Yang Ping on the Beijing Cultural Review

Yang Ping, “Intellectuals are Facing a Huge Crisis in Terms of Cultural Reconstruction”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated below is an interview with Yang Ping, editor of the Beijing Cultural Review/文化纵横, arguably the most important intellectual journal in China today.  Yang’s stint at Beijing Cultural Review caps a career of more than thirty years in China’s media world, during which he has served as editor of any number of well-known venues, including China News 华夏时报, Beijing Youth Daily 北京青年报, and China Youth Daily 中国青年报, among others.  Prior to launching Beijing Cultural Review in 2008, Yang was also the editor of Strategy and Management 战略与管理, probably the most influential intellectual policy journal of the 1990s and 2000s.
 
There are those within China’s establishment who understand that many Chinese citizens are skeptical of state propaganda, and that not all wisdom is contained within the Chinese or Marxist experience.  Consequently, ideas matter in China and the Party-State grants loyal intellectuals considerable freedom to explore, within limits that are constantly changing.  This means that while all of Chinese journalism is loyal to the Party-State, not all Chinese journals are lap dogs.  Some editors test the limits of what is possible, and Yang Ping is one of these editors.
 
This is obvious to anyone who has spent time with Yang Ping’s Strategy and Management.  I discovered the journal a few years ago when working on Kang Xiaoguang 康晓光 (b. 1963), the outspoken New Confucian who, in the early 2000s, openly denounced China’s crony capitalism and called for the establishment of a Confucian theocracy to replace the Chinese Communist Party.  Much of Kang’s manifesto was spelled out in lucid language in a series of six articles published in Strategy and Management between 2002 and 2004 devoted to the themes of political stability and cultural nationalism (see here for more on Kang).  The audacity of Kang’s proposals tells us something about the open-mindedness and ambition of Yang Ping, who is not a New Confucian, but who dares to imagine that China might change in important ways, if only for the better.
 
When he launched the Beijing Cultural Review in 2008, Yang did something that looks to me equally audacious:  he put together a private foundation to fund the journal.  The Longway Foundation 修远基金会 (http://www.xiuyuan.org/) was established in 2009, and its founding members include four scholars – all in economics or management – and 14 CEOs, plus Yang Ping as head of the magazine. 

I do not know China’s business world well enough to weigh the clout of the participating CEOs (the list is here, in Chinese), but several are important enough to have left a considerable Internet footprint.  I assume that most of these CEOs are business- and market-friendly, although some may come from the world of state-owned enterprises, and many are surely Party members.  The academic advisory board Yang set up is similarly star-studded (the list is here) and includes scholars from all walks of Chinese intellectual life (although there are no women). 

The foundation’s name comes from a famous poem from ancient China’s Warring States period (476-221 BCE), Qu Yuan’s (屈原 340-278 BCE) “Lisao 离骚” (On Encountering Trouble).  The poem recounts the travails of a righteous nobleman, wrongly banished by the king, as he searches for redemption and eventually chooses suicide.  The poem – long a favorite of Chinese scholars - has overtones of intellectual dissent or independence, as the author of the autobiographical poem remains true to himself, even in death. 

​The line from which the name of the foundation is drawn is “On and on stretched my road, long it was and far 路曼曼其脩遠兮,” alluding to the poet’s travels and suffering.  The line is often cited by Chinese scholars in the context of China’s “long road” to modernization, or to greatness, and underscores the responsibility of China’s intellectuals to contribute to this process.      
 
The Longway Foundation thus presents itself as a body of concerned businessmen and intellectuals, committed to helping China chart its way forward, particularly by engaging in “cultural reconstruction,” by which they mean “exploring the crisis of cultural continuity that has become increasingly acute in modern China, overcoming cultural anxiety and establishing the cultural autonomy, values, and discourse system of Chinese society.”  The tone here is that of cultural nationalism, which is unsurprising, but they go on to note that they will also “explore the new cultural and political aspirations of the emerging social strata arising from social structural changes,” suggesting that their cultural nationalism is not necessarily retrograde.
 
In addition to publishing the Beijing Cultural Review, the foundation also sponsors regular symposiums on important issues of the day in the manner of think tanks elsewhere in the world; it is clear that Longway is a player in China, although I have no way of measuring its influence or its independence.  The journals with which Beijing Cultural Review competes – Open Times 开放时代, Exploration and Free Views 探索与争鸣,  Literature, History, and Philosophy 文史哲 – are attached to universities or to social science institutes.  One would suspect that Longway has deeper pockets, which could mean that it is has more leeway to hold symposiums and launch other projects, although I’m guessing here and I do not really know how money works in the world of Chinese journalism, or what hoops one has to jump through to hold a high-visibility symposium.  There are financial disclosure forms available on the Longway website (see here), but these are largely meaningless to me.   
 
As for the Beijing Cultural Review, I have translated perhaps 30 of their texts because I generally find them timely, well-written, and if not critical, at least willing to go in different directions from those suggested by the headlines of the People’s Daily.  I have already written about my visit to their offices in May 2023 (see here), and about my naïve surprise at finding how “team China” they were – as if they could be anything else.  I also remember one of the editors’ talking about the difficulties of getting things approved for publication, which suggests that Longway funding does not shield them from the censor’s gaze, which is again not surprising.
 
For some years now I have been struggling to find a satisfying answer to a basic question:  how do people manage to publish interesting things in China, despite the regime’s muscular efforts to keep everyone on message?  I think the answer is something like the following. 
 
First, assume that most people working in China’s cultural industries would like to produce genuine content that would earn them an audience and the respect of their peers.  Second, assume that some of the people who wind up minding the cultural workers have some respect for what the cultural workers are trying to do, which allows for a sympathetic understanding that can make the frontiers of what is possible somewhat elastic.  Third, imagine a basic consensus of values grounded in cultural nationalism and “pluralism with Chinese characteristics” (meaning it is broadly valued in practice but can be shut down by the Party-State).  Of course China's censors are often ham-handed, and there are hacks and free riders in all systems, but when the winds are blowing favorably these assumptions might explain how smart authors and editors get their harvest to market.
 
The interview with Yang Ping is I think quite revealing on this front.  Yang speaks with the brash assurance of someone who has been an insider for decades.  He is a Marxist who understands the importance of money and markets; without Marx, you cannot understand the movement of history, but without money, you can’t do anything aboutit.  Ultimately, I don’t know if it makes sense to be a “Marxist who understands the importance of money,” but it is a popular stance among certain Chinese intellectuals. 

Yang is also convinced that China will ultimately prevail, and that some version of the China dream will come to replace the American dream.  As yet, he does not know what message the China dream will extend to the rest of the world but thinks that the broad outlines of this message may emerge if China manages to engineer another thirty years of success.  This may turn out to be glib nonsense but my impression is that much of the Chinese establishment thinks this way; we might see it as a hopeful Chinese appropriation of postmodernism in which Chinese values – community over individual, responsibilities over rights, an embrace of globalization – ultimately win out.
 
Some readers may laugh at Yang’s comparison of the Beijing Cultural Review with The Atlantic, but I think it speaks to Yang’s ambition and sense of possibility; his rise coincided with China's own, which put a stiff wind in his sails.  He wants his review to be beyond partisanship and to have the same impact he imagines the American journal to have; most of my Chinese intellectual friends believe that Yang has largely achieved these goals over the years, although they readily acknowledge the differences between the two publications.  I also believe that Yang is genuinely committed to excellence in journalism and that the quality of many of the articles printed in Beijing Cultural Review confirms this – even if the packaging of the journal as a whole is clearly statist in orientation.
 
As a journalist, Yang clearly prefers openness to censorship, and argues that things are much better now than they were in the 1980s and 1990s.  At the same time, his embrace of liberalism does not seem to go beyond money and markets, and he does not call for greater freedom of speech.  I don’t know if he really is satisfied with the “movement of history” on this front or if this is simply what he has to say.  The same goes for his claim that the Wenchuan earthquake resulted in the growth of NGOs in China.  Does he not know that police in Sichuan beat up Ai Weiwei for attempting to investigate the earthquake, or does he simply not mention it because he can’t?

In sum, Yang Ping stitches together a position which is equal parts apologist for the regime (or for the state of contemporary China), back-handed defender of a defacto pluralism, and elitist champion of a better China and a better world, arriving at some unprecedented future date.
 
Translation
 
On magazines:  “The time are changing, which means that we must change with them, otherwise we die”
 
Phoenix New Media:  Beijing Cultural Review was founded in 2008. At that time, the Internet craze was on the rise, and it was the golden age of portal websites. Now we have entered another new media era where the competition is even fiercer, but over the course of these ten years, Beijing Cultural Review, a journal privately organized and run, has not only survived, but has become increasingly influential.  This is extremely rare in an era where everyone knows that “print media is dead,” and may indeed be very instructive.  From the perspective of a print journal that has survived, how did you get here?
 
Yang Ping:  First of all, times are changing, and we have to change with them, and if we don’t we’ll die, which is completely normal.  In our case, when we set up the Beijing Cultural Review, we faced two situations.  First, there were many other magazines doing the same thing. When I was running Strategy and Management [established in 1993], there were only maybe four or five intellectual magazines, while when we launched Beijing Cultural Review, there were dozens of them.   At the same time, there was the rise of Internet websites, then Weibo, and later WeChat; these new media forms just kept coming, and the impact was overwhelming.  In the face of this, there is no way for traditional media to survive, whether via sales or advertising.
 
So we started to change, and our first priority was to focus on content, making it the highest quality in the field of ideas and culture. Our goal was to make the content both more in-depth and truly readable and impactful for the public at large.  In other words to make it into some kind of public service, after which we would go looking for financial backing. There are companies and organizations that are very interested in ideas and culture and are very willing to support projects related to these themes. In this way, we attracted a number of companies and organizations to support us and set up a foundation.
 
Second, we are a research institution as well as a media outlet.  We don’t just commission articles and print them but do research on background issues. We have a research team that is in touch with some one hundred outstanding scholars from many different fields, and over time our journal has reached out to almost one thousand scholars. These are the resources on which we have built our research capacity. We use this research capacity to commission articles that other people will pay for. This supports our team, which in turn supports the survival and development of the magazine. We are always exploring new avenues.
 
Phoenix New Media: When you commission articles and get commercial support to pay for research, does it affect the independence of what you publish?
 
Yang Ping: We try our best to keep everybody on the same page. Every group we work with has its own goals, while our purpose is rebuilding China’s culture, and our focus is mainly on the fields of culture, ideology, and politics. We have our own main line of research and can think about working together with anyone who is doing something similar.  We won’t take on a project if the point is solely to make money. We try our best to ensure that our focus is consistent with whatever topic some outside body entrusts us with, and only then do we take it on.
 
Phoenix New Media: In the face of the challenge of the Internet boom and the new media expansion, what new methods has Beijing Cultural Review employed to expand its influence?
 
Yang Ping:   In 2014, we started publishing free publicly available articles[2] on Weixin, which no one else was doing at the time in the world of intellectual, critical, or academic journals.  Our pieces are in-depth, and the average word count of our articles is between 8,000 and 10,000 words, which is a lot.  We have found, nonetheless, that even in an era when there is too much information circulating too quickly, people actually still need in-depth thinking. So we have been doing this for four years and have attracted 100,000 followers. Of course, we cannot compare with the millions of fans that more commercial and social magazines have on WeChat, but very few in-depth journals have many as we do.  Doing this on WeChat has been very important to the expansion of our influence in recent years.
 
Establishing Beijing Cultural Review on WeChat was the equivalent to launching a new magazine. Although we still call it the same name and the content and style are about the same as the original, where we get our articles, the type of articles we publish and the presentation style of the manuscripts are all completely different, so it is basically a new journal. I think journals like this are likely to replace paper journals in the future, but the time is not yet ripe.
 
Phoenix New Media: The purpose of Beijing Cultural Review is “rebuilding Chinese culture.”  When you held a symposium marking the fourth anniversary of the establishment of the journal in 2012, one scholar said that “rebuilding” usually refers to something that you do after demolition.  In fact, everyone sort of wonders what “cultural reconstruction” means.
 
Yang Ping: For us, "cultural reconstruction" means value reconstruction. Chinese people have a very strong feeling that after 40 years of reform and opening social wealth has increased dramatically, but people are generally anxious and uneasy. Elites no longer know what guidance to provide, and debate constantly among themselves over what aspects of our civilization to embrace, meaning that we lack values and a clear sense of direction. We see the lack of morals everywhere.   As the Tang poet Du Fu 杜甫 (712-770) put it, “Wine and meat rot behind vermilion gates while on the roadside people freeze to death.”[3]  Once again today, there are people lying on the roadside and no one goes to help them, a trend that is spreading no matter how much we deplore it.  This is why an era like ours requires rebuilding our values and culture.  Otherwise our people will be without a spiritual pillar, which to us is our most acute problem.
 
In fact, many people are solving the problem of making China wealthy, and it has become a kind of instinct. There are also people concerned about the country's diplomacy and politics, and there are many people worried about the strategic landscape and are trying to come up with some big move to defeat the United States. So many, many people are focused on this sort of thing. But given the state of people’s values and morals, how should we arrive at a new system of values that can be generally accepted, and that carries forward our tradition and remains open to the future? 

This is extremely difficult and urgent, and we have taken it on as our mission at Beijing Cultural Review.  When we say our mission is “cultural reconstruction,” we mean to rebuild Chinese people’s sense of values, China’s discursive system and their sense of history, even in an era of rapidly increasing wealth.   At the same time, we also explore emerging social classes and changes in the social structure produced by the evolving society, as well as the cultural and political demands of the new social classes in these new social structures.
 
Phoenix New Media:  From the sound of it, "cultural reconstruction" is a huge and arduous task. In the February 2023 issue of  Beijing Cultural Review, you wrote an editor's note called "Great Changes Are Coming," in which you mentioned that with the development of science and technology and changes in the world's political situation, revolutionary changes are taking place in almost all fields. Looking back at the various problems you pointed out six years ago in Beijing Cultural Review’s symposium on "Chinese Culture in the 21st century:  Dilemmas and Solutions,” which included issues related to wealth, value, classes, and the elite issues, among others, it looks as if the old problems are still there while the new ones continue to arise.  Given this, what challenges do you think a magazine like yours faces in dealing with "cultural reconstruction"? How are the new challenges different from those six years ago?
 
Yang Ping:  When you are running a magazine – especially an intellectual magazine – you have to understand the important issues, and not just today’s issues, but also those of the near future and the long term. Ten years ago, we felt that what China lacked most were cultural and spiritual values. Other problems seemed to have ready solutions, but not these. For people of culture and ideas, the point of publishing a magazine is to accomplish our mission, whether it’s online or on paper, whether it’s a newspaper or something else. 
 
Of course, we know that this is a huge task. For example, there have been many major wars in Chinese history, foreign civilizations have invaded, religions have come in from the outside so that there have been crises within and without, meaning that the transmission of our own civilization’s moral traditions has been disrupted.

A typical example is that of the late Tang period when the country dissolved in civil war with the invasion of wave after wave of northern nomadic groups, at the same time that Buddhist regimes threatened from the West, all of which posed a major challenge to Confucian orthodoxy in China. In order to rebuild this orthodoxy, China's elite worked hard for nearly three hundred years, following which, Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) and other Song period philosophers completed the construction of Neo-Confucianism, which absorbed the Buddhist influences from the West and carried forward traditional Confucianism.
 
By middle to late Ming times, the economy changed, as more money fostered the rise of a commercial economy.  This made people more materialistic, a major change in popular mentality.   We see this in the sexualized literature of the Ming-Qing period, both in well-known novels like The Carnal Prayer Mat and The Golden Lotus as well as in later works.  When secularism overwhelms civil society, people’s mentalities always change and morality declines.  So then we see the rise of people like Wang Yangming 王阳明 (1472-1529), whose new version of Neo-Confucianism offered a response to the rise of civil society that held sway for another few hundred years.
 
Now we are facing the challenge of the West, which began with the Opium Wars 180 years ago. Since then, we have experienced the Self-Strengthening Movement in the 1870s, which hoped to keep the old system intact by relying on a small number of elites who were hoping to learn Western technology and build up China militarily, which would solve all of our problems.  This proved to be a failure. 

Then in the late 19th century there was the reform movement associated with Kang Youwei 康有为 (1858-1927), which imported Western institutions in the hopes of solving our problems, which proved to be yet another failure.  Then we had the Republican Revolution in 1912 which we set up constitutional rule – not just technology – and imported the democratic politics and constitutional institutions of a modern republic, which ultimately led to the chaos of militarism. 
 
Later still, our hard work led to the establishment of a socialist country in 1949, but we encountered major setbacks yet again. The efficiency of state-owned enterprises and the planned economy turned out to be low, so we had no choice but to change it. So we introduced the modern enterprise system from the West and promoted the socialist market economy. In the process, economic development improved, but the value system established between 1949 to 1978 suffered a major blow, and there was yet another crisis in terms of popular mentality.  

We also introduced Western freedom, democracy, and the market economy as universal values, only to discover that Western values have their own problems, such as polarization between rich and poor, environmental degradation, and moral decline.  These are problems we are currently experiencing, yet existing Western values cannot provide us with solutions.
 
All of these problems have driven wave after wave, generation after generation of people to engage in all sorts of efforts to rebuild China through development and revolution, but in every instance, things fall apart after an initial success, or new problems appear, so that cultural reconstruction has become extremely difficult. 

​At the same we are also facing new challenges, including particularly the technological revolution beginning in the 21st century. We are all aware of the changes brought about by this technological revolution in the forms of artificial intelligence, big data, bioengineering, etc., which are parts of a series of changes that are rapidly reorganizing our lives and posing major challenges to our values. What are people, after all? What is their relationship with technology? Can machines become human, or will people remain part of nature? What is the relationship between the reality produced by AI and nature as we have always understood it? There are many challenges here.
 
The other challenge is globalization. Globalization has been expanding over the course of capitalism’s five hundred years. In recent decades, the speed has been accelerating, mainly due to the globalization brought about by technological revolution and capital circulation.
 
These two challenges also have impacts on the value system we have evolved over the past five thousand years - the traditional value system based Confucianism, the socialist value system formed over the past seventy years, and the values associated with socialism with Chinese characteristics, created over the forty years of reform and opening. In fact all existing value systems are threatened by the future society that will be the result of technological revolution and globalization. Therefore, as we rebuild our values, we not only bear the heavy historical burden of the Western challenge since the Opium War, in which we have attempted over the course of many historical changes to seek out the core values at the heart of our people, but at the same time we are also facing the uncertainties of a future world. 
 
As a result, today’s challenges in cultural rebuilding are more arduous and acute than those faced in any era in history, which means that meeting them is also extremely difficult. I don’t think our magazine or even our generation is up to the task, which will take several generations. But once such a value system is established, I think Chinese civilization will become universal, at which point, people will no longer identify with American values, and instead Chinese values that will become a truth acknowledged everywhere.  I'm still very confident about this.
 
Phoenix New Culture:  Do you have a clear sense of the direction in which you are working on this cultural reconstruction?  What might it eventually look like?
 
Yang Ping:  Currently, there are different opinions regarding the values we want to rebuild. Some people advocate socialism, some advocate liberalism, some advocate conservatism, and of course there are various other ideas. We believe that a future value system that people will accept should first be based on our tradition and our culture, including the five thousand years of Chinese culture, as well as our tradition of socialist culture, now nearly seventy years old, as well as the liberal tradition represented by the West over the past 180 years.  But at the same time, today we are in an era of technological revolution, an era of globalization, and an era of rapid change. Therefore, any change in values will definitely not work if it does not also address the world and the future as they are.  So asking people today to follow the Confucian classics or traditional Confucian morality is simply impossible. 
 
Thus what we propose is to "face the future, rely on tradition, engage the present."  In other words, we should be guided by the future even as we keep our basis in tradition and continue our search in daily practice. This search will be long and difficult, but we should not be anxious, and instead pay close attention to what is going on around us.  Businesses, government agencies, and NGOs may come up with ideas that can become cultural values that point the way forward, and then we can think about what cultural values are embedded in them and how they can be passed on and then accepted to form a truly positive culture with healthy values. I am talking about things that Chinese people are doing now, already.  Our job is to find these things, sum up what they are all about, and then process, refine, and disseminate them.
 
Today’s world:  Today’s populism is not what it once was; globalization must be sustained
 
New Phoenix Culture: Looking back at the many symposiums you organized in the 1990s, there one was in August 1994, when you were working at Strategy and Management called "Social Transitions and Populism." We now see that yet another wave of populism is surging around the world. How do you think populism is different now than in the past? How should we view populism now?
 
Yang Ping: When we talked about populism in the 1990s and early 2000s is meant something completely different from what we see today. In the 1990s, Chinese intellectuals and the public at large fully embraced mainstream Western intellectual trends, a kind of Enlightenment that mobilized all strata of society and even gave rise to social movements. In the context of rising prices and social corruption at the time, these movements led to boycotts and popular resistance to the system, which the authorities saw as a threat.
 
This populist threat was not conducive to the stability of the country and the governance of the ruling party, leading people to criticize popularism by identifying it with liberalism and protest ideas of the 1990s and early 2000s, or even to lump it together with the populism of the Cultural Revolution.  At that time, liberal elites inside and outside the system criticized Western liberal populism in order to maintain political stability. This was the background and meaning of the discussion of populism at that time.
 
Today’s discussion of populism is very different. After nearly 40 years of reform and opening, marketization has fully invaded all aspects of social life. One of the results of marketization is social differentiation and inequality. Society is divided into different groups and different classes and the gap between rich and poor is becoming increasingly obvious. The populism emerging in this context has a very different connotation. It is caused by the polarization between the rich and the poor, social injustice, and the corruption of morals, creating a nostalgia in the minds of many people for the socialism of the first thirty years of the history of the PRC. This nostalgia is very simple-minded, and of course misses the point here and there. But it is a feeling based on dissatisfaction with the social problems at hand and a reflection of real problems.
 
Thus when we talk about populism, I think we need to distinguish between the backgrounds of the different eras and what it means today. I’m not a fan of populism. Populism cannot solve problems, but when populism arises, it reflects what people are thinking.  So whether it is right-wing populism or left-wing populism, we have to understand its causes and its underlying rationality.
 
Phoenix New Media: In 1995, you organized a seminar on "International Strategic Views at the Turn of the Century - From ‘Looking Inward’ to ‘Looking Outward.’" One scholar who attended the seminar suggested that China had three strategies available.  One was "self-help,” or “go it alone,” another was "not stand out," or “keep your light under a bushel,” and finally there was the "free rider" strategy.  At present, it appears we are headed toward the “go it alone” mode.  What are your thoughts about this?
 
Yang Ping:  In the 1990s, the main factor shaping people’s thoughts about international strategy was that the West was encircling and sanctioning China.[4] Consequently, Deng Xiaoping put forward the famous 16-character policy:  “keep your head down, never take the lead, bide your time, and make a difference. 善于守拙、决不当头、韬光养晦、有所作为.”  Under this policy, China basically looked inward, solving its own problems, and did not take the lead in the international arena, pursuing a strategy of “hiding its light under a bushel.”  This strategy began to change somewhat in the late 1990s. China's economy was developing rapidly and its international influence grew continually, so we began to wonder if looking inward was enough.
 
Professor Shi Yinhong 时殷弘 (b. 1951), who was in the History Department of Nanjing University at the time, published a piece in Strategy and Management in which he argued that over the past five hundred years, countries that challenged the prevailing hegemon had failed, while those who joined the hegemon eventually wound up taking the hegemon’s place, so it was clear what China should do.   This issue was particularly important for thinking about China's strategy at the time, and it was related to whether we could modernize or not. For example, we often talk about the window of opportunity for national development. Simply put, this window refers to whether or not we become the main target of containment by Western powers, or the main enemy of the United States. When George W. Bush first came to power, he saw China as the enemy, which made us very nervous.  After September 11, the United States turned its main focus to dealing with terrorism, which opened up a window of ten or more years for China to pursue development.
 
Now it is time for a new strategic choice. The biggest difference between today and 20 years ago is that China's GDP has reached 60% of that of the United States, and China's industries are rising from mid-level to high-end. From a historical perspective, when the Soviet Union reached 50% of the GDP of the United States, the United States desperately tried to destroy the Soviet Union. Of course, there were ideological factors involved in this, but when Japan reached 73% of the US GDP, the United States also took action.
 
In geographic terms, the United States is an island sandwiched between two oceans. This creates a very safe environment where there is no threat from foreign enemies.  So when the US wants to mobilize its people – particularly given its multi-ethnic nature and the fact that its people have come from all over the world – it has to find a foreign enemy.   At present, Russia plays the role of the enemy, but the American elite is perfectly clear that from the perspective of development potential, ideology, history and culture, and the diligence of the citizens, the only country that can truly challenge the United States is China.  This means that China has a hard time keeping its head down and being a free rider.
 
Phoenix New Culture:  Now it looks like there is a debate between “globalization” and “anti-globalization.”  How do you see this, and what value do you see in upholding globalization?
 
Yang Ping: Both globalization and anti-globalization can be understood from the idea of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalism is cyclical and the business cycle is very short, generally seven or eight years.  What happens is that they produce too much, and can’t sell the overproduction, so they cut prices, after which either the company shuts down or at least its profits fall, after which the cycle starts over, someone puts some resources together, prices go back up...Capitalism itself also follows long-term cyclical patterns. A Hungarian scholar [Karl Polyani] wrote a book called The Great Transformation in the 1930s, which specifically mentioned that liberal capitalism moves from the left to the right and back again in thirty-year cycles.  During the Reagan and Thatcher era, which was also the period of China's reform and opening, neoliberalism was dominant in Western countries. It sought to minimize state intervention, improve corporate efficiency, reduce the tax burdens on enterprises, and give full play to the dynamic role of the market.
 
After thirty years of  neoliberalism came the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Fukuyama’s The End of History.   At the same time, people suddenly discovered that the West had problems. The rise of populism, the growing gap between rich and poor, and the rise of xenophobia are all part of the swing of the pendulum away from the market economy. Hence we saw the emergence of counter-movements, along with anti-capitalist, anti-liberal, and anti-market forces, including Trump’s populism, Europe’s anti-immigration, and Britain’s Brexit. This is how we got to where we are today.
 
In China’s case, this came at precisely the moment when the socialist market economy had been rising, so as we face the challenges of the technological revolution and globalization, it will not work for us to follow the wave of populist anti-globalization, neither will traditional socialism work, and fascism is no choice at all.  China’s current socialist market economy combines the efficiency of the market with the fairness of socialism, and to date has performed pretty well.  If we give it another 30 years, it might prove to be practicable.  If it turns out to be something that works, perhaps it will offer sometime truly new to mankind, a path that also fits together with globalization.
 
China must also choose globalization for another reason, which is that it has now entered the era of excess capital. China has to export its capital, as well as its production capacity, and its market economy needs to expand.   For example, we help African countries build infrastructure and new industries, and we help countries around China to develop, which is a positive export of capital and production capacity, a path that links us to globalization. But this is a new type of globalization, which is very different from the capital export and “globalization” of traditional colonialism.
 
Phoenix New Culture: Recently, a scholar said that the task of China's private economy has been to assist in the development of the state economy, and that now that this task has been completed, the private economy should withdraw from the stage of history. What do you think about this argument?
 
Yang Ping: This is nonsense. A socialist market economy is made up of the co-existence of many different kinds of economic ingredients.  We cannot, in the name of pursuing socialism, disallow the market economy, because pure socialism is inefficient.  So we need the market economy to be in the mix, and the core elements of the market economy are private capital, which means the long-term existence of private ownership.  But on the other hand, it would not be right to merely emphasize the efficiency of the private economy and cast aside state-owned enterprises. State-owned enterprises play many roles that are irreplaceable; they form the basis of the national economy and are important in strategic development, high-end technological research, and the relatively even distribution of social wealth.  So both are indispensable.  Not long ago, everyone was saying that we didn’t need SOEs, and now people are saying that the private economy has outlived its usefulness.  Both are ridiculous. 
 
Talking about the media: Nostalgia for the 1980s is a reflection of genuine feelings
 
Phoenix New Culture:  During the 1980s and 1990s, the media prompted a series of important intellectual debates through deep discussions of issues. However, in today’s media environment, discussions like these do not get off the ground. The public is emotionally obsessed with “denouncing” something or “taking sides” instead of trying to think through an issue and arrive at a consensus, and even refuses to engage in in-depth discussions. Why do you think the current media, especially online media, has created such an atmosphere?
 
Yang Ping: A truly constructive and effective media atmosphere is built on a premise, which is that all actors possess a high degree of civic engagement.  This is not only a right but a responsibility, meaning that you cannot only criticize others , but have to be adept at self-criticism as well.  This is what a mature citizen of a modern country should be.  However, a large number of people active in online media do not possess the abilities that healthy citizens should have. They actively fight for rights and freedom of speech but have little awareness of the responsibilities that these rights imply. What we see on the Internet is very much like a cultural atmosphere formed on the basis of a small-scale peasant economy.  They focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, they band together with people who think like they do and denounce everyone else, inciting extreme emotions.  The media ecology in such an atmosphere is truly very bad.
 
This is not only the case in China, but in some countries in the West as well, online media has been able to publish whatever it wants to for nearly half a century, but the noise it creates is wearing society out, and the impact is too great. So I think that in China, media people should not just talk about freedom of speech - Marxism talks about freedom of speech, just like Western liberalism talks about freedom of speech, and it pays attention to rights as well.  But in the Chinese context, within Chinese culture, people not only have rights, they also have responsibilities, and these are more important.  If you don’t have the capacity to take on this responsibility, then the harm that comes from giving you rights can be quite damaging.
 
Phoenix New Media:   China’s Youtubers 自媒体[5] (lit., “self-media”) are not part of the public media in a strict sense. It is hard to ask them to live up to the requirements of public media. What kind of responsibilities do you think self-media should assume?
 
Yang Ping: If you just open a Weibo or WeChat account for the fun of it and put together a little group, then no one cares. But if you have an audience of tens of thousands of people, then you need to be responsible and know what to say and what not to say. If you don’t, then public authorities can intervene and even shut you down, which is normal. The same is true of our current public media. If you don’t do your job properly, and spread pornography or promote sex and violence, subverting the social order, then the proper authorities will shut you down or keep you from publishing. The same goes for personal media. If you reach a certain level of social influence, then there has to be some kind of oversight.  It won’t work just to let things be.  Whether in the online world or in the real world, we have to have laws.
 
Phoenix New Culture: Judging from your experience in the 1980s and 1990s, has our space for public discourse been shrinking? Or what kind of changes have you seen?
 
Yang Ping:  There has always been control over the media, it’s just that different content comes out in different eras, in different places, under different conditions.  So the fact that the media space has been shrinking lately is no big deal, and we should not read it as the movement of history.  It might just be that today things are a bit tighter, and tomorrow they’ll ease up, and the cycle will continue.   But looking back, there has been a huge improvement in how much media space we have.  A few years ago, I reviewed a number of opinion pieces for a journalists’ association and remember thinking that none of the pieces I read could appear in Beijing Cultural Review.  Now, however, I could publish them as excellent pieces, which means that in terms of how we measure freedom of speech and the degree of tolerance and social progress is so great that we are hardly aware of it.
 
You young people all feel that you can't stand it today, but if you were back in the 1980s or 1990s, you wouldn’t be talking about not being able to stand it, you would be talking about jumping off a bridge.[6]  To my mind, in terms of the laws of the evolution of media, trends are toward ever greater opening and relaxation.  The most critical thing for the media is not the degree of freedom of speech, but whether the media can grasp the main line of historical progress, at a moment when history is at a turning point and nothing is very clear, and then follow that line and direction and its internal laws and demands to run your newspaper, write the articles, and have your say. Generally speaking, the chance of making mistakes will be smaller this way.
 
Phoenix New Culture: If things are better now, why do many people yearn for the 1980s and 1990s?
 
Yang Ping:  This reflects how people are feeling, just like some people miss the Cultural Revolution because they are dissatisfied with inequalities today. Why do the intellectuals and newspapers and media miss the 1980s?  It's not because there was more media space at that time, but because they are dissatisfied with the current situation and project their emotions on the 1980s and 1990s as they idealize the past.  In fact, if you look carefully at things written in the 1980s, you will find that they were not that great, and not very daring, and there were many things they were afraid to say.  So this is just an emotional projection.
 
Phoenix New Culture: Under the impact of the feelings and pressures we are talking about, many media people are leaving the industry. At the same time, due to the various dilemmas of our times, we see many young people online who talk about wanting to join the media in their search for “truth.”  How do you understand this contradiction? 
 
Yang Ping: Generally speaking, over the past thirty to forty years the media has become increasingly market-oriented and more and more controlled by capital and business, so that profit maximization is the basic starting point. Comparing various industries over the past thirty or forty years, profit margins in the media world are declining, while those in the financial industries are rising, so according to the logic of the market, it is normal that people are leaving the media for greener pastures.  Just because a lot of people no longer work in the media does not mean that we should be pessimistic or feel that we can’t seek the truth or anything like that.  Some people left, it’s not that big a deal.  It’s that their salaries suck and their social status is low, that’s the key issue.  If a ton of people go into finance and banking, and they’re all smart, smarter than people in the media, it’s all because of salary and social status.  That’s the issue and we shouldn’t try to cover it up with something else. 

But from another perspective, if your dream is to be in the media, then you should figure out if it is realistic or not.  Reality is a house and a wife and family, and it may not seem doable, but if you set aside your dream, then at 50 you may find yourself still with your nose to the grindstone, full of regret, all alone. The question is whether you have the courage to cling to your ideals.  I can say that I have been doing just that for thirty years without changing.  If this is your ideal, you have to stick to it, because it is a blessing to be able to combine your career with your ideals and personal pursuits. If you abandon your ideals over something like a house, then those ideals didn’t really matter all that much. You have to ask yourself what it is that you want to do.
 
Phoenix New Culture: What would you like to say to those young people who want to find the truth about society by joining the media?
 
Yang Ping:  I would like to say to these people that they should not think that truth is out there waiting for them to find it.  When you are searching for the truth, if you don’t already know what the truth is then you are not going to find it, because reality is different depending on the perspective from which you approach it, including people’s interests and positions.  So the only way to figure out the truth about something is by thinking about it – not just “discovering” it.  To my mind, this is the first thing a media person should bring to the game. If they don’t know how to think for themselves and are just hoping to do a little digging and unearth a few sensational truths, this might last a month or two, but then what?[7] 
 
Talking about elites: If intellectuals do not “transform” themselves, sooner or later they will be culled out
 
Phoenix New Culture: The target audience for the Beijing Cultural Review is the elite.   Targeting such a niche group will inevitably have an impact on the magazine's circulation and coverage. Given this, why did you target this group?
 
Yang Ping:  First, the content discussed in our journal is basically of concern to the elite.  We do some popular topics as well, but relatively few.   Most of what we pay attention to are high-end intellectual issues, that touch on important political, economic, social, and cultural questions.  Elites are more receptive to such discussions.
 
In addition, in terms of China’s population base, 1% of a population of 1.3 billion population is 13 million, and 1% of 13 million is 130,000. If I get this 1% of 1% and 130,000 people read my magazine, then I’m satisfied. Are there magazines read by 130,000 people now? By which I mean not only academic but popular magazines.  I don’t think any magazine has this readership, this 1% of 1%.  So in my thinking, if one thousandth or one ten thousandth of China’s 1.3 billion population reads Beijing Cultural Review, this means that some 50,000 to 100,000 elites are discussing the issues we care about.  So we have influenced the creative, thinking elite, and they in turn influence the media, whose job it is to diffuse information, so their journalists will reach millions or tens of millions of people, we imagine concentric circles of information being diffused.
 
Phoenix New Culture: In a symposium six years ago, you compared Beijing Cultural Review to The Atlantic.  Does Beijing Cultural Review share The Atlantic’s stance of being non-partisan? 
 
Yang Ping:  Yes. When we launched Beijing Cultural Review we faced a number of very serious challenges.  In addition to competition with other similar print media, the conflict between left and right in the intellectual world was even more difficult. In the 1990s, intellectuals could still sit down at a table and discuss, but after 2000, there was basically no contact between left and right and both flung curses at the other from their own corner. The academic world is both the focus of these left-right intellectual conflicts as well as the main source of our magazine’s content, which meant that we had to find a way around these value conflicts. The solution we proposed at that time was "face the issues and transcend left and right." In other words, we would publish voices from both the left and the right as long as the problem they discussed was real and the solutions put forward were also realistic and feasible. 
 
From another perspective, in any society, during any historical period, people are divided into left, right, and center; they cannot all be the same.   In an era of rapid industrialization, as wealth increases, people's awareness of their rights and the importance of contracts also increases.  So in times like these, people will be thinking more in terms of liberalism, so how can we not reflect this in what we publish?  But for similar reasons, as wealth increases, so does inequality, moral corruption, and environmental harm.  So socialist demands for equality and for attention to the environment bubble up, and how can we not reflect demands for socialism in our work?   So in an era like ours, you must express the views of the left, center, and right, and give them space, without going to extremes in any direction. We are facing reality, and we have to use objective and scientific methods to analyze and talk about it.
 
Phoenix New Culture: Different eras define the elite differently. In the past, whether we are talking about May 4th Movement of the 1920s or the intellectual waves of the 1980s and 1990s, young people played a leading role and can be seen as part of the elite, but now the situation seems to have changed. The number of college graduates in 2018 reached 8.2 million, while in the 1980s, there may have been only a few hundred thousand. Can we still use the same definition of elites? In terms of cultural reconstruction, do you think current college graduates can assume the responsibility of China’s elites and complete this task?
 
Yang Ping: Elites are defined differently in different eras.  In traditional China, they were “scholars,” who were “officials” in the government and “gentry” in the countryside. In modern times, political parties make up social elites.  Before university education became widely available, educated people were the elite.  Now that we are producing seven or eight million college students every year, we can’t call them elites, but merely educated workers.  In a market society, elites are usually measured by wealth; in traditional societies, it was instead by education and official position. In today’s world, capitalists are definitely elites, as well as officials, but there are also “nouveaux riches 土财主” who are not elites because they only focus on their own interests – their companies and families -  and do not look to the interests of society. I think the real elites should be those who can shoulder responsibilities that transcend region, job, and family, and entertain universal concerns.
 
Young people can have hope. We say that today’s young people are different, but really, how are they different?  When we were the new generation back in the 1980s, we thought we were different from our parents, but how were we different?  It’s generational, although there are changes in the culture and in the social atmosphere. Some of these social changes bring problems, like populism and China's international strategic choices, as we just discussed. These problems look to be acute and challenging, but they are problems faced by a previous generation that they failed to solve. We say that young people today are more involved in pleasure and don’t pay attention to politics, and that’s all well and good, but at a certain point, these questions will come and grab these young people by the neck and force them to come up with an answer. So those young people who can look past their career family and develop a sense of responsibility will come forward to answer these questions.
 
So I think we can count on young people, especially those born in the 1980s and 1990s. You guys grew up with the Internet, and there is no way we can compete with you in the way you absorb information.  You also received a good education and have a sum of knowledge that again, we cannot compete with.  Moreover, young people who grew up in a market society are extremely adaptable to competition, unlike our generation, which still has a bit of the old “iron rice pot” mentality.  You don't; you’re born to adapt to competition, and you keep your eyes wide open. Therefore, I have full confidence in the current generation, especially the young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. You are much more competent that we are.
 
Phoenix New Culture:  You just mentioned that today’s young people pay more attention to non-serious issues and are less interested in more consequential things.  So for example, they may not fully grasp the idea of cultural reconstruction or rebuilding values.  Do you think the current popular culture will divert concern from larger issues?
 
Yang Ping:   Of course, behind popular culture is market culture, and market culture is characterized by being immediate, fast, and fragmented. It emphasizes immediate solutions and quick satisfaction and does not engage with overall or long-term issues. The mechanism of the market economy is the division of labor and exchange, and the result of the division of labor and exchange is that we are linked together without knowing one another. If you are making teacups, the person who makes the lid is not the same person who makes the cup, and neither of these is the person who sells the final product. Sellers and buyers are separate. The links of production, sales, purchase, and consumption are separate. In fact, they are inseparable, but the market economy divides everyone into different links through the division of labor, so that no one knows their relationship with the whole, meaning that the sense of comprehensiveness and the sense of the long term are lost. This is the characteristic of entertainment culture and consumer culture—instant pleasure and gratification. The most important thing about capitalist market culture is that it dissolves the grand narratives of religion, holiness, and socialism, and what does it leave us? Only the instant happiness of the individual, which happens to be the characteristic of the mainstream culture of today's youth.
 
But sooner or later, questions concerning the longer term or the essence of something will surface, at which point the best of these younger generations, the true elites, will feel the pain that comes with these questions, and they will wake up from their immersion in instant gratification and look for answers to the problems.   Look at the youth student movement in France in 1968, the Japanese labor movement in the 1960s, and the student-labor movement in South Korea in the 1980s... They were all young people who grew up under capitalist conditions, but who woke up when confronted with genuine problems.  This kind of awakening should look forward to social changes and reforms. What is awakened is never an individual, but a group, and it always appears together with social movements. For example, the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 led to an explosion of NGO development, an explosive increase in donations, and an explosive increase in the number of volunteers. This can be regarded as a major social movement.
 
Contemporary Chinese youth need to set aside what we call entertainment culture, prepare themselves to think independently, and try to empathize with the major changes in society, after which they can experience an overall awakening. As mere individuals, people have no value in a sociological sense and are just narcissists. If personal ideals cannot be turned into something achievable, they are just fantasies. This is why wave after wave of social movements are needed. But I still feel there is hope, absolutely.
 
Phoenix New Culture:  Two things are going on with the elite.  On the one hand, this era requires elites to solve many major intellectual and theoretical issues, but such elites have not appeared.  On the other, the rise of populism and the popularity of the Internet have created a sort of anti-elite wave. What do you think of the current state of today’s elite?
 
Yang Ping: If I know nothing else, I know about the state of today’s intellectuals. First, since the 1980s, as the university system has become more academic and professional, it has also fallen deeper and deeper into the quagmire of formalism and dogma. There are fewer and fewer intellectuals who can relate to reality, and they have been replaced by more and more academics who write for smaller and smaller audiences. They might be read by a few dozen or a few hundred people, and if they say it’s good, then they’re satisfied.  But sometimes no one else understands it at all.  How can such an intellectual elite influence society?
 
Second, the change of elites over generations is called elite replacement. The elites who dominated the discourse in the 1980s are now becoming obsolete, and their ideas are becoming outdated.  We cannot empathize with contemporary youth concerns or understand their anxieties, and they push us increasingly to the side, something we have to pay attention to.  With age and generations one group of elites replaces another, and changes in social structure also bring about elite replacement.  At the same time, there are certain entrepreneurs, financiers, and Party and government officials who have the ability and the vision to stand at the forefront of the times and see trends and changes in a timely manner. The traditional elites were unable to see these problems, and fell behind, eliminated by the rapidly changing society.
 
Third, the elites are divided. Elite division is a symptom of social division. We can already clearly feel that the elite groups in Chinese society, on the left, middle and right, no longer share a common language [lit., “no longer pee in the same pot 尿不到一个壶里了”] and cannot sit down and discuss issues with each other. In the event social turmoil occurs, they represent their own constituencies and are willing to fight to the death, which is also worrisome.  So when you mention elites, these three things are what I think about.
 
Phoenix New Culture:  Given this, do you think that the elites should reconcile the conflicts between them? Or what is the most important thing that China’s elites should do?
 
Yang Ping:  I would like to see the elites integrated in some new way, because a society still needs elites for leadership and management, and elite division is difficult for a society. The core division of China’s elite lies in their different perceptions of the first thirty years and the second thirty years of PRC history.[8]  Left, right, and center divide over this.  My hope is that the next thirty years will lead us to a new understanding the first sixty years.  Given that at present we are unable to reconcile history with the current day, then we should look to the future, to the age of globalization, digitization, financialization, which should shed a new light on history.  This is where I have always placed my hope. 
 
History always proves, however, that if elites cannot unite, then at a certain point some of them will become irrelevant and disappear.  When society changes drastically, the changes come at the cost of a lot of sacrifices, and the biggest sacrifices are the elites. The transformation of history comes in waves, and history dispassionately suspects and even eliminates certain groups of people. This is a historical law, which elites need to grasp this law so as to lead the whole people forward.
 
Phoenix New Culture:  Do you think those intellectuals who have withdrawn from the game have any hope of coming back?
 
Yang Ping: Chairman Mao said that intellectuals must painfully transform themselves and only then can hope to join together with the workers and the peasants. If contemporary intellectuals cannot grasp today’s practice of social production and today’s technological revolution, then they will be eliminated sooner or later. In my opinion, 95% of intellectuals are already gone.
 
Notes
 
[1]杨平, “知识分子面临巨大危机，文化重建迫在眉睫,” published on August 25, 2022 on the website of the Longview Foundation.  Yang was originally interviewed by Phoenix New Media/凤凰网文化, “a global leading new media company with an integrated platform consisting of Internet media website (www.ifeng.com), mobile channel (3g.ifeng.com and APPs) and video channel (v.ifeng.com).”  The only link I can find to Yang Ping on the Phoenix New Media site dates back to 2018 (see here for a video clip, which does not load on my computer), so his remarks may be slightly more dated than they appear to be.
 
[2]Translator’s note:  In Chinese, gonghao/公号, which is basically a “teaser account” – i.e., they publish a few of what they consider to be the best or the most appealing articles of the issue at no charge via their Weixin platform, in the hopes that people will buy the issue or subscribe, or at least talk about the teaser pieces to other people.

[3]Translator’s note:  From Du Fu’s poem “A Reflection on the Road from Capital to Feng Xian Town 自京赴奉先县.”
 
[4]Translator’s note:  I assume Yang is referring to the Western reaction to the Tian’anmen massacre of 1989, which extended well into the 1990s.

[5]Translator’s note:  I am aware that YouTube is not available in China without a VPN, but I think this is the word we would use in this context.  The literal translation for zimeiti/自媒体 is “self-media,” which refers to people “making media” on their own online, and can refer to “citizen journalists” as well as someone broadcasting their standup comedy routine or selling a product.  Here, the reference is clearly more general, and is probably referring to “media stars” who drive opinion online.

[6]Translator’s note:  This is meant to be funny.

[7]Translator’s note:  I have allowed myself considerable liberty in translating this paragraph because a literal translation is bland to the point of being meaningless, and I think Yang is saying something important.  The main translation difficulty is that he uses the terms zhenli/真理 and zhenxiang/真相; the first means “truth” as in an “eternal truth,” while the second means “the truth about something” that has been perhaps hidden or misunderstood, the “skinny” on something.  So his first sentence might be translated as “don’t think that there are hidden realities out there waiting for you to reveal; if you are looking for truth, you can’t unearth anything unless you already understand what truth is.”  He continues this opposition throughout the paragraph, but it gets quite awkward to translate.  In addition, some of Yang’s vocabulary – such as qiudao de jingshen求道的精神 – lit. “the spirit of seeking the Way” – simply seems out of place in a discussion of how to do journalism.  Here’s a literal translation of the paragraph by DeepL:  “I want to say to these people, don't think that the truth will wait for them to seek it, to seek the truth, and it is impossible to know the truth if you don't know the truth, because different perspectives, interests and positions will have different truths. So, first of all you have to ask for the truth, for those truths that recognize the truth, and then have the thought that you can really recognize the truth. This I think is the first thing you need to have to be a media person. Without this spirit of seeking the truth and seeking the way, what can you do if you think of being an investigative reporter and getting some sensational truths that will satisfy you for a month or two?”

[8]Translator’s note:  The basic argument here is whether the first thirty years – i.e., the Maoist years – were positive or negative.  Those who feel that the first thirty years were positive often feel that the second thirty years were a betrayal of the first, that markets are a betrayal of socialism.