Let's Rethink Our Relationship to Time and Space

QDaily's editors' picks for the week.

Happy Lunar New Year!

How did you spend this Spring Festival break? Shuttling between countless relatives' homes, most of your time spent in transit? Or lying comfortably in bed, whiling away idle afternoons and evenings with the TV, a tablet, a phone? However you chose to pass the time, it probably looked nothing like your ordinary days during the rest of the year.

Life's rhythm changes abruptly during these seven days and the month or so around them. A few years ago, a joke described the Spring Festival like this: factories shut down, shops close, bustling streets go empty, and the hardworking, courageous Chinese people suddenly turn lazy and gluttonous — in short, a scene of general desolation. Only under such a violent shift does one fact gradually come into view: our lives are always bounded by the time and space we happen to occupy. And when we break out of the time and space we're used to, we can see more clearly how our lives have been shaped.

This Spring Festival, QDaily ran two small, entertaining features. A handful of not-so-ordinary, interesting people shared how they experience time, along with one singular trip each of them had taken. Giving up the life you've grown used to isn't easy, and these people's sense of time and space might serve as a rare point of reference.

Theater director Wang Chong built himself a power-outage pavilion. In his apartment near Dawang Road, he redesigned and renovated the place, deliberately keeping all electricity outside. Having given up lighting, the internet, TV, and phones — every tool that stretches the night out indefinitely — he felt a "natural tide": "Sunlight can wake you in the morning, and by 10 or 11 at night, you naturally get sleepy."

Wang Chong developed an even stranger sense of time, able to estimate the hour to within half an hour. All of it depends on engaging senses that normally go unused. "There are very few pedestrians downstairs just after 6 a.m., but by 8 or 9 it's clearly livelier." "The sound changes during rush hour — traffic starts backing up far past the Dawang Bridge, the honking, the noise — all of that factors into the judgment." Time, this way, is reduced to a layering of sight, sound, smell, and touch.

Rock-band manager Xu Kaipeng experiences time on a longer cycle. Nearing 40, he feels his time moves in seven-year cycles. "If everything around me is still, or I'm alone, time passes slowly. But the moment I step outside, or when I enter society or just start a job, time speeds up a lot. Especially watching everyone rushing around now — delivering packages, delivering food, hailing a Didi — it sometimes feels like a dream."

#Talks discusses time, while "Unconventional Travel" discusses how unfamiliar spaces affect people. Travel is another word that now carries too much freight — it always conjures up arty young people trying to escape the trivial and cleanse their souls, and as those arty types have come in for mockery, travel itself has come to seem a little less respectable. But set aside these secondary meanings that people have piled on out of mutual contempt, and every traveler still takes their own experience from it.

Zhao Wanting walked a religious pilgrimage route, starting in Canterbury, England and ending in Rome, 1,700 kilometers in all. She expected to burst into tears at the finish, but what moved her most was a hilltop town she stopped in partway, and the starry sky above it. Tori, a Malaysian, was stranded for a month in Egypt under a state of emergency, and was even seized and searched by the Egyptian military. To get past the fear, he kept reading up on the latest news from Egypt and on the country's history, trying to understand and sympathize with its people.

This before-and-after contrast shows up in every traveler's account. It seems inevitable: an unfamiliar space constitutes a different kind of life. It is bound to collide with the individual, and to push back. That pushback is what builds a person's sense of self and the boundaries of their character.

QDaily's annual book recommendations continued through the Spring Festival.

American sociologist Randall Collins's The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification was one of QDaily's books of the year for 2018. Chen Xinxiang, a professor at the School of Ethnology and Sociology at Minzu University of China, sets the book against a larger sociological background. The question he wants to explore is whether education really does promote social equity and provide a mechanism for social mobility, as people believe it does.

The answer seems to be no. The idea that education helps society took hold in the 1950s, after World War II. Sociologists of the time, such as Michael Young and Daniel Bell, argued that as social structures underwent major changes, knowledge replaced bloodline as the key factor deciding a person's place in society, and so a university degree — education itself — became what people relied on to change their social class.

But by 1979, when The Credential Society was first published, Collins argued that "over these years, the proportion of children receiving high school, college, and vocational education has grown enormously, yet social stratification hasn't changed. The view that universal education would promote social equality has been proven wrong." On the contrary, it is a person's origins that determine their education.

Though 40 years have passed since the first edition, The Credential Society speaks directly to many of the problems facing China today. The expansion of university enrollment in the 2000s produced a huge cohort of college graduates, and degrees have depreciated to the point that applications to master's and doctoral programs have surged. Mountain schools in Yunnan have used livestreamed classes from Chengdu No. 7 High School, one of the best in the country, to produce students who got into Tsinghua and Peking University. The Ministry of Education has repeatedly called for a crackdown on after-school tutoring, yet cram schools of every kind keep springing up. The Credential Society offers readers a way to understand these problems.

Stupidity is a topic that has never gone out of style in human history. Being anti-vaccine is stupid. Large-scale security-screening systems are stupid. Refusing to teach rape law in the classroom is stupid. Not knowing that foreigners don't actually kidnap children to render them for oil is stupid. What all forms of stupidity have in common is that they refuse logic, refuse common sense, refuse goodwill.

Logic, common sense, and goodwill sound simple, yet all are hard to come by — never mind that wielding these weapons tends to mean losing sight of one thing while attending to another. On security screening, what has to be weighed is not only the terrorist attacks it prevents and the handful of people it might protect in rare cases, but also the enormous equipment costs, the time lost to screening, the anxiety it causes the public, and the room it may leave for government inertia and rent-seeking.

It may be a long time before anyone can say whether security screening is good or bad, or whether it should continue, but the right attitude is to "grow through error, eliminating errors one by one." Science and logic never claim to solve every problem, but at least they know what their problems are — something stupid people cannot do.

When the Facts Change and The Spiritual Condition of Our Time《我们时代的精神状况》 were the two books singled out in the last book review published over the Spring Festival. What they are concerned with, as the titles suggest, is the anxiety and difficulty of our era.

Trump's election as US president, Britain's vote to leave the EU, Europe mired in populism and a rising far right, the immigration crisis. Sum up all these scattered problems and what they amount to is the outright decline of the Western world. "The acknowledgment that society contains unavoidable ethical and material conflicts, distrust of power, faith in human progress, and respect for the individual" — this humanist core, inherited from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, is gradually disappearing.

The last time the world faced a challenge like this was the Great Depression of 1929. When the economic crisis struck without warning, the whole social structure collapsed, and everyone doubted whether the Western world built on that spirit could hold together — even the Soviet Union's authoritarian system became a plausible alternative. The choice the West faced then was between Keynesian government intervention and Hayekian free-market purism. In the end it chose the former, answering the challenge from fascism, and later the challenge from communist totalitarianism, through something close to social democracy.

This time the enemies facing the humanist core are stronger still: beyond fascist-style populism, there is also radical rights activism and reactionary politics across the countries of the third world. And there seem to be no figures like Keynes and Hayek now to offer the Western world a set of choices. Without a ready-made path, anyone willing to take up the challenge needs at minimum these traits: "to confront painful questions head-on and search for solutions; to refuse to echo official positions; to stir up argument not only among critics but among her own friends; to challenge widely accepted ideas so that people can no longer accept them complacently."

Fiction recommendations also continued.

Among them were works by established writers, such as Snake by Liu Yichang, the founder of Hong Kong modern literature. What looks like a rewrite of a classic love story turns instead into a psychological suspense tale. Liu wrote it in 1978, and the old writer died just last year.

There were also works by some old friends. Following Typhoon Day, we published Bodhisattva by Lu Yinyin once again. True to her usual style, Lu Yinyin describes the details of everyday life, large and small, in a flat, unhurried voice — the human heart is fickle, while the bodhisattva watches over its worshippers forever.

The Sea Breeze Blows Over a Bald Head by Zhu Yiye, Thin Tongue by Buyou, At a Loss by Huang Guojun, and Sealed Jar by Yuan Zhesheng each had their own appeal. In addition, our contributing editor Zhu Yue published a story of his own, Wellspring. Since he refuses to write his own interpretive notes, QDaily wrote the reading notes for this story on his behalf.

Here's what you might have missed over the break.

Fewer and fewer people watch the Spring Festival Gala, but it remains one of the rare TV programs that can still draw a mass audience. As the most important advertising season of the year — Wanglaoji earns roughly half its annual revenue in the month or so around Spring Festival — major brands usually pour resources and money into this window. But Spring Festival marketing in 2019 looked quite different from years past.

After the Gala comes the moment for the family to go to the movies together. Eight new films opened during this year's Spring Festival box-office season, and theater managers were all braced to make a killing. Yet box-office revenue on the first day of the Lunar New Year rose, even as fewer people actually walked into theaters. Ever-pricier tickets and a dizzying array of choices have left audiences unsure what to pick. The Spring Festival box-office business is getting harder to run.

Also worth adding to your Spring Festival watchlist: Kinema Junpo published its list of the ten best Japanese films of 2018. Besides Cannes Palme d'Or winner Shoplifters by Hirokazu Kore-eda, last year was a strong one for Japanese film overall. Asako I & II, And Your Bird Can Sing, The Chrysanthemum and the Guillotine, and others are all worth watching. Among the films Kinema Junpo left out, we'd also recommend One Cut of the Dead.

The 46th Annie Awards announced its winners. This year's list was a bit lackluster. Sony's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse took home seven awards, including Best Animated Feature, Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Editing. Best Independent Animated Feature, an award aimed mainly at animation made outside Hollywood, went to Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda's Mirai.

The first Experimental Architecture Foundation Award announced its winner. The prize emphasizes radical experimental practice in architecture, challenging how people perceive the boundaries of space, while moving past experimental architecture's utopian fixation on "paper architecture." In the end, London-based artist and sculptor Holly Hendry took the top prize. Her signature work is a huge set of snake-like, intertwined silver air ducts titled Homeostasis.

An Iranian Kurd won Australia's richest literary prize. No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison tells the story of its author, Behrouz Boochani, who fled Iran, sailed from Indonesia seeking asylum on Christmas Island, and was ultimately detained by the Australian government at an offshore camp on the stated grounds of "illegal people smuggling by sea." Because of Australia's hardline immigration policy, Behrouz Boochani remains in detention and could not attend to accept the award.

After He Jiankui was punished over gene editing, the advances and the controversy around gene editing continue. Bryan Bishop, a 29-year-old American programmer, has started a new project; his business plan shows he is founding a company devoted to producing designer babies, and he already has his first pair of parent clients.

On the ethical controversy around gene editing, Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, points out that parents always face two different moral responsibilities: how to improve their offspring's quality of life, and how to accept the child as they are. It is a balancing act, and there seems to be no general rule that holds apart from the specifics of each case.

The Earth is still on its way to ruin. NASA announced that 2018 was the fourth-warmest year for the Earth's average surface temperature in nearly 140 years, and global warming clearly shows no sign of slowing. Meanwhile, a separate five-year research report found that before the next century arrives, a third of the vast ice fields across the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush will have melted away.

On the business front, Tencent is set to invest in the American site Reddit, a 14-year-old forum-style sharing community that has drawn plenty of famous people to interact with users through its distinctive "Ask Me Anything" section. Its vitality lies in being wildly varied and all-encompassing. Will Tencent's arrival change anything?

Angela Ahrendts, the senior vice president who has run Apple's retail business for the past five years, is leaving. She joined Apple in 2014; before that she was CEO of the British luxury company Burberry. Tim Cook had hoped she could help turn the Apple Watch into a luxury product, a goal that has since been abandoned.

Google's full-year revenue grew 22%. The main source of that growth is still advertising, while its other varied bets — AI, cloud computing, self-driving cars, YouTube, Google hardware — have yet to bring the company meaningful returns.

Four hundred listed companies have forecast losses totaling 300 billion yuan. Goodwill impairment after overpriced acquisitions is the chief culprit behind this wave of blowups. The deeper reason so many companies are announcing large-scale goodwill impairment is that at poorly performing listed companies, chairmen cashed out while share prices were high. Now that share prices have fallen, rather than grinding through the work of rebuilding performance and market value, it is easier to start a new company and a new business.

Commerce is usually seen as an expression of consumerism: it produces goods in enormous quantity and severs people's connection to the world and to society. Glenn Adamson, a senior scholar at the Yale Center for British Art, proposes a new concept instead — the "object quotient". He believes that observing the objects around us closely might help us find our bearings again in the material world, and take better responsibility for what we do. It is a fascinating piece, well worth reading carefully.

Finally, it's back to work tomorrow. To help you avoid post-holiday syndrome, our Hack Your Life column recommends these nine methods.

Through the Year of the Pig, QDaily will keep bringing you the most thought-provoking and most noteworthy developments from every field around the world — and the stories behind them.

Cover image / Inception