We Must Stand Up for What We Believe, No Matter the Odds or the Consequences

This week's editor's picks from QDaily.

Avengers: Endgame keeps breaking records. As of April 26, it had taken more than 1.4 billion yuan at the mainland Chinese box office in three days, and its Douban score stood at 8.9.

“Only someone who knows nothing about Marvel would be surprised by the presale record Avengers: Endgame set,” we wrote on April 22, before the film opened, in What Rules of the Game Built the Most Successful Film Product in History, the “Marvel Universe”?

In that piece we asked why the Marvel Cinematic Universe works so well. For example: “In this sense, only the Marvel Cinematic Universe has caught hold of something central to entertainment today. Audiences want a strong jolt, so Marvel runs a strict assembly line and turns out films in batches that all clear a certain bar. Audiences find it hard to stay interested for long, so a reasonably complete story line, with suspense built in, tells them that this film connects to the next one. The Iron Man and the Captain America that the Marvel Cinematic Universe built have become idols for today's fans. To some degree it also feeds demands that grew out of fan subcultures — after Loki turned into a hit, the films played up the bond between Thor and his brother. All of this together is what makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it is why the star system, the effects blockbuster, IP, and the hero team-up cannot, on their own, explain its success.”

Beneath the optimism, though, sits a worry. “Every attempt to find a formula for a successful entertainment product runs into the same basic contradiction: audiences change far faster than any plan made in advance … If this film (meaning Avengers: Endgame) is the end of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first season, the obvious next question is whether it will now slide from peak into decline, the way TV series do when they get canceled after a few seasons.”

As a successful piece of pop culture, The Avengers has drawn readings of every kind. One we recommend is the book The Avengers and Philosophy, which reads the films through philosophy and explains part of their pull. The philosophy professor Mark D. White argues that superheroes face the same moral dilemmas ordinary people do: Iron Man is a utilitarian, Captain America a deontologist. And neither way of deciding what is right — utilitarianism or deontology — works without firm conviction.

Captain America once put his own conviction to Spider-Man this way: “Doesn't matter what the press says. Doesn't matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn't matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world — ‘No, you move.’”

And “the only thing that word properly applies to is conviction, the resolve to stand by your own moral choice, which people often mistake for pigheadedness. Standing by your convictions is, in fact, a virtue,” Mark D. White writes in the book.

Virtues are easy to talk about and hard to practice. Fortunately, such people do exist. The American writer Jennifer Egan, the Chinese photographer Yuan Xiaopeng, the people who built and entered the rap competition “Underground 8 Mile” — in each of them, to different degrees, we see the force of holding to a belief, and the story of what that costs.

Egan, now 57, made up her mind in her teens to become a writer, feeling that writing was her deepest connection to the world and what gave her life meaning. She wrote and kept writing, published a good deal, and won recognition — the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award. Now president of PEN America, she wants to press the case for the value of literature today and do her part for free speech. “I think telling the truth, and being allowed to tell the truth, are both essential to democracy. … I believe that through good writing and good reading we stay awake and alert, and our minds become harder to manipulate. We have to be careful about everything now, because so many forces want to control people, and the people who don't think carefully are always the easiest to control.”

The photographer Yuan Xiaopeng founded the self-publishing studio Same Paper. In five years he and his colleagues have put out 11 photobooks and one magazine, and they run an independent bookstore now in its third year. As they see it, “against the tireless, always-refreshing Instagram feed, the photobook is a fine antidote — one shot, straight in, and it always gives a more satisfying, deeper read.” The writer of the piece calls it the hardest thing he has written in the past six months, because he feels that at bottom he is doing what the photographer does: “Finding your own way of saying things may be the hardest part of any act of creation.” “It's about photography, but what the piece is really trying to convey is the effort the search itself takes.”

“Underground 8 Mile” is one of the most important rap competitions in China, founded on June 20, 2012. Ye Nan, who runs it, says the point at the start was simply that he and his friends were buried in work and daily life: “We had to go find the music we loved. We couldn't let the fire in our hearts go out.” Contestants that first year included Ding Fei and Beibei of Hong Hua Hui, and Ding Fei helped organize it as well. This year, after the Ministry of Culture banned the Chengdu leg, the organizers suspended the entire 2018-19 season. In a sense, the story of the people who built and entered “Underground 8 Mile” is the story of rap in China: setbacks and stubbornness at once. “Chinese rap has been going for more than 20 years. Which year was easy?” Ye Nan said.

Besides the Marvel piece, two business stories are worth your time this week: one on the mid- and low-end sneaker market, one on what is changing in express delivery.

On the first: from our interviews with brands, distributors, sneaker designers, and shoppers, the mid- and low-end sneaker market has become a converging free-for-all, with design, distribution, marketing, and supply chains all in motion.

On the second: over the past two years, express delivery has slowed sharply. Growth in parcel volume has fallen from 51% before 2017 to 26.46% now, back to where it sat after the 2008 financial crisis. How to read that? We offer a few readings. Express delivery is the infrastructure of e-commerce, and e-commerce has been a main engine of Chinese consumption for a decade, so slowing parcel growth is really consumption slowing. Parcel growth leans more and more on cheap goods from Pinduoduo, yet growth in the countryside has begun to fall too. Market share is concentrating in the biggest firms, but that will not hand those firms pricing power.

Over the past two years, the changes in business have not been confined to markets and industries. Plenty of individual big companies have run into trouble, and the trouble has exposed real problems.

After the Ethiopian Airlines crash and the grounding of the 737 Max, Boeing reported its latest quarter: revenue, net profit, and core operating profit all shrank in the first three months of this year, a rare thing for the company. The New York Times, after reviewing hundreds of pages of internal emails, company documents, and federal records and interviewing more than a dozen current and former employees, found that Boeing's culture often prized speed over quality. Facing long production delays, Boeing repeatedly brushed aside problems its own workers raised and pushed them to build Dreamliners faster.

“The question Boeing faces now is whether, in rushing the Max out to catch up with its rival Airbus, it let safety risks into the design — the anti-stall system involved in both crashes, for one,” the article says.

In a single week in February, YouTube ran into trouble again and again: it served ads against videos pushing anti-vaccination claims; videos coaching small children to kill themselves surfaced on the platform, setting off a nationwide panic; a user posted a widely watched video exposing how pedophiles were running wild on the site; and then came the “bestiality” flap. After all that, the New York Times turned to the coolest, most level-headed person behind YouTube — chief executive Susan Wojcicki.

“I wanted to know what kind of chief executive she is, how she handles one crisis after another, and whether there is any sense of urgency inside YouTube. So over the past few months I met more than a dozen current and former YouTube and Google employees and interviewed Wojcicki three times. What I found was both reassuring and worrying. Behind the world's largest and messiest video platform stands a calm, clear-thinking person. But given how often the horrors and the idiocies erupt on YouTube, and how far they spread, her composure can look out of place,” the article says.

One more thing: the Bauhaus centenary series reached its fourth installment this week. When we say “Bauhaus city,” what are we actually talking about? The answer is odd — there is no such thing as a real Bauhaus city, and yet the Bauhaus did shape the space we live in.

The piece argues: “Two new architectural forms are taking over cities today. One might be called postmodernism: computer technology plus cheaper thin shells and space frames, put together into shapes that are newer and further from the laws of mechanics. The other uses local materials and imitates old forms. Some cities are split theatrically into a new district and an old one to display both. … The second form sometimes comes out of intellectual architects rethinking the International Style and globalization. … The Bauhaus faithful shaped today's urban architecture with their own hands, but they also left the styles that came before standing out more sharply in history.”

Finally, a few other things worth noting:

The Ministry of Natural Resources, which governs the release of state-owned land, recently issued a notice urging again that more residential land be supplied. Economists point out that local governments are the only sellers of land. With land supply tangled up in local finances, a local government has little reason to release more land to hold prices down while land or housing prices are climbing, and may instead starve the market of supply, pushing the price of residential land higher still. That is closer to a business decision than a policy one.

As the country's largest cargo airline by fleet size, SF Express disclosed in a recent 6.5-billion-yuan financing plan that 1.6 billion yuan of it will go to buying aircraft and maintenance parts. With SF Express's own money added in, the aircraft will cost more than 2.1 billion yuan in total. At the end of 2018 its all-cargo fleet stood at 66 planes on 65 scheduled routes. Counting the belly-hold space it rents on passenger flights, SF Express covered 2,134 air-freight routes in 2018 and earned roughly 7 yuan for every kilogram flown.

Four large companies reported earnings this week. Starbucks' second-quarter results pushed its share price to a one-year high; revenue for the quarter was $6.3 billion, up 4.4% year on year and slightly below expectations. China Mobile also reported first-quarter 2019 revenue of 185 billion yuan, down 0.3% from a year earlier, and net profit of 23.7 billion yuan, down 8.3%. For the fiscal third quarter ended March 2019, P&G posted net sales of $16.5 billion, above Wall Street's expected $16.36 billion, with organic growth of 5% and net profit up 9.2% to $2.776 billion. And Facebook's first-quarter 2019 report showed revenue up 26% year on year to $15.08 billion, beating expectations of $14.98 billion.

QuestMobile published its Spring 2019 Report. Between January and March 2019, China's mobile internet added only 7.62 million monthly active users, short of the more than 10 million it averaged per quarter in 2018. Time spent grew more slowly too. To keep growing, JD.com and Taobao have long been hunting for new users in third- and fourth-tier cities and below. Mini programs, which can draw traffic quickly off the big platforms, are growing fast: products with more than 5 million monthly mini-program users are now growing faster than mobile apps.

Peter Ashlock has driven for Uber since 2012 and has logged more than 25,000 trips. His Nissan Altima has covered 218,000 miles, about 350,000 kilometers — nearly the distance from the Earth to the moon. Riders give him 4.93 out of 5. Set against the people Uber made rich, what does an ordinary driver's life look like?

What exactly is “private photography”? The Japanese photography critic Kotaro Iizawa once wrote a book on the question, On Private Photography 《私摄影论》, working through four photographers: Takuma Nakahira, Masahisa Fukase, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Shigeo Gocho. We talked with him, and the conversation offers a few threads to pull on. Private photography, for instance, is trying to shake off both ideology and the duty to document; its standard is not the exact description of an event but some mood inside a lived experience. Is that actually possible? And if it is, how far?

Canada hosted a debate on “Happiness: Capitalism vs. Marxism”, with Jordan Peterson, defender of free markets and known as the “lobster professor,” on one side and Slavoj Žižek, standard-bearer of the global left, on the other. But “people expected a spark-throwing debate of the century and got a friendly exchange of views,” the left-wing magazine Jacobin noted, not without sarcasm. On human beings and on the future, Žižek and Peterson seem to share more than they disagree on.

Several primary schools in Barcelona are considering pulling hundreds of children's books from their libraries, among them Little Red Riding Hood and the legend of Saint George. A gender-equality committee formed by parents holds that some of the books are strongly sexist, leave children with stereotypes, and have no teaching value.

On April 25, a relief law for victims of Japan's former Eugenic Protection Law passed unanimously in a plenary session of the upper house of the Diet. Under it, the state will offer the victims “reflection and apology” and pay each of them a one-time 3.2 million yen (about 190,000 yuan). Most victims are not satisfied.

The physicist David Thouless died in Cambridge, England, at 84. He shared the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for using mathematics to explain strange states of matter, such as superconductivity and superfluidity. The behavioral scientist David Hamburg died in Washington, D.C., at 93. He was a familiar public figure, and his theory of conflict resolution was tested in negotiations with Soviet leaders during the Cold War and with African guerrillas who had kidnapped a group of students.

Happy May Day holiday, everyone.

Cover image: a still from Avengers: Endgame, via Douban.