, rest.

Q: But at times like that the publisher is still pushing you.

I have to wait until I've thought it through. I don't care how much they push. I wait until the urge comes back, or until I've found a first sentence. Right now, for instance, I have several things I want to write, the ideas all in place; whichever one's first sentence comes to me first, that's the one I write.

Q: What made you think of doing Zen?

Lu Jinbo asked me to. If you want the truth, that's it. What other people had made were all called "courses"; Lu Jinbo and I flatly refused to call ours a course. Ours is an audiobook. So we're not like the others, where you pay 100-odd yuan for a year and they hand you a bit this month and a bit next month. We give you the whole thing at once for 39 yuan. With the launch preface it's eighteen episodes, 39 yuan. The price of one book, handed over all at once; how you listen is your business. I haven't even checked the listening figures these past couple of days.

Q: Do you have a habit of checking view counts?

Sometimes I check.

Q: Ever since your television days you've taken public feedback more directly than most authors. Now with view counts and comments it's probably even more direct. How do you keep your composure? Creators are quite affected by this.

I'm not.

Q: You don't care about likes?

I don't care.

Q: Then why did you just check?

Curiosity. If you hadn't brought it up I wouldn't have. You reminded me, so I was curious.

Let me have a look. Haven't looked in a while. Oh, the launch preface already has 880,000 views.

Q: How do you allocate your energy over a day?

I'll tell you, the key is efficiency. Because I come from science and engineering.

I was once in Hangzhou, and a local outlet there was quick to spot it: Mr. Yi, why do I feel you're a science-and-engineering type? I said, you're right, it's an engineering mind. Anyone who's worked with me knows this. I'll say you arrive at such-and-such an hour and minute — precise to the minute, that's how it has to be.

Only by being precise to the minute can you get so much done. When I travel I pick my own flights and trains; I choose the best time. A time when neither Beijing nor Shanghai is jammed, say, or a flight where lunch is served on board. When I flew often I'd pick the 11:30 flight: you board, lunch comes shortly after, you eat, you nap, and by the time you wake you're in Beijing and the roads are still clear. I always choose that way, always plan it out, so not a bit of time is wasted. Or, if I'm not sleeping on some stretch of the trip and something needs handling, I make calls from the car.

I can't afford to waste time.

Q: Do you pick a set time to write?

No, you can't set a time for writing.

Q: You don't have particular writing habits?

No.

Q: Not fussy about it?

Not fussy. The key is whether the first sentence comes.

Q: That's fussier, in a way.

If the first sentence doesn't come, you can't write.

Q: You're a lot like a producer.

I think I'm more like a general manager. I could never be the chairman, only the general manager. I coordinate every department. If I'm going somewhere, everything has to be spelled out and everyone has to report back to me: what time I arrive where, what transport, who picks me up, who sees me off. If I'm giving a talk somewhere, I need to know which hotel I'm staying at, how many minutes from the hotel to the venue, on foot or by car — all of it laid out for me.

Q: You don't have a personal assistant?

There's a colleague at Guomai. I'll have him check flights for me, say. That's what the assistant amounts to. Or I'll have him make slides. But the one giving directions is always me.

Q: What's the difference with a chairman?

A chairman only makes decisions, he doesn't execute.

Q: A chairman also carries the risk.

Right. But he doesn't execute. I handle execution.

Intern reporter Sheng Haitao also contributed to this article.

Photography: Wu Lingwei

Cover image from: Flickr1, Flickr2