No Forbidden Zones in Reading

This week's picks from QDaily's editors.

"No forbidden zones in reading."

Forty years ago, on April 10, the magazine Dushu 《读书》 published its first issue. The essay in it titled "No Forbidden Zones in Reading" 《读书无禁区》 caused an uproar: "After ten years of confinement, how the Chinese people long to read good books of every kind! But the forbidden zones around books have not been fully opened. One question of principle remains unsettled, the poison left by the Gang of Four's cultural dictatorship is still at work, and some of our comrades still carry the fear. The question of principle is this: do the people have the freedom to read?"

In the years that followed, Dushu ran several more essays that pushed past the forbidden zones and made a wide mark, sounding the opening note of the New Enlightenment of the 1980s — among them Yu Haocheng's "Achieving Freedom of Publication Is an Important Issue," in the first issue of 1981. Besides editorials of that kind, the magazine carried reviews of books including Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies, and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.

Read again today, those forty-year-old essays still speak directly to the present. Indie musician Li Zhi was wiped from the Chinese internet on April 12: his social accounts went dark and his songs came off the streaming platforms. Lou Ye's new film The Shadow Play set off an argument over whether its plot was too melodramatic — but the version audiences saw had been heavily cut, which drained the argument of meaning.

Two years ago, QDaily sat down with Shen Changwen, who edited Dushu for ten years. Two years on, to mark the magazine's fortieth anniversary, we are running that conversation again. As for what the magazine meant, the business writer Qin Shuo has a good summary. He said:

"At the time, the whole society — college students especially — cared about reform and cared about the world. What kind of world is this today? How can China catch up? That was the sense of duty to the era, that was the mood. Dushu gave us, while we were still fairly young, a softer cast of mind. At the core of it was something like enlightenment — lighting yourself up, measuring the present against a universal yardstick, reaching for a state of mind that goes beyond the immediate."

This week the big technology companies sat through congressional hearings they did not enjoy. In two days, spokespeople for Google and Facebook faced questioning from two opposite positions. On April 10 the House Judiciary Committee asked them to explain why video of the murders by a New Zealand white supremacist had spread so widely on their platforms. A day later the Senate came out flatly with a hearing titled "Stifling Free Speech: Technological Censorship and the Public Discourse."

This week's series, "What Is Antitrust Actually Against?", takes up exactly these two hearings. The first piece retraces Google's growth, and its controversies, over the past twenty years. As early as 2005, a district court in New York halted its settlement with book publishers because of the power it held over information about books online. As Google grew, the more serious and more frequent charges from Congress came out of worries about control of speech, not market competition.

The second piece goes further, pointing to a fact behind the shift: compared with fifty years ago, the technology companies are all bigger, which makes it easier for them to monopolize a market — and gives them the power to do harm.

Monopoly's problems, though, have no simple fix; people do not even know where to look for one. For the technology companies, the paradox is how to balance free speech against policing harmful content. Regulators, for their part, still do not know which tools would rein in the companies' power and protect every consumer.

"QDaily's Books of the Year" reaches its nineteenth installment.

This week's theme is how cities grow, and how they interact with the people who live in them. Across humanity's fairly short history of urban development, one pattern has mostly held. Industry created a working class; the working class poured into cities and became their main population. To house it, the first residential districts were built. Before long, manufacturing moved from rich countries to poor ones, the workers lost their jobs, and their neighborhoods fell derelict. The only rescue that looks workable is to be bought up by big capital and converted into expensive middle-class apartments.

Scientific progress is one of the few bright spots human society has.

Humans have "photographed" a black hole for the first time: a fuzzy, warm-orange ring. The image of the M87 black hole, released on April 10 by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT, the international astronomy project known as the Event Horizon Telescope), was easily the day's biggest astronomical news. Google turned its Doodle into an animation of the M87 black hole to mark the breakthrough.

How did Karen Uhlenbeck, the first woman to win the Abel Prize, see a mathematical universe inside a soap bubble? This long piece from The New York Times is not an easy read, but it does convey that advanced mathematics and daily life are not strangers to each other.

Why Read recommended two books about mathematics this week as well. Morris Kline wrote A Brief History of Mathematics 《数学简史》. Over twenty-five centuries, mathematics has passed through repeated crises: the shock non-Euclidean geometry gave to Euclid, the discovery of irrational numbers and the widening of the number system, the difficulties calculus created for analysis. Kline works through the great events of mathematical history to peel back, step by step, how mathematical ideas and mathematical thinking changed.

Ten Talks on a Spring Night 《春夜十话》, a collection of essays by the Japanese mathematician Kiyoshi Oka, is more romantic. "The common view is that scholarship depends on the head," he wrote, "but I think emotion is what actually matters… For me, studying mathematics is only a way of feeling the pleasure of studying mathematics."

Business news worth watching:

Labor is badly short across the United States. For a long time immigrants, and undocumented immigrants in particular, have supplied low-skilled workers. But their numbers fell from a peak of more than 12 million at the height of the 2008 housing bubble to 10.7 million at the end of 2017. That has pushed the average wage of non-supervisory workers in American residential construction to US$25.34 an hour, more than 6 percent above a year earlier and close to the largest annual rise the government has recorded in nearly thirty years. Economists worry that the shortage of low-skilled workers will have wider effects on the economy. Companies in one industry after another complain that without immigrants they will lose their workforce.

Hip-hop artists are usually broke before they make it, and Wall Street hedge funds have noticed. Bloomberg reports that the Wall Street hedge-fund magnate Jamie Dinan signs artists to long-term contracts and takes a share of the earnings once they become famous. Sometimes an artist may pay interest of more than 30 percent of the principal. One legal document shows that the record producer, songwriter, and hip-hop artist Sean Garrett received US$44,852 from Sound Royalties in August 2018 and, on the basis of his income in the year of the advance, would have to repay US$74,174 over the following three years.

More and more American fast-food chains are putting bacon in their burgers. Darren Seifer, a food and beverage analyst at NPD, thinks bacon is a good way to add flavor, and the change costs little. The other way round, bacon lets a chain raise the price of a burger with a straight face. When foot traffic is flat, that is a direct way to lift revenue.

Luckin Coffee, after expanding at a furious pace, is showing signs of trouble. The company raised 45 million yuan in financing after pledging its coffee machines, milk containers, and powder silos as collateral. It had been buying users with heavy subsidies, and tight cash flow followed. In the first nine months of 2018 it sold 80 million cups of coffee, took in 375 million yuan, and lost 857 million yuan.

After the explosion in Xiangshui, Jiangsu, the local government reached for the blanket solution that is so common in China. Jiangsu issued a draft plan to clean up and upgrade the chemical industry: cut the province's chemical manufacturers to 2,000 by 2020 and to no more than 1,000 by 2022, and require the 34 companies sitting within one kilometer of the Yangtze's main channel or its tributaries, outside the designated chemical parks, to withdraw entirely, in principle, by the end of 2020. Shutting that many chemical plants in so short a time will plainly do Jiangsu no small damage.

Allbirds, the casual sneaker brand that Silicon Valley and New York have taken to, opened its first store in China, at HKRI Taikoo Hui in Shanghai, and launched a Tmall flagship store and a Chinese website at the same time. Its selling point is that it turns high-end New Zealand wool into shoes you wear every day, priced at an approachable US$95.

JD.com has been through a run of changes lately. Besides reshuffling executives and the management structure, the company may cut 8 percent of its staff, some 12,000 people, with logistics one of the main targets. It had already scrapped couriers' base pay, hoping bigger performance bonuses would push them to pick up more parcels; JD.com later confirmed the change to its pay structure. Since early March it has also been running a 996 schedule.

And a few things worth a look:

Netflix released the nature documentary Our Planet. The name calls to mind the BBC's Blue Planet and Planet Earth. It should: Our Planet was made by the team behind Planet Earth. David Attenborough, the trademark voice of the nature documentary, narrates this one too.

Mindfulness is catching on in some armed forces, America's included. Major General Walter Piatt believes the best way to make a decision rests on a tradition both ancient and powerful. Before he starts the day's command work, he often breathes deliberately, relaxes his jaw, and stares steadily at a palm tree.

A trailer has appeared for Parasite, the latest film by the Korean director Bong Joon-ho. The title sounds alarming, but this is neither horror nor science fiction. Song Kang-ho plays a father, with Choi Woo-shik and Park So-dam as his son and daughter; Lee Sun-kyun and Cho Yeo-jeong play a married couple, and the story turns on the two families.

In 2017, 11 million people worldwide died from unhealthy eating, with too much salt at the top of the list. A Harvard study earlier found that after reform and opening-up, as the economy grew, the Chinese diet changed sharply: red meat, sugary soft drinks, and fast food took hold, and cardiovascular disease rose steeply to become the country's leading cause of death. In 2011, 44 percent of Chinese who died over the age of 35 died of it.

The idol contests roll on. iQiyi's Youth With You (the second season of Idol Producer) was delayed and fought over its contestant rankings; in the end, nine members debuted as a new boy band, UNINE, in the twelfth episode, aired on April 6. At 8 p.m. the same evening as the Youth With You final, Tencent's Produce Camp 2019 (the second season of Produce 101) began.

The Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre, at 288 Anfu Road in Xuhui District, opened to the press for the first time since its overhaul. Four seasons across 2019 and 2020 will make up the theatre's opening year; the ten productions announced so far are Beautiful Times 《良辰美景》, Galileo, Skylight, A Summer Day, Henry V, Behind the Lies 《谎言背后》, Art, Classic of Mountains and Seas, The Sailor's Mystery 《水手之谜》, and The Piano in a Factory.

Helvetica, used everywhere, has been redrawn, and now comes in a new style called "Helvetica Now." Nearly 40,000 letters, symbols, and encoded characters in the family have been redrawn; to suit different reading situations, the type offers more choices in the fine details of its shapes, in weight, in slant, and in size.

Cover image / The Book Thief