Literary Editor Li Jingze: Today's Novelists Have Lost the Ambition to Understand Life and the World | Interviews

"We are facing a great era, but our writing may be small and mediocre."

In 2017, Li Jingze published two books in quick succession — Tales of the Blue Bird (《青鸟故事集》) and Singing on the Way Home (《咏而归》). The first recounts "all sorts of odd incidents from the history of cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world"; the second is a collection of essays, "on the classics, on tradition — the taste and the eye of a man of letters."

Past fifty, he calls himself an "up-and-coming writer." He used to leave his books to fend for themselves once they were out; this time he went out to hawk his wares, sitting through book talks and signings and "meekly listening to critics pick over the work."

That was no small change for him. Until then, Li Jingze was better known as a literary critic. He had published several books of criticism (To the Ideal Reader, 《致理想读者》, and A Defense of Literature, 《为文学申辩》), written prefaces for many young authors (Feng Tang, Cai Chongda, Wen Zhen), judged the Mao Dun Literature Prize, won the Lu Xun Literary Prize for literary theory and criticism, and seen his name turn up in the blurbs on the front and back covers of new literary titles.

The novelist Bi Feiyu, a friend of more than 20 years, calls him "brilliantly gifted," a man who has built a body of literary criticism and a critical language all his own — the "Jingze style." "What he cares about is his own aesthetic taste, his own Li-style tone. Honestly, I share Jingze's taste and I like Jingze's tone. He is upright, and he leans toward the ornate. He wins me over," Bi Feiyu wrote in the essay "Li Jingze: From 'Looking This Way and That' to 'Tales of the Blue Bird'".

What is the "Jingze style"? The late critic Lei Da put it this way: "Jingze blends the freedom of the essay, the airiness of prose, and the wit and humor of the polemic into a style that keeps turning a corner and finding the light again, one that carries heavy things lightly. It can feel a bit roundabout, but inside that roundaboutness you feel an edge."

Since the 1990s, Chinese literary critics have divided roughly into two kinds: the academic, and those working in the field, in practice. Li Jingze belongs to the second kind, and that has a great deal to do with his day job.

His day job is literary editor. He has been an editor at Selected Stories (《小说选刊》) and editor-in-chief of People's Literature, and is now editor-in-chief of Modern Chinese Literature Studies (《中国现代文学研究丛刊》) and vice chairman of the China Writers Association. Counting from the year he entered the trade at 20, that is more than 30 years. Writers whose reputations have grown steadily since — A Yi, Feng Tang, Liang Hong, Li Juan — owe something, in varying degrees, to Li Jingze finding them and pushing their work when he was an editor.

"I have always thought that my first identity is editor — an all-purpose handyman. Writing has always been a sideline. It still is amateur work for me. That isn't modesty, it's the fact. I have a job, I clock in nine to five like everyone else, and I can only write at night or on my days off," Li Jingze told QDaily.

As he sees it, he is a Capricorn, and his temperament is an editor's temperament. "A Capricorn is bound to be a very earnest person, earnest even about things that don't matter. I'm very much like that, so I have an editor's temperament. To this day, when I see someone else's typo I can't help fixing it; when I see a sentence that doesn't run right I can't help fixing it. Capricorns hold themselves to harsh, fussy standards, and sometimes they wear themselves out," he said.

After more than 30 years in the trade, he believes the most important thing an editor has is an eye. A good literary editor must "grasp, sharply and precisely," a writer's "real talent" and "the direction in which the literature and art of an era are moving," and so be "able to quietly push an era's literature forward."

Many friends, Liang Hong and Bi Feiyu among them, find Li Jingze's reading staggering in volume, solid and diligent. It may come from a habit formed in childhood.

He was born into a family of intellectuals; both parents graduated from the archaeology department at Peking University. The places he played as a child were mostly archaeological digs, and the first books he read were mostly history — he went through several editions of A General History of China (《中国通史》). During the Cultural Revolution, because his mother worked at a publishing house, he had the run of what were then called "banned books" or "internal-circulation books": Sartre, Yukio Mishima, Tolstoy. Looking back, he finds the reading of those years almost surreal — a child raised on nothing suddenly dropped into a pastry shop, eating everything at random, with no idea what any of it was for.

In 1980, at 16, he placed first in Hebei province in the humanities track and entered the Chinese department at Peking University. In college he had no grand plans; he read all sorts of books and wrote little. He graduated in 1984 facing a choice between two job assignments: the General Logistics Department, or an editing job at Selected Stories. Since the General Logistics Department would mean morning calisthenics and no sleeping in, he chose Selected Stories without hesitation.

So, by accident, he entered literary editing, and he has stayed there ever since. Of his classmates in the Peking University Chinese department, none went into literary work apart from Zhang Yiwu and Yan Zhen. Zhang Yiwu is now a professor in the Chinese department at Peking University; Yan Zhen is a professor in the Chinese department at Central South University.

Beyond that, Li Jingze says he has never had the "I must make something of myself" urge; he is "fairly laid-back." Even becoming a critic was something of an accident. "I didn't really start writing until I was past 30, in the mid-1990s. It wasn't that I badly wanted to write — I'd write something now and then, someone would say it was good, and then came all the requests and the deadline-chasing. I've said since that I was basically nagged into writing by editors, so it was all rather hit-and-miss," Li Jingze said.

In 2018, editors "nagged" two more books out of him — Meeting Rooms and Hills (《会议室与山丘》) and Notes on the Symposium (《会饮记》). The first collects his writing and talks on literature over the years; the second gathers his column in October (《十月》).

"The literature we now face has to reckon with an upheaval unseen in three thousand years, a change that reaches down into our most basic experience of life. Our literature has not shown that it can fully grasp this change, understand this change, or produce work equal to it," Li Jingze wrote in Meeting Rooms and Hills.

That no such work exists is partly the fault of Chinese novelists themselves, he thinks. "To some degree, our novelists have lost a certain ambition. What ambition? The ambition to understand life and understand the world. Today's writers, today's literature, lack the ambition to take something this complex, this nearly formless, and give it form, understand it — and they lack that creative spirit too. So in that sense, we are facing a great era, but our writing may be small and mediocre," he told QDaily.

In August 2018, in the middle of a typhoon, we met Li Jingze at a Hong Kong-style café in Shanghai's Huangpu district. He is 54, his hair neatly combed, dressed in a dark green jacket, and he talked with us, unhurried, about 40 years of Chinese literature, the trouble with novelists today, Chinese tradition and the May Fourth Movement, and his own taste in reading.

Q = QDaily

Li = Li Jingze

Over the Past 40 Years, China's Literary Currents Have Followed the Direction Set in the 1980s

Q: You've made this judgment about the development of contemporary Chinese literature: "The logic, the vision and the aesthetics established in the 1980s still govern us today. Some writers established canonical status in the 1980s." What does that mean, concretely? Could you spell it out? What logic, what vision, what aesthetics, established in the 1980s, still govern us today?

Li: It's a complicated business. But look at it historically: this year marks 40 years of reform and opening. Before reform and opening, Chinese literature went through a rupture during the Cultural Revolution. Then, after the 1980s arrived, Chinese literature as a whole had to establish itself again, out of the ruins. That meant, on one hand, picking up the thread of the New Literature tradition, and later the tradition of classical Chinese literature as well. On the other hand, we had to build an outward orientation. There was a famous line in the 1980s — "go out into the world." That was a slogan. So Chinese literature in the 1980s also had to see itself within the field of world literature and work out what it ought to be doing.

So the revival of realism in the 1980s, the appearance of the avant-garde, and so on — you can see that even now, across these 40 years, our basic literary currents, including the basic drift of our aesthetics and our ideas, still follow the direction set in the 1980s.

And that generation of 1980s writers did establish their canonical status this way. The names the public knows well now — Mo Yan, Jia Pingwa, Yu Hua, Liu Zhenyun — all rose in the 1980s, and the canonical status they won then is unshakable today. They are still the serious literary writers with the widest public recognition and acceptance. In that sense, what we have in literature now is still a continuation and development of the 1980s.

Q: You just said our literary currents over these 40 years, including the basic drift of aesthetics and ideas, still follow the 1980s direction. Does that current have one overarching characteristic?

Li: Broadly, in the 1980s, in aesthetic terms, we went through a liberation of sensibility and of ways of speaking. By liberation of sensibility I mean that in the 1980s you find literature exploring human sensibility across the board.

Even now, the reach of literature — the aesthetic style of Chinese film and television, for instance — much of it was learned from 1980s literature. Writers like Mo Yan and Yu Hua established that aesthetic in literature first.

Zhang Yimou's early films came almost directly out of literature. Not just the stories; the aesthetic key came from literature too. Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern, To Live — their influence wasn't the influence of a story, it was the influence of an aesthetic key.

Ways of speaking too. Take Wang Shuo — I don't know whether young people still read him. But the way young people talk now, and the way we and the media often talk, if you dig down to the root, it all started with Wang Shuo and the writers around him. That's where it comes from. Go out on the street today and look at a real estate ad: that ad is written in the style of early Misty poetry (laughs), the old literary-youth style.

Sometimes literature's effect on society isn't a matter of any one work. Sometimes it quietly shapes how a whole generation feels and how it speaks.

Q: In your new book you say: "Many of the elements of 1990s literature, many of the possibilities it once opened up, are all but nonexistent today." Could you expand on that? Which possibilities do you think are worth holding on to now?

Li: The 1990s were a crucial decade. China's full market reforms began in the early 1990s, and the abrupt social change that followed, the large-scale urbanization, the arrival of the internet — all of it happened in the 1990s, and it shaped what we look like now.

New elements appeared in the literature of the 1990s to match. One was the expression and understanding of the feelings and circumstances of modern city life. That was a very new element in modern Chinese literature too. China was an agricultural country, and you find that in the modern period the strongest current in our literature has been rural narrative, village narrative. There was writing about cities — Lao She wrote about old Beijing — but that was a pre-modern city, not a modern one. In modern literature, probably only a handful of writers, Eileen Chang among them, wrote about people against an urban backdrop.

By the 1990s it was quite different. Many writers, including young ones at the time, began writing about human circumstance and human nature inside a growing, fast-changing city. That was an important new change, a new thing, in Chinese literature. And now there is indeed more and more writing about cities, about people in cities.

But some of the dimensions and possibilities the 1990s opened up when it first started writing about cities were never fully developed afterward, which is a pity.

Q: And the process of urbanization now is even more far-reaching.

Li: Right. It has given Chinese literature a vast new space. It isn't that we have written our cities well; we haven't written them nearly enough. To some extent we still haven't worked out, still haven't explored — how do you portray city life with any force?

Q: That reminds me of Li Tuo's recent novel The Ring Finger (《无名指》), which is also about people in the city. One of his motives for writing it was his sense that too much writing today is "social-problem novels," and that novels that truly enter the inner life of people today are few, almost nonexistent. He argues that writing today should stop worshipping the canonical modernists and relearn from the practice of 19th-century realism — the most important lesson being how to build character — and use literature to help us understand reality. I'm curious what you make of that.

Li: I broadly agree with him. But I don't think it's as simple as putting down this glass of water and picking up that one. Modernism is also a forceful expression of modern experience. We are in the 21st century now, writing about 21st-century cities and 21st-century people. Our life itself is sometimes modernist. You can't throw out the entire artistic experience of modernism and go back to the 19th century — and I don't believe that's what Li Tuo means either. What he is stressing must be that we should write with the spirit of the 19th century: realist, grounded in reality, taking hold of reality as a whole. As for the art of it, I doubt you can write novels the way Balzac did. Nobody would read them now.

Of course literature should help us understand reality, and help people understand themselves. Literature is not merely entertainment, something to make people happy — its great function in the modern age is to give us a sense of the pattern by which we understand the world. That matters, and it should still do that job today.

We Are Facing a Great Era, But Our Writing May Be Small and Mediocre

Q: Back to the 1990s literature we were discussing — you said one of the new elements was the city. Besides that, are there other elements that once opened possibilities and are now all but gone?

Li: Ah, sometimes one thing leads to another in conversation, and "nonexistent" is too absolute. What I mean is that in our novels today, to some degree, our novelists really have lost a certain ambition. What ambition? The ambition to understand life and understand the world.

We all know how complex the experience we face now is, how complex the world is. Set against someone living in the farming age, or life before reform and opening, things are far more complex now. But you'll find that today's writers, today's literature, lack the ambition to take something this complex, this nearly formless, and give it form, understand it — and they lack that creative spirit too.

So in that sense, we are facing a great era, but our writing may be small and mediocre. That appetite for understanding, which our literature may once have had, is weakening.

People now think a novel is just telling a story, or that a novel merely expresses one person's feelings, moods, and a very narrow band of experience. Even in craft our novels are very old-fashioned: start a story at the beginning, run it straight to the end, kill the character off, done. Facing modern experience in the 21st century, we haven't even tried to look for a modern form — as a modern person, how do you tell a story? We don't have the nerve for even that.

That's the sense in which I say it. It isn't that I'm nostalgic for the 1990s, or that I want to go back to them; what I'm pointing at is our problem now.

Q: From 2000 to now, what new literary elements have you noticed that are worth taking seriously and talking about? It doesn't seem like there's much that's new?

Li: Right, because as I said, we've walked forward under that same logic. When I raise this, what I hope for is what a very fashionable academic term now calls "chaoke" — to transcend and overcome at once. To grow out of something and also get beyond it.

We may need a "chaoke" of the 1980s and the 1990s. This generation of writers, of young people, should have an ambition of its own: facing my era, I want to offer a new path for literature, a new form, a new way of saying things. On that front we haven't yet seen many new elements.

Sometimes young people write in a very old-fashioned way too. Young people don't seem young. That, I think, is also a serious problem.

Q: From your own point of view, which younger writers are worth watching? When contemporary literature comes up, ordinary readers usually only know that generation from the 1980s and 1990s; there are so many young writers, and it's hard to know how to judge or choose.

Li: I don't think young or not young matters much. Someone may be very young and already write like an old man. Someone else may be past 50 and still be an up-and-coming writer. Obviously I'm not referring to myself (laughs). In that sense I think some are quite good — Shi Yifeng, for one. Shi Yifeng writes well; at the very least he tries hard to give forceful expression to the very particular experience of our era. Yi Zhou and Zhang Chu are good too.

There's also a group of very young writers, or ones who don't look very "professional." That's what I find most encouraging, and what I have the highest hopes for: China may be going through a big change in the mechanism by which writers emerge. So whenever I sit on a prize jury or something similar, I read the writers' résumés. Sometimes a résumé makes me happy. Once I was looking at the résumés of some of these young writers and I thought, good! Good how? Not one of them had studied Chinese literature (laughs). They had all been working in finance, computing, law, medicine, selling transformers, and then took up writing.

More and more young people from different backgrounds and walks of life are joining the ranks of writers, and that matters a great deal. From the 1980s into the 1990s, writers' backgrounds were fairly uniform. My generation, born in the 1960s, came almost entirely from villages and small towns and studied Chinese literature. Objectively, certain inner conditions were already set in advance, and they shaped how you saw things.

Now so many young people write purely out of love for literature and belief in it. A man in finance could perfectly well not write novels. What money is there in writing novels? If he writes anyway, it must be because he truly loves it. The same goes for people in science and technology: they come from different backgrounds, their feel for the world and their way of putting it may differ, and that brings very new elements.

One important new element in recent years is the rise of science fiction. For one thing, the genre was already a powerful one, and it is a purely modern genre. It fits China's overall economic and social development. And, importantly, science-fiction writers almost never studied Chinese literature — they all come from technical backgrounds. They bring a new way of seeing the world and a new way of saying it. I think that's especially important.

May Fourth Wasn't Entirely Anti-Tradition — In Essence It Rebuilt Tradition

Q: In your new book you write: "We have now lost the tong, the unifying thread; the century of upheaval since modern times began has been an attempt to solve, once again, the problem of gathering it all into one — this is also a great difficulty of modernity." Could you say more about your view here? I remember Gan Yang proposed "connecting the three traditions," inheriting the traditions of Confucius, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping at once; and Chen Pingyuan proposed "connecting the two traditions," joining the Confucian tradition to the new tradition of May Fourth. What's your view?

Li: The question of the tong is a long story, and a big one. It matters, of course; it is really a question of totality. Can we understand the world, understand ourselves, understand China, inside a framework that is at once temporal, spatial and continuous? Because since modern times we have often thought in terms of rupture. Everything before doesn't count; we start over now. Time begins again — and then it keeps rupturing.

Take May Fourth: very great, very important. But some also think May Fourth's problem was that it, too, declared a rupture too decisively and wrote off everything before it. A hundred years on, we find that what came before can't all be written off. At the same time, after 100 years of development, we all now feel a strong need — a need for something that can join our modern experience to 5,000 years of tradition. And that joining thread has to reach not just as far as us but keep running forward. This tong may really be a great question of our era, one everybody is anxious about and is exploring.

But whether it's three traditions or four or however many, the need for this kind of tong is important. Because a civilization, or a modern nation, cannot exist for long without one — cannot go on existing, over the long term, with no continuous, overarching narrative.

Q: But the question is which "traditions" we should look for now, and how we find them. And once found, should they be transformed, and how?

Li: Right, which is why I say it isn't easy. We may identify with traditional culture, but traditional culture holds so much — which part of it? Even if I say I identify with Confucian values, Confucian values still need a modern transformation. So none of this is a matter of simply finding some object or fetching it back; it all has to pass through our creative transformation as modern people. This tong isn't a rigid thing you achieve by shouting a slogan. These things have to become genuinely part of us, something that guides our lives from the inside. The difficulty of it will probably take several generations of work. It's a process.

Q: You just mentioned the modern transformation of Confucianism. Do you have particular thoughts on that?

Li: Confucianism isn't my field, but it certainly needs a modern transformation. Many of its basic values still have meaning and still apply today. Some things have to be discarded, of course — the inequality of men and women, and the power relation that comes with it. There's nothing wrong with talking about filial piety, but that doesn't make the relation between father and son a power relation. A son can be filial toward his father, but they are equals. In the Confucian scheme, what's stressed is not only a moral question; it also produces a power relation. There really is a question here of transformation, of critical inheritance, in the course of modern life and modern values.

There are many problems of that kind, I think. It isn't a matter of picking up a classic and reciting it. Sometimes, if you just pick up a classic and recite it, you send yourself off the rails.

Q: You just mentioned May Fourth — next year happens to be the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. Looking back at the literature and the writers of a century ago, set against today, what strikes you most?

Li: I think May Fourth was extremely important, extremely great. For one thing, its spirit is still an important proposition for us. The spirit of democracy and science is still an important question for us. But as a cultural movement, some of its cultural judgments — a hundred years on, some of them do need adjusting and rethinking. It was a revolution, and revolutions can't help being extreme and fierce at times. Including its flat rejection of parts of the Chinese tradition.

Its face is complicated, of course. We always talk about May Fourth being anti-tradition, but in fact May Fourth wasn't entirely anti-tradition; in essence it also rebuilt tradition, it rebuilt our classical tradition from scratch. Take the Four Great Classical Novels we all know now. Where did they come from? May Fourth built them. It was Hu Shi and his cohort who first affirmed that Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West were great classics. Before that they had no standing at all in Chinese culture. That's an important point, and one we often don't discuss. The same goes for our general picture of tradition today — Tang poetry, Song lyrics, Yuan drama, Ming and Qing fiction. Yuan drama and Ming-Qing fiction were built entirely by May Fourth, or by the New Culture Movement around it. In the 1930s, when a professor at Peking University started a course on Yuan drama, people still said: goodness, why is he studying that stuff? It was thought fit only for the gutter. May Fourth is what raised it into the hall of refinement and set it up as part of our national tradition.

So our understanding of May Fourth has to take in very complicated facets. It isn't simply "down with the Confucian shop," sweeping all of tradition into the rubbish heap. May Fourth wasn't like that; at the same time it did a great deal of work sorting out and rebuilding tradition through a modern eye and a modern field of vision. So what May Fourth means for us, whether you admit it or not, is that we are all its descendants. The blood of May Fourth, the blood of the New Culture Movement, runs in us. Without the New Culture Movement we wouldn't speak the way we speak now, or write the way we write now. That is beyond question. It must be one of the crucial turning points in our nation's history.

The People of the Spring and Autumn Were Like Gods — Whether Doing Good or Evil, They Did It on a Grand Scale

Q: In your new book you write: "We have aestheticized history, but what has meaning now is not sighing with relish over some difference; it's the reverse — looking at where we resemble the cultural figures of the late Qing and the Republic, and where we haven't changed." Where do you think we resemble those figures? And where have we not changed?

Li: It's like this. We aestheticize history very easily, even turn it into literature, looking only at whether some historical figure struck a handsome pose. But we lack any grip on history as a whole. So on the point you raise, what I object to is that the moment the Republic comes up, everyone was a master and everyone had marvelous bearing. I say: don't forget what kind of era the Republic was. For most of its span and in most places, it was an era in which people had no way to live. In an era of general hunger, poverty and outright turmoil, if you have no grip on it and go around calling the Republic a golden age every day — have you any common sense at all? You're substituting your small aesthetics, your small life, for a basic understanding of history.

So all this daily sighing over the past sounds very lofty, but I think it's fake. Everyone of that generation, the intellectuals of that generation included, bears responsibility for the state the Republic was in. Can you say a person bears no responsibility for their own era? Good era or bad, you had a hand in it, didn't you? Don't forget: while they lived refined lives in Beijing and Shanghai on professors' high salaries, the rest of the country was sunk in general poverty and misery, wasn't it? In that sense, how could the revolutionaries not have had their reasons? They had every reason, and so did the intellectuals who took the revolutionary road. Sometimes we seize on one aesthetic detail and confuse ourselves completely.

Q: One of your writing projects now is a four-volume Chronicle of the Spring and Autumn (《春秋传》), which will do for the 255 years of the Spring and Autumn period what Plutarch's Parallel Lives did for Greece and Rome — writing it from beginning to end, one event at a time, one person at a time. In theory you can't write every person and every event; there's a question of selection. How do you handle it? How do you handle what we usually call minor figures against major ones?

Li: In the end, I don't think of myself as writing an academic history. I want to write the things that are genuinely interesting — and interesting to people today, specifically.

The Spring and Autumn really was an extraordinary era. For the Chinese nation it was our Axial Age. That the Chinese are Chinese, that Chinese culture is Chinese culture, was truly settled in the Spring and Autumn. It produced a whole crop of philosophers — Confucius, Laozi. The main thing is that the era is so interesting! It was our nation's childhood, or its youth: hot-blooded. So when I read the history of the Spring and Autumn I often feel I'm reading the Homeric epics — the people in it seem like gods. Whether doing good or committing evil, they did it on a grand scale. Even their evil wasn't squalid, not like the petty scheming and small-time nastiness that came later. The people of the Spring and Autumn did evil in a thunderous rage, entirely as they pleased. So that era really was a great one, a time when our nation's vital energy ran full.

But on the other hand, the Spring and Autumn is the period the Chinese know least. If we sat here talking about history and quizzed each other, I'd guess everyone has some idea of the run from the Qin and Han onward. Of the Spring and Autumn, nobody has much of an idea — a hazy one at best. So in that sense I hope to write out that extremely interesting stretch of history, and write out those giants. They really were giants.

Q: Does that mean aestheticizing it?

Li: This absolutely has to be aestheticized. That's a separate matter. It isn't that history can't be aestheticized; it's that you can't let aestheticizing take the place of a true judgment about history. We still need a true judgment of history, and given one, of course we'll be moved by the heroes of history and bowled over by all the colossal figures in it.

What I Worry About Most Is the Death or Decline of Real Reading

Q: One of your more lasting interests is reading history, and all sorts of miscellaneous books — old biji notebooks, art history, archaeology, objects. Could you talk about the history books or miscellaneous books that have influenced you most, or that you've enjoyed in recent years?

Li: Plenty of miscellaneous books. In the 1990s I had nothing to do. At one point I read through pretty much every collection of Tang, Song, Yuan and Ming biji I could find. These days I mostly still read history — I like reading history: frontier history, the history of exchange between China and the outside world. Tales of the Blue Bird is, to a great extent, the product of that reading.

As for influence, reading a lot of books is basically like eating meals: it's hard to say which piece of flesh came from today's dinner. But some things do stand out. When I was young I read Sven Hedin, and the impression was very deep; he really did shape my interests and my direction, an inward influence. Hedin wrote Through Asia, The Silk Road, The Wandering Lake — the record of a Swedish explorer's journeys in western China, and the books themselves are superb.

Q: You said you mostly read frontier history and the history of China's exchange with the outside world now. Any good recommendations?

Li: For frontier history, the first I'd recommend is Sven Hedin — really good. And in recent years frontier history, steppe history, Central Asian history and inland history have all become hot subjects among historians. A lot of related books have come out in academic publishing. If you're interested, there's plenty to choose from.

History is interesting. For me it's more enjoyable than reading novels.

Q: Why? Because your job means reading so many novels?

Li: Right. I can't enjoy it, because you treat it as work. When I graduated and was assigned to Selected Stories, my classmates said: what a blessed job, reading novels all day! What I thought was: try making novel-reading your job and see how you like it. And as an editor, you aren't reading Dream of the Red Chamber — you're reading a huge pile of submissions, most of them bad, very poor novels. That is not enjoyment. So my off-hours reading has almost no fiction in it.

Q: If you could meet one author, living or dead, who would it be? What would you want to know?

Li: Literary figures don't interest me much. I'd probably want to meet Foucault. I like Foucault very much, and I feel he shaped me inwardly, shaped the way and the path by which I see the world. And Foucault was superb. I'd have so much to ask him. Back in the days when I had nothing to do, I read nearly every book of his I could get hold of.

Q: Which book, or which author, do you feel you ought to like but don't?

Li: Plenty of them. Which is why I say: don't trust reading lists, don't trust people telling you these are the classics you absolutely must read. Some classics really are like chewing wax. Take the very great Tolstoy. I love Hadji Murat, I think Anna Karenina is very good, but I really can't get through War and Peace, and I still can't to this day. Great as it is, I still can't get through it. Among the 19th-century realists, I think Dickens is particularly good, marvelous! Read now, Dickens is still a lively, forceful writer. But Balzac's books I can't get through either.

Q: I haven't finished War and Peace either. I feel quite ashamed about it.

Li: No need. Every one of us has a pile of great classics we're quietly ashamed of and genuinely cannot get through.

Q: Do you have worries about this society?

Li: As someone who works in culture, the thing closest to hand, the thing I worry about most, is still the death or decline of real reading.

Because we have phones and the internet now; we take in enormous amounts of information every day and form a judgment about everything fast. Sometimes you haven't even finished an article, can't be bothered to finish it, and you already have a judgment — already liking it, or already swearing at it.

What does reading a book mean, in that light? It means that when we face a book, or a problem, we have the patience to work it through carefully and deeply until we understand it. Reading a book from page 1 to page 200, you necessarily go through a process of deepening your grasp of a question. People today don't have that patience.

So the issue now probably isn't simply whether we read books. It's whether we're forming a general habit of mind in which we can't think deeply about anything or understand anything, and judge everything, and settle our sense of everything, on first impressions and first reactions. You'll find that this is the general state of everyone's mind now: too lazy to look hard or think hard about anything.

So the decline of reading isn't only a matter of books. It's whether our habits of mind, our way of thinking, are becoming this fragmented, whether we're growing used to a very shallow state of thought. That is not a small thing. It's serious, and dangerous, and a real problem.

Cover image: a still from the film Raise the Red Lantern, courtesy of Douban.