Stones From Other Hills Can Polish Jade

QDaily's editor-in-chief picks for the week.

This week's top picks are the pieces in QDaily's annual books series on Japan (part one and part two) and on India.

All three carry the spirit of the old line "stones from other hills can polish jade": use another country's experience to think about the problems China faces now and will face later.

The two Japan pieces look at the present through people, society and culture, and face aging and population squarely — population structure and the demographic dividend, the welfare state, how work is divided, the middle class, the middle-income trap. The problems Japan has today are often described as China's troubles tomorrow. Is that really so?

Most of these problems come down to policy, and scholars such as Liang Jianzhang have been beating the drum, hoping the leadership will change course. But at this point, as the writer Liu Zhizhen reminds us: "When the wish to change things is too urgent, we pin too much hope on policy; yet in hoping for anything from the top, there is always one thing to remember — the power, or the destructive power, of policy in a centralized state. Exactly when we are pushing hardest for an idea we believe is right, and that may really be right, we should be most alert to its abuse. Put plainly: in the realm of policy, we should all be wary of Ceaușescu-style birth policy."

India and China are both large developing countries, and rapid growth has brought them many of the same problems: the middle class, social change, class mobility, fairness. But because both are so large, those problems are complicated and hard to solve, so these books can only give us a few clues about Indian society. Even so, they leave plenty to think about — for instance, whether there is something wrong with the way we treat the poor. That, rather than tall buildings, is the real measure of how civilized a society is.

"When we talk about tolerance, are we being kind and respectful? When we talk about solving problems, do we only mean that they should stop bothering us? When we talk about high-end jobs, urban renewal, transformation and livability, are we only thinking about our property values? They are people who live humble lives, but they feel what everyone else feels; their souls, and their faith in humanity, are equal to anyone's. What made George Orwell take the side of the poor without argument was his belief in what is good in people. They are not a problem to be solved; they are us," the article says.

Readers often complain that most of the books we recommend are translations, and that Chinese authors barely appear. The India piece gives one reason: we do not have enough realist work that shows society as it is. That has to do with how much room there is to speak, and also with our state of mind.

Liu Zhizhen guesses, for example, that Indians feel about V. S. Naipaul roughly the way Chinese readers feel about Lin Yutang's My Country and My People. This week we happened to recommend A Biography of Lin Yutang (《林语堂传》), which records the attacks Lin faced at the time. Some people today, it seems, have not changed.

"One reaction I did not expect was the charge that in writing My Country and My People I was 'selling out my country and my people to get rich.' People who say such things are shameless. How can their heads hold nothing but private gain? How can they not believe that a person might look honestly and deeply into his own nation and culture? Judging a book by imputed motives is contemptible. What counts as truthful and intelligent advocacy for China? Westerners are not fools. Package China as a flawless beauty and who will believe you? My attitude is to say things as they are, and to stress that China is a developing country slowly coming out of years of war and poverty. This refusal to allow any criticism of China as it is now is an inferiority complex, and it has to go," Lin Yutang wrote.

Seen this way, the saying itself has a problem. We are not necessarily the jade. After China's rise, learning to be a "stone" — and to learn modestly from the "jade" and from the other "stones" — may be the more practical attitude.

We also want to point you to two business stories this week.

The first is the opening installment of a series, What Is Antitrust Actually Against? Antitrust, we think, has moved back to the center of American politics, the penalties have escalated to breakups, and the targets are the biggest technology companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple. It has been 69 years since the United States passed a new antitrust law, 25 years since the last breakup, 21 years since the last big case. But the reason it is back is the reason Standard Oil was broken up in the first place — fear that individual freedom and individual rights are being violated, traceable straight to the liberties protected by the First Amendment. Its return also has to do with how companies have changed. The five most valuable companies in the world are all technology companies, and they control digital services embedded in the lives of billions of people. What they touch is no longer just photos of cats and dogs.

The second is a business history of the hedge fund, 70 years after it was born. Seventy years on, there are at least 10,000 hedge funds in the world, managing close to US$3 trillion. On average they run 7x leverage, which means the money they actually move exceeds US$20 trillion. Some hedge equities, some bet on mergers and pocket the premium on the share price, some wait for a company to go bankrupt and then trade its debt, some run macro strategies.

Along the way, the whole financial market came to accept the hedge funds' complicated trading logic. That is one of the foundations on which every later kind of elaborate derivative was built. Some firms invented contracts that had never existed before, in the name of making markets work better; in theory, investors could use the new tools to allocate assets and manage risk more efficiently. Finance also became complicated beyond understanding. And once it reached China, as we know, it got more complicated still.

Sometimes "polishing jade" is too eager to be useful. Stepping outside yourself to simply look at the "stones from other hills" and think about them is a fine thing too.

Cindy Sherman, 65, has opened her first exhibition in China, at the Fosun Foundation in Shanghai. She has won nearly every kind of fame and prize an artist could want, and ARTnews named her one of the "25 most influential artists of the twentieth century." She has made more than 500 works, spending 40 years playing other women — or, more exactly, different "images of women." Many people read the work as a forerunner of feminism, even as the ground on which the theory of the "male gaze" was built.

Maggi Hambling, 73, has opened her first retrospective in China, at the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing. It gathers more than 60 works — oil paintings, prints, drawings from life and sculpture — and tries to cover her whole career. She has been called "the grumpy grandmother of British art." Her character comes through clearly in the interview, and it is as sexy as her paintings. "Victor Hugo once got very angry with trees, because they can live to be 300. I'm a bit like that," Hambling said.

Yugong Yishan, Beijing's oldest live house, has closed, and we have written down its 15 years. It registered the changes in the music — the bands, the audiences — and it is also a small history of the live house in China. Politics and capital shaped it, and together they killed it. "Yugong Yishan had begun planning to end the management model of the past dozen years, bring in outside investment and open venues in cities such as Guangzhou, Shanghai and Shenzhen… There are also plenty of problems that moving cannot solve. And until industry standards exist that can be cited and enforced, small underground venues remain in a gray zone, undefined and liable to be shut down at any moment," the article says.

Two of our series, Remarkable Little Studios and 1999: A Memoir, also have new installments this week.

The first is about the photographer Ni Liang, who wanted photography to be taken seriously and so started a publishing business called Imageless (《无像》). The second is the story of Liu Ren, the star IT reporter, and DoNews, the IT community he founded.

Finally, a few other things worth your attention:

A-shares have risen for nine weeks straight since the start of 2019. The Shanghai Composite has climbed from 2,493 points back above 3,000; ChiNext has gone from 1,250 to about 1,700, the biggest gain of any market in the world. Amid all the cheering, shareholders of listed companies keep filing notices that they intend to sell. By March 6, 368 companies had announced share reductions, more than in the same period in any recent year — and some of those shareholders plan to sell out entirely.

Second-tier cities have begun competing harder to get "unicorns" to move in. In 2018 six cities landed 10 new unicorns, with relocation subsidies running as high as 65 million yuan. Using the US$1 billion valuation threshold, China had 161 unicorns in 15 cities in 2018, worth about US$713.5 billion in total. More than 80 percent of them sit in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Shenzhen, and those firms account for 95 percent of the total value.

The drug industry opened the year with a wave of big acquisitions. Deals worth US$169.8 billion closed in two months, close to the US$163 billion record for all of 2018. Pharmaceutical M&A is unusually busy, and more than a few of today's giants grew by buying. The aims are the same as anywhere else: speed up product launches and add revenue and profit, and, for listed companies, buy a maker of innovative or cutting-edge drugs to give the share price something to hope for.

Inditex, Zara's parent company, released its 2018 results. Sales were 26.1 billion euros last year — by any measure its slowest sales growth in at least five years. Adidas, meanwhile, reported double-digit net profit growth, with 23 percent growth in Greater China pulling up the overall number. Still, 2018 was an awkward year for Adidas, because demand is slowing for the lifestyle sneakers that won it attention over the past few years.

After several days of wrangling, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration followed other countries' aviation authorities and grounded the Boeing 737 MAX. The order came in the early hours of the 14th, Beijing time, and took effect immediately: planes already in the air were pulled from service once they landed, and the rest waited where they were for further word from the FAA. The FAA said that comparing the latest data showed similarities between last week's Ethiopian Airlines ET302 crash and the Lion Air JT610 crash late last year, and that it grounded the fleet on that basis.

K.T. is an Amazon "Vine Voice". Amazon sends her free products; she tries them out and, as a reviewer people trust, writes them up. K.T. is one of the most prolific of them. Over the years she has made the top 100 of Amazon's overall reviewer ranking several times. For every new product that arrives, she takes the time to study it and writes a short but complete review.

On March 12 the largest college-admissions corruption case in the history of the U.S. Justice Department was made public. According to CNN, the BBC and other outlets, 50 people were arrested and charged: two SAT/ACT test administrators, one test tutor, one university administrator, 13 coaches at elite universities and 33 parents. Among them are well-known executives, investors and celebrities.

On March 15, students in more than 71 countries and 700 places will walk out of school for a global climate march. One of its emblematic figures is Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swedish student, who on August 20, 2018, skipped class and sat down outside the Swedish parliament to demand that the government answer for climate change — setting off a chain reaction around the world.

Africa will be the focus of the next stage. The Economist calls what Africa now faces "the third scramble" for power and lays out how it differs from the first two. Outside powers are still contending over the continent, but the article takes a more hopeful view of this round, and predicts that if the current wave of development moves toward more transparency and more democracy, Africa itself stands to gain from it.

Coral reefs everywhere are dying, yet the reefs off Bonaire are in good shape. The main reason is that the island is small and has only 19,405 people, which has kept development to a minimum. Its 40-year-old marine protection system and its reef restoration work are the other reasons its corals still thrive — a model the rest of the Caribbean could learn from.

A battered warehouse in Brooklyn, New York, is a recycling center that producers and set designers visit often, hunting for computers that the history of technology has thrown out. The prop shop inside puts obsolete electronics back to work, renting them to film and television productions that need a period look. Every object was brought in by the person who owned it.

March 14 was Albert Einstein's 140th birthday and the first anniversary of Stephen Hawking's death. To mark both, we recommend two articles on each. On Einstein: Why Are We So Taken With Einstein That We Even Swallow Quotations He Never Said? and Einstein Explained Everything With Relativity, and It Happened Exactly 100 Years Ago. On Hawking: Hawking Is Gone, and His Ideas Echo Through the Universe and Stephen Hawking's Last Book Is Out, Thinking Through Ten Big Questions Facing Humanity.

Have a good weekend.

Cover image: a still from the film Sweet Bean, via Douban.