Guo Shixing: When Living Things Are Challenged by Lifeless Ones, Alienation Is Inescapable | Interviews

Born in the 1950s, Guo Shixing did not start writing in earnest until the late 1980s. Perhaps because of the violent, unstoppable experiences of his past, he has always been wary of things without life.

Many of Guo Shixing's plays still look unusual, even today.

Director Lin Zhaohua, who has worked with him many times, once said: "There is one outstanding playwright in Chinese theater today, and that is Guo Shixing. I don't think we have paid his work the attention it deserves."

The most recent Guo Shixing play to be performed is The Imperial Special Train (《帝国专列》). Directed by Yi Liming, it premiered in 2015 and toured again this May; it tells the story of Empress Dowager Cixi taking the Guangxu Emperor by train to pay respects at the ancestral tombs in the northeast, before the 1911 Revolution. There is also Blizzard (《暴风雪》), which he directed himself in 2014 and which is about a snow disaster in southern China, and Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, which he directed in 2017. The rest of his plays can now only be watched on video.

Guo Shixing began writing plays in 1989. The first three — Fishman (《鱼人》), Birdman (《鸟人》) and Chessman (《棋人》) — are known as the Idlers Trilogy, and all three were directed by Lin Zhaohua. Their subjects, fishing, keeping birds and playing Go, came from his own hobbies and from his family's tradition.

Guo Shixing learned to fish at 13 and a half. The Cultural Revolution had just begun; slogans covered the streets, Red Guards were smashing things everywhere, and school had stopped. At first he was overjoyed, then troubled, because "I didn't have to go to school, but I couldn't see my classmates either. There was nothing to do. It was unbearably boring."

A boy from the same courtyard dragged him along to go fishing. He described the feeling: the quiet of Houhai, sitting under a bridge, dipping a small rod into the water, and suddenly there it was. That was how he got hooked.

"By the water there is always a dazed kind of pleasure. You don't know where to drop your hook, don't know how to set the float, don't know what line to use, but the moment you cast into the water your heart lifts, and you've staked the whole day's hope on it. As long as the float doesn't move, you don't lift the rod — you can sit there for hours." Fishing became a children's game. The Cultural Revolution came roaring in, and it poured into even this.

As a child, Guo Shixing loved novels. But all literary works had been banned. It was not until after that winter that someone smashed open the teachers' library. When he heard, he went in, and among the books left behind he found Dream of the Red Chamber (《红楼梦》), A History of European Literature, Volume 1 (《欧洲文学史（上）》), The Comedies of Molière (《莫里哀喜剧集》) and a batch of Russian novels — his first encounter with play scripts.

Keeping birds came even earlier than fishing, in his second year of primary school. A classmate kept a bird, so he kept one too. His father told him that no good man carries a birdcage around. After he fiddled with his first bird until it flew off, he kept the next ones in secret.

Once the Cultural Revolution began and his schooling fell apart, he kept three more, and trained one of them to pick up coins in its beak. He resolved many times afterwards to give up bird-keeping and set his birds free, but he always ended up keeping birds again without meaning to. Guo Shixing still keeps birds today — during the phone interview you could hear a whole room of birdsong behind him. The only time he ever dropped the hobby was when he was sent down to the countryside as an educated youth.

In 1967, the central government issued the "Notice on Resuming Classes and Continuing the Revolution at Universities, Middle Schools and Primary Schools." Students who had been in fourth, fifth and sixth grade when classes stopped now entered middle school, resuming classes while continuing the revolution; students already in middle school were handed diplomas and sent to the countryside. Guo Shixing entered middle school and graduated in 1969, at about 16. Beijing's class of 1969 was sent in its entirety to work on border-region farms, and he went to Beidahuang, the Great Northern Wilderness.

The production and construction corps he joined lay between the Songhua and the Heilongjiang rivers. The area had once been wetland — "knock down a roe deer with a stick, scoop fish out with a ladle, pheasants fly straight into the cooking pot." After 1958 the wetlands were drained and reclaimed for farming. Guo Shixing traveled west to one of the reclamation sites and spent five years there.

In his memoir he describes leaving for Beidahuang, and later leaving Beidahuang.

On the train out, everyone cried, even the usual "petty hoodlums." The moment the train moved, the crying went up with a roar, because thousands of people inside and outside the train began crying at once. Everyone felt they might never come back. Guo Shixing deliberately held his tears in, but when the train started he still pushed his way over for one more look at his father.

By the time the train reached Tongxian, the crying had stopped dead. The girls started on their snacks; "the boys began the most unrestrained day of their lives" — smoking, telling dirty jokes — and a little while later they were sick of the subject. With a thousand children of the same age on one train, nobody was lonely, but the chaos gave you a headache.

His interest in Go began at Beidahuang. Guo Shixing was born into a family of Go players; the name Shixing comes from a line in the historical record, the Wuxi County Gazetteer (《无锡县志》), describing his ancestor Guo Bailing: "a man of refinement, with the conduct of a scholar" — shi xing. His grandfather Guo Xuchu and great-uncle Guo Tisheng founded the Beijing Go Research Society, the first Go organization established after 1949.

When Guo Shixing was in first grade, his grandfather suggested he train in the children's Go class at the Children's Palace, where Nie Weiping and his brother were enrolled at the time. But he had no interest in anything that required calculation. He only memorized what he found "fun": the entire dialogue of a film, storytelling performances, tongue twisters, poems, incantations, the patter of a street magician. Much of it later turned up in his plays.

In 1970, while home from Beidahuang for medical treatment, he got the idea of learning Go, as a way to kill the boredom of farm life. He later heard that Nie Weiping had used his Go skill to get transferred off a farm to the national training team, and hoped Go could get him out of Beidahuang too.

But his grandfather had no interest in playing with him. Once, Guo Shixing recalls, his grandfather came by the house; he went into the inner room for the Go set, and by the time he came out the old man had slipped away. He ran after him and caught sight of him already at the mouth of the alley. This is about making a living, he thought, and tears came up all at once. "But that's how they were. They'd rather spend all their time playing with more gifted children than bother competing with me."

After Fishman, Birdman and Chessman, Guo Shixing wrote The Street of Bad Words (《坏话一条街》). Directed by Meng Jinghui, the play put folk rhymes in place of gossip as its dialogue, and told a "sinister" story set in Huaihua Hutong.

The story came out of the street Guo Shixing used to live on. In 1972, home from Beidahuang for the second time, he had not registered for a temporary residence permit. When a light fixture broke, he steeled himself and went to the neighborhood committee, but the committee director spoke in bureaucratic platitudes and simply would not stamp the paperwork. That was not all: during the Cultural Revolution, several of the committee's staff had framed homeowners in order to seize their houses. It was this sinister street, Guo Shixing says, that made him write The Street of Bad Words more than twenty years later.

While he was writing it, he read what he had just written to Zhi An over the phone almost every day. The writer Zhi An has been his friend for many years. Zhi An's older brother once studied Go under Guo Shixing's grandfather and great-uncle, and Guo Shixing studied poetry under Zhi An's father, the poet Sha Ou.

Zhi An felt that "when Birdman, Chessman and Fishman were staged one after another, people found that each had a character of its own, and everyone said that was no easy thing — but The Street of Bad Words was different from all of them." It was no longer a play grown out of one specific pastime, but a purely spoken play, in which language itself became the subject again.

After that came Toilet (《厕所》), To Live or to Die (《活着还是死去》), Going Home (《回家》) and others — thirteen plays in all so far, eleven of them staged, two not, one blocked by censorship and one for other reasons. Toilet, To Live or to Die and Going Home were all directed by Lin Zhaohua, and take up urban change, ecological change and an aging population. All three focus on social problems and on how human dignity goes unrecognized, and are known as the Dignity Trilogy. Asked how he came up with these subjects, Guo Shixing said it takes no racking of the brain — as with Toilet, once things change, you naturally start to think about it.

In recent years, hemmed in by theaters' own plans and schedules, his plays have rarely been restaged. So he began directing his own work, and along the way wrote some fiction for literary magazines. His reasoning: if getting a play onto a stage is this hard, write books instead.

In 2015, his essay collection Me, the Fish, and the Birds (《我和鱼，还有鸟》) was published. When the publisher came to ask for the manuscript, Guo Shixing asked whether they could publish his scripts alongside it. The publisher agreed, and his plays appeared in a collection for the first time. Read against each other, the memoir essays and the scripts make both clearer.

Zhi An once said: "Shixing told me, 'I used to lament that I started my literary life too late. Now I'm glad it wasn't earlier — writing before you've reached enlightenment only misleads yourself and others.' But if he is not to be misread, someone has to understand him first." In his essay collection As If Speaking Face to Face (《如面谈》), Zhi An wrote: "In an age when everyone is chasing after restlessness, self-interest and sentimentality, my friend Shixing seems to me unable to escape the fates of Third Master, He Yunqing and the Fishing God in his own plays."

These characters remind Zhi An of Qing the woodcarver in the Zhuangzi — "Qing carved wood into a bell stand, and those who saw it were astonished, as though it were the work of ghosts or spirits." In As If Speaking Face to Face, Zhi An writes that Guo Shixing, like Zhuangzi, treats Third Master and the others as embodiments of the Dao: they move among ordinary people yet are fundamentally cut off from them, revered by the crowd but never understood by it.

Third Master and his birds, He Yunqing and his Go, the Fishing God and his fish stand as metaphors for one another, Zhi An believes, and their fates have something in common: the Dao is swallowed up by worldly things of no small weight.

Q: QDaily

Guo Shixing: Playwright, theater director

Q: You often bring up "alienation" — from your earliest scripts to the last few years, you keep coming back to the word. It seems to be a key term for you. Can you explain it?

Guo Shixing: I think it is a permanent problem for humanity. Your material conditions can change, your material and emotional life can grow rich, and you still can't escape it. Because the essence of a human being is that they carry life — a person is a living thing. When something alive is challenged by something not alive, the problem only sharpens. Technology does not make people happy, you know.

Q: You've always been thinking about alienation, but where it lands has shifted?

Guo Shixing: Right. From the agricultural age to the industrial age, to the electronic age, to today's virtual, intelligent age — it keeps changing, and its object is different each time.

Q: What is the core thing behind alienation that pushes you to think about it?

Guo Shixing: It is made by people's own hunger for quick results. Every one of these problems is made by people themselves. People think they are clever, and they use that cleverness to build things that get twice the result for half the work, things that raise efficiency — but the higher the efficiency, the bigger the problems behind it. Nuclear energy, for instance. Genetic modification, for instance.

Q: Is the alienation in Birdman also alienation made by that hunger for quick results?

Guo Shixing: Keeping a bird is a hobby: you discipline the bird, you make it live the way you live. In changing the bird, the man forgets to change himself. There is a purpose in it, but the man's purpose is not the bird's purpose in existing, in living. It runs against nature, against the essence of life. It is cultural discipline applied to a bird. It bends the bird out of shape, you know?

It bends the bird like this, ruling what is correct for the bird and what is wrong. But birds have no correct and wrong — birds live by instinct. You put it in a cage, you tie it up, and by your own demands you change that life of instinct. That goes deeply against the instinct of life. People have done it to themselves too. Three-inch golden lotus feet, for instance, or European corsets binding the chest and waist — since the Middle Ages some European women were laced until they fainted, all for the figure.

Q: But you keep birds at home yourself.

Guo Shixing: I'm the same. People are all contradictions. On one hand I do it, on the other I criticize it. That's why I don't train my own dog. Other people's dogs roll over and sit up and beg. Ours has learned nothing and knows no tricks; it does as it pleases.

Q: If the environment were different, would it be better not to have this hobby?

Guo Shixing: Without this hobby there would be other problems, problems of discipline much like the bird's. Read Foucault and you'll understand it. Take a simple example, fashion. There are fashion magazines, and if you try to think the fashion question through on your own, as an individual you can never break out of it. There's a whole team behind it and you're no match for them. Most people are consuming fashion information — young women especially — New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week... A lot of people dress the way they do because of all this. Why do old people fall out of style? Because they don't have the information. Fashion is alienation.

Q: Emotionally speaking, is the environment you grew up in very different from now?

Guo Shixing: Utterly transformed.

Q: Somewhere small, the change wouldn't be so drastic; in a big city you get this problem.

Guo Shixing: The change is too big. Take a street in the old days. It had a few landmark buildings, a restaurant say, that stayed put for decades. You grew up there, and when you told someone where you lived you'd say, next to such-and-such restaurant, giving them that landmark to go by, right? Now you can hardly say that — the restaurant will probably be gone next year, out of business, shut. All your coordinates have changed. The school I went to, for instance, disappeared long ago; those streets have all been widened. The old houses are gone, turned into office towers.

You start to wonder whether the life you lived back then was real. Did you really live here? It leaves a person with no roots, drifting, unsure, and that badly damages a person's memory of their own existence. Paris and places like it haven't changed in a hundred years. The route the Chevalier de Maison-Rouge took to save Marie Antoinette in Alexandre Dumas's novel The Chevalier de Maison-Rouge (《红屋骑士》) — go and check it today and it's exactly the same, unchanged, the same streets the Three Musketeers walked. That kind of thing gives people a sense of stability. It has a good, positive effect on fiction and on literary work. If things keep changing, different in a moment, it hits a person's memory hard.

Q: Does this connect to the alienation you talk about? Is it an important reason you care about alienation? Can we say this is the cause and that's the effect?

Guo Shixing: Yes, yes, yes. I think so.

And soon people will start changing their own faces. Humanity used to rely on natural selection, and change came very slowly — from Homo sapiens to modern humans, changes in appearance were extremely slow, measured in millions or hundreds of thousands of years. Now, with plastic surgery and genetics, the change is man-made, and in the future a person's appearance may be shaped to order.

Q: Is the area you grew up in different from the area you live in now?

Guo Shixing: Completely different. The streets I lived on as a child no longer exist. The landmark buildings have all changed too. They're all restaurants now. It's genuinely frightening, I'll tell you. If Mount Huangshan vanished, wouldn't the people around you feel the world had turned over, that the change was too much?

Q: When did you first feel Beijing had changed so much that it was frightening?

Guo Shixing: The late 1980s? It must have been around the turn of the century.

Q: When you say frightening, was the shock really that violent?

Guo Shixing: The longer you lived in the old days, I think, the bigger the shock. Young people who don't know what it used to be like don't care either way. They were born into a world where every household has a toilet. Plenty of young people who watched my play Toilet only learned from it that people used to relieve themselves that way.

Q: Is there a subject you want to write about now?

Guo Shixing: First I have to be able to feel it — without feeling, without being moved, I won't write it. Right now my main goal is directing; writing has moved to second place. Ideally I'd direct an original script, not necessarily my own. I'm fairly optimistic about contemporary European drama. And in some cases, certain novels here have the potential to be adapted for the stage.

Q: Why are you optimistic about contemporary European drama?

Guo Shixing: Because their thinking goes deeper. The predicament of human existence they show is more profound, and more intelligent.

Q: The Imperial Special Train was staged recently. How did you come to write a play like that?

Guo Shixing: 1998. It started as a commission — China Film Group wanted something about the collision of Eastern and Western cultures. They gave me a few books, one of them Princess Der Ling's Imperial Incense (《御香缥缈录》), which describes a lot of interesting episodes of the court's contact with Western civilization at the time. But I noticed one thing in it: Empress Dowager Cixi had a train custom-built abroad and meant to ride it to Shenyang to pay respects at the ancestral tombs. On the way there, certain things happened. She doesn't go into much detail, but some of those details could become a play.

So I put everything happening in the Qing court onto that one train and wrote a film script. That script held a huge amount of material — really enough for a two-part film. At the time they wanted something in that nonsensical style, something like a Stephen Chow film.

I hadn't seen a Stephen Chow film. I think A Chinese Odyssey (《大话西游》) was playing that year, but I had no time to watch Stephen Chow, and I had no idea what his style was like. I just wrote it according to my own idea of comedy, which probably didn't meet what they wanted.

It wasn't quite cinematic enough — it would have been troublesome to shoot, and there was a lot of dialogue. But it suited the stage, so I later turned it into a play script.

Q: And still it took this long to be staged as a play.

Guo Shixing: Right. First Lin Zhaohua came asking me for the script — I can't remember whether it was 2012 or the year after. I gave it to him and he said it could be staged. He submitted it to the theater, and nothing came of it; I suppose they weren't interested. Then around 2014, Yi Liming came asking for the script, said he could stage it, and I gave it to him. And he did stage it.

Q: So even now you've never seen a Stephen Chow film?

Guo Shixing: I have — I saw Kung Fu Hustle (《功夫》) later. His kung fu really is something.

Q: What is your understanding of comedy?

Guo Shixing: If it doesn't make people laugh, it isn't comedy. Comedy mocks human weakness; black humor flatters it.

Q: A lot of your plays are black comedies. Why?

Guo Shixing: Step back and you'll see the form was already there in the 1950s and '60s. It differs from our traditional realism, differs a great deal. As a way of telling a story it hasn't changed much from fiction — it still tells a story with a beginning and an end. But it gives us a path into somewhere non-logical. It isn't logical; it is anti-logical.

Q: What kind of theater should there be more of now, and what kind less?

Guo Shixing: Since I'm directing now, I've been watching, and the make-up of theater audiences has changed a lot. People who went to plays used to be older than me; later there were more people my own age. Now I find that my generation and the generation above it have stopped going. Most of the audience is young, and a good many are women. You can tell they're better educated; there are more intellectuals among them.

Because the audience has changed, if our plays stay as plain and simple as they used to be, I don't think they'll satisfy anyone. What do audiences come to the theater for? Probably not purely entertainment. Most of them, as I see it, are looking for something to think about. So plays today can go a bit deeper philosophically.

For myself, I can write more boldly now. The Lin Zhaohua Theatre Invitation Festival, the National Centre for the Performing Arts' Berlin theater festival programs, the art festivals other companies put on — bringing in first-rate performing groups from abroad — all this opens up the audience's field of vision. There used to be one mold for watching theater: heavily realistic plays, heavily plotted plays. That mold has been broken now, and audiences can take more. So theater-making from here on can be bolder.

Q: The Shenzhen Contemporary Theatre Festival held a young directors' forum a while ago. Someone who attended said that when people talked about their difficulties in the work, many directors said, without prompting from one another, that they often think about quitting theater.

Guo Shixing: The biggest problem with theater is that it's slow, and a lot of it loses money.

There are several reasons. One is the money you have to put in. Ticket prices are already very high, and it's hard for a production company to make anything. There are fees for the creative staff, rent for rehearsal space... and during the run the theater takes almost half the box office. You're also responsible for the promotion and distribution costs. Theater doesn't have the kind of money film has, so media and writers don't want to write about you, you know. Add up all these costs and you only start to recoup after more than 30 performances. But most productions get swapped for something else before they reach that many. So unless a theater is privately owned, the state should provide some subsidy and treat it as a public good. Then the rent production companies pay the theaters wouldn't be so high, the pressure would ease, and there could be more productions and more performances.

Another reason is that production costs are now very high — a lot of productions cost more here than abroad. Why? I think it has to do with monopoly. Put in something with a competitive mechanism and the costs would come down. In Beijing right now, set construction has already moved to Jiangsu. Hebei doesn't allow it anymore — they cite noise, pollution, that sort of thing. There used to be set-building factories in Beijing; then they moved to Hebei, then from Hebei to Jiangsu. Once it's out of the area, you build it there and ship it back, and the cost goes up.

Q: Anything recently worth sharing?

Guo Shixing: Seal carving. I've always admired it, but I'd never tried it, because I didn't have the knack and couldn't cut the stone. Then I noticed that some young women could carve, and it occurred to me that this isn't purely a matter of hand strength — I just didn't know the method. Videos make it easy now. I watched some videos on seal carving and solved one problem in the cutting itself: how to bring the knife down. But your hand can still slip, go out of control, and ruin the carving.

There are other technical problems, like how to get the draft onto the stone. You write it out with a brush first and paste it on, and you have to carve the characters in reverse, since only then do they print the right way round. It takes some time before you can change your writing habits, because now you're writing with a knife. Look at the seals cut by the old masters and it seems like the work of ghosts and spirits — how did they carve so well?

Q: Where's the pleasure in it?

Guo Shixing: Summing it up: first, it's the pleasure of layout, of design. Usually a seal has four characters; some leisure seals have a dozen or more, and how you arrange them is never the same twice — you can't cut every character in the same style, right? The typeface, the size, the relationship between characters — it needs layout, graphic design. There's a design idea inside it, and it's a form of creation too. There's a real thrill to that design work. That's the first.

Then when you're carving, when the knife meets the stone, there's the pleasure of labor. Think about it: you take a stone with nothing on it and use it to express your idea. Your design becomes real, and there's pleasure in that process of work. When you slide the knife across the stone, you feel the pleasure of cutting.

The third is the pleasure of printing. Getting something printed out in the world is a nuisance, but here you press it onto a piece of paper and that's the equivalent of the pleasure of publishing. And now there's Moments — in the past you couldn't show it to everyone you ran into; it might take years to get that piece of news out. Now you post to Moments and within minutes everyone knows you've stamped a new seal, right? So there's the pleasure of printing and the pleasure of exhibiting too. It satisfies you on a lot of fronts at once.

Q: In a memoir piece about your obsession with fishing, you wrote: "I longed for the day I'd have a home of my own, when I would decorate the bedroom like a reed marsh, make the bed in the shape of a fishing boat, and paint the ceiling full of stars." Did you ever do it?

Guo Shixing: I never did, because back then I had no place of my own — I lived at my father-in-law's. I thought that once I had my own house I'd do exactly that. Then I had my own house and found it was very hard. Getting the renovation crew to give it a plain whitewash was already trouble enough. It would probably be a lot of effort for nothing. Because I keep crickets and so on, once winter comes people say our place is like walking into a graveyard. Add a reed marsh and nobody else could live there. You'd need plenty of spare rooms for something like that.

Back then there were few places to fish, which is why I thought of making my own. Now there are plenty of places, so I go out and fish. No need to fish at home.

Q: Decorating a house like a reed marsh is a strange idea. Have you had any similar ideas lately?

Guo Shixing: Lately, no. Lately I've been packing dirt into the bottoms of cricket jars — several dozen of them in a row, and there's a pleasure in that kind of work. Renovating a house makes too much noise; renovating a cricket jar makes hardly any. It's a clay jar, and after firing it's extremely dry, which isn't good for raising crickets, so you have to line the bottom with earth.

The bottom can't be "fluffy," meaning loose — if it's soft the cricket will dig right through it. You have to tamp the bottom firm. After the jar is fired you boil it, and once it's boiled you tamp it down with a lime-and-clay mix, a yellowish layer packed hard, you know? It's complicated, a real nuisance. Once I'm done I plan to give them to friends. I can't use that many myself.

Q: When did your interest in raising crickets and keeping birds start?

Guo Shixing: It must have been the late 1980s. I kept them as a child, but I didn't know what I was doing, I just kept them blindly. Later I interviewed some bird-keeping masters, real experts, and when I started deliberately wanting to train birds — that must have been the late 1980s.

Q: You've said what's fun about seal carving. Where's the pleasure in raising insects and keeping birds?

Guo Shixing: With insects and birds there's an exchange. In the beginning, keeping insects and birds in Beijing was different from the south. In the south they're mainly for fighting — the hwamei thrush, for instance, or a bird called the huangteng; those birds are raised for combat. Crickets are raised for fighting too. Not in Beijing. A fair number of people in Beijing raise them to listen to. They want to hear the birds and the insects call. They want to enjoy that sound of nature. I'm in the second camp.

Q: It sounds a little... sad.

Guo Shixing: There's a desolation in it. Where does the desolation come from? Nature keeps shrinking. Housing developments today all have green space, a certain amount of it. It wasn't like that before — none at all! Building against building, house against house, a few trees at most. You had no contact with nature. Everything you could hear was made by people, or by machines and appliances. The natural sounds — birds calling, insects calling, frogs croaking — you almost never hear them.

And now even nature is changing. Land development has reached into the countryside, and farmland has turned into housing developments. So you hear even less. That's why raising these creatures does so much to ease your nervous tension. When you listen, something in the frequency of their sound matches the frequency of human life. Listening to it makes you feel at ease.

Q: And that's why you started keeping birds and insects in the late 1980s.

Guo Shixing: That's right.

Q: Why have these hobbies lasted so long?

Guo Shixing: It's like boarding a pirate ship — easy to get on, hard to get off. It's addictive, like smoking or drinking. Because there's always a new challenge, you know. When you hit a problem you didn't solve well, you keep thinking about putting it right next time round. A bit like clearing a level in a video game.

Q: I have a feeling, though I don't know if it's a bias, that maybe only Beijing people get hooked on these things so easily.

Guo Shixing: The culture has something to do with it, but Beijing also has the conditions in place. It's easier to take these things up here. Once I went to a small place in Zhejiang, and people there had trouble even buying a hook if they wanted to fish. There was no shop for it.

Beijing has these big tackle shops, with every kind of the world's most advanced gear. So Beijing is a hub. It's convenient to do these things here, the trade around them is well developed, and you can get set up fast. Out in the provinces it's a little less convenient.

But people outside Beijing are interested in these things too. Take growing flowers — there's nowhere in the country without people who love flowers, and there are expert growers and bonsai makers everywhere. But Suzhou, Shanghai and Beijing are more convenient, because the expertise is concentrated there; you can get guidance quickly and buy what you need. It's simply easier.

But now these people have been driven far out, and some flower-and-bird markets are shrinking. They don't seem to fit into urban planning, which is a great pity. Remote areas may end up flourishing instead. If you want to grow flowers in the future you'll have to go a long way out — to Hebei, you know? These past couple of years they've been clearing out the "low-end population." These people were labeled low-end and cleared away.

Q: What's one thing you'd most like to understand better?

Guo Shixing: The grain question — whether our country can grow most of the grain it uses.

Q: What's the most recent thing that frightened you?

Guo Shixing: Among the things I read about, one is genetically modified food, and another that's quite frightening is human trafficking. Children suddenly carried off. China's birth rate is already low, and the population keeps shrinking. It's hard enough to have a child at all — hard to get pregnant, and raising a child costs a great deal. These children are China's future. If you don't protect them, and their organs get taken or they're crippled, then with the population already this small, if it keeps going this way, I find it frightening.

Q: Who do you think is doing the most to push this era forward?

Guo Shixing: Commercial profit.

Q: What advice do you have for society?

Guo Shixing: Stop always doing things for quick returns; look further ahead. This country and this nation need plans that span a century. Don't just think about what to do in four or five years and then change it all when someone new takes over. You have to think about a hundred years of development, urban planning included...

Cover image: a production still from The Imperial Special Train, from Douban; a still from The Sun Also Rises