68 nlr 6prefaceWang Hui, chief editor of China’s leading intellectual monthly Dushu (‘Reading’), was born in 1959 in the city of Yangzhou, where he graduated from the Teachers’ College before moving to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing in 1985. There, after completing his doctoral work, he became a research fellow in its Institute of Literature. After the events of 1989 he was sent to the mountainous countryside of Sha’anxi on the borders of Henan and Hubei, one of the poorest regions in China, for a year. Returning to his post in Beijing in late 1990, he published his fi rst book Revolt against Despair—Lu Xun and his World. This study of the central fi gure in modern Chinese literature was widely greeted for its break with the standard inter-pretations of Lu Xun, whether inspired by ‘progressive’ or ‘conservative’ orthodoxies. Wang Hui’s portrait of Lu Xun stressed his debts to the thought of Stirner and Nietzsche, and the paradoxes of his support for the cause of a social revolution which would yet have to be opposed, once it was victorious, in the spirit of Stirner’s radically asocial values.Three years later, a collection of essays on the May Fourth movement and its echoes in Chinese history, entitled No Room for Hesitation in a Void, confi rmed Wang Hui’s reputation as one of the most independent minds to appear in the nineties. When the editorship of Dushu fell vacant in 1996, he was picked to take over the journal. A year later, his Self-Selected Essays proved an infl uential collection for younger intellectuals in the PRC. By this time, he had begun challenging what had become mainstream opinions among the Chinese intelligentsia, not to speak of offi cial doctrines, about the present and future of the country. A central essay, ‘Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, was published abroad in Social Text in the summer of 1998. His collected writings on the theme of ‘modern-ization’ have since appeared under the title Rekindling Frozen Fire (1999). The sharp social criticism contained in these unsettled the ranks of marketeers, amidst indignant complaints that China is now faced with the phenomenon of a ‘New Left’. By the spring of 2000 this term had acquired general currency, as controversies within the Chinese intelligentsia about the direction the coun-try should take assumed a vehemence not seen since the interwar years. Wang Hui has been at the centre of this storm, in the course of which he has just published a two-volume study of The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought.new left review 6 nov dec 2000 69wang huiFIRE AT THE CASTLE GATEWhat is the role of Dushu in Chinese intellectual life, and how do you con-ceive your position in it as editor?The first issue of Dushu was published in April 1979. Its leading article was entitled ‘No Forbidden Zone in Reading’, and you could say that has been the spirit of the journal from the beginning. This is how we do our editorial job today, and we will never change it in the future. The fi rst editor of Dushu came from the Commercial Publishing House in Beijing, historically the most important imprint in modern China. A year later, Fan Yong—a pro-gressive publisher with close links to the intellectual world since the forties—took over. I think he was the most signifi cant fi gure in the his-tory of the journal, making it a key forum for new ideas and debates in the eighties. From 1979 to 1984, most of these were raised by an older generation of scholars or open-minded offi cial intellectuals, like Li Honglin, Wang Ruoshi and others. It was they, for example, who took up the issue of the relations between Marxism and humanism. Then around 1985 a younger levy of intellectuals took centre stage. Among the most active were the Editorial Committee of Culture: China and The World, a series of translations aiming to introduce classics of modern thought from abroad, most of them produced by the Sanlian Press, which is also the publisher of Dushu. The journal ran many reviews of these books, which attracted a lot of attention from university stu-dents, graduates and fl edgling intellectuals. There was an enthusiastic reception of modern Western philosophy, social theory and economic thought. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Cassirer, Marcuse, Sartre, Freud, not to speak of modernization theory and neo-classical economics were eagerly canvassed in the articles of the time. There was some resistance to all this, since the style in which these notices were written was often criti-cized as too diffi cult or obscure. Looking back, one can see that this70 nlr 6younger generation was more interested in introducing new theories, without any necessary political bearing, whereas the older generation had a much closer relation to politics. In this phase Dushu was not a radi-cal journal—it was relatively detached from the political ferment of the late eighties. But an intellectual space for further discussion was created, which was not without signifi cance in 1989.That year saw a turning point. Whereas there was a high turnover of editors in other periodicals by late 1989, there was no change at Dushu, whose chief editor Shen Changwen carried on till 1996. This was partly just because the journal had played little direct political role in the preceding years. But in the general atmosphere of conservatism and dogmatism after 1989, Dushu now stood out as more open-minded. Of course there were pressures on the journal, and after Deng Xiaoping’s visit to southern China in 1992, a wave of consumerism and commer-cialization swept the country. In these conditions, Shen shifted editorial policy towards articles that were easier to read, with less academic discus-sions, to boost sales. Circulation rose from 50,000 to over 80,000 in fi ve or six years, but while the journal became more popular, it was also criti-cized for failing to refl ect the development of intellectual research in the country. Actually, it was still introducing new themes like Orientalism or post-colonialism, and continued to be widely viewed as a symbol of elite culture. But the changes in Dushu in the early nineties did mark a new tension between popular culture and high culture in China.In 1996 I was invited to be a chief editor—joined a year later by my col-league Huang Ping. Since then, our policy has been to keep a readable style for the journal, but to move it away from consumerist