Without Zhan Hongzhi, the man with 200-plus business cards, "there would be no Taiwan today" | Interviews

Zhan Hongzhi talks about his reading habits; how Hu Shih shaped him and what he makes of Li Ao; why literature, music and film all flourished in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s; and why breaking the existing social structure has become urgent.

In 2012, Zhan Hongzhi's work was published in mainland China for the first time. Well-known cultural figures — A Cheng, Liang Wendao, Zhang Dachun, Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin — all recommended it, with plenty of praise to go around.

One passage from Liang Wendao may sum up Zhan Hongzhi's character and contribution most simply. He wrote: "These works can certainly give mainland readers a glimpse of Zhan Hongzhi's encyclopedic knowledge and his antennae, as sensitive as a radio telescope, and can certainly hint at the restrained brilliance of this extraordinary talent. My only worry is: is that enough? What would it take to make mainland readers understand that without Zhan Hongzhi, there would be no Taiwan today?"

That sounds like extravagant praise. But look back at how Zhan Hongzhi is threaded through the history of Taiwan's cultural development and you find that Liang Wendao has a point.

In 1978, at 22, Zhan Hongzhi graduated from National Taiwan University's economics department and joined United Daily News as a supplement editor. His main job was staying in touch with writers, which brought him into contact with many well-known figures in the literary world. At the time, the literary supplements of United Daily News and China Times were the two most influential in Taiwan, and the rivalry between their editors, Ya Xian and Gao Xinjiang, set off a postwar literary boom. It was also a good era for newspapers: by 1981, at 25, Zhan Hongzhi was editor-in-chief of China Times Weekly, after which he spent a year in New York at China Times USA.

Back from New York, he changed jobs again, moving from literature to music. Rock Records invited him in as a manager in the planning department, and his first project there was Luo Dayou. At the time, "Luo Dayou wore black, wore dark glasses, and sang in a raspy voice; his lyrics couldn't pass censorship, couldn't get on the radio, couldn't get on television," so Zhan Hongzhi thought of putting on a concert — a real first back then. By his own account, at Luo Dayou's two-day concert one guest performer was Li Shouquan, another was Pan Yueyun, and the man who built the steel scaffolding for the stage was Lin Hwai-min. Luo Dayou grew more famous as a result, and is now called "the godfather of Taiwanese pop." Besides him, Zhan Hongzhi later worked on records by Wu Bai and Lin Qiang.

After literature and music came film. In four years he planned and produced nine films, among them Hou Hsiao-hsien's City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster and Good Men, Good Women, and Edward Yang's A Brighter Summer Day and A Confucian Confusion. City of Sadness and A Brighter Summer Day are now regarded as classics of Taiwanese cinema and as landmarks of the Taiwan New Cinema movement. Zhan Hongzhi also drafted the "Manifesto for Taiwan New Cinema."

By the 1990s he had moved into publishing, first as general manager of Yuanliu Publishing, then founding the Cité Publishing Group. Bardon-Chinese Media Agency, the Taiwanese rights agency familiar to mainland publishers, was also his creation. Publishing is the work he himself considers most important. In those years he published collected works by Hu Shih, Li Ao and others. Hu Shih influenced him more deeply than anyone; Li Ao was a model in his youth. He studied both men's prose styles. Later, after leaving the publishing house, he curated two hugely influential book series: "The World's Ten Greatest Spy Novel Classics" and "The Murder Specialty Store" (101 mystery novels).

Zhan Hongzhi feels that he has never really crossed any boundary at all — he has always worked with an editor's or a publisher's mind. As he once told us: "Publishing happens to combine the characteristics of every industry added together, because publishing is made up of all kinds of different interests and knowledge to begin with. This diversity, this range of behaviors — once you understand publishing, you can understand every other industry."

In 2005 he left the Cité Publishing Group and moved entirely into the internet business. He is now chairman of PCHome Online, which mostly does e-commerce.

He has also written more than 20 books, on marketing, creativity, trends, fiction and essays, including Zhan Hongzhi's Private Murders (《詹宏志私房谋杀》), Green Light, Bygone Days (《绿光往事》) and Travel and Reading (《旅行与读书》).

Because his work has been so varied, Luo Dayou once suggested he "might one day hold an exhibition of his business cards." Thinking it over, Zhan admits he has indeed "had no fewer than 200 different ones." It is precisely his work across so many fields that makes him, in a sense, worthy of Liang Wendao's line: "Without Zhan Hongzhi, there would be no Taiwan today."

Many people who know him well think his real gift is designing excellent working methods, over and over — the classic example being how he recouped the cost of City of Sadness by selling off its various rights. Speaking to the public or the press, he likes to bring up two things about himself. First, that he was born in Nantou County, a "country boy," hardworking and bold. "However hard something is, it's just another performance by that country bumpkin who came to Taipei." Second, that he loves reading and thinks he is rather good at it. Reading is not only his opium of the spirit but his first method for solving problems, because he believes the experience of those who came before matters enormously. Nearly everything he knows he taught himself by reading.

For decades he has kept a simple, regimented life around that reading.

He goes to bed around 11 pm and gets up a little after 4 am. Awake, he first cleans the litter box or feeds the family's three cats, then brews a pot of coffee, and then comes the reading time no one interrupts (the only ones who do are the cats). Apart from making his own breakfast a little after 7, he reads until 9, when he goes to work. Add the scraps of time elsewhere — in a car, waiting for someone, gaps between meetings — and Zhan Hongzhi reads four to five hours a day. He has kept that up since high school, for close to 50 years.

The last time he moved, a friend helping out counted the books in his home and put the figure at 40,000. He buys about 2,000 a year. Decades of editing taught him to train his reading speed deliberately: a Chinese novel goes by at roughly 100,000 characters an hour. He both skims and reads closely.

"When a box of books arrives, I open it and sit there for over an hour, flipping through, giving each one a quick skim. You look at the beginning, look at the end, work out what it's about. One or two I set aside, hoping I'll find time to read them whole; the rest just stay where they are. So does that count as having read them or not? A lot of books I've read a few pages of, a few dozen pages of; some I've finished. The ones I finish are, I'd guess, no more than a few hundred a year — the unfinished ones are far more numerous," he told QDaily.

The hunger goes back to his childhood. Taiwan was not then a society where you could read freely, and his family's finances also kept him from reading his fill. He has recalled that after university, once he had his first decent salary, he spent a third of it every month for 48 months straight to buy a complete Encyclopædia Britannica. That much money could have covered the down payment on a house in the Taipei suburbs. "When I first got it I was thrilled — I flipped through it every day, smelled it," he said. The joy later "lost a bit of its shine," because many sentences in the volumes had been inked out or covered with stickers.

In April 2018 we met Zhan Hongzhi in a hotel coffee shop in Beijing. At 62, with graying long hair, a backpack, sneakers and glasses, he looked every bit the "old college student."

"I really want to explain that I'm not a monster. I just like reading," he told QDaily with a laugh.

Besides his reading habits, Zhan Hongzhi talked with us about how Hu Shih shaped him and what he makes of Li Ao; why literature, music and film all flourished in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s; and why breaking the existing social structure has become urgent. We have set down the interview in his own voice.

How Hu Shih shaped me, and what I make of Li Ao

"Influence" usually means the strong impressions you take in early, before your mind has set. In fact I have to say that the truly deep things you read are books you only become capable of reading later, once your reading has grown richer and more mature. So the books that influence a person are rarely deep ones. Mr. Hu Shih's books were not deep books. His gift was clarity and ease — and being clear and easy also means being, in a way, a little shallow.

But before your character sets, the books that shape you are usually not the formidable ones, because your reading isn't up to them yet. What they do is set a tone. That is how Mr. Hu Shih worked on me. I read him very early, from about elementary school. What marks his writing is how plain and clear it is: no false profundity, no arguments hidden inside murky prose, none of that. It is all like plain water, clean and clear. His language is clear and so is his character.

A few things about him left a particularly deep mark. When Hu Shih was compiling his own anthology, Selected Writings of Hu Shih (《胡适文选》), he wrote a passage that struck me hard as a boy. He said that when Bodhidharma came east, all he sought was one person who could not be deceived. If the world has any prophets, they come looking for someone who cannot be misled, cannot be fooled — so anyone swept along by an -ism, a doctrine or a famous name is no true man. You have to find your own way, so that in the end everything you say is something you thought through yourself, not something picked up cheaply, secondhand goods gleaned from others. So think everything through for yourself. Whoever the idea originally belonged to, you need to arrive at your own understanding of it. That line has stayed with me. To this day, among my friends, the compliment that sits best with me — other compliments, if they miss the mark, leave me uneasy — is that a lot of my ideas look different from other people's, that they have something original in them.

Originality isn't really an ability; for me it is a habit. You don't want to repeat what others have said; you want to work out whether you actually have a view of your own. I do it without thinking. Even with a book everyone has read, if I'm going to say something about it, I hope to see something that both does justice to what that book created and doesn't just rehash other people's opinions. I've written about plenty of classics everyone has read — Robinson Crusoe, that sort of thing — and I can often say or write something many people haven't noticed. It's a reminder I impose on myself, and it comes from Mr. Hu, because of that line of his. Think every question through independently.

Mr. Hu shaped me in another way too: that slightly optimistic, slightly naive, rather open and candid temperament. You can see it in his style. He was cheerful, and he really did treat everyone as an equal, with no condescension, no airs at all. As a child I found that captivating. Here was a man of such academic standing, so widely respected, and his way of speaking was so close to ordinary people. If "democracy" refers not to a political system but to an attitude toward life, then Mr. Hu genuinely showed that attitude. It was not like much of the talk about democratic politics I heard elsewhere. Some people are thoroughly authoritarian by temperament, and they use that very authoritarian manner to talk about democracy.

When I worked at the newspaper, my boss — a well-known man in Taiwan then — would call his executives in and say: the spirit of our paper is democracy, freedom, love of country. And you over there, stop talking! That's the difference (laughs). That was a slogan, an idea, not an attitude that came from inside the man. With Mr. Hu it came from inside. I may be darker in temperament than he was — I'm not as cheerful — but his is the way of living I aspire to.

By the time I was editing Hu Shih's collected works he had long been dead; I never met him. I did visit the Hu Shih Memorial Hall in high school, because I always felt I owed him a debt for waking my mind, and felt especially close to him. Li Ao, though, I actually worked with a great deal — his books were all published by Yuanliu, where I worked.

Reading Li Ao as a boy, two sides of him drew me in. Take Soliloquy Under Tradition (《传统下的独白》): that was of course a free spirit resisting authority and a rigid social system, a spirit in pursuit of freedom. And there was a very clever, cutting prose style, a power of argument that was genuinely captivating. In his early A Critical Biography of Hu Shih (《胡适评传》) you could see he had it in him to invent a whole new style for historical writing, something a little like Hendrik van Loon. He was only in his twenties when he wrote it, so you saw limitless possibility.

By the time I worked with him, his life had settled into two registers. First, the part he lived on: editing books for Yuanliu, whether The Complete Historical Romances of China (《中国历史演义全集》) or, later, The Complete Essential Classics of China (《中国名著精华全集》), both of which drew on his knowledge of the Chinese classics. That sat oddly with the wholesale Westernization and smashing of the old that he had preached in his youth. The trouble is that his later development never met the expectations he had set as a young man. You'd have thought he would become a man versed in both Chinese and Western learning. He never did. On the Western side he ended up with nothing at all.

By then he was also writing Thousand Autumns Review (《千秋评论》) every day. On the whole that was of course a significant thing in Taiwan, because it was a means of resisting a Kuomintang government of enormous power — one man running a magazine by himself, writing over a hundred thousand characters a month, doing one thing only: opposing the KMT.

Yet to my mind both of these were, in a way, not worth it. Perhaps it's an old-fashioned view of mine, but I always thought it a shame. He had scholarly potential; he should have gone and written a history of Chinese thought, done that kind of work. So once, in a meeting, I said to him: Mr. Li, you've dropped work like A Critical Biography of Hu Shih for this. These things may not survive, because the KMT won't be there forever — and when it's gone, your books will truly be gone too. He answered half in jest, in a way that caught his character exactly. He said: Hongzhi, I'd curse the KMT even if it cost me money — let alone when it makes me money! (laughs)

A few years later — the year the first volume of The Memoirs of Li Ao (《李敖回忆录》) came out, and the book made quite a stir — Li Ao was named publishing person of the year by Taiwan's Kingstone Bookstore, and Kingstone asked me to write an essay about him. So I wrote about his early years and the spirit of resistance he stood for in Taiwan. Without someone like Li Ao standing up to that hugely powerful, highly centralized KMT government, the rest of us might have felt bleaker. Seeing one man who feared nothing made everyone else feel a bit stronger. So he did help sustain the unbroken spirit of resistance across Taiwanese society.

From another angle, though, I found him pitiable. He spent essentially his whole life led by an appetite for revenge. He could have made a different contribution to society, and that possibility simply vanished. A young man of unlimited potential ended up, in all likelihood, a very limited one — which has something to do with how narrow his subject matter and his goals were. After the essay came out, Li Ao actually telephoned me, which shows how much it bothered him, and said: Hongzhi, what you said isn't quite right. Results matter, but so does process (laughs).

I don't think holding that attitude changed much for him. I think Li Ao was a tragedy. He began as an optimistic, funny man with enormous potential — as a writer, as a scholar, in every direction. Then a sudden stretch in prison, a spell of terror over speech, changed him completely. After that he decided nothing else mattered; resisting authority was the one thing left to do. That may well have meant a great deal to Taiwan. But think about what came after: the KMT eventually fell, and even that goal was gone. What he said no longer carried much value. When the KMT was strong, opposing it looked like courage. Once it had fallen, cursing it didn't even count as courage. So later he went on television and did all sorts of things, came to lecture at Peking University, said a great many things endorsing and supporting Mao Zedong and the mainland. That was controversial in Taiwan. But if you look at how he had always argued, you understand: whenever he argued A, his purpose was to oppose B. His research on Chiang Kai-shek, his research on Sun Yat-sen, his account of the "228 Incident" — his purpose was never really to write about the subject itself. What he wanted to say was: if you claim it was like this, then let me tell you there is other evidence proving part of it was nothing like this. All of it was too targeted, and so too instrumental.

Take those books out of the framework of opposition and you find they have no independent value. They only make sense inside that adversarial notion of the marketplace of speech at the time: if everyone in society said one thing, he'd tell you, no, there's other evidence proving some of it was nothing like that. Same pattern every time. In Taiwan, when the KMT government said how terrible the Communist Party was, how terrifying Mao Zedong was, he'd tell you the KMT's propaganda wasn't entirely right — this detail here, that detail there. Place him inside that frame and you know what it means. So there is a time-bound idea in what he did — it was very much "in time," done against the whole framework of understanding society held at that moment. Look at it that way, go back to that period, and you can see where the function of his words lay.

But once that time and place were gone, I'd say those words became not merely meaningless but liable to invite misreading and resentment. So the greatest price he paid over a lifetime of resistance wasn't prison — it was turning himself into a man who no longer mattered. That is far too high a price. He started out clever and likable, and ended up neither clever nor likable (laughs).

Why did literature, music and film all flourish in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s?

Look at how Taiwanese society developed. The 1950s and 1960s built what was called the processing-and-export model, finding Taiwan a place in the division of labor of the world economy. Which is to say: before mainland China became the world's factory in the 1990s, Taiwan had already been the world's factory in the 1950s and 1960s.

Christmas lights, umbrellas, bicycles, basketballs, footballs, balls of every kind plus sneakers — at one time or another Taiwan was the most important supplier of these things to the Western world, and the main force pushing their prices down. In that process it placed itself at the bottom of the global supply chain. It owned no core technology and no core IP; what it had was its people's poverty and diligence. Poverty plus diligence equals effective low wages. That was how Taiwan's economy found its feet. The process kept accumulating into the 1970s, and wealth began to show. As an agricultural society, a poor country, started to do better economically, new wealth began piling up. I may come back to that accumulation later to compare it with the mainland's, since wealth accumulated there through the same kind of process.

Taiwan was then locked in the Cold War standoff, but on the whole there was no war — only localized clashes, like the August 23rd Artillery Battle — basically no war. So the society really did get a quiet stretch in which to raise a generation, broadly stable: stable prices, economic growth, stable schooling. I was a beneficiary of that. Compared with our parents, we were the first generation to receive a complete education, whole and unbroken by war. That was my generation in Taiwan. On the mainland the same generation was hit by the Cultural Revolution; we had nothing like it. So when we came out of school and turned into productive labor, the biggest difference between me and the generation before was that they had suffered enormously, had been through every kind of hardship — to borrow Lung Ying-tai's phrase, they were people of "Big River, Big Sea." We were not. We were newcomers, complete rookies with no experience at all.

But my lack of experience turned out to be more useful than my elders' experience. New things kept appearing. While I was at the newspaper, for instance, Taiwan and the United States began negotiating intellectual property, and it was immediately clear that translation rights for all future American material would have to be protected. Once that protection took hold it would create friction for Taiwan's economy, and friction even in the process of getting hold of content. I was only in my twenties, and I told the paper: you can't wait for the negotiations to end, you have to start building some framework now for how copyright will be handled — that's what should be done. My boss's response was to send me to the United States to negotiate copyright. I was 25, had never done anything of the sort, and had no idea how copyright worked. I had one simple concept to go on. My boss handed me a list and told me to talk to these publishers, magazines and media outlets, and I went down it, telephoning each publisher one by one using the information printed in their books.

I had two problems. First, I didn't know whether my English would work. I'd studied it from middle school through university and had never met a foreigner. You can score 80 on an exam, but can you use it? I had no idea. Second, I didn't know whether anyone would take my call. You don't ring up, ask for the editor-in-chief and get the editor-in-chief, ask for the president and get the president. You ring up and get the switchboard. Remarkably, on that first trip almost every editor-in-chief and president agreed to see me, and only in talking to them did I discover that copyright worked differently in America than I'd assumed. The magazines had no right to license their articles and photographs to you, because they didn't necessarily hold those rights — the rights might still sit with the creators. So the real work wasn't dealing with magazines at all; it was dealing with professional rights agencies. And Taiwan had no professional rights agency. When I got home I made some recommendations to the paper and helped set up the relevant departments.

Later, once I was in publishing, I came to feel a professional rights agency really mattered, so Taiwan's first one — Bardon-Chinese Media Agency — is a company I founded, which you probably didn't know (laughs). I set it up and had an American run it, an assistant of mine. He had taught in Hunan, then chased a girl all the way to Taiwan and ended up teaching English there. I brought him in to help with translation work. Later, because I was going to the Frankfurt Book Fair to negotiate rights and couldn't cover everything myself, I made him my assistant — you take these publishers, I'll take those — so that we could cover more of them at once. This was in the 1980s. On the way back I asked him: without a professional rights agency, doing it this way at Frankfurt takes too long and costs too much. If there were a standing organization, your daily work could all run through it, and you wouldn't have to wait for a book fair to see the books and the people. An organization could handle these books as routine. He said he was willing to do it.

So I found a few publishing-house owners, myself included, and together we put up the money for a company for this young American to run. He was later poached by an American publisher, and today he is global president of the big American house John Wiley — my old assistant (laughs). Many of my former assistants went on to do big things. When I was making the New Cinema films I also hired an American in Taiwan as my assistant, a young woman who mainly wrote my correspondence with international film festivals — she is now a vice president at Warner Bros. (laughs). Because they were among the earliest people handling China matters, they have become important and highly useful today.

I ran that rights agency for a few years, and when the American was invited away to work for an American publisher I asked another of my assistants whether he'd like to take over running it. That assistant came from a wealthy family, and his family proposed that if he was going to do the job, could they buy the agency outright? I wanted the thing to happen either way, so I had no objection and handed the company over; his family bought it. That man is Chen Jiaxian, now general manager of SinoPac Financial Holdings in Taiwan. He too was my assistant at the publishing house back then.

So I got the chance to do that work not because I had experience — when I was sent out I had none, and I was only in my twenties. Evidently I could handle it better than my superiors could, because I'd had a complete education. They had a great deal of work experience but no way to think through legal matters, copyright matters, dealing with foreigners. My superiors had all lived through the Chinese Civil War, endured great hardship, lost their schooling when they got to Taiwan, and taught themselves to write and read while serving in the army. They were self-made men, every one, and they had no capacity to handle a modern society. That was my good fortune: we had received an education that could connect us to the West.

This explains why, through the 1970s and 1980s, the first postwar generation kept surfacing in one field after another. That includes Taiwanese publishing in the 1970s, which was the work of the first postwar generation of publishers — Shen Deng'en and Wang Rongwen, the men behind houses like Yuanjing and Yuanliu, all of whom were educated in Taiwan. Wang Rongwen was born in Taiwan, finished university there, and then went into publishing.

Taiwan's earliest publishing houses were mostly the Taiwan branches of mainland houses: Chung Hwa Book Co. had a Taiwan branch, Cheng Chung Book Co. had a Taiwan branch. The Commercial Press in Taiwan wasn't a branch in that sense — it had already been operating in Taiwan under Japanese rule. Because the Commercial Press was such a fully developed commercial enterprise, it had branches in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southeast Asia (Singapore and Malaysia). So after the split in 1949 all those branches stayed put; it's just that, given the politics of the time, the Taiwan branch became a standalone publisher, splitting off from the mainland Commercial Press into two organizations. Most of the original publishers, the ones from the Japanese colonial period, were closed down by the KMT government, so the new houses were in effect all Taiwan branches of mainland houses. There were also a few independent small publishers with no official coloring, like Lin Hai-yin's Pure Literature Press. But even these people had some mainland experience.

Only with Yuanjing Publishing did Taiwan get its first generation of publishers formed entirely by Taiwanese experience. When these people appeared in 1970s Taiwan they brought a very different eye to the work. Consider what the Commercial Press did in Taiwan: one of its important lines of business was the so-called "Taiwan first edition," which meant picking books from its mainland years that wouldn't offend Taiwan's taboos and working out how to reissue them. So the books in the Everyman's Library (《人人文库》) series in Taiwan were basically old books, already published on the mainland, reissued in Taiwan under a new label, the "Taiwan first edition." Which means it wasn't a first edition at all — it was the first edition published in Taiwan (laughs). That's the history. But once Yuanjing came along, it decided that publishing Taiwanese writers mattered, so it published Huang Chunming, Qi Dengsheng, Chen Yingzhen — the first wave of force from homegrown Taiwanese writing.

These forces, these people, were not the sophisticated corporate organizations we'd talk about today; they were very personal, very humanistic. This wave of homegrown publishing fed into a second wave, in popular music: local songwriting.

In Taiwan's early years television carried great weight, including over music — what we call the All-Star Club (《群星会》) era. The pop songs of the 1960s were sometimes called decadent, cloying music. Trace where that music came from and you find two sources: Taiwanese-language songs carried on the tradition of Japanese enka; Mandarin pop songs, mostly sung by women, carried on the tradition of Shanghai ditties, the tradition of Zhou Xuan and Bai Guang. That was the face of Taiwanese pop at the time.

Then in the 1970s came what's called the Folk Song Movement. Young people started asking what a song like Shanghai Nights (《夜上海》) had to do with them — they'd never been to Shanghai. They said they wanted to sing their own songs, write about the things around them, and so the Folk Song Movement emerged in the early 1970s. By the end of the 1970s and the start of the 1980s an explosive force was building, and its representative figure was of course Luo Dayou. He released Zhi Hu Zhe Ye (《之乎者也》) in 1982 and Masters of the Future (《未来的主人翁》) in 1983, and those records hit the old order hard. That was popular music's moment.

New Cinema didn't arrive until 1985, 1986. Film was doubly hard, because filmmaking takes big capital and depends heavily on it, and there were hardly any private studios. Taiwan's most important film company then was CMPC, the Central Motion Picture Corporation, originally a KMT party enterprise, a film organization Chiang Ching-kuo had ordered set up. Taiwan's cinematic revolution came out of CMPC, but its real spirit was carried through by independent producers working with the studio, so the whole process was a matter of a group of people coming together. Looking back today at how that group managed such big things, you get to the explanation I just gave — you need that backdrop. What it comes down to is that this work could never have been done through a fully commercial mechanism, because when those films were shot none of us took any money; everyone had other jobs. When a film came along everyone gathered; when it was finished everyone went back to their own lives, leaving only the director wandering the streets (laughs).

Only inside a working system that unbusinesslike could you make things like that. Judged by the logic of commercial investment, not one of those films would ever have been made. City of Sadness cost about NT$26 million. What does NT$26 million mean now? By today's measure, a bit over 5 million yuan. By the time of The Assassin the cost was roughly NT$600 million, or over 100 million yuan. In terms of film quality the difference isn't actually large. But making a film today means working entirely inside a commercial structure, paying for everything. In my day the art directors weren't paid, and they were first-rate — Liu Kai and others, all top graphic artists in Taiwan. On scripts, Zhu Tianwen and Wu Nianzhen would grind away with Hou Hsiao-hsien for two or three years. If they had really charged him he could never have borne it — and in fact they took almost nothing. The rest of us worked on these films purely to get them made; not one of us was in it for money. That naivety, that refusal to calculate — and it wasn't only us. When Hou Hsiao-hsien wasn't shooting and Edward Yang was, Hou would play his lead, scout his locations, handle everything on the production side. When Hou was shooting, Edward Yang would come and do the music. Who was getting paid? Every one of them a first-rate professional, and whenever one was working, all the others turned into his assistants.

That explains why Taiwan, with far better economic conditions today, can no longer make anything like that. Use a more commercial mechanism, or let everyone weigh and calculate more carefully, and it simply can't be done. So there was an atmosphere at work: economic strength supporting cultural activity in society, combined with economic naivety among the people doing the work. It took both to produce that period's work, which is why it is so hard to repeat. To make something like it happen elsewhere — on the mainland, say — and I imagine young people ask me this because they too long for such an era to arrive — the road isn't easy, because the mainland has commercialized so much faster than Taiwan did. Taiwan went slowly, so there was a window.

(But the 1970s and 1980s were also Taiwan's martial-law years.) The mood of that era was one of pursuing every possible avenue of free expression against a backdrop of control and intervention. That backdrop was the premise of everything. You had to be aware that anything you said might, in certain circumstances, run up against the regulatory norms of the day. That is not Taiwan's situation now. For creators working today it isn't an issue at all; the backdrop simply isn't there. Today's dominant backdrop is more likely commercial logic: how do I find the money, and once I've spent it, how do I earn it back? That's the difficulty. That has become the difficulty for new creators.

But in our era — take City of Sadness, the first film for which I carried substantial production responsibility. That film got lucky later on and was a great commercial success, a very profitable film. So in Taiwan it was described as "an export-oriented strategy aimed back at the home market": go abroad, win a prize, bring it home to screen. That was absolutely not true. How could you plan to win a prize? Winning is pure chance. Nobody can plan for it. If that film hadn't won, its chances of a full theatrical release in Taiwan would have been slim.

Rather than that, it's more accurate to say my plan was this: even if City of Sadness couldn't be shown in Taiwan at all, that would be fine — it just had to pay for itself. I reckoned the film could sustain itself on international rights alone. As I saw it then there were theatrical rights, video rights, television rights, plus rights sold to film libraries — bit by bit, what I called "fundraising-style revenue." So what I had in mind was never the box office in any one place. As business planning, that was a new idea. It wasn't export-then-sell-at-home; it would have been fine with no home sales at all. I was the one doing the work, and I was also the one who came up with the concept and carried it out. Descriptions from outside were all views from outside; they never saw the reasoning that went into it.

So these arrangements were perhaps only a small extra push. The real force came from the creators, whose work broke through every obstacle — the rest of the world simply discovered Hou Hsiao-hsien. Say that discovery meant other people wanted to secure him somehow; I borrowed the leverage of their wanting him and designed a working method around it. Because the film won a major international prize, it couldn't be banned in Taiwan and no scene could be cut, so it broke through in one stroke.

There was chance in this and there was design. The design was the business model; the chance was that a first-ever major international prize broke through the restrictions the film would otherwise have faced. Looking back at that breakthrough today, it obviously came from a group of naive workers, because none of it fits the thinking of anyone more calculating and realistic, and you also had to believe it could work. That, too, was only possible in the particular atmosphere of a particular era.

Why is breaking the existing social structure urgent?

In Taiwan these past few years, young people have been very unhappy about their circumstances. Many would say the unhappiness comes from wages having stood still for a long time. Low pay looks like a structural predicament for Taiwan. But I don't think low pay is really the problem.

In my day wages were even lower. Yet I clearly didn't have it as hard as young people do now. First, my low pay came with low costs. In the society I lived in, housing wasn't expensive and neither was anything else. So even on a very low wage, if you saved seriously, some savings looked achievable. Second, that society was moving upward — as the mainland was too, until a few years ago. When a society moves upward you see plenty of people doing better than before, and that gives society a relatively optimistic mood. That momentum has vanished in Taiwan. And not only in Taiwan — you see it in the United States, in Hong Kong. Compared with those earlier societies, the channels of movement seem to have hardened, crystallized. Add today's low pay, the inability to save, and ever-rising housing prices, and you feel there's nowhere to plant your feet. The feeling is deeply oppressive.

What I see in Taiwan is the source not only of social movements but of a great deal of social conflict. Take last year. A man I hold in great respect, the founder and for a long time the head of 7-Eleven Taiwan, Xu Zhongren, an elder of the business world, said something on one occasion — with context, of course. What he meant was that although young people have it hard, they're also rather fond of spending money these days. That remark, coming somewhat out of the blue, set off a firestorm among the young. Xu Zhongren apologized afterward and in the end had to resign. Mr. Xu had worked in Taiwan for decades. I would say he was not only one of the best-performing entrepreneurs but one of the people most concerned with how society develops. For a long time, outside work, he gave himself entirely to volunteering. The volunteering he did is hard to imagine: every holiday he took his executives out to clean public toilets, one after another. He brought in toilet-cleaning experts from Japan to learn how to do it properly. He insisted on the most menial, lowliest work, as if to settle an account: you've made this much money from society, you owe it something back. That is the sort of man he was, and over one wrong sentence young people seemed unwilling to forgive him. That very sentence is one I heard every day when I was young (laughs) — my parents, my elders, my teachers all said "you young people this, you young people that," and much of it wasn't even true. We heard it, and though we didn't like it, we never got as angry as this.

Whether it's social movements or generational clashes of this kind, I have one observation. Young people's anger is ready-made; the issue is essentially random. There is a pent-up frustration that has no outlet. So look at who happens to walk into it now — a lifetime of good deeds counts for nothing, because the anger has already piled up. Every social movement, whatever its stated reason — the Hung Chung-chiu case, a soldier beaten to death in the army; the so-called Sunflower Movement, which came out of Taiwan signing the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement with the mainland — in the early days, I'd bet 90 percent of the people in the street had no idea what the trade agreement actually said (laughs). The anger is ready-made, and any subject at all will let it out. It began as a call to review the agreement, to understand it afresh; before long, merely saying the words "service trade agreement" was enough to set the anger off.

Looked at this way, Taiwanese society, in that emotional state, is really quite unhealthy. Almost anything can trigger a backlash of that kind. It's structural. So looking back, why has it gone this way? It really has. Would you say these young people's struggles make no sense? Graduate from university today and go looking for work: some get a better salary, some a worse one. A better one might be NT$30,000 or NT$40,000 a month. Then you look at housing in Taipei, and at that price you cannot buy. Fine, you say, I'll work harder, be patient, save more. Your salary rises from NT$30,000 to NT$60,000, and housing goes from NT$1 million to NT$2 million per ping — you still can't afford it. Even obedient patience can't change the outcome, because the structure has already set. So you can't call this anger unfounded. It's real, and its source is the structure.

To dissolve the anger, to bring society back to a state where people are more even-tempered and everyone has a fair chance to get ahead, the structure has to be broken. So that's the thing that needs doing: break the structure. But in any society, the political structure and the structure of vested interests exist to preserve the status quo, and there is the difficulty. Why do I put it this way? If you don't see this, you won't see breaking the structure as today's most urgent task. A stable structure lets those making money now go on making it; the upside is a stable society and a growing economy. Break the structure and some of that may be lost. But without breaking it, young people have no way up, and the structure will only keep rotting — what's known as the growth rate of asset values outrunning the growth rate of returns on individual productivity. That gap will only widen, never narrow.

I hold a more radical view, in fact. I'd double Taiwan's minimum wage outright, to NT$40,000. Doubling it would hit society hard: everything might go up overnight, and living standards wouldn't necessarily improve. But to me that would still be better. First, as I always say, better to be poor at a high level than poor at a low level. Your life wouldn't really change, because if wages double, every bowl of noodles on the street doubles too, so you don't end up with more money. But the process carries two meanings. One, asset prices fall in relative terms — housing is cut in half. Two, when you go abroad, you realize your position relative to others has changed. Suppressing the value of your currency belongs to a world-factory idea, not to a consumption-driven, domestically oriented country living its own life; it exists to keep you at a relatively low price point in global trade competition, and that is its advantage. Taiwan has long been that kind of exporting country, a country earning foreign exchange. So its logic has always been to keep holding down inflation, to keep holding down currency appreciation. This isn't the result of a year or two; it's the result of holding things down for thirty or forty years. Look around now: most of the world's economies that have reached relative maturity have high incomes and high prices. Only Taiwan has low income and low prices — not even Hong Kong or Singapore is like Taiwan in this. These relationships all developed together.

Taiwan's experience does offer the mainland something to learn from. Right now the mainland's social momentum is such that young people may have grievances, but the society is still moving upward, so certain forces are less visible. But after it has developed a while, the day will come when fast economic growth is no longer society's main axis. When the growth rate is no longer 8 or 6 percent but 3 or 2 percent — and if inflation is 3 percent, that amounts to no growth at all — everyone comes to a halt. And with asset values that high while your income sits where it is, low relative to those assets, the sense of a society with no way out becomes intense.

The mainland will face the same incentives Taiwan did: hold down the currency, let inflation run, because that helps exports. If exports are a major economic activity, a society can slip into that trap without noticing, exactly as Taiwan did. In another five or ten years I think the mainland will run into it. The same picture explains Taiwan and Hong Kong. Young people's anger in Hong Kong today is also very plain, and their pressure can only be higher than that of young people in Taiwan, never lower, because the relationship between their income and local property prices is worse than in Taiwan. Hong Kong has something worse on top of that: wealthy mainlanders buy property there, so property price growth has become almost unrelated to local economic development — the disconnect is even more severe than in Taiwan.

So of course I think this is unfinished business. Taiwan faces an important challenge in the coming years: society has to get back to a state without this much generational conflict. Right now young people's anger has nowhere to go. Online, anyone who owns a house looks like a target; everyone looks wrong to them. That's how bad it is.

The conflict causes plenty of trouble. First, there's no mechanism that can settle it quickly. Second, the mistrust brings worse consequences. Normally one generation and the next cooperate a great deal: the older generation invests, and the younger rises through it. Now, in this atmosphere of suspicion, the older generation doesn't even dare invest, because it doesn't know how to talk to the younger one. If the assets these generations have accumulated stop moving downward and just sit there, the rot gets worse.

So I feel a certain sadness about Taiwan's development. But that runs against the governing experience of most societies, which generally hope for harmony and stability.

Banner image: a still from the film A Brighter Summer Day; lead image: a still from the film City of Sadness, source: Douban