Taiwanese Writer Yang Zhao: Literature, History and Social Justice Are the Three Most Important Pursuits of My Life | Interviews

From caring passionately about society to growing ever more “selfish” — how did Yang Zhao come to change?

In September 2004, at 41, Yang Zhao stepped down as editor-in-chief of Taiwan's The Journalist (《新新闻》). He began to drift away from journalism, faded out of current affairs and politics, and stopped being so eager to concern himself with society.

“I gradually became a more selfish person. By selfish I mean that what I wanted for myself became relatively more important — doing what I enjoy,” he told QDaily.

He had not always been this man.

Yang Zhao is a pen name. Li Mingjun was born in 1963 in Hualien, Taiwan, into a “mainlander” family; his maternal grandfather, Xu Xiqian, was a victim of the February 28 Incident. Growing up in a bare, deprived society under the Kuomintang's White Terror, Li Mingjun found life suffocating. In middle school he loved literature, wrote poems and published them. Around that time, through the journal 《三三集刊》 (San San Collectanea), he met Tang Nuo, Chu Tien-hsin and Chu Tien-wen, and later joined the literary group San San.

Taiwanese society was then in upheaval: the Nativist Literature Debate of the late 1970s, the Formosa Incident of 1979, the roaring Dangwai (“outside the party”) movement of the 1980s. All of it marked the young writer deeply. He decided to stop writing poetry — poetry was too selfish, he thought, and literature ought to engage with society — and, holding to a nativist leftist creed, wrote a great many intensely social novels.

After graduating from the history department at National Taiwan University, Yang Zhao went to Harvard for a doctorate in East Asian studies. Harvard had by then gathered a roster of great historians of China — Benjamin Schwartz, Philip Kuhn, Yang Lien-sheng, Kwang-chih Chang, Tu Weiming. His purpose in going was simple: learn what he could from the United States, come home, and go on fighting the authoritarian government. He had even prepared himself to be arrested. But events moved far faster than he imagined. In 1987 Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and ended the bans on opposition parties and new newspapers. In the United States, unable to hold down his concern for Taiwanese society, he began writing on current affairs in March 1990, set off by that year's student movement, and did not stop until 2004.

Perhaps it was exactly that concern that sent Yang Zhao, still a PhD candidate, back to Taiwan without finishing his dissertation or taking his degree, to throw himself into changing the society. He spent a short stretch in politics — project director in the campaign office for Hsu Hsin-liang's run for Taiwan's “president,” then head of the Democratic Progressive Party's international affairs department — and a stretch in journalism, as chief writer, editor-in-chief and deputy publisher of Tomorrow Times (《明日报》), among other posts.

“I felt that in Taiwan's passage from the lifting of martial law to full democratization, a person had to give something to society. Taking part in Dangwai politics, then moving into journalism — all of that was social responsibility. At the time I felt that personal creative work, personal dreams, weren't that important; at such a historical moment you had to put your social responsibility into practice first,” Yang Zhao said.

But threaded through with fatigue, disappointment and disillusionment, Yang Zhao, as he says at the top, grew steadily more “selfish” after 41, and gave himself over to what he liked doing.

Two things: writing novels, and reading.

It was in this period, too, that Yang Zhao came to see the idea of literature intervening in society as laughable, a “one-sided wish”: “literature returns to art and to the pursuit of one's own creation, back to what one meant at the start, back to writing for oneself.” Creator is also the identity he values most and claims for himself; he says he is at bottom a man who writes novels and has taken on a great many odd jobs.

Of all the novels he has written, the one Yang Zhao is happiest with is the “A Century of Desolation” series. It is a vast, heavy cycle: he set out to “write a hundred stories for twentieth-century Taiwan, one for each year, mixing historical research with fictional imagination, digging open the desolation on the surface to sound the complexity underneath.” The first drafts took him about 15 years. Three volumes have been published; the rest are still being sorted and revised. Worth noting: Yang Zhao writes everything else on a computer, but these novels he writes entirely by hand — a fair measure of what they mean to him.

What troubled him most at the start, Yang Zhao says, was exactly what to let in and what to leave out. Should Chiang Kai-shek's rule on the mainland go in? Should the War of Resistance Against Japan? In the end he decided: “As long as I can tie these people to something later on — they went to Taiwan, so that is the history of their lives, that is their memory. Of course it belongs inside the whole hundred-year framework of Taiwanese memory.”

For him, the hardest years in the series to write were the self-evident ones. The February 28 Incident happened in 1947, but the 1947 story only brushes against it; the story that really takes on February 28 is the one set in 1989.

“1989 opens with a man in his twenties in the middle of a romantic mess. Then, strangely, the girlfriend he wants to break up with comes and waits outside his door, and then leaves. It turns out she ran into his grandfather — and what did the grandfather say to this girl that made her give the relationship up? It becomes a kind of tracing back. From there it opens into the grandfather's memories, and into the February 28 Incident. 1989 was the pivotal moment: young people in Taiwan finally had a chance to learn about February 28. Before that it was all taboo. So I used this method to tie the two stretches of history together.”

“(1947) tells the story of one of the earliest mainlanders to reach Taiwan. He comes from Henan, and he is astonished — the place feels not just southern but somehow Japanese. After fighting the Japanese all those years, how did I end up in Japan again? That shock, that jolt, leaves a tearing and a hatred inside him that he can't handle. On the surface the story says nothing about February 28, but to me this is the root cause of February 28 as I understand it: the misunderstanding between the two sides. So I used this method — instead of writing the incident itself, I wrote this man's story.”

The first drafts are done, but Yang Zhao is no longer sure he will publish the series to the end, because he senses that the reading climate in Taiwan has changed: “I'm less and less sure who I'm writing this for.”

As for reading, Yang Zhao says he invents every kind of excuse to make time for it — teaching, for one. So he has taught many courses at Taiwan's Eslite Lecture Hall, Minlun Lecture Hall and Trend Lecture Hall, covering classics from the Book of Songs and the Analects to the Laozi, Democracy in America and Das Kapital.

Because he ranges so widely, the writer Chang Ta-chun once said of him: “Since turning forty, Yang Zhao has been able to offer opinions that are both accessible and widely read and deeply thought on nearly every field he touches. I've all but formed a habit: when I don't know something, ask Yang Zhao.”

From 2007, Yang Zhao taught a complete course in Chinese general history twice over, first at Minlun Lecture Hall and then at Trend Lecture Hall, each run spanning five years. As with his other courses, the material was to be edited into books — and so came A History of China for Everyone (《讲给大家的中国历史》), thirteen volumes in all, close to 2 million characters, running from the Neolithic to the 1911 Revolution.

It is not a work of original scholarship, and Yang Zhao admits he has cast himself as “a diligent, faithful synthesizer of second-hand research who takes nothing on trust and gives no ground,” hoping to bring a century of accumulated historical scholarship to a general readership, so that readers might come to know Chinese history afresh.

The series is being published on the mainland, which is what brought Yang Zhao to Beijing. We met him in a café and talked about the three words of his life — literature, history and social justice. “These are the three most important pursuits of my life,” he said.

Q = QDaily

Yang = Yang Zhao

You Can't Just Find What Past and Present Share — What Matters Is the Direction of Change Between Them

Q: A History of China for Everyone runs from the Neolithic to the 1911 Revolution. In the book you explain why Chinese history should start in the Neolithic, but you don't say why it stops at the 1911 Revolution. Could you talk about that?

Yang: Put simply, starting from the Neolithic means telling the story of how China appeared — what exactly do we mean by “China”? By the second volume I had already said plainly what I mean by it: the cultural Axial Breakthrough that occurred in this region during the Zhou dynasty. That cultural axis includes the lineage system that came with the feudal order. The lineage system was at once a political organization and a social one. The etiquette of human relations that grew out of the lineage system is another key part of the Axial Breakthrough culture. And then there is the writing system — the only non-phonetic script in the world — which kept the written word fixed, so that it did not shift along with the spoken language. So roughly in the Zhou dynasty, as the feudal order took shape, what Karl Jaspers called humanity's Axial Breakthrough occurred here as well. That breakthrough established China's cultural axis from then on. That is how the book begins, and so of course it ends with the shaking and collapse of that axial culture, of traditional China.

Why stop at the 1911 Revolution? What that means — and it isn't entirely about the 1911 Revolution itself, but the revolution stands as a representative, landmark event — is that from then on the axial culture that had emerged in the Zhou was battered until it could no longer hold. What had been taken for granted, needing no explanation and no defense, as the content of that axial culture, changed after 1911. And after the change came a wholly different, modern China.

The key events of modern China include the 1911 Revolution. In 1915 the last attempt to restore the imperial system — the political system of China's own axial age — failed. After that came the May Fourth Movement of 1919, which meant “Down with the Confucian shop,” a thorough overturning of the ritual and lineage parts of the axial culture we just discussed. The founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 meant an entirely new arrangement of Chinese society… a whole chain of events, and by then it was no longer traditional China at all.

So this book of mine opens with how traditional Chinese culture formed and closes with the end of traditional Chinese culture.

Q: If you were to go on and write the history of China after 1911, what would you want to say? Are there questions you'd especially want to explore?

Yang: First, I wouldn't write it. You have to know your own limits. In this field of history I have trespassed far enough already. People already ask: how can you go from archaeology all the way to the late Qing? But behind all of it, for me, there is a basic methodological idea. Traditional China had this axis, and the axis itself strings everything together, so I can cut across eras and take documents normally filed separately as philosophy, literature, politics or economics and organize them through the unchanging part of the axial culture. That is the basic way of ordering traditional Chinese historiography and historical material.

Modern China is different. Its biggest feature is that once the axis collapsed, everything fragmented. So the problem you face today is that the fragments have to be sorted piece by piece, and someone needs the strength or the time to sort out every single one. Until that condition exists, you run into a big problem: you think you're talking about the whole thing, and then you find you've left out far too much. With traditional China, I have a rough grip on it. What I leave out isn't left out because I don't know it's there, but because I know I've made a choice. With modern Chinese history I have no grip at all — I genuinely don't know what I'm leaving out. Take the simplest example: from May Fourth to the 1930s, how many Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School novels came out in Shanghai? What was the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School, exactly? A subject that small, and you could never finish sorting it. Any judgment you make sits badly with you. So methodologically, I don't think I have the ability to grasp modern Chinese history, or to do it well.

Of course, you ask whether there are big questions. There certainly are, but I now think the sorting of the source material isn't far enough along to answer them. They have to do with the relations among the different pursuits that sprang up in different fields once traditional China's axial culture fell apart. For instance: the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 — what exactly was Marxism, in that setting? Back when I went to study in the United States I was once very curious and wanted to explore this big question. Why Marxism? Why did the Chinese Communist Party rise so fast, in the following 20 years, into such an enormous force? What were Marxism and communism, in relation to each other? That question alone is enormous. I do have a few preliminary answers, but they could never be very definite.

Q: Could you share some of them?

Yang: Basically, in that age of collapse Marxism and communism did something remarkably rare. On one side they brought in the intellectuals — the stratum left over from traditional China. On the other, a new class, the peasantry, could now be mobilized by Marxism. Each side took from it what it needed. For intellectuals, Marxism and communism were the newest results of Western scientific research; that was a scientific faith, a scientific belief — objective science, or at least they truly believed it was science. To them it was the most advanced scientific truth. But seen from the other side, to the peasants it was the plainest, most elemental justice. Communism meant equal distribution, striking down landlords, striking down the rich.

No other system of thought or belief in the China of that time could do this. Take liberal democracy — sorry, but that meant nothing at all to peasants. There was no way they'd see it as touching their lives. And the other things peasants could understand held no appeal for intellectuals. So communism was in fact two-sided; it amounted to reassembling Chinese society. Intellectuals could be drawn by the scientific-truth face of Marxism, peasants by a plain justice of property, and the two were clamped together, forming a force of social mobilization unlike anything before.

Q: Just now you didn't separate Marxism from communism — you used them interchangeably.

Yang: Right. Because in that era it was precisely their being used interchangeably that gave the thing such power. The founding of the Communist Party went through many stages. Zheng Xuejia, for instance, was a Trotskyist, and he wrote a superb book making the Zunyi Conference the turning point for the CCP. What happened at Zunyi? Mao Zedong seized power. Mao's seizure of power meant a strategic turn for the whole party, from the original urban labor movement to a peasant mobilization strategy of surrounding the cities from the countryside. Standing on Trotskyist ground — or what you might call orthodox Soviet-line Marxist ground — Zheng Xuejia argued that from that point it was no longer Marxism at all. It's a fascinating view, because it connects to what you just asked, including the relationship with the Soviet Union.

Without the Zunyi Conference, without Mao seizing power during the Long March, then following the Soviet Communist Party's original strategy, the Chinese Communist Party could never have succeeded, because it would have had no way to mobilize the peasants. And this is exactly where Mao's genius lies. Once he made that turn, Marxism itself mattered much less. What mattered was communism — striking down landlords, settling accounts, the plain idea of social justice that peasants could understand.

So after Zunyi, Mao turned the whole thing into the most effective machinery for a double mobilization. To Zheng Xuejia this was a loss in the history of communism, the disappearance of orthodoxy. I think it is exactly this that shows Mao's real historical place in that period. Without his transformation, the Chinese Communist Party would not have succeeded.

Q: The “tong” in the Chinese word for “general history” means “comprehending the changes through past and present.” In coming to understand Chinese history anew, what particular threads of continuity and change did you find? And how do they help us understand China's problems today? Is it mainly the axial civilization?

Yang: Right. If we're talking about continuity, it's the Axial Breakthrough that established China's cultural axis. But following Sima Qian's “comprehending the changes through past and present,” it isn't enough to find what past and present share; what matters is the direction of the change between them. Besides the axial civilization, there are a few other threads in the book.

One of them I take from Mr. Qian Mu's An Outline History of China (《国史大纲》), and I keep coming back to it: how did China's civilizational center keep moving from north to south? As that center of gravity shifted southward, how did it show itself in each era? I gave particular attention to Emperor Wen of Sui, for instance — and to talk about him you have to talk about the canal, and the canal only makes sense once you set it inside the north-to-south shift of the economic and productive center. That includes why the Southern Dynasties could exist at all, and why, once they ended, Emperor Wen had to rework the canal — because the reviving economy of the south now had to be shipped north.

All the way down to the Taiping Rebellion in the Qing, I'm still following the same thread. Why was the Taiping so hard to handle? Because it came out of Guangxi, and from Guangxi swept through Jiangxi, Anhui, Zhejiang — the wealthiest part of the south, the whole way. So the comparison between the White Lotus and Nian rebellions and the Taiping runs along this same axis. The White Lotus and the Nian were in the north, and the north had no shortage of such upheavals — but because it was poor, they never posed as great a danger to the regime. When the destruction hit the south, though, and the mobilization there stirred the peasants and the rebels fought their way to Nanjing, that was another matter — that was terrifying. So this essentially forced the Qing, with its political center in the north, to pay a brutal price: it now needed a second center, in the south, to be able to put the Taiping down. That is Zeng Guofan's Xiang Army.

Another thread of “comprehending the changes through past and present” is the makeup of Chinese society. What doesn't move in the axial civilization is the kinship system. But outside the kinship system there is the division into social strata, and there the changes are full of interest. After the Wei, Jin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties, an aristocratic-clan stratum appeared. In the early modern period, from the Song onward, the aristocratic stratum vanished on one hand while a literati stratum rose on the other. Both the literati and the great clans were privileged groups, but the clans held their status by birth, while the literati earned theirs through the examinations. That made medieval and early modern society completely different in structure. By the Ming, scholars and merchants combined to produce yet another new arrangement of strata. So from the angle of social strata you see all sorts of different trajectories of change in China.

I'm only giving examples — but general history has to be read this way. Only read this way does general history mean anything.

I'm a Man Who Writes Novels and Has Done a Lot of Odd Jobs

Q: In 2013 you gave a lecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong called Literature, History and Social Justice — My Life's Path. In it you said that as a young man you were a literary type with no expectations of the world, and that life felt not worth living. Has that idea — that life isn't worth living — changed for you?

Yang: It's a long story. Growing up in Taiwan, we lived a long time with a kind of stifled frustration. We didn't want to turn into the adults we saw around us. Saying life isn't worth living really means being afraid of growing up. Why? Because as a rebellious teenager with opinions of your own, your enemy is the vulgar adult. So it isn't that I thought life wasn't worth living and later decided it was after all. The crucial turn came around 20, when I made some very fundamental resolutions.

At the time it was pure nerve, of course: I absolutely would not become the kind of person my 16-year-old self looked down on. At 20 I made some more concrete decisions. I hoped, for instance, never to hold a job for my whole life, never to work nine to five. A bit later, in my thirties, I hoped to be a man without a title. Being pinned in place by a title is a sad thing. Roughly that was the resolve I made — and every day, as long as I still believed in that resolve and that dream and followed it, I could go on living, without so much worry. For thirty-odd years, roughly, none of it has changed.

Q: When you were young you hoped never to become the kind of person your 16-year-old self despised. You're 56 now — have you kept that wish?

Yang: I think so, yes. On this front I've done right by myself. Because basically I've never really compromised my principles. Being a person of integrity, a decent person — upright and presentable, not deceiving myself, living up to my own conscience, holding to my basic principles. Money, reputation, titles, anything else — none of it weighs as much as these. So, roughly, OK. I've done right by myself.

Q: A lot of people think that way when they're young and then don't manage it. Why do you think you did?

Yang: That's easy. Luckily I read the Analects as a child, and there's one line I've never forgotten: “When I was young I was of humble station, and so I became capable in many menial things.” You have to be capable in many menial things. If you have only one talent, that's dangerous — you have no choice but to live off that one talent, and having only it forces you into all kinds of compromises. So you must be capable of many things.

Q: So that explains why you've been involved in so many different things?

Yang: Yes. Give yourself skills and techniques in as many areas as you can. My first job was doing layout and design for a magazine. I studied design; I've worked as an editor. I can edit, I can write books, I can teach. Because I've been piling this up since I was young, I have far more experience than people realize — things most of you don't even know about. From 2009 to 2015, for instance, I spent six years running a hospital. Being capable in many menial things gives you a lot of freedom. You don't have to keep your eye fixed on any one thing.

Q: That's what hasn't changed. What has?

Yang: Plenty has changed, of course, because you have to change with the times. Between 16 and now, one crucial turn came from the situation in Taiwan, so for a period my social consciousness was very strong, and above all my sense of social responsibility. I felt that in Taiwan's passage from the lifting of martial law to full democratization, a person had to give something to society. Taking part in Dangwai politics, then moving into journalism — all of that was social responsibility. At the time I felt that certain personal things weren't so important, including personal creative work and personal dreams; at such a historical moment you had to put your social responsibility into practice first.

That state of mind lasted only until I was about 40. Around 40 came another turn. Frankly, part of it was tiredness, part disappointment and disillusionment. I just felt: enough! On social responsibility I could say I'd done right by Taiwanese society; I'd done a great deal of what needed doing. I gradually became a more selfish person — by selfish I mean that what I wanted for myself became relatively more important, doing what I enjoy. That's roughly the biggest change.

Q: You stopped being so concerned with society around 40. What actually happened then?

Yang: The more important turning point was September 2004, when I left the editor-in-chief's post at The Journalist and stopped doing political journalism. I didn't leave the magazine, of course — I stayed on as chief writer, later became deputy publisher, took on management as well, and kept writing political commentary. But I stopped overseeing reporters, stopped chasing the news so hard. I had genuinely grown more and more sick of the news, so that was roughly the turn. By Taiwan's second transfer of power in 2008, apart from the occasional commentary piece, I was no longer directly involved in politics and current affairs.

Q: Looking back at your years in journalism, what stands out?

Yang: From the very beginning I understood perfectly well that I don't have a journalist's temperament. I went into journalism out of an intellectual's sense of social responsibility, and nothing else. I'm not a newsman; I know that all too well. But many of the reporters I supervised had the real thing.

Q: What do you mean by a journalist's temperament?

Yang: Here's an example. 9/11 happened at 9 p.m. Taiwan time. When word came that planes had hit the World Trade Center, everyone called me. It was a deadline day, we had to cover this enormous event, and everyone was to gather at the office. I was out having dinner with my children; after dinner I had to take them home. I got them home, got them to sleep, then drove in. A lot of the reporters were furious — editor-in-chief, why are you only turning up now? That light on their faces, and their anger at me: with news this big, nothing was more important. That's what I call a journalist's temperament.

Part of that temperament is captivating, and part of it is frightening — when a great disaster happens, you see them get excited. I have none of that in me, so I'd have to say part of me is badly suited to journalism. I never feel the urge to rush to the scene. Another example: in Taiwan's “two bullets” affair in 2004 (the March 19 shooting), reporters went straight to the scene, and I genuinely felt out of place. So I know that in part I don't have a journalist's temperament. When something big happens I stay calm, and in fact my mood sinks.

I've had my moments of satisfaction in journalism, of course, but never that kind. Back to 9/11: I got to the office past 10 p.m., and we absolutely had to send the pages to the printer by 3 a.m. — only a few hours to lay out the issue and write the copy. To this day I'm very proud that before 3 a.m. we had the magazine's main headline settled. My colleague Nan Fang-shuo, the senior chief writer, strongly disagreed; he argued with me for ten minutes, and I barely got him to accept it. We were both reading the same wire reports, but his judgment differed from mine. Why so proud? Early the next morning we were on the newsstands next to the dailies, and I looked through all of them: The Journalist was the only one with this headline — “All Fingers Point to bin Laden.” No other outlet mentioned bin Laden. I was the first to say bin Laden; you had to take the risk to say bin Laden. By the afternoon of the next day I was proved right. I really am proud of that. Because in the moment I held my ground, and I knew why I was holding it. That's my strength: when something big happens I'm extremely calm, so I can tell easily whether a thing is smoke or the real fire — in Taiwanese politics too.

But maybe it was this same temperament that produced another problem. Because I face the news calmly, I noticed that news keeps repeating. Society's problems don't happen once and then stay away. Take covering the Legislative Yuan: after a while, writing commentary on it every time became a chore. I'd turn it over and over and not know what I hadn't already said. Day after day, week after week, writing and writing, unable to find anything fresh — I became deeply frustrated, and a thought settled in me: I don't want to live this way, I don't want to keep repeating myself, writing what I've already written. That was a huge frustration in the middle of it all.

So the reason I eventually left, or made that decision, really was this feeling. I didn't want to waste my life repeating similar things over and over. In the end I became relatively more selfish, doing what I actually like doing. Look at Chinese history — so many subjects to take on, and nothing needs to repeat at all. Give me five years of lectures and I won't have to repeat a single sentence. How much more interesting is that! Why would I go on living a newsman's life?

Q: What exactly do you mean by doing what you like?

Yang: The first is writing novels, because I still care a great deal about my own work. The most interesting, or the most important, thing in life is being a creator; nothing can replace that. If you make me describe my own identity, all I can say is that I'm a man who writes novels and has done a lot of odd jobs.

The second is reading, and inventing every kind of excuse to have time to read — which really means teaching. So in 2004 I started a close-reading course on modern classics at Eslite Lecture Hall, and 15 years on it hasn't stopped. From 2006 I taught a short one-year course at Minlun Lecture Hall, then began teaching Chinese history, then went on to Trend Lecture Hall, and by now there are many other halls too. Teaching isn't really the point. Teaching gives me a reason to carve out the time so that I can read. Reading is the happiest thing there is. It's the most selfish thing there is.

Q: And how do you look at social responsibility now?

Yang: Social responsibility became, in the end, an explanation I give myself — and one I genuinely believe: that part of your life must go to social responsibility, but that a person also can't live without a self. If you have no self, if you don't know where your values lie, you can't discharge your social responsibility either.

The consolation, or the account, I give myself is this: counting from 1987 when I went abroad, or at least from March 1990 when I began writing current-affairs commentary, set off by that year's student movement, all the way to 2004, I kept at it for nearly 15 years without a break. So I say that if I owe society a term of service, I've served it out. I gave up most of my time and energy, in what was relatively the best stretch of my life, to discharging that responsibility. That's enough, isn't it? I've done right by Taiwanese society.

There's another thing: social responsibility can take many forms, and it doesn't have to be aimed at Taiwanese society in particular. I still hold to the belief that a person can't live purely for himself. I know very well that much of what I do isn't purely for me, so I still feel I've done right. That's roughly how I see it. As for many things in Taiwanese society, I have at least faded out and don't take an active part — that's the reason.

Q: But looking at your Facebook lately, you're still speaking up about current events.

Yang: Sometimes you can't help getting angry. My problem is that I often can't stand things in public life that are too stupid, and sometimes I act on impulse. So these days I usually speak only because I've seen something so stupid I truly can't bear it.

A Pessimistic Optimist, or an Optimistic Pessimist, Is the Better Attitude to Life

Q: In your youth you were an idealistic leftist, deeply influenced by neo-Marxism. Later, in your writing, you stated your position outright as a “nativist leftist worldview.” Do you still hold it?

Yang: Roughly, it's all still there. First, on “nativist” — this is one reason I'm often angry, and one reason I don't say much in Taiwan these days. My understanding of Taiwanese nativism isn't the same as today's nativist camp's, and in the end I stopped wanting to be called part of it. Because Taiwan's nativist camp has narrowed the label a great deal over time, and it works by subtraction. The first thing subtracted is China. Nativist thinking has been welded to de-Sinicization. That will never be my position.

My position is this: what does “nativist” even mean? What is most distinctive about Taiwan, or what gives Taiwan its meaning, is that it is a place where all sorts of cultures meet — not a choice Taiwanese people made, but a historical accident. So there are countless cultures here, and that composite quality is Taiwan's special asset. Chinese culture, for instance. I feel there is more Chinese culture in me than in you — and that's not because I'm impressive, it's because while you were having the Cultural Revolution, we were reviving Chinese culture. Chinese culture is the root I grew up in. I absorbed it, and I cannot stand Taiwan's nativist camp saying it isn't Taiwanese. I say: what gives you the right to cancel the most important, most valuable thing in my life? That is what I learned in Taiwan; that is part of my Taiwan.

Beyond that, my father taught me to read Japanese when I was 15, so that later I could read Kawabata Yasunari in the original. That matters enormously to me too. So the relationship between Japanese culture and Chinese culture is also part of my culture. Not to mention that as a boy I watched four old American Hollywood films on television every week, and the music I listened to was the Beatles, the Doors, the Who — this culture out of Britain and America is also among the most important things in my life.

To me, all of it added together is what Taiwanese nativism means. That is my nativism, or what nativism means to me. It is an entirely different thing from what people in Taiwan mean by the nativist camp today.

As for the leftist part: when I talked about being a leftist in the 1980s and the early 1990s, it came from neo-Marxism, so it wasn't a revolutionary leftism. I often say I'm a defeatist leftist — I don't believe socialist revolution can succeed, but I believe socialism and the left exist so that capitalism won't be quite so vicious. On that, I'm still a leftist. Seeing, and having to analyze, the most vicious parts of capitalism is what I take the leftist's duty to be.

So why does this position show up when I write Chinese history too? I would never deny the important contributions historical materialism has made to our understanding of Chinese history, including its sorting out of class, the peasantry and economics — I respect all of that. In any case, as a leftist you have to care about unfairness and injustice in society, and you have to stand with the weak; you have to care about the inequality that comes out of economic production, which is the most basic thing of all. You cannot ignore the relations of economic production. I hold to all of this still. So it's only that I don't go out of my way now to use the phrase “nativist leftist” — in substance, this is what I believe most deeply and most fundamentally, and it will not change.

Q: Are you still an idealist? Is there anything you'd say to young people who want to push society forward?

Yang: I'd rather everyone tried to be a pessimistic optimist, or an optimistic pessimist. By optimism I mean believing the world can get better; on that I'm an optimist. But why insist on being a pessimistic optimist? Because you also have to believe the world won't get better easily. These are two sides of one thing. If you don't believe the world can get better, you're a pure pessimist and you'll have no ideals at all. But if you're naive enough to think the world can get better on its own, you'll never work hard enough, never put everything you have into making it happen. So both have to be there.

What we mostly see is this: when you're young you assume the world can get better far too easily, and then you find out it can't, and you stop believing it can get better at all, so you start catering to the world and give up on changing it. I don't much use the word “idealist” anymore, because now people assume you can be an idealist while you're young, and then, once your ideals collapse, you become a realist — as if everyone had to walk that same road. That isn't so. I think a pessimistic optimist, or an optimistic pessimist, is the more durable, the better, attitude to life.

You're always looking for the next thing you could do that would make this society, this world, a little better on some point or other — and if you find it, you should do it. But I absolutely cannot be arrogant and naive enough to think that, however hard I try or whatever I predict, the world is bound to get better. There's no such thing. That's my basic attitude.

Q: You've been a witness, a participant and a critic of Taiwan's democratic transition. In recent years many people feel the whole world — the United States, Europe and elsewhere — is drifting toward the extreme and the closed, that liberal democratic institutions in many Western countries are in trouble, and that globalization is running in reverse. What do you make of it?

Yang: Human experience has already shown, quite plainly, that democracy is not a perfect system. But even today democracy is the system with relatively the fewest flaws — the one that gives most people a chance to live at ease. Because it isn't perfect, many of its problems inevitably break out. But the biggest dispute today is partly a result of China's existence. And in the end that dispute has produced confusion.

In the past, in the United States and Britain, and in places shaped by American and British democratic institutions and beliefs, there was always a basic consensus: when democracy runs into trouble, what do you do? The usual answer was more democracy, and it has been tested again and again — the United States really is a fine example. You find that the approach works. So when democracy has problems, you don't put democracy on trial; you ask where we haven't gone far enough, and if we go further the problem is solved.

But in recent years that consensus has vanished. More and more, the so-called China model has become the biggest challenge. Many people think: when democracy has problems, why not look at China, which governs so well without needing democracy at all? At this point a quarrel between two paths has opened up inside countries that were democracies to begin with. One is that more democracy should be used to deal with democracy's problems; the other is to take some democracy away.

Have you read Against Democracy?

Q: Against Democracy. You talked about it on the radio recently, too.

Yang: Right. Back to elitism: elite authoritarianism becomes another option. Once that option exists, frankly, the whole question of democracy stops being simple. It was never going to be settled completely anyway, but now there's greater confusion. I think part of today's disorder comes from exactly this. If I'm honest about my own leanings, I still believe more democracy is the only way to deal with democracy's problems.

Q: Is that a belief or an argument?

Yang: An argument. It's a long one, of course. In Taiwan I'll finish putting together my Seven Lessons for Citizens, and it should be clearer there.

Q: The three words of your life are literature, history and social justice. If you had to sum it up, what relation do the three have to one another, for you?

Yang: These are the three most important pursuits of my life, and at different stages the relations among them have differed. But honestly, I no longer think they must have any necessary connection.

For a period, for instance, I treated literature as a means of putting social justice into practice. There's a history to that. In Taiwan in the late 1970s came the Nativist Literature Debate, and with it a socialist-flavored conviction about literature, and I was influenced by it when I was young. Then at the end of 1979 came the Formosa Incident, and in 1980 the whole great upheaval in the Dangwai movement. So at the time it seemed entirely reasonable to me that literature should engage with society. In those years I wrote a great many intensely social novels.

Later I came to feel this was wrong: you should write for yourself, not for society. Because it was false — the age in which you could use literature to influence society and realize social justice is gone. We're not in the May Fourth era, we're not in the 1930s; leftist literature has meaning only in a particular time and place. That's over now, and Taiwanese society has left that setting behind. So for me at this point, literature returns to art and to the pursuit of one's own creation, back to what one meant in youth, back to writing for oneself.

Literature and history I know are closely related. But now I have to keep them deliberately apart. When I'm telling history, for instance, I know the urge is still there — because literature is the ground I've tilled, and I know plainly that the extra ability I have, beyond other historians, is a richer capacity for description and argument on the page. But then I look at Yi Zhongtian, say, and I pull back. I think that's wrong. This literary way of writing shouldn't be pushed that far in historical description and argument; I have to rein it in and keep the history relatively clean and clear. Historical writing is not literature.

So the question you've asked — I'd never actually thought about it. But now I feel these are three very important pursuits in my life, important to this day, and they are three different things. At this stage of life I keep them more and more separate. Because in the past, when they were mixed, what came of it wasn't the best. That's about how it is.

Cover image: a still from the film A Brighter Summer Day. Banner image: a still from A Time to Live and a Time to Die. Source: Douban.