In the ferment of the late 1980s, when artistic and literary revival became a political agenda, liberals within the Chinese Communist Party needed the right sort of newcomer to offer fresh ideas. The task fell to Wang Meng (王蒙), a 51 year-old writer who had spent much of his adult life through the Mao era doing physical labor in far-flung Xinjiang – penance for critical writings including his 1956 short story, “The Young Newcomer to the Organization Department,” which put a spotlight on bureaucracy and inaction within the CCP.

“Now, Chinese literary politics have come full circle,” the Los Angeles Times said as it reported the news of Wang’s appointment in June 1986. The notion of a cultural renaissance was in the air in China. Zhu Houze (朱厚泽), the country’s liberal minister of propaganda, urged young cadres to break out of the Marxist mold and learn from Western political ideas. Not long after Wang’s appointment, Zhu wrote in the People’s Daily that a wave of “culture is hot” (文化热) had swept over China. “Culture is a big issue,” he said. “We must think farther and more broadly on how to improve the cultural literacy of the whole nation. [We must] push small culture on to great culture, and with great culture promote the full development of our society, politics and economy.”

By June of 1989, China had once again gone full circle. The brutal suppression of the pro-democracy movement on June 4, 1989, spelled the end of more open cultural experimentation. And Wang Meng was among several liberal officials removed from his post in September that year.

China is now in the midst of another push for cultural greatness. Since 2019, Xi Jinping has stressed the need for “cultural confidence” (文化自信), which he has said is “a matter that concerns the fate of a nation.” Xi has also spoken of the need to safeguard “cultural security” (文化安全). More so even than in the Hu Jintao era, when “cultural soft power” was bandied about as a key component of China’s comprehensive national power (CNP), culture has been defined by the CCP in strategic terms. “Especially for a large nation, a large country, and a large political party like ours,” Xi has said, “if we are culturally passive and lose our independence, then the independence of our system and sovereignty will be taken away from us.”

In recent years, there has been a concerted push to capitalize on this new confidence, and to work toward the “building of a cultural power” (文化强国建设), including through funding for “cultural” projects. But what are the real implications for cultural activity, for the creation of artistic works and the celebration and appreciation of expressive acts, when culture becomes a matter of political urgency – more about apparatchiks than about artists?

It is against the backdrop of this most recent push for “cultural confidence” in China that we should read the latest remarks from Wang Meng, the former cultural minister, who penned an essay last month for the WeChat public account “Chang’an Street Book Club” (长安街读书会). The essay, “Cultural Treasure and Cultural Bubbles,” is a prime example of the “Spring and Autumn Style” of writing (春秋笔法), which subtly and indirectly criticizes, avoiding (or so is the idea) direct censure.

The danger with promoting a whole-society, whole-politics approach to culture, Wang warns, is that this does not give rise to cultural treasures that enrich all, but rather results in a “cultural bubble,” as corporate and political interests rush to capitalize on national priorities.

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“Cultural Treasures and Cultural Bubbles”

Wang Meng

Chang’an Street Book Club

When an entire society prioritizes and awaits the development and flourishing of culture, the result may be a positive situation that can give rise to cultural treasures (文化瑰宝) worthy of a great era and deep traditions. But the result may also be the creation of a cultural bubble by muddling through, or by resorting to histrionic fakery.

What are cultural treasures? This is a matter of what sort of path, insight, spiritual enjoyment and life wisdom we offer the audience. For example, we might interpret traditional culture in ways that align it with the achievements of modern human civilization. For example, we might [introduce] a better way of thinking about education and the future prospects of our nation — ultimately leaving behind the restrictions of a fill-in-the-blank, test score mentality. For example, [we might see] the emergence of writing and artistic achievement of true value that has the potential to go down in history. Or [we might have] theoretical innovations, scientific and technological innovations, and institutional innovations that unleash the imagination and creativity of the entire nation with the new horizons they make possible.

What is a cultural bubble?

It might, for example, appear as the staking out of [cultural] territory, trying to gain footholds, extending loans. The more people lack imagination when it comes to culture, the easier it is to financialize (财务化) and infrastructuralize (基建化) culture, making it about interests and simplistically materializing it. Everywhere [now], we see the building of cultural ecology parks (文化生态园), cultural memorial parks (文化纪念园), cultural celebrity parks (文化名人园), cultural bases (文化基地), cultural squares (文化广场) . . . . Some of these have been done well. But others have simply sought loans in the name of culture, building ostensible stages to culture on which the economy is meant to sing.

I’ve already seen quite of few of these “gardens” and “pavilions,” which claim to be about the commemoration of some cultural celebrity, but which in fact deal at most around 10 percent with this aspect in terms of area, and perhaps one percent in terms of funding. The exhibits are old and dilapidated, and no one visits them.

As so-called value-adding, extension businesses they offer restaurants and catering, accommodation, spas, massages, wedding services, chess and gambling (or gambling on the down-low), karaoke and so on. I’ve even seen how one company has entirely renovated a cultural monument, taking over control of an entire street of stores from the government.

My proposal is that inspections and clean-ups be made of existing cultural facilities everywhere, and that management and supervision be strengthened over parks, pavilions, sites, plazas and companies that fly the banner of culture by are not really about culture.

We see on the one hand that our existing cultural heritage is not being cherished, and is sometimes being destroyed, and on the other hand that false monuments are being fabricated and constructed at will.

The thinking here is to identify culture as something symbolic, and to use culture as a business card. This way of thinking isn’t exactly without reason. For trademark design, tourism advertising, investment promotion and general popularization globally of a culture that is not in the world mainstream, using [culture] as a symbol, brand or calling card may work – add the Great Wall, the Temple of Heaven, a panda bear, a cheongsam or exotic Chinese characters . . . . and then China is represented. Not exactly a bad thing. But this is only a superficial understanding, and sometimes it can become a cheapening, oversimplifying and repackaging of Chinese culture. Sometimes the distance between cultural symbolism and the cultural bubble is just a single step.

For certain popular art to invent certain cultural symbols is acceptable. But some people, influenced by such popular art, grow ever more foolish and extravagant, the result being shallowness. For example, [the idea that] the Chinese people are descendants of the dragon, and so on. In Chinese traditional culture, the dragon is a precious creature, a totem of kingship, a symbol either of spirits or of the sea and rain. Or it can be a name, or the way a feng shui master describes a mountain, and so on. But there is no evidence that the dragon has ever been ancestor or totem of the Chinese nation. 

Aside from the lyrics of the popular song “Descendants of the Dragon” (龙的传人) by Taiwanese musician Hou Dejian (侯德健), there is no other evidence. This song is full of nationalistic passion, and it is well loved by audiences on the mainland, but to take this and decide we are [the dragon’s] descendants, or that it is a totem of our people, a final word on Chinese culture, and to loudly proclaim that “dragon culture” has arrived, or to oppose it on such grounds, is incredibly foolish.

Then, during the opening ceremonies of major sporting events, we again see quite a number of serious and fabricated cultural symbols.  We see the odd spectacle of long-extinct Chinese instruments coming out en masse. This is all quite eye-catching, and something certainly up to the discretion of the great director. But we cannot seriously think that strangeness and mystery, the gigantic and the ancient represent the real Chinese culture.  As for hanging up red lanterns as a sign of favoring wives and concubines, this is even more laughable.

The word “make a show” (作秀) derives from the English word “show,” and in Hong Kong it has been translated as “flirtatiousness” (骚) [NOTE: The first character here, 秀, in Chinese means “elegant” or “graceful”]. Whether “elegant” or “flirtatious,” it is a popular and mass spectacle, something entirely different from the true meaning of cultural “performance.” The works of the genius director Zhang Yimou (张艺谋) are careful to “show” symbols of traditional Chinese culture, but though the symbols abound [in his work], this stuff consists mostly of cheap landmarks newly invented by the genius director’s imagination, and their value as real Chinese culture is limited. My apologies, but I can’t help but say this.

The problem is that our uncoordinated cultural experts can’t themselves say clearly what these “symbols” mean, and are instead pulled along by videos and popular songs, and sometimes can’t avoid making fools of themselves.

An even bigger instance of the cultural bubble is the [phenomenon of] treating culture as a mere formality, going after huge scale in cultural events, spending huge amounts of money on culture, but missing the spirit of culture entirely. Parties and banquets are held, song and dance numbers are performed, scores or hundreds of people from the arts participate, and the audience swells into the millions, with ratings extremely high, and even using various high-technology approaches. The upshot is that there are “selling points” for all – beautiful women, handsome men, stuntmen, the spectacular use of vocal chords, swimwear, martial arts, water curtains, special lighting, smoke . . . . But no consideration, no thought, no passion, no  love and hate, good and evil, no depth, no educational benefit, no spiritual nutrition, and no fullness or sublimation of feeling. This sort of culture is an empty culture, a pallid and soulless culture, a lamentable culture.

Then there are certain of our blockbusters, which though they are big, come off as puffed up and lacking any spiritual depth or intensity.

In terms of cultural content, American blockbusters do not exceed the average [cultural understanding] of their audiences. The problem is that our blockbusters often fall shorts [in terms of cultural content], falling far below the average cultural awareness of our audiences. The intellect of our audiences is rising, but the content of our blockbusters remains impaired.

As a matter of government management and cultural policy, any cultural activity that does not violate the law is permissible. We can also feel thankful and make allowances for cultural events and arts programs that are enjoyable and make audiences laugh. At the same time, what we call for and what we want are cultural treasures, not cultural bubbles. We absolutely must not continue to encourage such froth. On this point we must not vacillate in the least.

In literature too, why is it that discussions of the literary aspects of literature grow thinner and thinner, while the hype about sales and bestsellers grows louder and louder? While sales can result in enormous benefit for authors and publishers, in no place in the world does this equal literary value.

We should also be wary of certain specious, fanciful and showy claims about culture. Culture is wisdom, history, lifestyle and a spiritual pillar. Culture is not about fanciful rhetoric and lyrical recitation, about tasteless posturing. It is not about flirting with your charms. The more commonsensical principles are presented in ways people can’t understand, the more we must refuse to believe them.

Zuo Fang (左方), one of the most formative figures of China’s press in the reform era, passed away on November 3 in Guangzhou. Zuo’s legacy was closely to that of Southern Weekly (南方周末), which through the 1990s and into the new century carved out a reputation as a standard-bearer of professional journalism in China through its in-depth and investigative reporting of social and political issues. As Caixin noted in a tribute to Zuo on November 5, the newspaper has been “[known] as one of China’s most influential media outlets,” which has “actively advocated China’s market-oriented reforms and closely followed the country’s social developments.”

The fate of Southern Weekly at the outset of the Xi era is a story well known to observers of China, a sign, many would say, of a new phase of press repression following two decades during which journalists in the country made substantial, albeit always unstable, gains. The newspaper persists today, but is a shadow of its former self in terms of its influence both inside and outside China.

The newspaper’s ups and downs were long a snapshot of media transformations, and growing pains, since the 1980s. When Nanfang Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Guangdong CCP leadership, launched Southern Weekly in 1984, media reforms had just begun in China. Southern Weekly was an experiment in market-driven media. Zuo Fang’s vision was to create a new kind of publication that parted ways with the Soviet “Pravda model” – the newspaper as a propaganda tool. Zuo envisioned Southern Weekly as a platform for social enlightenment. The newspaper, he famously said, could not always tell the whole truth, but it would resolutely not tell lies.

As a tribute to Zuo and his impact on the development of journalism in China, we offer a translation of a profile of Zuo’s memoir, How Steel is Not Made (钢铁是怎样炼不成的), that appeared in Hong Kong’s Asia Weekly magazine in June 2014. The book had recently been published in Hong Kong, and Zuo was in the city to attend a launch event hosted by the China Media Project. Asia Weekly was along for a very memorable Saturday sojourn to Cheung Chau Island that included a number of Southern Weekly veterans.

Many of Zuo’s observations and concerns about China’s development seem as fresh and relevant today as they did seven years ago.

. . . . . . . . . . . .

Exclusive Interview with Southern Weekly Founder Zuo Fang

Yazhou Zhoukan
Saturday, June 28th

The day after he held an event for the release of his new book, Mr. Zuo Fang and his old friends went to Cheung Chau Island, a narrow outlying island that has a long-standing reputation in Hong Kong. But from the Central Pier all the way to the island with its fishing harbor, the bright sunshine and the azure sea scarcely attracted Zuo Fang’s attention. From beginning to end he was engaged in conversation with historian Zhu Xueqin (朱学勤) and media scholar Qian Gang (钱钢) about contemporary Chinese history, politics and the press.

On Cheung Chau Island, the only photo he volunteered to take was as he stood beside the street billboard of a Hong Kong legislator, which read, “Defend Press Freedom” (捍卫新闻自由). Zuo straightened his shirt and stood leaning on the fence, and the camera registered the light and shadow. What the camera could not record were his solemn words: “This is my Chinese dream.”

A Broken Utopia

Zuo Fang was in Hong Kong this time because of his new book. This book has a very particular name, How Steel is Not Made. At a dinner party with his old friends, Zuo Fang said in a perplexed tone, “I don’t know what sense there is in this book of mine coming out.” Upon which the essayist Yan Lieshan (鄢烈山) broke in: “The Stalinism we accepted back then was actually utopianism plus totalitarianism, and your experience has a special meaning for the future generation under a different system.” Qian Gang’s view was that, “This is a prehistory of Southern Weekly.”

How Steel is Not Made was not something Zuo Fang originally planned to publish. He believed that too many people had talked about the story of Southern Weekly. “There are things online, and I don’t have anything to add.” And there were countless contemporaries with experiences similar to his. “Leave it to the young people to put it out there,” [he had said].

It was a set of 45 questions brought to him by [the writer] Shen Hong (沈洪) that made him decide finally to make an oral history of his own life. After the book was completed, the Sanlian Bookstore expressed interest in publishing it, but Zuo Fang’s original title of the book became the biggest difficulty. Sanlian Bookstore wanted to change the title, but this title clearly had deep value for Zuo Fang, and he was determined.

“The reason I chose this title How Steel is Not Made is because I wanted to use my life experience to explain the bankruptcy of the Stalinist utopian political movement,” Zuo Fang said. And in his youth, Zuo Fang had considered the famous Soviet work How Steel is Made to be a classic.

This meant the book was difficult to publish. His former colleague at Southern Weekly, University of Hong Kong scholar Qian Gang, finally realized the book project in Hong Kong with the support of HKU’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. Zhu Xueqin, the scholar of history who has long researched the [transition] “from the Cultural Revolution to reform,” told Asia Weekly that Zuo Fang’s oral history was not only a template for the research of Southern Weekly, but “even more detailed historical material for the research of the history of the Cultural Revolution in Guangdong.”

Zuo Fang confessed: “I participated in all of the political movements after the founding of the nation. In some political movements I was a blind follower, in other political movements I was an ignorant victimizer, and in still other political movements I was an innocent victim. Utopian ideology and the doctrine of class struggle followed along with me for half my life.”

Zhu Xueqin places considerable value on this book as it covers the six years during which Zuo Fang was assigned to work in the reference materials room (资料室) after being censored for a second time after the Cultural Revolution. The end of the Cultural Revolution, and the shattering of utopian ideals, and real oppression, nothing caused Zuo Fang to give up on himself. “He arrived at a great enlightenment in that reference room,” Zhu Xueqin said.

In his book, Zuo Fang recalls in detail the metamorphosis of his thinking. During the six years he was sent to the reference room, he kept thinking about two questions: “Why was the path of the international communist movement so tortuous?”, and “Why is the road to revolution in China so tortuous?”

All of those “gray books,” which were “distributed internally for criticisms,” became Zuo Fang’s window onto the road to freedom. During these years, Zuo Fang engaged in thorough reflection, and the doctrines that had profoundly influenced him — communism, Leninism, the Soviet-style planned economy, the theory of surplus Value, the theory of class struggle, and revolutionary theory — all were subjected, one by one, to his penetrating analysis.

This “great enlightenment” not only transformed Zuo Fang from a utopian communist believer to a liberal, but also ignited his ideals about improving China (改良中国) – returning to the democratic enlightenment that had been interrupted by the revolution. It was the heart-stopping prelude that would eventually provide the inerasable tune of Southern Weekly.

Chinese-Style Newspaper Publishing

“I’m a hopeless idealist,” Zuo Fang said, raising his voice as he sat in a reclining chair in a small seaside store. He continued, “But I hate to rush.” This was change brought about after all of the political movements, and Zuo Fang poured it entirely into the Southern Weekly newspaper.

To this day, Jiang Yiping, who later served as editor-in-chief of Southern Weekly, still remembers one of Zuo’s outbursts. It was during a weekly meeting after the publication of the newspaper, and the younger journalists were furious that many stories could not be published. “They were very vehement, saying that instead of this, there was no need to fear that the newspaper would be beheaded, because it was like cutting leeks anyway, and there was one crop after another,” Jiang Yiping recalled to Asia Weekly.

“But Old Zuo was really angry, and he said, this newspaper is not just our own. Every one of us has a responsibility to treasure this newspaper,” Jiang Yiping said. “Old Zuo’s concern was with how to maintain hold of the limits, so that we could speak what we wanted to speak, but at the same time continue to exist.”

From the very beginning, Zuo Fang had a precise positioning for Southern Weekly: “Enlightenment is the soul of Southern Weekly, and the mission of Southern Weekly is to wave the flag for reform and opening.” This strategy allowed the newspaper to survive successive storms and live up to its mission.

In 1989 Southern Weekly exploded internally, but through Zuo Fang’s insistence “not a single word or picture was published.” When an American journalist interviewed Zuo Fang, he was incredulous. Zuo Fang showed him back issues of the newspaper, which surprised the reporter and his preconceived notions about Southern Weekly.

“I don’t advocate behavior that is too radical. Especially after the two marches, the students had originally resumed classes. But then there was the hunger strike action. According to my judgment, there were some extreme members who in order to prevent the students from resuming classes who actually acted in a way that was like hijacking.  While I understood them, having been young myself, I did not agree with this approach.”

After Zuo Fang saw the difference between Zhao Ziyang’s statement at the ADB annual meeting and the official editorial in the People’s Daily, he judged, based on his understanding of Chinese politics, that the student movement would definitely end tragically. “As far as I understood it, Deng Xiaoping’s character being what it was, he would never back off. What Zhao Ziyang proposed, he could never accept. Well then, the student movement could only end in tragedy. I didn’t want Southern Weekly to be martyred for a student movement that was bound to fail,” Zuo Fang told Asia Weekly.

After that point, China’s politics tightened as never before, and the openness of the 1980s vanished. All at once the circulation of Southern Weekly was cut in half from 400,000 copies. At a time when the whole country was in a state of silence, Zuo proposed his own strategy to his colleagues, and he recalled his three-act play in his book How Steel is Not Made his “three play” strategy – “play with human nature, play with words, play with page layouts” (玩人性, 玩文字, 玩版面).

This allowed Southern Weekly to quickly emerge from the nadir in the market to become a leader on the national media scene. Many years later, Zhang Xiangchun (张向春), the senior art editor who presided over the design and layout of Southern Weekly, recalled to Asia Weekly: “At that time, my design and layout was completely free of rules and restrictions, and Old Zuo fully supported me. Southern Weekly was a million plus circulation newspaper, and from our million plus circulation you could see how confident we were at the time.”

After Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour,” the latitude allowed to Southern Weekly slowly liberalized, and Zuo Fang’s strategy was to “let sensitive people write non-sensitive articles, and non-sensitive people write sensitive articles.” At that time, Southern Weekly often reported on Hu Jiwei (胡绩伟), who was the editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily and proposed that “the People’s Daily is the people’s newspaper” (人民的报纸) and worked to promote the drafting of a press law for China.  At that time, this newspaper figure was a staunch supporter of Zhao Ziyang and opposed the crackdown. Afterward, he was removed from all positions and put on probation for two years, a sensitive word for the Chinese regime.

“He was a most sensitive figure, but when I was chatting with Hu Jiwei at his home it didn’t matter what day, he was always a leader among us journalists. But if sensitive people write sensitive articles that those at the top have an eye on, this poses a major risk to the newspaper. But I wanted Hu Jiwei to be seen in Southern Weekly,” Zuo Fang told Asia Weekly.

So with his “ulterior motives,” Zuo Fang published [a chronicle” of Hu Jiwei’s travels in Sichuan and other nostalgic articles in Southern Weekly, and even published an article on how Hu Jiwei had married his wife. “Hu Jiwei said he took a rich woman, and I published that. How would this rich woman marry Hu Jiwei?”

Although this was a gossip story that was not at all sensitive, the appearance of Hu Jiwei in the newspaper could draw notice from readers across the country. For sensitive issues, meanwhile, he chose to find young, lesser-known scholars to write about these. “Superiors just skipped over these,” [said Zuo Fang]. “But anyhow what needed saying was all said.”

Already retired in 1994, after he returned to work for Southern Weekly, Zuo Fang still made regular “risk assessments” for the newspaper. At that time, the frontpage headlines of Southern Weekly were mostly all “major cases” of sensitivity that built up the circulation and reputation of Southern Weekly, but caused unease for Zuo Fang: “I felt things had to change, but I couldn’t figure out clearly how to change, so I called everyone together to discuss it.”

This meeting in 1998 was one of the few times that Zuo Fang grew angry again. “Many young journalists like major stories, and they disapproved. The day before [the meeting] they drank a lot, and at the meeting the next day many of them dragged in slowly, more than half an hour late,” Zuo Fang recalled. Zuo Fang had a background in the military, and Qian Gang had a vivid memory of his fury at the time. “He said, fortunately I am not the editor-in-chief right now, otherwise I would drag a few of you out and shoot you myself!”

This was Zuo Fang’s last year working at Southern Weekly as a retired employee, and not long after Zuo Fang would become a mere spectator, watching Southern Weekly enter another era. Before this, Zuo Fang had already built two teams at Southern Weekly with his own hands.

A Two-Team Jigsaw Puzzle

Jiang Yiping had been working at the Nanfang Daily Group [the publisher of Southern Weekly] for several years before she took charge of Southern Weekly, which was then the most envied in the whole group. “It was a place many people wanted to get into, but this was really hard.”

When Jiang Yiping was promoted to lead the [group’s] committee, making her responsible for Southern Weekly, she didn’t fell that she was there as a leader. “I was there to follow Old Zuo and learn. I revered him from afar, because I knew he had founded Southern Weekly.”

At that time, Zuo Fang, who had returned to the job [from retirement], had to lead two teams, one for editorial and one for operations, and he focused on advertising operations. Jiang Yiping was impressed by Zuo Fang’s business acumen: “He had a special sense of the market.”

She still remembers Zuo Fang’s vivid description of market-oriented media — the “three wheels” theory, in which “the front wheel is editorial, the left [rear] wheel and the right [rear] wheel circulation and advertising, with editorial pulling circulation along, and circulation pulling advertising along. In the early 90s there were not many newspapers that could express their business philosophy in this way.”\

Zuo Fang was adept at conveying the values of Southern Weekly to the management team, and everyone on the team soon became dedicated disseminators of the Southern Weekly brand. As Jiang Yiping recalled to Asia Weekly: “They were able to tell Southern Weekly‘s customers very accurately what kind of newspaper Southern Weekly was. It was like they were brainwashed by Old Zuo. And as the idea was passed along to customers, they too identified with these values.”

In the era when the newspaper had just undergone market-oriented reforms, the importance of the management team went without saying, and Zuo Fang always paid his managers quite well, something one of Southern Weekly‘s deputy editors was quite upset about at one point. “Why do you pay your managers such high salaries?” [they asked. Zuo Fang responded nonchalantly: “No problem, you can also come over to the business side.” This [attitude] meant that Zuo Fang’s “two rear wheels” spun very fast.

And at the same time there was the other team, which Zuo Fang also did not neglect. He found a partner for Jiang Yiping [on the editorial side, and Southern Weekly‘s senior team was realized.

He dedicates one chapter in his new book How Steel is Not Made, called “Three Invitations for Qian Gang” (三请钱钢), to the recollection of [what he calls] three humble visits to a thatched cottage [a reference to a famous episode in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, referring here to Zuo calling on Qian Gang to draw him to the paper]. But Qian Gang recalls an episode not recorded in the book.

At that time, Qian Gang worked for the CCTV news investigation program “News Probe” as a chief planner, and he had long had Southern Weekly in his sights. Qian Gang remembers that the newspaper’s slogan at the time was, “A Northern Expedition in Newspaper Publishing” (报业的北伐). He remembers that at the time Southern Weekly could print as many as 100,000 copies in Beijing alone. The year before Qian Gang arrived at CCTV, Zuo Fang had already invited him once to join [the newspaper], making what Qian Gang felt was a prophetic statement.

“He said to me, this knife that is Southern Weekly must be sharpened, and whose head should it remove in the future? It should be directed at crony capitalism. That’s incredible, that in 1994 this was already his thinking. He had already seen how China would change,” Qian Gang recalled.

Later Qian Gang was transferred to CCTV, which made Zuo Fang’s invitation even more difficult. “I was treated very well by everyone in CCTV, and I was also the older brother, so this little environment was great. Actually, I didn’t want to leave CCTV,” [Qian Gang said]. But after each issue of the newspaper, Jiang Yiping would ask Qian Gang, still at CCTV, to comment on the issue. Zuo Fang would also continue to invite Qian Gang, until finally he employed a small “deception” to ensure Qian Gang joined [the paper].

“One time, out was out filming with my film crew, and on the way to the filming, I received a call from Zuo Fang. His voice seemed old and frail. He said to me, Qian Gang, I recently injured my leg. I’m bedridden and can’t come down. I just want to say one thing. Southern Weekly is a good opportunity. You should come, and do this newspaper together with Jiang Yiping.”

“It was the feeling I had from the sound in his voice that really moved me. I said, OK, I’ll go, I’ll go to Southern Weekly. Only later did I learn that he was tricking me. He hadn’t been injured at all. This was just a ploy, tricking me into going and joining Jiang Yiping,” Qian Gang recalled.

This champion jigsaw puzzle readied Southern Weekly for a period of flourishing, but the retired editor-in-chief, having returned to the paper, still had no real position. The employees just called him Old Zuo, or sometimes Mr. Zuo. Sometimes, when he was talking business with advertisers, Yan Lishan over in the editorial department thought he was too noisy. “So when we held editorial meetings we would kindly ask him to find another small room.”

Zuo Fang never cared about such things [as titles], and he hated all bureaucratic forms of address. But there was one thing that always nagged him. And what happened later confirmed to a great extent Zuo Fang’s concerns.

The Problem of the Layout Change

[Editor’s Note: This section refers to the changes that occurred at Southern Weekly followed the January 2013 “Southern Weekly Incident.”]

In 1998, Zuo Fang left Southern Weekly for good after an order against rehiring him was issued. Soon after, in 2001, Jiang Yiping and Qian Gang were also ordered to leave Southern Weekly. Zuo Fang said that after 2001, Southern Weekly entered a new era.

At that time, Southern Weekly began to change its layout, something that still haunts Zuo Fang, who values strategy. Previously, according to Zuo Fang’s plan, Southern Weekly was regarded as supplemental to Nanfang Daily [the official Guangdong paper]. “I don’t care what sort of meetings you are holding. July 1. October 1. I don’t care what meetings you’re holding. July 1. Or October 1. Because there is already a Nanfang Daily. I am a supplement, and I will pursue the role of being close to the readers and enlightening [others].”

“But young people considered Southern Weekly to be irregular, because it was a compilation of special topical pages. They said that as a paper with over a million circulation, it should be a weekly newspaper bringing together current affairs, the economy, society and culture.”

Zuo Fang’s concern is not only about his dissatisfaction with the changes he’s seen in “my own children.” He spoke especially to Asia Weekly about the restrictions of China’s political system. “I’m not against running a weekly newspaper. I also appreciate that they are doing well now, that they are developing. But you can create a new one. You don’t need to change Southern Weekly. Don’t change it. Because as long as [the question of] China’s political system has not been resolved, and the question of space for journalism has not been resolved, a newspaper like South Weekly should exist. I positioned South Weekly as a compilation of topical columns and special issues, so that we can keep a certain distance from politics, which may be more beneficial to China’s progress.”

“To define it now as a special edition on politics, frankly speaking, it’s very difficult to do without speaking falsehoods, and without speaking empty words. I led Southern Weekly, and I dare say I never told a lie, I never spoke an empty word. Today’s Southern Weekly, they wouldn’t dare say such a thing. There’s no way,” said Zuo Fang.

Jiang Yiping shares Zuo Fang’s concern, telling Asia Weekly, “Old Zuo isn’t rejecting it, but he believes that as a newspaper with the mission of enlightenment, [Southern Weekly] could continue on. It’s already effectively applied concepts of running a newspaper that have been proven in the marketplace. Why can’t that be taken further?”

“Later young people felt that Southern Weekly was a standard news broadsheet, and they’ve seen a lot of foreign newspapers, economic, lifestyle and entertainment publications. . . . So they also want these things. It should be said that after 2000, China’s newspaper industry was strongly influenced by Western newspapers.”

“But the vitality before was that if politics tightened, I could lean a little more towards entertainment, and once things relaxed, I could highlight the political side more. Later on, with various different templates set up, this is a bit like confining yourself to circles drawn on the ground, and if you dance in them you’re not free,” Jiang Yiping said.

Revamping the format learning from Western journalism of course can make the paper more professional and atmospheric. But the thing Zuo Fang worried about kept happening, and the most recent storm was the Southern Weekly New Year’s Greeting Incident of early 2013.

Since then, staff at Southern Weekly have been leaving in droves, and as many people in the newspaper industry grow pessimistic, Zuo Fang has a slightly different view.

No Pessimism for Southern Weekly

After all the turmoil that followed the Southern Weekly New Year’s Greeting Incident in early 2013, Yan Lieshan said Southern Weekly New Year’s dedication event in early 2013, Yan Lishan said sorrowfully: “It doesn’t matter what Southern Weekly is like in the future. For 30 years, Southern Weekly represented the yearnings of the people. So many people with journalistic ideals have come through. This is where it’s strength lies.”

But Zuo Fang doesn’t feel this way. He remembers Southern Weekly after 1989 as a comparison: “I think its normal for a newspaper sometimes to sink and then rise. When I was at Southern Weekly, we once dropped from 400,000 copies to 200,000 copies, and at the time I kept things going by playing the game. Because the political situation in China is sometimes tight, sometimes loose, so it’s nothing for newspapers to have their ups and downs.”

His confidence comes from the newcomers at Southern Weekly, who have come to him in admiration. These new journalists told Zuo Fang that they were going into journalism to push for Southern Weekly‘s future. “Southern Weekly is not something you can just change by sending a leader there. You can control it, but its ideas, these are something you cannot change.”

Meanwhile, the rules set when Zuo was in charge remain in place. One recently arrived leader ordered the editor to publish a piece written by his friend in Southern Weekly, asking that it appear in the next issue. But the editor in charge of the page wrote on the article instead: “This article is not suitable. Return it.”

The angry leader approached the editor, who told him, “Old Zuo set the rules, ‘prioritize the paper, not the money; prioritize the article, not the person.’ While a leader coming down from Nanfang Daily does have the right to kill an article, they do not have the right to order one to be published. This rule has not been scrapped.”

Zuo Fang’s even greater confidence comes from the power of the market. He told Asia Weekly: “In the marketplace, we have already established our own group of readers. They accept this concept of publishing a newspaper, and that’s why they buy Southern Weekly. If you want to change entirely, this means throwing out your market. Southern Weekly not only creates a great deal of revenue every year for the Nanfang Daily Group, but also has huge brand power.

After the Southern Weekly Incident of 2013, most of Southern Weekly’s core journalists and editors resigned and left, but Zuo Fang believes this is a good thing. “Lin Chufang (a famous mainland journalist and current editor of IRead magazine, formerly at Southern Weekly) said to me that after the departures from Southern Weekly nearly half of the journalists now doing market-oriented media are people who came from Southern Weekly. When I heard that I was really happy. If they take the concept of Southern Weekly outside, that means promoting social reform.”

“China’s road to modernization is still long, and there is no reason for Southern Weekly to abandon its mission.” And for now, Zuo Fang hopes that fresh blood continuing to flow into Southern Weekly, and a new group of young people being influenced by Southern Weekly, will help maintain and increase momentum.

Southern Dreams

As the sun sets on Cheung Chau Island, Zhu Xueqin tells Zuo Fang a story about how Taiwanese view communism. “Taiwanese are afraid, and say, ‘Communists don’t recognize their own relatives.’ Old Zuo did you ever have that feeling in the 1950s?”

Zuo Fang nods and muses. He tells a story about his mother. “When I was 15 or 16, I had to join the army to fight against the United States and aid North Korea. My mother was widowed in her 30s and raised me on her own. She didn’t agree about me going, which I now think is understandable. At the time I had a huge fight with her and broke off our relationship.””If I had really made it to North Korea, there is an eight-to-nine out of ten chance that I I would have perished there. My mother worked so hard raising a child, and how hard would the rest of her life have been. So when my mother died, and when her body was pushed out at the memorial service, I suddenly couldn’t control myself and knelt down and cried all at once, blocking the way. This was the only time in my life that I took a knee . . . . “

This is a story Zuo Fang has told many times before, and he continued in a solemn tone: “So many died, in what was gained? Look at how North Korea is now!” A thorough reflection on Stalinism is the biggest reason why he decided to write his thoughts on the current situation today in the last chapter of How Steel is Not Made.

In the last chapter of the book, Zuo Fang elaborates his thoughts on China’s future: “It is now at a critical moment . . . . reform through the decade if it succeeds, it will achieve a new generation of great people, but if it fails reform and opening will go into a total regression, and we will have a dark country ruled by police and secret agents, leading to a new round of revolution. How it will end is something only history can answer.”

Echoing Mao Zedong before him, Xi Jinping regularly stresses the Party’s domination of all aspects of life. “East, west, south, north and center, Party, government, military, society and education—the Party rules all,” as he has said. The latest target of this drive to domination is “fandom culture,” or fanquan wenhua, which refers to online youth communities that coalesce around shared obsessions with celebrity idols. According to the Cyberspace Administration of China, “toxic idol worship” threatens to poison the minds of future generations. Last month, a newspaper published by the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department warned that internet addiction among teenagers “results in health risks that cannot be ignored.”  

This effort to control fandom culture comes against the backdrop of a crackdown on youth entertainment in China, including harsh restrictions on online gaming. But all this talk of rescuing Chinese youth from their own appetites is in fact a smokescreen for a far more serious purpose. Closer scrutiny of China’s recent internet crackdown suggests these moves are part of a broader effort to reassert the Party’s control over the internet as a key battleground for political and ideological security. The struggle, which touches on the future of the regime, is for the hearts and minds of China’s Generation Z. For policymakers considering how to respond to China’s crackdown on online freedoms, it is vital to understand the full scope of its efforts to consolidate power, which go far beyond just the tech industry to include online culture.  

In the eyes of the Party, the country’s hitherto vibrant internet and entertainment sector is a thing to be tamed, and the official backlash facing fandom culture in recent weeks is one of the clearest examples of how even apparently benign aspects of the internet can run afoul of a leadership obsessed with control. Just as the Xi regime has sought to bring the country’s technology companies to heel, it also seeks to control online culture more deeply, and this does not bode well for the long-term development and vibrancy of China’s internet sector. 

From stargazing to collective action 

For many young people in China, particularly those born after the 1990s, fandom culture—which can be traced back to the idol worship of the 1980s and 1990s—has offered a rare avenue for identity formation and community building in a society where associations of all kinds are subject to strict government control. As networked and often highly organized communities of fans rallying around their beloved idols, “fandoms” have enabled close parasocial interactions in which fans feel a kind of intimacy with the object of their shared interest, as well as a sense of active participation that can be empowering and identity forming.  

Examples of fandom culture include the hit show “Idol Producer,” which launched in January 2018 on the online video platform iQiyi and empowered fans to select and promote their favored contestants from among 100 aspiring performers. The ultimate goal of the program was to select nine performers to form a brand-new male idol group. As fans organized to promote their favored idols through social media platforms, their interactions were fueled by Gen Z-focused services like live-streaming and live commerce.  

Fandoms have become big business in China. A report published by iResearch Consulting Group put the market value of the fan economy in China at close to $620 billion in 2019 and estimated that the fan economy would grow a further 50 percent by 2023. 

It would be easy to dismiss fandoms as shallow and celebrity-obsessed, but the highly organized online communities forming around China’s fandoms have already demonstrated their potential for both social activism and political organization. Perhaps the most prominent example of online fandom communities’ potential for political expression came in 2016, when the so-called “Diba expedition” saw thousands of highly organized cyber-nationalists, mostly “fan girls,” mob the Facebook account of Taiwan’s newly elected leader, Tsai Ing-wen.  

Fandoms and their capacity for collective action were also one of the largely untold stories of China’s fight against the COVID-19 epidemic in its early stage. In January 2020, as it became clear that an epidemic had emerged in Wuhan and surrounding areas, the government response was far too slow in many key areas, including the provision of protective equipment. By contrast, the networks already formed within fandom culture—the same that allowed mobilization in support of chosen idols—enabled the rapid marshalling of resources. On Jan. 21, 2020, one day after China confirmed human transmission of COVID-19, the fan network of Zhu Yilong, a young actor originally from the city of Wuhan, mobilized funds to purchase more than 200,000 protective masks. These and other supplies were delivered to Wuhan within 24 hours, offering much-needed support for medical personnel and others on the front lines. The aid offered by the Zhu Yilong network is just one of many examples of how online groups provided a crucial means of support amid a rapidly unfolding crisis.  

Perhaps more worrying for the CCP has been their potential for mobilization on a global scale. Within 10 days of China’s formal acknowledgement of the coronavirus outbreak in January 2020, a group of 27 fandoms from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan known as the “666 Alliance,” had sourced nearly half a million-yuan worth of medical supplies for use in Wuhan. As one Chinese scholar wrote of fandoms in 2020: “They are a huge population, are well-organized, and have a clear division of labor, giving them an explosive power many would find astonishing.”  

Guiding Gen Z 

The Chinese leadership understands the immense impact youth movements have had in the country’s political past—from the May Fourth Movement at the start of the 20^th century, to the chaos wrought by Mao’s Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 70s, to the large-scale pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. It may seem a stretch to compare such historical upheavals to the myriad iterations of online youth culture in China today. But it is important to recall that the most enduring lesson Party leaders took away in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Massacre was the imperative of mastering the social zeitgeist, ensuring especially that the thoughts and ideas driving China’s youth can be directed through effective controls on culture and the media. As China’s reform-minded premier, Zhao Ziyang, was shoved aside in the wake of the massacre, and as Jiang Zemin assumed leadership of the Party, the project of ensuring the control of news and ideology to preserve regime stability was given a new catchphrase: “guidance of public opinion.” The phrase came directly from language in the Party’s assessment, published in the journal China Comment, of Premier Zhao’s failings of that spring.  

Meeting with propaganda leaders in May 1989, as pro-democracy demonstrations continued to grab international attention, Zhao had urged the officials to open things up a bit. “Make the news a bit more open. There’s no big danger in that,” he said. “By facing the wishes of the people, by facing the tide of global progress, we can only make things better.” The consensus from the start of the Jiang era was that Zhao’s tolerant approach had “guided matters in the direction of chaos,” hence the phrase that came to dominate the project of media and internet control for decades to come.  

The CAC’s Aug. 27 notice on fandom communities—“Notice on the Further Strengthening of the Management of ‘Fandom Chaos’”—describes the political objectives driving this clean-up of “fandom chaos.” The notice says that “all regions must further improve their political stance,” or zhengzhi zhanwei, which is a term that came to prominence in 2018 to signal allegiance to Xi Jinping and the CCP. The term is a distillation of what is known as the “Four Consciousnesses,” which is fundamentally about Xi Jinping’s “core” status. Crucially, the notice urges government authorities in all regions of the country to govern “fandom chaos” in order to “preserve online political security and ideological security and create a clear online space.” This spells out far more clearly—by the standards of China’s often obscure political rhetoric, anyway—the urgency of controlling fandom culture in order to maintain the stability of the regime. There is also explicit language about the need for platforms that host fandom activity to take on a “guiding responsibility,” a subtle yet unmistakable reference to the aforementioned media control phrase and the events of 1989.  

China’s leadership has been pushing insistently for better “guidance” of fandom culture since at least the second half of 2020. Fandoms came under much greater official scrutiny from February to July of 2020 following an online controversy centering on Xiao Zhan, an actor and internet idol. When AO3, a fan fiction site outside China played host to an overtly homoerotic work of fan fiction about Xiao and a former co-star, some of Xiao’s millions of fans were enraged. They retaliated by reporting the fan site to government authorities, who answered with a wholesale blocking of the site from inside China. This prompted bitter reprisals against Xiao Zhan fans, including name-calling and doxing, from other fandoms dedicated to AO3. Xiao quickly became a toxic figure for major brands like Cartier and Estée Lauder, who backed out of endorsement deals. 

The online storm around Xiao Zhan became known as the “227 Incident” (referring to the date it began, Feb. 27) and brought a wave of official criticism in the Party-state media. One official newspaper wrote via its news app in early May 2020 that fandom culture is a “highly-organized” threat to ideological security. The role of fandoms in “self-identity construction” had caused them to “constantly intrude upon or subsume other ideologies to form a fierce and aggressive and highly-organized machine.” Fandoms’ “potential social influence in broader arenas” cannot “be underestimated,” the paper warned. Following an initial apology in March, Xiao Zhan again issued a mea culpa in July 2020, using the Party’s own language of ideological control: “I do have a duty to guide correctly and to actively advocate [for the correct values].”  

By July 2020, the stage was set for this year’s curbs on fandom culture as part of a much larger crackdown on China’s internet. From that point on, “fandom chaos” was a regular topic in the official media. A headline that month in Guangdong’s official Nanfang Daily read: “Relevant Departments Focus on ‘Fandom’ Chaos: Media and Celebrities Must Properly Carry Out Guidance of Public Opinion.” 

Idolizing the general secretary 

Attacks on fandom culture and online entertainment in China’s state media this year have continued to dwell on the impact on the health and well-being of young people and on the damage supposedly done to the country’s “online ecology.” But accepting this official rationalization for the crackdown on fandoms requires that we turn a blind eye to the most defining trend in Chinese domestic politics today—namely, the Party’s push to build a culture of loyalty, and even infatuation, around the person of Xi Jinping. Celebrity worship may be on the way out in China. But strongman worship is the order of the day. By cracking down on fandoms, the Party seeks to ensure that the vigor of celebrity worship is re-directed toward Xi Jinping himself, as the embodiment of Chinese ethics and values.  

Despite all the chatter in the official state media about the “chaos” of fandoms, the push to make China’s internet giants to give back, the need to safeguard data privacy and official morality, and so on, the most fundamental driver behind wave after wave of new internet restrictions this year has been far more basic: the need for the Chinese Communist Party and its charismatic leader to shore up the foundation for political and ideological stability. On Aug. 24, just three days before the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee issued its new regulations on fandom culture, China’s Ministry of Education announced that the study of Xi Jinping’s personal governing concept will be incorporated into the official education curriculum, helping China’s youth “build faith in Marxism.” Primary school children in China—now restricted to their two hours of online gaming per week—will now also be obligated to study not just the governing concepts of Xi Jinping, but to study and internalize the stories of Xi’s life and deeds. The country’s leaders may decry a commercial internet culture in which everyone is “striving for eyeballs.” But the fundamental point here is that the Party too is striving for eyeballs. And its future, it knows, will depend on China’s obsessed youth.  

This article previously appeared at Brookings TechStream, and is republished here with permission.