Gan Yang 1980s (4)

Gan Yang, Interview in Zha Jianying’s The 1980s, Part Four
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction

This part of the interview discusses Gan Yang’s life and work as the editor of his famous translation series “Culture:  China and the World.”  More broadly, Zha and Gan are talking about a period known as the “culture craze” wenhuare/文化热, when Chinese intellectuals once again looked to the West for answers to the problems China was facing, much as they had done in the 1920s during the New Culture Movement.  Gan was definitely a major player in this movement, and he and Zha discuss many other participants in the culture craze.
 
I particularly appreciate Gan’s frankness in this section of the interview.  He is old enough that he can laugh at his younger self for his arrogance and pretentiousness, even though he still believes that he and his friends did something important (a belief I share).  From one perspective, Gan is still the “punk” he was as a sent-down youth, throwing his intellectual weight around to try to get to the top.  At the same time, he and his band of “snobs” (their words, from the interview) have the souls of sensitive poets, and much of their inspiration comes from German Romanticism. 
 
Without this interview (and others in Zha’s volume), I could never have imagined the texture of Gan’s life, equal parts swashbuckler, entrepreneur, and philosopher.
 
If you missed Part One and my general introduction, you can take a look here. Part Two, on Gan Yang’s life as a sent-down youth, is available here.  Part Three, on Gan’s life as a university and post-university student, is available here.
 
Translation
 
Zha Jianying:  Beijing was very lively in 1985 and all sorts of cultural groups were active on the eve of the eruption of “culture fever.”  Were you in touch with other groups outside of the Institute?
 
Gan Yang:  We were, but those of us at the Institute were very arrogant and disrespectful of other people, and felt that what we were studying was of course the most important thing.
 
ZJY:  The crème de la crème.
 
GY:  The very definition of elite.  We also believed that we had our fingers on the pulse of modern Western philosophy, which meant for example that we despised everyone working on Sartre.  Not necessarily people like us who were specialists, because they were our friends, but more broadly, people in literature classes using Sartre to explain things.  Sartre was popular at the time, which had to do with the contemporary popularity of existentialism.  But because we were studying Heidegger, we assumed that we knew what we were doing.
 
ZJY:  Was it that you felt like everybody knew about Sartre and his “vulgar philosophy?”
 
GY:  We thought it was mere humanism.  In 1946, Heidegger wrote an essay called “A Letter on Humanism,”[1] which in fact was a criticism of the existentialism of people like Sartre.  Heidegger had no truck with humanism.
 
ZJY:  From what angle did he condemn it?
 
GY:  It’s pretty much the same as when Derida and Foucault condemned humanism later on, the idea being that humanism is merely a construction, a frame.  They wanted to ask deeper questions while Sartre was selling his bourgeois humanism, which we believed served to block all genuine thinking.  So you can imagine that we all felt we had our hands on the real thing.
 
ZJY:  What a bunch of academic snobs!  But I can sort of imagine you feeling being above the multitudes.  It’s kind of cute.
 
GY:  Heidegger will reel you in.  What I want to stress is that when I think back on the 1980s, it is very different from now.  When you compare the 1990s to the 1980s, they are already very different.  In the first place, in the 1980s, the social sciences had not really appeared, which left the humanities leading the way, and philosophy comes first in the humanities.  We usually think of people who do literature as being superficial, and people who do history as kind of slow, while philosophers are deep. 
 
Another thing is that when you think back on the 1980s, people like us never cared about economic reform.  We saw economics as really boring, while people’s minds were infinitely more interesting.  In fact, people were doing economic reform at the time, and when you look at the things Zhou Qiren (周其仁, b. 1950) and Wang Xiaoqiang (王小强, b. 1952)[2] published back then, they were very impressive.  But we knew nothing about them at the time. In the early 1990s when I was the editor of the Oxford series on “Society and Thought,” the first thing I did was to ask Zhou Qiren to put together a two-volume set on the economic studies they had done in the 1980s.
 
ZJY:  Was Zhou Qiren already in the Institute of Economic Reform at the time?
 
GY:  They were all under Chen Yizi (陈一咨, 1940-2014).[3]
 
ZJY:  Zhang Weiying (张维迎, b. 1959)[4] was also in the Institute of Economic Reform, right?
 
GY:  Right.  They all were.  They had never published the stuff they wrote up, because it was all neibu.  But they were focused on economic reform, and didn’t hang around that much with intellectuals, and what they worked on wasn’t our kind of intellectual discourse. 

So there were several things that distinguish the 1980s, and one was that economic reform was not part of our intellectual project.  We weren’t thinking about it, we weren’t talking about it, we thought it was boring.  The second thing was that the humanities were the most important, and the third thing was that studying the West was the most important.  The West was everything.  Given this, we found ourselves in a very special position. 
 
That said, I really don’t feel like we had much of a real impact on society.  Of course our books made a lot of waves among students at universities and in graduate schools, because at the time, everything was about the humanities, and humanities meant the West.  So once our editorial committee was set up[5], its identity was clearly grounded in Western philosophy.
 
ZJY:  Now when we look back at the 1980s, three book series stand out:  one was your “China:  Culture and the West,” another was Jin Guantao (金观涛, b. 1947) and his wife’s[6] “Toward the Future zouxiang weilai/走向未来,,” and the third was Tang Yijie’s (汤一介, 1927-2014) “Academy of Chinese Culture Zhongguo wenhua shuyuan/中国文化书院.”  In fact, the other two were set up earlier, and yours wasn’t set up until 1986, right?
 
GY:  In fact we started mulling it over in 1985, but it didn’t get formally established until 1986. 
 
ZJY:  The three series were positioned differently.  The Academy of Chinese Culture wanted to revive tradition, Jin Guantao’s thing was aimed at the natural sciences, so it looks like both of them wanted to use some kind of theory to reinterpret history?
 
GY:  There’s a big difference between what we did and what Jin Guantao did, which is that they were pretty close to people inside the Party who were pro-reform, which meant that they had a big impact on policy.  They had something to do with economic reform as well, even if they didn’t play a direct role, but the people in their network included a lot of pro-reform Party members, to say nothing of think tanks.  Nothing was really all that high up, but they were still part of the game, so they tried to find people they thought were enlightened. 
 
ZJY:  Were they basically concerned with what had been orthodox ideology before?
 
GY:  Yes, right.  They were basically closely connected to the establishment, so in discussions, half of their language was bureaucratic, because they spent a lot of time talking to officials, which meant that they had to talk in such a way that officials could understand accept.  To tell the truth, we had a hard time respecting this, because it was a bunch of stuff with no theory that we could see.
 
ZJY:  They talked about the “three theories,” right, “systems theory” or something.[7]
 
GY:  That their “three theories” would be popular at the time is easy to understand.  Once reforms and opening got underway, things like the natural sciences were relatively easy for orthodox ideology to accept.  The natural sciences don’t look dangerous, right?  Science is relatively neutral, and the position of science is pretty easy to accept, which makes the philosophy of science easy to accept too.  At the beginning things like Sartre and Heidegger were criticized.  Early on, before the craze, Sartre was criticized as part of “bourgeois corruption.”
 
ZJY:  It looks this Sartre craze had nothing to do with you guys.
 
GY:  In our editorial group there were people who specialized in Sartre.  But this kind of study and the vulgar use of Sartre elsewhere in society are very different things.  At the time, people didn’t necessarily understand Sartre, and didn’t necessarily read his theoretical works.  But he wrote a lot of novels, right?  So he seemed easy to understand.  When we first started out in philosophy, Sartre was really famous and a lot of people were reading him – his novels were translated pretty early on, including Nausea, the book they made a movie out of.  This played all over the country, and quite early, and he was a Marxist to boot, so it was complicated.  But it was nothing like the kind of philosophy Heidegger did.  My feeling is that we entered a period of pure interest in Western philosophy, a vein of Western thought.  So the way we looked at Sartre and Heidegger was solely as a question within Western thought.
 
ZJY:  In other words, you were just getting a handle on the Western philosophical system, searching for a vein, and had not yet thought of a way to get back to Chinese issues?
 
GY:  I think that was maybe a bit later, but everyone was thinking about it, although people are different.  For me the most important thing was get into Western philosophy, which meant using English to open a door to a huge world.
 
ZJY:  Something unknown but seductive.
 
GY:  At the time scholars had strong motivations and desires, and that was pretty much all they paid attention to.  For example, Wang Wei and Wang Qingjie were always arguing about the problem of Marxist alienation, and I always told them not to bother with those questions, because they don’t mean anything.  So for example I had absolutely no interest in criticizing the system, or criticizing extreme left thought.  I wasn’t interested because I thought we had solved these long ago.  I thought the key thing was how to join the future, how to join Western thought.
 
ZJY:  Did you feel like, compared to Heidegger, all of these things were small potatoes, kind of beneath you?  What year did you first read Heidegger?
 
GY:  Of course it was while I was at the Beida Institute.  I went from Cassirer to Husserl to Heidegger, and felt that they were all part of a common intellectual tradition.  To me these similarities came from a common scholarly tradition they all shared, for example, German Romanticism, so for me it was all linked together.
 
ZJY:  All of these guys were trying to figure out what modernity was, and they all had a rebellious streak.  It’s no wonder that when you were a sent-down youth you liked Shelly’s “A Defense of Poetry.”
 
GY:  From German Romanticism to Heidegger.  Some people also liked Marcuse, like Zhao Yuesheng.  Xu Youyu was into analytic philosophy, although this wasn’t something we as a group were into, because analytic philosophy is very technical, and it’s hard to link up with humanistic concerns.  Youyu cared a lot about politics, even if what he studied had no relationship to politics at all.  But the things most of us talked about had a common background, like Heidegger and Marcuse, and German Romanticism, all of which were directly related.  In fact, a very representative work is the one Liu Xiaofeng published when he just graduated, called Poetic Philosophy 诗化哲学.  It was an expanded version of his master’s thesis, but at a certain level expressed the concerns of many people.  For example, in his final chapter he talked about Marcuse, which is what Zhao Yuesheng was working on.  He also talked about Cassirer, whom I had worked on, and Martin Buber, which was Chen Weigang’s (陈维刚) subject.  Xiaofeng’s book captured a mood, which was based on Heidegger. 
 
Looking back on it now, I feel like we could title this period from the Beida Institute to the editorial committee as “a poetic criticism of modernity,” because what we were doing was in fact very poetic. Xiaofeng’s book more or less reflects what a lot of people were talking about.  As for what their concerns were, for Liu Xiaofeng and his friends, poetry was very important, all of them had a background in literature, and all of them had read German Romanticism.  When they were sent down, they all read the “Classical Literary Theory Translation Series,” where they found things like Schiller’s “Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man.” From Schiller to Marcuse – Zhao Yuesheng’s subject – everything was a criticism of capitalism. 
 
So after we started studying Western stuff, we naturally thought about a lot of complicated things.  In other words, other people were using Western studies to criticize China, but the Western studies we were reading were in fact criticizing Western modernity and Western industrial civilization.  The entire Romantic movement was a reaction to industrial civilization.  Which means that there was a line between Heidegger and Derida.  This was the thing that interested us the most.  This is also why in the 1990s more than a few people took a second look at the criticism of our editorial committee and its work in the 1980s.  I feel like they had a point, and that the things we were importing had nothing to do with modernization.
 
ZJY:  It wasn’t focused on indigenous Chinese problems, particularly not back then.
 
GY:  People thought we were bringing things in to modernize China, but instead we brought in things that were against modernization.
 
ZJY:  Because China was in a historical period where, as a premodern society, it desperately needed modernization.
 
GY:  This is what most people were seeking at the time.
 
ZJY:  This may be a bit of a caricature, but I feel like a lot of people basically felt that you guys were among those promoting total Westernization, and they didn’t really understand the stuff you were translating from the perspective you’re talking about.
 
GY:  Of course.
 
ZJY:  But a lot of people bought your stuff.
 
GY:  I feel like this had a lot to do with what was popular in society at large.  But even if the Westerners we were translating were anti-Western, they were still Westerners, which put them in the right camp in terms of what the Chinese readers were against.
 
ZJY:  At the time, anything Western was seen as “anti-“, and could be used in the way the reader saw fit.
 
GY:  That’s right.  Everything was anti/against something, which explained the strong critical languages condemning Western capitalism in the texts we translated.  In addition, those of us at the Institute weren’t all that taken by the Frankfurt School.  Aside from Zhao Yuesheng who worked on Marcuse.  Neither I nor Xiaofeng nor Jiaying had much patience with it.
 
ZJY:  But you read a lot of it, right?  Were you reading Habermas at the time?
 
GY:  Yeah, we read him and we read a lot of things.  But nothing drew us in the way that Heidegger did.  Of course I’m not speaking for everybody.  Youyu wasn’t like the rest of us.  He was completely into analytical philosophy, which was something very different.
 
ZJY:  So you went from Hegel to Kant to Heidegger…so it was all continental philosophy.
 
GY:  Of course, from the perspective of Western philosophy, analytic philosophy despises continental philosophy.
 
ZJY:  It’s too romantic, not rational enough…
 
GY:  They think it’s all literary…So when I got back from the US [in 1999] I asked Xiaofeng to hunt up his Poetic Philosophy and let me read it again, and my thought was “why were we so excited by this stuff?”  I think it has to do with a lot of the things we read in school before the Cultural Revolution.
 
ZJY:  Hmm.  That’s an interesting line of thought to follow up on.
 
GY:  I think it was that before going to university we were all literary youth looking for some kind of romantic, poetic world.  This is why I keep coming back to the “Classical Literary Theory Translation Series.”  At the time, you didn’t necessarily know that they were talking about, but when you read Schiller’s “Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man,” you felt like a lot of people were against poetry back then.  You were just a kid and didn’t understand all that much, but your mood matched that poetic spirit, and when you read Pushkin, the English poets, Byron, what you were searching for was some kind of poetic world. 
 
Then later on when you read Heidegger, there was a complete critique of technical civilization.  A phrase we used all the time was the “technical age,” a central concept we took from Heidegger.  This was a term he used to describe all of modernity:  in a technical age, there is no place for man’s soul.  So when I think back to our group in the 1980s, a core thing was a volume I edited in 1988 called The Civilizational Consciousness of Contemporary China 当代中国文化意识.[8]  This was a successful example of the sort of thing our group was concerned with.  It was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong in 1988, and my impression is that the Mainland published a reprint without asking for any changes.
 
ZJY:  You’re already into the latter period of the editorial committee, right?  1988 and 1989.  Let’s go back and fill in a bit about the earlier period.
 
GY:  At the time, everyone was translating different things, without publishing them.  Chen Jiaying was translating Heidegger’s Existence and Time.  While he translated he circulated the text and we all talked about it.  We all hung around together and debated it all day long.  This is because Heidegger is really hard, both in terms of his language and meaning.  It’s kind of unparalleled in that sense, and it’s really challenging intellectually.
 
ZJY:  Like Nietzsche’s poetic parables?
 
GY:  Not at all.  Once you’ve read Heidegger then you have no more interest in Nietzsche.
 
ZJY:  I find Heidegger’s language extremely obscure.
 
GY:  It’s obscure because he’s too complicated!  And even if it is a book by Heidegger, in fact he’s always taking on the entire Western philosophical tradition, because he thinks that explains what led to the emergence of the West’s technical age.
 
ZJY:  So he starts from the Greeks and tries to figure out the origins of the modern era?
 
GY:  He wants to go back to the pre-Socratic era in Greece, because he thinks that Western philosophy was already in trouble in the Socratic era.  But he’s really amazing, because he has a structured reading of the entirety of Western philosophy, and everyone fits into his structure – Hegel, Kant, Leibniz, Descartes, even Aristotle and Plato.  This is another reason for his overwhelming influence on the Western world.  So on the one hand he is reading and evaluating the entire Western tradition, but on the other he’s looking for alternatives.
 
ZJY:  Are there alternatives?
 
GY:  There are two ways of looking at that.  For Heidegger, at the end he was waiting for another god.  He felt that everything was already so deeply rooted that change was difficult.  But he had this huge impact on the world, because without Heidegger there would have been no Derrida or Foucault.   From the perspective of advances in intellectual thought, he was a complete insider who made a comprehensive, deconstructionist reading of the tradition, which opened up the way for a fresh new take.  Of course later on these readings multiplied, meaning different people addressed different questions.  But at the time we were proud of ourselves for understanding the power of his capacity to see through thought and ideas.  For example, Taiwan had never broken with the West in the way we had [with the Communist revolution], but we suddenly discovered that they were behind us because they didn’t know Heidegger.
 
ZJY:  You guys must have been feeling good.
 
GY:  We thought we were the best, that we were standing on the peak. (Laughs)
 
ZJY:  So at the time there was a certain distance between you and the China question, right?
 
GY:  A lot of distance.  To tell the truth, I was a long way from contemporary concerns.  I felt like anybody could talk about that kind of stuff.  This was not where you showed how smart you were.  We might talk about the system now and then, but this wasn’t how you showed off, you showed off by talking about how thorough your understanding of the West was, this was what we were concerned with.
 
ZJY:  Studying Western philosophy was in fact the basic reason you set up the editorial committee, right?
 
GY:  That’s right, but at the time we weren’t thinking about setting up a committee.  We were thinking about other things.
 
ZJY:  So when did you start thinking about the committee?
 
GY:  It started with me, and at the outset had nothing to do with anyone else.  After I went to CASS in 1985 or 1986, there was a group of people setting up a magazine, people I didn’t know.
 
ZJY:  This was your job assignment after graduating?
 
GY:  Yes, it was Xu Youyu’s group working on modern Western philosophy.  So on the one hand I had this group of friends, but at the same time, this other group searched me out, and they were setting up a magazine - in fact the editorial committee was already put together - and they wanted me to be the editor.  They were tight with the Youth League Party Secretary of the graduate school.  I didn’t really know them, but at that point I was a little famous in the rumor mill of the field.  I was known because I had published a book and the other young scholars had not.  This was the book I translated, which immediately became a national best-seller, with 24o,000 copies printed in one year, and it won some prize in Shanghai.  At the time print runs were all big, but mine was the biggest of any philosophy book.
 
ZJY:  What was the main point of Cassirer’s An Essay on Man?
 
GY:  The main point made no difference.  The book sold because of its title!  Because the Cultural Revolution was just over and everyone was talking about “man” and “humanism,” so this was a complete surprise.
 
ZJY:  (laughing) At the time there was a book that sold even better than yours and its title had “man” in it twice, Dai Houying’s (戴厚英1938-1996) People Oh People! 人啊人[often translated as Stones in the Wall].
 
GY:  So it was completely by accident.
 
ZJY:  I’ll bet many of the people who bought your book were fooled by that.  Is Cassirer’s book easy to understand?
 
GY:  Not really.  It’s from the humanities.
 
ZJY:  What’s its relationship to Heidegger?
 
GY:  They were antagonists, so it’s against him.  Heidegger got famous because of a 1927 debate with Cassirer, a big deal in the history of German philosophy, and is seen as the turning point where Neo-Kantianism began to decline and Heidegger started to rise.  Cassirer was of the generation of Heidegger’s teachers.
 
ZJY:  I wonder whether you lost interest in Cassirer pretty quickly…
 
GY:  Of course he had an impact on me.  Cassirer was a rationalist, and when you compare me with Liu Xiaofeng and his crowd, they are more poetic and into aesthetics while I am a bit more rational.
 
ZJY:  There was a time in the 1980s when I was really into Liu Xiaofeng’s books.  I never read Poetic Philosophy, but I really loved Delivering and Dallying 拯救与逍遥.
 
GY:  That was later on.  Poetic Philosophy came out in 1985, and it wasn’t part of our book series, but instead there was one by Yue Daiyun (乐黛云, 1931-2024).[9]
 
ZJY:  Liu Xiaofeng’s language is very literary.
 
GY:  Yes, his literary language made Poetic Philosophy very popular.  But I’ve been thinking a lot about the 1980s lately, and it seems to me that in the 1980s there were in fact two…Liu Xiaofeng’s literary language was something different from the earlier craze for aesthetics, the goal of which was to professionalize aesthetics.  Liu Xiaofeng was after something deeper, a concern shared by many of us on the editorial committee, even if we all addressed it differently.  For example, the reason Cassirer was different for me was that he basically wrote like a man of letters, although he still was very controlled and dispassionate.  Heidegger’s language was also controlled and dispassionate, as was Derrida’s.  This all has to do with a reaction to the decline of romanticism, which of course affects how you write.  It was no longer like in the romantic period, with its exuberance and arrogance.  Once romanticism was gone, people were pessimistic or desperate.  After Nietzsche, there was no more romantic writing.
 
ZJY:  Nietzsche’s writing is still very high-spirited.
 
GY:  But there’s not much optimism in it.
 
ZJY:  God is dead.
 
GY:  I mean when you read things from the early romantic period, you still get the sense that a beautiful world is possible, but after WWI, the mood changed in Europe, and people felt the search for the beautiful was impossible.  This all has a lot to do with the post-modernism that came later, so modern literature in fact has a lot to do with this.  I feel like this was a crucial moment.  If I can leap ahead a bit, I feel like what brought an end to the direction or the mood of what the editorial committee was doing in the 1980s, or indeed the whole process, was the 1994 “great debate on the humanistic spirit.”[10]  That discussion was in fact a continuation of the 1980s culture craze, so it was still very literary…at least it wasn’t like the “rationality of modern capitalism.”  I feel like this is important, because in a certain sense it leads us to why things later became so weak, so easily destroyed.
 
ZJY:  What became weak?  The human spirit?  Do you mean in China?
 
GY:  In China.  What I mean is that the market talk of the 1990s completely washed away what we had been doing in the 1980s.  And in the 1990s everyone was forced to compromise.
 
ZJY:  Why compromise?  To meet the market?  I feel like there was a double compromise, with power and with the market, and furthermore, the market was very controlled by or even completely implicated in power.  But let’s set aside for a moment the question of what the intellectuals had to compromise with and look at the people in general.  A little while ago we were talking about the situation of American intellectuals.  I feel like you guys here are like left-wing intellectuals in the US in that you were both frightened by power.  American left-wing intellectuals had not realized that in fact their pursuits and dreams were not shared by the people, and in fact that their whole way of thinking was different.  In fact, the questions you guys were thinking about back then were disconnected from what “the masses” were thinking about, even more so than in the case of American intellectuals.  Even if from my point of view the questions you were thinking about were extremely interesting.  In a country as big as China, and given how pathetic intellectual life was after the Cultural Revolution, to have a small bunch of elite intellectuals fall head over heels for Heidegger and early on establish a relationship with European philosophers and share their concerns over the dilemmas and future of mankind in the post-industrial era, and then for some European philosophers to get all excited over the books you translated…if nothing else, from the perspective of environmental diversity this is a good thing.  It’s all really exciting to listen to.  But still, it seems to me that you were really disconnected from what most Chinese people were concerned with at the time.
 
GY:  I don’t see it as disconnected, just another dimension that should have been important from the outset.
 
ZJY:  Of course it “should have,” but this is more like an assumption or a wish, like saying “China should have industrialized and entered the technological age along with everyone else,” or “China should have been a part of industrial civilization all along.”  In the Western context this is indeed an important dimension, and there was this sort of undercurrent, in philosophy, yes, but even more visibly in literature.  There were a lot of writers Isaiah Berlin talked about who were “counter-cultural,” but the motivation for their anti-modernism and how they expressed it came out of their own historical context, which we did not share.  Their modernity was not like ours, from beginning to end.  So there were differences in terms of processes and contexts which I feel we have to take into account when we import them, otherwise we’ll mistake one thing for another.
 
GY:  No.  We were not grafting anything from them onto us, we were looking for the origin of something.  Later on as we understood more about the West, everyone took on their own specialization, and their specific concerns were all different, but there was a shared mood.  For example, Zhao Yuesheng worked on Marcuse, who was an ardent critic of capitalism.  Su Guoxun worked on Weber, but he focused on the limitations of rationality, and his book was called Rationality and its Limitations 理性化及其限制, which talked about the problems rationality brought with it.
 
ZJY:  You used your books to directly look into what developed capitalism really meant.
 
GY:  So look, all of this had a direct impact on everyone.  To a certain degree, we were part of mainstream discourse, which was to criticize capitalize and modernity.
 
ZJY:  (laughing). It’s like you were Berkeley before Berkeley!
 
GY:  Way before!  My feeling is that at the time our understanding of capitalism as a whole was not based on feelings but on theory.
 
ZJY:  Pure theory.  You jumped several rungs on the Western philosophical ladder and wound up on top.
 
GY:  Not completely, though, because fundamentally we still had a literary temperament.
 
ZJY:  Right, this literary temperament was an internal, instinctual cushion, from when you were sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution.
 
GY:  It was our literary temperament that made us like all this stuff, and liking it was not by chance.  Because there were other choices, and not everyone had this temperament or could read this material.  Heidegger is really hard, but this temperament is why the people on our editorial committee were so into it.  The temperament spread a long way, too, and it was why our editorial committee had the impact it did, including on people who eventually worked with us.  Our committee touched a lot of peripheral organizations throughout the humanities.
 
ZJY:  You’ve jumped ahead again.  Let’s go back to when they were setting up that magazine at CASS.
 
GY:  At the beginning, the people setting up the journal were tied into what was happening pretty closely, involved in the reforms, but then they asked me to be the editor.  The person who contacted me was He Jiadong (何家栋, 1923-2006), an editor at the Workers Publishing House.
 
ZJY:  He was a Party insider long associated with reform.
 
GY:  Yeah, he was a long-time Party member, so of course he was involved with the reforms, but he was very nice to me, as an up and coming type.  Things were difficult at first, and He had trouble getting things done as there were lots of obstacles.  It’s not easy to get permission to set up a journal.  What I remember most is the title I chose for the journal, “China and the World,” which gives you a sense of my ambition.  Later on I think it was Li Zehou (李泽厚, 1930-2021)[11] who had the idea of adding the word “culture,” so it became:  “Culture:  China and the World.”  I found three people to work with me.  He Jiadong wanted to find some famous person to be the “formal” editor whose name would be on the cover, saying that was the only way to get things done.  I of course refused, saying someone like that would not get what we were doing.  He thought the famous person would help break through the obstacles at the time to translating things, otherwise it wouldn’t work.  I said that if it didn’t work it didn’t work, but I was going to do things my way.  So they learned just how stubborn I am!  And of course He had an editorial committee, and I met with them and said that I didn’t want to work with them.
 
ZJY:  So these weren’t the people who wound up on the editorial committee.
 
GY:   Not a one of them.  They were all from the World Economy Research Center or things like that.  They were all big names in their fields, but I said that that wasn’t what I wanted to do.  At the time, I wanted Western thought, and culture itself, to be at the center of what we were doing.  They were thinking of things like the world economy and diplomacy, and I didn’t know them at the time, so it was really strange that accepted me as editor.  So the first thing I did was to dismiss this makeshift committee.  Then I replaced them with my people, the core of which was made up of graduate students from Beida’s English department.  Yu Xiao (于晓) was the leader and there was also Liu Feng (刘峰) and Wang Qiang (王强, b. 1962), later associated with “New Asia.”  So these were my core team.  Later on of course there were the people from the Beida Western Philosophy Institute and from the CASS Modern Western Philosophy group, who came to my place for meetings, people like Wang Qingjie, Wang Wei, Chen Jiaying, Xu Youyu, Zhao Yuesheng, Su Guoxun…There was this situation at the time. 
 
Aside from my Cassirer translation, which had come out already, their translations had all had problems.  Chen Jiaying and Wang Qingjie had translated Heidegger’s Being and Time and Du Xiaozhen and Chen Xuanliang had translated Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and the publishing houses were just sitting on them.  Everyone was fed up with it.  The problem was that Shanghai Translation Publishing messed up.  All of these books had been agreed on by Hong Qian and Xiong Wei at the same time, but while my book sailed through, for the others they kept looking for translators who kept making corrections, so that the original translators had had enough.  In other words, the cooperation wasn’t working, with people always wanting to endlessly reread and recheck the translations.  But think about it, who were they getting to check the translations?  Who would dare to challenge us?  It was strange, why was the publishing house doing this?  They were crazy, because they said yes, we have to translate Heidegger, but then they tried to get people to check our translations! 
 
So my buddies all got mad and said to me, “Gan Yang, let’s do it ourselves.”  So at the outset we weren’t going to do a series, we were going to do a journal, but because of these problems we set up the series at the same time.  The journal was called “Culture:  China and the World.”  But editor He couldn’t push things through, and the first book he got published was Sun Yiyi’s translation of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, which they thought could make some money.  So I decided we weren’t a good fit with the Workers Publishing House, because their background was not very intellectual.
 
ZJY: It was for workers; it's political.
 
GY:  Other manuscripts always got stuck there; it was incredibly slow. As for Mr. He, he was always saying that the political situation was bad. I didn’t think he wasn't making it up, either. Still, me and editor He got along quite well.  At the time, it was kind of embarrassing for me to say, but I don't think we liked the same books (Editor He and I). What he liked were books that could either make money or were connected to reform. So, what was Heidegger doing in there?  It wasn't related to reform, and it was also dense and probably not easy to read, so he wasn't really interested.
 
There was also one more interesting factor at the time, which was that Nanjing University sent a female graduate student over to the Sanlian Bookstore. Her name was Yang Lihua (杨丽华), and at the time, she was really close to Zhou Guoping.  By that time, I was already famous, so Yang Lihua wanted Zhou Guoping to introduce her to me, after which she introduced both of us to Wang Yan (王焱).  At the time, Wang Yan was a deputy editor of Dushu magazine. We talked it over and understood one another really quickly, and the book was transferred over to Sanlian Bookstore to be published.  At that time, the most important people at Sanlian Bookstore were Wang Yan, Wu Shan (吴杉), Shen Changwen (沈昌文), and Dong Xiuyu (董秀玉).  These last two were the most important.  At the time, old Shen was probably Sanlian's deputy editor, and the editor was Fan Yong (范用). Wang Yan and I hit it off immediately, and he went and told Mr. He and Mr. Dong about the situation. 
 
At that time, the Sanlian Bookstore had just returned to operation, so things could be done in a real hurry. Probably the funniest thing that happened at that time was that the rumor mill culture began to function, and the press in Shanghai that had been holding books up heard about what was going on and got all upset. They sent some of their key people to come see me to negotiate, hoping that all the books that had been promised to that press would stay there and not go to Sanlian. So the two wound up fighting over the books at the time. Since the press in Shanghai had published my Essay on Man, our relationship was pretty good, so they hoped that I would help them out. Talking with the other translators was no use because they would all say to ask me about it.
 
ZJY:  Had the editorial committee been set up at that time?
 
GY:  It was sort of halfway set up, but it wasn't like now where we could hold big meetings; I had never held meetings like that before. Later on, we had to hold those editorial meetings, and once we started, it was my friends who talked first. We had to go through a whole bunch of draft manuscripts. Still, at the time, the main thing we were doing was running a magazine and putting out issues. That was a really slow process, and nothing came out until 1986. We needed to write a text announcing the creation of the journal. I first asked Youyu to write it because I was busy running around seeing people and didn't have time to. After Youyou wrote something, we all went to Zhao Yuesheng's house to talk about it, and we massacred him.  His text was like something an elementary school student would write, and the Chinese was so awful I couldn't believe it.  You know, now he might be a little more mature, but at the time, we couldn't even talk about his Chinese in our group of friends because it was so bad. Back then, we were all really good friends, but at the time things were not like they are now, when we can all speak openly without there being problems.
 
ZJY:   You mean you massacred him textually?
 
GY:  Textually, ideologically…everything Youyu wrote back then was more or less like this. It had something to do with the reforms, so for us, it all felt pretty conventional. In terms of his language, it was very immature. We decided that the text announcing the establishment of the journal was something I would have to write. We asked that they find a room just for me, meaning that I couldn't be running around all the time and I had to be locked up in a room so I could write something good.  So then I wound up being locked in a room at Yu Xiao's house for more than a month to write. I produced a piece that was 3,000 characters long. It was meant to be the text announcing the journal, but later on we published it separately. In February 1986, Dushu published part of it as a headline piece. It was about tradition, using Heidegger and Gadamer’s interpretive theories to get to a new insight on tradition.
 
ZJY:  Were you interpreting the Western tradition or the Eastern tradition?
 
GY:  Neither one. It was about how to understand tradition itself. In other words, starting with the idea of tradition and what it meant, which was something that hadn't been discussed before. It made a lot of noise when it came out in Dushu, where the title was "Tradition, Temporality, and the Future" chuantong, shijianxiang yu weilai 传统，时间性与未来.  "Temporality" was one of Heidegger's concepts, but actually, this was just one chapter of the text that I wrote. Our journal, with that text in it, finally came out at the end of 1986.
 
ZJY:  So if Sanlian published the journal, did they also pay you guys?
 
GY:  Nobody paid anybody.
 
ZJY:  But there are always expenses, right?
 
GY:  Not at the beginning. Back then, there were no expenses. They just published it and they didn't ask for our money; we didn't care whether they asked for money or not. They paid us to translate, and that's how things worked back then. It's not like it is now.  Then, I think it was at the end of 1985 or the beginning of 1986, Guangming Daily published the table of contents for our series on "Culture: China and the World." It was divided into four parts.  On was on modern Western scholarship, and another was on new knowledge, both of which were translations.  The Guangming Daily also allowed us to publish an advertisement in their newspaper, and it seems like they didn't ask for money for that either. That made a lot of noise for a while too; it made us look like a really big translating machine.  So I put together a huge translation plan. We decided who would translate what and decided on a calendar for people to turn in their translations.
 
ZJY:  What were some of the books in your catalog?
 
GY:  The first bunch to come out included Zhou Guoping's translation of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, and there was Weber's The Protestant Ethic.  In the second group were Heidegger's Being and Time and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. In fact, everybody had been working all along, so all this stuff came out all at once and everybody was thrilled. We had done what we had planned to. In other words, I had done at least a little bit of what I wanted to do. And even if I didn't do everything I wanted to do, I had at least planted my flag, and I hadn't just worked hard to pave the way for somebody else.
 
Notes

[1] Translator’s note:  See here for a brief discussion of the letter.

[2] Translator’s note:  Both Zhou and Wang were important figures in the rural reforms that transformed village China in the 1980s.

[3]Translator’s note:  Chen was an important figure in the China Institute for Economic Structural Reform (体改所) , the group at the center of reform ideas in the 1980s.

[4]Translator’s note:  Zhang is known as a champion of free markets, and came to fame somewhat later, in the 1990s.

[5]Translator’s note:  by “committee” Gan means the editorial committee for the “Culture:  China and the World” series. 

[6]Translator’s note:  Jin’s wife and collaborator is Liu Qingfeng 劉青峰 (b. 1947).

[7]Translator’s note:  Jin and his group talked about the “old three theories” (systems theory, cybernetics, and information theory) and the “three new theories” (dissipative structures, synergetics, and catastrophe theory). Jin’s most influential work was Behind the Appearance of History: An Exploration of the Ultra-Stable Structure of Chinese Feudal Society.

[8]Translator’s note:  The text is available here.

[9]Translator’s note:  Yue was a revolutionary who eventually got into trouble for criticizing the Party as an insider, a story told in her To The Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (Berkeley 1987)· She later came to champion comparative literature and working together with Western scholars and is seen as a liberal.
 
[10]Translator’s note:  This debate was an important occasion for artists and humanists to express their opposition to what market forces were doing to their world and work.  They did not win their debate, and there was considerable push-back from within the artistic community.

[11]Translator’s note:  Li Zehou Is one of contemporary China’s most famous intellectuals.  His specialty was aesthetics, and he argued that beauty could not be reduced to a Marxist materialist definition.  He similarly argued for human agency and against all forms of determinism.  He stood up for the students during and after the events of June 1989 and eventually wound up in the United States, where he taught at Colorado College until the end of his career.