(Chinese Version)

1

Yesterday, I was invited by a Miss Pretty to a dinner.
Miss Pretty has not only a good look, but also rich experience: she used to work in an investment bank but hopped to a media agency later on, and is currently working for a high-level executive in the finance industry. (Personally, I am quite interested in what drove her to hop from the lucrative investment bank to the bitter media agency.)

Aside from her exceptional career profile, Miss Pretty  also loves reading books and becomes quite literary sometimes. When she asks people out for dinner in Shanghai, she prefers to book restaurants located in the remote Xuhui region of Puxi District, so that her guests will have to walk across the winding lanes and alleys of old Shanghai to find the restaurants, since there are no parking lots around.

Having heard of her “distinct” taste long ago, I didn’t bother to drive my car. Once I was invited by Lin Chufang from TouTiao, but when I found no parking lots around the restaurant, I stood him up and headed back home. I dare to stand my friend “Old Lin” up, but how should I dare to stand a pretty and literary lady?

2

Besides me and Miss Pretty, a lady and a gentleman were also at the dinner. Although our topics varied, they were all inter-connected since they all had something to do with liberal arts and literature.

For example, both the lady and the gentleman agreed that an increasingly number of people were beginning to read books, whether paper or electric ones, but they were in disagreement over what kind of books that most people were reading.

By the way, I have always believed that most Chinese people read for utilitarian purposes. Bestsellers here in China must either have something to do with hot-spot concepts such as Internet+ and Internet thinking, or be written by successful businessmen. There are always a huge crowd of listeners to these people no matter what bullshit they are talking about. At the same time, these people are also becoming increasingly fond of voicing their opinions, if not showing up their faces, and speaking for their companies.

When Miss Pretty asked my opinion on Wu Xiaobo and Qin Shuo’s business adventures, I told her that I though highly of them.

These years, entrepreneurs are increasingly fond of pretending to be thinkers in today’s China. In a utilitarian society, ideas of successful entrepreneurs, instead of thinkers, seem to be more trustworthy and useful.

The other years, after his project InfoHighWay failed, Zhang Shuxin compiled a series of books on Internet thinking. Personally, I regard these books, written by some of the best thinkers in Chinese Internet industry, as the best ones on Internet thinking in China, yet few people seem to know the series. Brilliant and eye-opening as they are, these books can never help readers make a fortune overnight, so why should readers bother to read them?

That’s why I feel so glad to see Wu Xiaobo and Qin Shuo, two of the best thinkers in the Chinese Internet industry, launched their own business adventures and received lots of media coverage. Yet, Chinese society is still too utilitarian and impatient, and I really look forward to seeing more real thinkers launch their business adventures and earn due respect by Chinese society.

I know quite well CheersPublishing, a leading private-owned publishing company in China. It is well known that most of CheersPublishing’s books are translated from other languages, yet somehow I found that most of CheersPublishing’s books were also written by college professors. College professors’ books may sound pretty boring in China, but how should CheersPublishing dare to publish these books? As a matter of fact, CheersPublishing only published bestsellers on Amazon, so if CheersPublishing are publishing books mainly written by college professors, then these books must be very popular in the US. In this case, thinkers seem to be more respected in the US than here in China.

3

Of course, you can find books on success and fortune both in American and Chinese airports, but when you take a closer look, you may find that other kinds of books, like literature, history books, can also be found. In the tiny airport bookstores, only popular books are sold. So I advise anyone that is interested in another country to go and drop by an airport bookstore of that country for half an hour, and you may find a lot about what’s popular in that country and what values are held high there.

Why are Chinese airport bookstores filled with books on success and fortune? Why are Chinese so obsessed with making money?

4

Chinese society is highly secular and almost free of religions. In China, there is nothing wrong with making money and getting rich, but it is common practice for people to make up lies that help explain their fortune.

American society is also secular but the dominant religion is encouraging everyone to make as much money as one can, as is illustrated by Webber in his well-known book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”.

Miss Pretty also regarded Vietnam as a promising market and suggested that Vietnamese society was secular, Vietnamese were hard-working, and corruption was not too widespread in Vietnamese government. Well, I agree with her on this.

Besides, she thought that people of different financial backgrounds read different kinds of books. I do admit the importance of one’s financial background, yet I agree with James Kelly’s arguments saying that “cultural and financial backgrounds are equally important when deciding a person’s preferences”.

5

I used to take guided tours around the US a lot, but this summer, I decided to do something different, so I rent a car and drove across the US. During the journey, I found many interesting phenomenon. For example, trucks are always so well-maintained in the US that they seemed to be just bought in the US. In China, unfortunately, trucks are normally ill-maintained and no driver cared if the truck is clean or not.

A Chinese American explained to me that this had something to do with the distinct car culture in the US. American truck drivers just loved dressing up their trucks. As far as I know, Chinese truck drivers seem to like their trucks also but they are so busy delivering goods and making money that they have no time doing such stuff. While American blue-collar workers seem to be pretty satisfied with their jobs, Chinese blue-collar workers seldom laugh. Once I got in to a shopping mall and asked a salesperson to grab a pair of sunglasses for me, he was wearing earphones and murmuring tones at that moment and gave me the pair of glasses while dancing to the music and wiggling his bottom.

6

Recently, the word “craftsmen” suddenly became popular in China. Personally, I believe those who promoted themselves as craftsmen are actually businessmen, since craftsmen never aim to maximize their profits with their products, but always devoted fully into their products and figured out the best way to “craft” the best product they could. Luo Yonghao, the founder of Smartisan, may want to be a good craftsman, but as long as he needs investment, he’ll have to become a good businessman first.

Craftsmen enjoy crafting their products, not making a fortune. They are not ambitious in making a fortune, yet ambitious to see their products being widely-used generations after generations. In this sense, CEOs who claimed to be craftsmen are great insult to the core of what makes a good craftsman.

7

It seems that craftsmen can never find their place in Chinese society. On the one hand, no Chinese dare to devote fully into their products and ignore how much profits they could make out of their products since they are forced to make as much money as they could to buy houses, cars, and support their family. On the other hand, craftsmen have always been thought low of in traditional Chinese culture. For example, Lu Ban, the inventor of a flying wood bird, was despised by orthodox Chinese value system: after all, what’s the use of a flying wood bird?

8

There is a widespread slogan on some websites, saying that “we should help writers make money with dignity”. Sounds touching, isn’t it? I do agree with the value held by this slogan, but since Chinese traditional culture has always been respecting the learned, thinkers, I don’t regard this as a major problem. The real challenge for Chinese culture is, however, to begin respecting blue-collar workers and craftsmen. Only when craftsmen are no longer thought low of can Chinese airport bookstores filled with not merely books on success and fortune.

9

Rumor has it that the headmaster of Shandong Lanxiang Senior Technical School once made joke of Peking University and Tsinghua University and warned his students that if they didn’t devote fully into their studies, then they would become as arrogant as students of PKU and THU. Unfortunately, he might be saying the truth.

[The article is published and edited with authorization from the author @Wei Wuhui, please note source and hyperlink when reproduce.]

Translated by Levin Feng (Senior Translator at ECHO), working for TMTpost.