17 Scholars' Reading Lists: They Might Make Us Richer, or Better, or Just More Resolute

This is the final piece in the series "Living With the Future."

"Sometimes what matters is not changing the world, but explaining it."

At a moment like this one, on how to explain the world and how to live with the future, we need to hear wise, independent voices.

The questions are many and tangled, but they bear directly on the lives the younger generation will lead. More than 20 professionals from economics, law, sociology, communication studies and other fields hope the world we leave to the young will run well and keep growing more civil — and that people will stay independent and clear-headed in a world that is complex and bewildering.

Journalist Ian Johnson, like many readers of our era, is puzzled by how little patience people now have for books and long articles: are readers less patient, or just dumber — or have editors, the people who supply the content, lost their nerve?

As if answering Johnson, Wang Xiaoyu, an associate professor at Tongji University, says he has spent the past few years on the classics — reading the Poems, chewing his way through In Search of Lost Time — and has finished neither. "These past few years I've mainly been reading the classics slowly, going through the pre-Qin philosophers one book at a time. I've also been reading some of the great 20th-century novels closely."

Ren Jiantao, a professor at Tsinghua University, keeps coming back to the same point: whether we read on a screen or on paper, we still read too little. Various figures show that book consumption has in fact risen since online bookstores and e-books made buying easy, and yet people keep saying they seem to read less and less.

As Ren sees it, pick any category at random — natural history, say — and a great many books have appeared. "The cultural history of plants, the cultural history of animals, round-the-world travel, surveys of countries around the world, material on the Belt and Road — you can read any of it." There is no shortage of books for the general reader, the kind that combine ideas with genuine interest. "China publishes more than 100,000 new titles a year on average. There are plenty of good books."

This article is the last in the series "Living With the Future."

What every scholar we spoke with gave us, above all, was a way of thinking — an index, you might say. We started from these conversations, and if their learning can open up a wider view of the world for us, we will count ourselves lucky.

So for this final piece, we asked them about the books they had read and liked over the past year or two, or books they think are worth reading — in their own fields or for the general reader.

We hope every reader takes something from it. Maybe it will make us richer. Maybe it will make us better. Or maybe it will simply make us more resolute.

1. The Courage to Act

Zhang Bin, researcher at the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Ben S. Bernanke's The Courage to Act.

2. The Approaching Financial Cycle (《渐行渐近的金融周期》) and Two Others

He Fan, professor at Peking University HSBC Business School

Peng Wensheng's The Approaching Financial Cycle — I think he gets it about right. Then there's Li Bozhong's Muskets and Ledgers (《火枪和账簿》), also well written. And Wang Dingding has one called The Basic Theory of Behavioral Social Science (《行为社会科学的基本理论》). Some of his own thinking is in there, and I think it's quite good too.

3. Rereading Hayek (《重读哈耶克》), Plus Steven Pinker and Kodansha's History of China

Wei Sen, professor at Fudan University School of Economics

I wrote Rereading Hayek for the sake of a social re-Enlightenment, to change how people think. These past few years I've been working on the history of monetary systems, so I don't talk about that book much anymore. Steven Pinker's books are all pretty good. Kodansha's History of China series from Japan is good as well. The more academic ones — the Cambridge economic histories, say — most people probably don't have time for.

4. Confucius, Wang Yangming, and A New Kind of Science

Sheng Hong, economist

The most important thing is that everyone read according to their own interests. I've read so much I don't know what to recommend.

Among the books I've read: Zhang Xianglong's Nine Lectures on a Phenomenological Interpretation of Confucius (《孔子的现象学阐释九讲》). Then an English one, A New Kind of Science. And Rare Earth. And some biographies — the three-volume life of Wang Yangming by Xu Baoyun, and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

5. A Book Called Speaking into the Air

Wu Fei, professor at Zhejiang University's School of Media and International Culture

I'll recommend a book from our own field, journalism and communication: John Peters's Speaking into the Air (rendered in Chinese as both 《交流的无奈》 and 《对空言说》).

6. The Development of the Commandery-County System in the Han Dynasty (《汉代郡县制的展开》), Miyazaki Ichisada, and Balzac

He Weifang, professor at Peking University Law School

Reading comes in stages, and sometimes it's a matter of age. Take French novels. Young readers often find Balzac dull and turn to Hugo, who sets the blood racing. But go back to Balzac at a certain age and you see how remarkable he is — his insight into human nature.

Over this past year I've read mostly history — books by Japanese scholars, for instance, including The Development of the Commandery-County System in the Han Dynasty, a very thick study of the commandery-county system, and then the collected works of Miyazaki Ichisada. I've read a fair number of books in this vein. I doubt young people today would enjoy them much.

7. Mingxing and Suqin (《明星与素琴》), and Leaving a Better Record

Ma Yong, researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

If I had to recommend something for young people, the book that left the deepest impression on me this year is probably Mingxing and Suqin, from Oriental Press. Though it is heavy going for young readers too.

A bookshop owner in Jiangxi — in his forties now, I'd guess — has been buying up old papers, and out of them he pieced together the story of a couple who went from sweethearts to marriage, children and a household of their own, running from before 1949 through the 1950s and 1960s. It's a small history, the history of one family's changes.

The book is written lightly; young people who pick it up will be able to get into it. Using letters and private papers that happened to survive, the author lets you take your own lesson from it. You don't have to dwell on how wretched the era was, from the hardships of the Republican years to the cruelty of the later political campaigns — you don't have to look at any of that. What you can see instead is how much it matters that the daily lives of young people leave a record behind. That record later becomes the historian's material.

I'd had my eye on Mingxing and Suqin for a long time, not for the story of Mingxing and Suqin itself, but because the scholarly ambition and spirit behind it deserve to be championed. I don't know when it started, but our historical writing no longer begins from the small and particular, no longer insists on difference and individuality; it has to fit some outline, some mainstream line. History has always been concrete and singular. If historians ignore what is unique about their subject, if they parrot what everyone else says and rehash old material, scholarship never advances. This book takes a trove of private documents that survived and surfaced by pure accident and reconstructs a love story history could easily have lost altogether, and in doing so it shows how fragile and accidental an individual life is inside a great era. The author's digging, sorting and reading of the sources, and his reconstruction of events, are first-rate by any measure.

Reading it moved me. Why is so much of our history writing today doctrinaire and abstract? Because we haven't left behind this kind of varied material. We actually have a great deal we could preserve now — the Weibo and WeChat posts young people write ought to be kept as a record of a life lived, a life's course. Historians in the future may well use it to reconstruct how our generation lived and thought.

That's the angle from which young people should read this book: not for the brutality of the political campaigns of the 1950s or the turmoil of the 1940s, not as politics, but for the beauty of young lives in it. It's well worth reading. The other books I'd recommend are all history, and probably heavier going.

8. Nationalism, Reshaping China (《重塑中华》), Fierce Winds Favor Flying Against Them (《风疾偏爱逆风行》), and Memories Under a Solitary Lamp (《孤灯下的记忆》)

Lei Yi, researcher at the Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

Nationalism. One of the Oxford "Very Short Introductions," this is the best book there is for understanding nationalism. The author, Steven Grosby, is a professor of religion at Clemson University in South Carolina. Because he is an authority in the field, the book can be accessible and still go deep, moving from surface to substance with historical narrative and theory of a piece. It also gives a crisp, uncluttered survey of the various views and schools, as a general introduction should, while using its own analytical framework to turn a long series of historical facts and events into concepts and theory, and offering pointed analysis of more than a century of research on the subject. Its scholarly value runs deep.

Reshaping China: A Study of the Concept of the "Chinese Nation" in Modern China. In China today, the most widespread and deeply held concept, idea and word is "the Chinese nation." Yet follow it back carefully and the concept turns out to be little more than a hundred years old. The author, Huang Xingtao, is a prolific historian of modern China, wide-ranging and rigorous. Drawing on a wealth of sources, the book traces where "the Chinese nation" came from and what it meant, and shows how an idea barely a century old came to exert such enormous influence. This kind of genealogy of ideas matters a great deal, and it makes gripping reading.

Fierce Winds Favor Flying Against Them. Reform and opening naturally included opening in culture. Anyone who lived through it will remember the huge impact — the shock, even — that the sudden unbanning of foreign films and novels had on society in the early years. In bringing in culture from outside China, the magazine Yilin (《译林》) played an enormous part, and the memoir of its founder, Li Jingduan, is important material on that cultural opening.

Memories Under a Solitary Lamp. This is a personal history and a family history at once. Zhao Yin is the daughter of the eminent historian Zhao Liesheng, but she herself spent years as a farmhand in a remote part of Gansu, living at the very bottom of society. Her memories of the scholars and notables her father knew are interwoven with her memories of the humblest people around her, and together they make a fairly complete picture of a society. With a fineness of eye particular to a woman, she renders a great many details precisely — in a sense, this is a history of everyday life.

The Lowly Are the Wisest (《“卑贱者”最聪明》). Cai Fang is a well-known economist with deep research on population, and on population economics in particular; this is a collection of his essays on the economy. The essay is a freer form, letting him speak his mind more directly, with more honest and penetrating thinking.

(Note: these four recommendations come from "Lei Yi: My Reading in 2017", written for the Economic Observer; excerpted and used by QDaily with Lei Yi's own authorization.)

9. Homo Deus, and the Much-Disputed The Pivot (《枢纽》)

Wu Guanjun, professor of political philosophy at East China Normal University

I'd certainly recommend something that is both a good read and worth reading: Yuval Noah Harari, a writer born the same year as me. His Homo Deus is well worth reading, and it reads very well. Writing outside the academy, he sets out his own reading of this era. So personally I think a book first has to be readable, and then, on top of that, it needs an analysis that cuts through. You may not agree with Harari's analysis, but he can feel the pulse of certain things about our future, and I recommend him strongly.

Then I'd recommend a friend of mine whose book came out this year. Once his views were published, plenty of people attacked them. I know that, but I think he at least offers a way of placing China under its new era, and one with a sense of history. That's Shi Zhan's The Pivot. I think the book gives us a fresh grasp of the direction China itself is now heading in.

10. Jiang Ruoshui, Natural History, and Taming Leviathan (《驯化利维坦》)

Ren Jiantao, professor of political science at Tsinghua University

It's hard for me to recommend what I read to general readers, because I've always insisted that professional reading and public reading are two different things. My own work is specialized research on state-building, and there's not much of that reading I can share. As for public reading, I've sat on a few book-prize panels, which give the general reader some sense of direction — just choose, according to your own interests, whatever books you're drawn to.

But here is what I'd urge on everyone, myself included: don't read only the fast food on your phone screen. Chinese people still need to read books. The biggest difference between a book and a phone screen is that a book holds systematic, reasoned thought, while a phone usually delivers only what is ready-made, of the moment and opinionated. Being willing to take in what comes off your phone is itself a mark of an engaged citizen, and we should say so firmly, especially in the internet age. But on the other hand, reading books is a basic indicator of a highly intelligent society. Take Israel: not long after it was founded it managed to stand firm surrounded by hostile Arab states, and Israelis read more than 60 books a year per person. In China the optimistic count is 3 books, the pessimistic one only 1.3 — and that 1.3 probably includes a lot of comics, food writing and travel guides.

We still need to embrace great minds. Not that we have to aim at greatness ourselves, but embracing great minds washes some of the grime out of our souls and lifts the qualities in them we want to grow.

For China, how do we build a habit of reading? That's something this nation has to work hard to change.

In literature, for instance, there's Professor Jiang Ruoshui's The Modernity of Classical Poetry (《古典诗的现代性》) and Eight Lessons on Poetry (《诗的八堂课》), and Strings and the Farewell Song: Scholars of the Missionary Universities (《弦诵复骊歌——教会大学学人往事》) from the Commercial Press — all worth reading. And in recent years China has produced a great many books on natural history: the cultural history of plants, the cultural history of animals, round-the-world travel, surveys of countries around the world, material on the Belt and Road — you can read any of it. China publishes more than 100,000 new titles a year on average; there's no shortage of good books.

For professional reading — politics, economics, culture, science and technology, education — choose according to your needs. For public reading, you want work that combines ideas with genuine interest. In political science, for instance, there's Wang Jianxun's Taming Leviathan, an excellent piece of work. The thinking in it comes out of his specialty, but it wasn't written for specialists; it was written for a general readership. You can pick any of these cross-disciplinary books meant for the public. The Beijing News's annual best-book list, the Commercial Press's list, the Social Sciences Academic Press's list, China Reading Weekly's list, the Economic Observer's list — readers can follow all of them and pick out a few, and they're all sound choices for general reading. There are classics mixed in, too: among the Commercial Press's good books you'll find Summa Theologica and Summa Contra Gentiles, which a specialist like me may not necessarily read, but which the public may well be curious enough to.

11. Taming Leviathan, the Classics, and History

Guo Yuhua, professor of sociology at Tsinghua University

Wang Jianxun's Taming Leviathan is excellent. It lays out the reasoning very clearly: why do state and government power exist? Because you need them, and at the same time you have to guard against them. Every citizen ought to understand this — it bears on how citizens understand the state, understand themselves, understand their own rights, and understand what the relationship between themselves and the state should be. A very good book.

I'd also recommend Liu Junning's Conservatism. And you should take a look at Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit.

Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society is excellent too, and I think young people should read it. It criticizes intellectuals who pronounce on society without taking responsibility, who point out the way ahead and then answer for none of it. He clears away a lot of illusions.

Books like these make plain a great many things that are, I think, really just common sense.

In political philosophy, you should read the classics of liberalism and conservatism. For liberalism, Locke, Montesquieu, Hume. These may be too classical for some, so you can take a shortcut: Mises, Hayek, Arendt, Tocqueville are easier reading and you should start with them. Then for conservatism there's Edmund Burke's Liberty and Tradition (《自由与传统》), which is in fact a very easy read; you should read that too.

For history, start with China — the work of Gao Hua, for instance, including research on the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution.

My own books are hard for me to recommend, because they aren't distributed in the mainland. I have one that's an oral history of peasants; you can actually see the basic logic of Chinese society through what happened to the countryside in the second half of the 20th century. That book was pirated in Guangdong as though it were literature. I find that odd, because it's a very academic book — apart from the introductory chapter, which is heavily theoretical, the rest reads almost like storytelling, and you can see Chinese society in miniature through the story of one village.

12. The Institutional Logic of China's State Governance (《中国国家治理的制度逻辑》), Neighbors, and China in Liangzhuang (《中国在梁庄》)

Yan Fei, associate professor of sociology at Tsinghua University

Zhou Xueguang, a professor of sociology at Stanford, wrote The Institutional Logic of China's State Governance. It examines China's state governance today from the standpoint of organizational sociology, and it answers one basic question: how do you handle the enormous tension between a unified system and effective governance? What do "a unified system" and "effective governance" mean here? Set them in the context of the Chinese state as a whole and you find that central policy, when it is carried out locally, runs into all sorts of different standards; many local governments implement and interpret policy according to local realities. So this is a conflict within central-local relations.

When we do social surveys and interviews with local officials, they often tell us that the moment a red-letterhead document arrives from the central government, the first thing they do is read it closely from start to finish — every single word is worth turning over. And what is the point of turning it over? To find the gray areas in the document, the room for maneuver, so they can respond flexibly to local conditions and needs.

The second book is Neighbors, about the massacre of Jews in a small Polish town in 1941, an act of inhuman violence. But the killers weren't German Nazis; they were the local Poles who had lived alongside those Jews as neighbors. Why does the story matter so much? It breaks the received assumption that the murderers in the Holocaust were simply "the Nazis," and opens up a piece of history in which the real killers, in this town, were the Polish neighbors you saw every day. That analysis puts you on alert, because it makes us compare across history and find many similar acts of violence under other political conditions. In the end, history keeps repeating itself.

The third is China in Liangzhuang, a new book by Liang Hong, who wrote Out of Liangzhuang (《出梁庄记》). In her novel she casts her father as a good man, but the finest part of the book is the scene of that father, Liang Guangzheng, being denounced during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It works exactly as Neighbors does: Liang Guangzheng was denounced and threatened again and again by his own neighbors, and that is what shaped the character he later had.

13. Eichmann in Jerusalem, Raymond Aron's Memoirs, and Other History and Biography

I can't call these the best books, of course — there are plenty of good ones. The year-end prizes run by the Economic Observer and The Beijing News have already caught a lot of them, I think. There's an early book by Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which had been published here before and has now been reissued; I think that's a fine book.

There's also Raymond Aron's Memoirs, which I also think is excellent. And there are a lot of history books worth attention, including on Chinese history. One studies the relationship between the Chinese nation and the ethnic minorities around it: Grow Great by Being Xia, Gradually Admiring Hua Customs (《能夏则大与渐慕华风》).

There's also The Life of David Hume and a Life of Tocqueville, both of which I think deserve attention — very good.

14. The Social Contract

Zhang Qianfan, professor at Peking University Law School

There are lots of good books. I once recommended one on WeChat Moments called The Social Contract: A Critical Study of Its Development, and I thought it was excellent. Published in 1957, it is a critical study of the social contract and how it developed; I don't know whether a Chinese translation exists. It is, admittedly, on the old side. 1957 — what were we doing then? Fighting the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and then came the Great Leap Forward, the great famine, the Cultural Revolution. I've only just finished the book, and personally I got a great deal from it. The social contract is also something China has always lacked: Chinese society has always been governed from the top down and has had no culture or spirit of contract rising from below. Without the social contract underneath it, a constitution is useless even when you have one. That's also why Britain has "constitutionalism without a constitution," while we have done the reverse.

15. Orwell's 1984, Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Kafka

Hong Tao, professor at Fudan University's School of International Relations and Public Affairs

Orwell's 1984 speaks directly to the present. Technically, his prophecy has not merely come true, it has been overtaken: today's means of control have reached a point the devil himself could not have imagined. And the problem doesn't stop at the growth of surveillance technology. It lies also in the fact that modern politics sets out to remake human nature. Even a well-educated person, once caught in the snare, comes out reborn and unrecognizable. In China now, young and old alike adapt extremely fast. The moment someone enters the apparatus of power, or means to, their manner of speech changes on the spot, and everything they learned goes to waste. There are plenty of examples. That is the real core of 1984: the harm of totalitarian rule lies in the remaking — more precisely, the corrupting — of human nature.

On modern politics, Swift's Gulliver's Travels is worth recommending too. It is also a prophecy about modern politics, and it is a better read than 1984. Orwell's book only makes you afraid; it has none of Swift's mockery and rage. The difference is probably the times. Gulliver's Travels was written in the early 18th century, just as the modern age was beginning, while 1984 is a 20th-century work more than 200 years later. By the 20th century the riddle of the modern state had largely been solved, and Orwell couldn't laugh: this former man of the left had grown thoroughly despairing.

Kafka's place in 20th-century political philosophy can hardly be overstated. His work reaches the spiritual dimension of human beings, showing the damage done to the human spirit by a power that seeped into everything in the 20th century, and the spiritual wasteland of modern man that followed. His novels The Castle, The Trial and Amerika, along with the shorter works The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Problem of Our Laws, A Hunger Artist and A Country Doctor, are all masterpieces of reflection on modern politics and the modern spiritual condition.

16. The Classics

Wang Xiaoyu, associate professor in the Chinese department at Tongji University

These past few years I've mainly been reading the classics slowly, going through the pre-Qin philosophers one book at a time. I'm reading the classics, but not along the line of classical exegesis that once held a monopoly, nor the line of classical studies currently fashionable in the academy. When I say I'm reading the Poems, for instance, I don't call it "the Classic of Poetry" (《诗经》) — I'm trying to keep as much distance as I can from that "classicized" way of reading. I feel very close to my native language, but I don't like Ji Xianlin's line that "the relationship between Eastern and Western culture is thirty years on the east bank of the river, thirty years on the west bank." It smells of a leftover way of thinking — "either the east wind prevails over the west wind or the west wind prevails over the east wind." I'm closer to Qian Zhongshu's line: "East Sea, West Sea — the human heart is the same."

My interest in recent years is mainly poetics, and I read mostly literary works and literary theory. Besides poetry, I've been reading some of the great 20th-century novels closely — Kafka, Faulkner, Pedro Páramo, and In Search of Lost Time, which I am still nowhere near finishing. Most recently I read Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's The Makioka Sisters, three times through, and I still wasn't done with it. Just as Chen Yinke wrote A Biography of Liu Rushi at a moment when "the Qin-era moon filled the land," Tanizaki wrote The Makioka Sisters in wartime Japan, turning a matchmaking story into a kind of "epic" — so out of step with the mood of wartime mobilization that the serialization was stopped almost as soon as it began. Both men appear to be dwelling on wind and flowers, appear to have nothing to say about affairs of state, and both held clear-eyed political judgments.

The Austrian writer Ilse Aichinger's story collection The Bound Man was the new book that left the deepest impression on me in 2017. I say "new," but it isn't really new anymore — the author died in 2016. This slim collection, some fifty or sixty thousand characters in Chinese, I've read over and over, and I still can't say with confidence that I understand it. Sadly, it is the only book of Aichinger's in Chinese so far. There is far too little of her in translation.

Calvino once reviewed his own work anonymously and said he kept "an appropriate distance from any form of professionalism." How to be professional without slipping into professionalism is something I keep thinking about. My interest is poetics, but I don't accept the view that makes literature and art sacred — "poetry is supreme," "culture transcends everything," "art matters more than politics." At bottom these are a warped, snobbish view of art. If poetry weren't supreme, if culture didn't transcend everything, if art didn't matter more than politics — would you stop loving them?

17. Readers Need Patience, Editors Need Courage

Ian Johnson, journalist and writer

There's a novel called Manhattan Beach, by Jennifer Egan, who won the Pulitzer Prize. The book is very popular right now. It's set in the 1940s and follows a woman making her way in a business dominated by men. There should be write-ups of it online. Another novel is about refugees in Europe: Go, Went, Gone, by Jenny Erpenbeck.

There must still be some readers willing to read long pieces. Take The New Yorker. They used to run long — often 8,000 to 10,000 words — and the standard now is about 5,000, half what it was. And more and more of it is news about politics and current events. That may reflect a new shift in the world too.

In any case, The New Yorker used to be a completely different magazine. They had all sorts of interesting articles with nothing to do with the news at all. Now look at the cover: much of it is Trump, Hillary Clinton — nothing like before. They probably feel that if they didn't do it, a lot of readers would leave them. Are readers getting dumber, or are editors getting less brave? Hard to say. I'm not running The New Yorker down — The New Yorker counts as the best magazine in the West, and it still does today. Maybe people's attention is more scattered now? Five minutes into an article, they don't want to go on; they have no patience for anything long. Does that mean today's readers are dumber than they used to be?

Interviewees featured in this report:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: stills from the films 84 Charing Cross Road and Inglourious Basterds, via Douban.