Vol.225 Another Thread for Understanding China's Grassroots Society: Red Shoe Town, Tax Farmers, and Local Elites

Summary

• Tian Yi’s core judgment—and the foundation of the book—is this: “Taxation has had an enormous impact on China’s overall changes over the past 100 years; I think it ranks either 1st or 2nd.” Red Shoe Town traces the rise and fall of tax farmers in a small town under Baotou City, Inner Mongolia, from 1906 to 1950, following the hidden thread of state extraction from anti-tax resistance at the end of the Qing through today’s fiscal bargaining.
• The fiscal explanation for the KMT’s collapse: in 1948 and 1949, tax collection grew ever more aggressive even as men were being conscripted—the public’s own words were, “The KMT is the same as the Japanese.” Tax farmers began resigning en masse: “The Nationalist government’s lifeblood—the fiscal lifeblood—was severed by these tax farmers.” Imagine 70% of the country’s tax farmers going on strike or remitting only half the taxes: with food and military pay cut off, “why it fell so fast” becomes clear.
• The new regime’s ability to reach down a level was decisive: the village-level cadastral maps that emperors and the Japanese had sought for centuries, the Communist Party “got in less than 1 year.” By using militia members, Communist Youth League members, and Party cadres to break up and reassemble the entire social structure, it eliminated intermediaries from tax collection. 蒋介石 had already considered mobilizing rural primary-school teachers in his diary during the Fourth Encirclement Campaign, “but he did not have the power to do it.”
• The Yongzheng problem went unsolved for 300 years. Around 1725, 雍正 banned tax farming, but the prohibition quietly disappeared 2 or 3 years later; in 1932, when 宋子文 convened a national fiscal conference to abolish the system, only 4 of more than 100 counties in Hebei said it could be done, while 96 said, “If we abolish it, we won’t be able to collect anything at all.” Every central government hated tax farmers, but when governing capacity was weak, it had no choice but to rely on them—until 1949.
• The fiscal starting point of reform and opening was the same: the system was “unable to keep running.” By the late 1970s, government finances at every level were “on the verge of bankruptcy,” prompting the state to devolve power and profits, carry out the profit-to-tax reform, and allow self-employed businesses—in essence, “we can’t carry all of this anymore, so you’re on your own; we’ve given you freedom”—before searching for new tax bases in commerce and real estate. Before the 94 tax-sharing reform, the central government took only 20-something% of total fiscal revenue, “less than a quarter,” forcing 朱镕基 into difficult province-by-province negotiations. The tax system is fundamentally a political contract that is constantly renegotiated.
• The recurring thread across a century is usury embedded in the tax chain. The Republic of China had “tax slaves” and “debt slaves”; around 2000, township officials were still borrowing at usurious rates to hit tax targets. “This isn’t just a personal problem; it’s also a systemic one.” Tian Yi’s riverbed metaphor captures the method: economic institutions shape people far more powerfully than literary judgments of good and evil. “I can’t just look at the speed of the water on the surface… I have to look at the bottom.”
• It is a direct rebuttal to the romanticization of the local gentry. The Republic of China was an era in which personal evil, organizational evil, institutional evil, and the evils of the economic system were “piled on top of one another” for decades. “If you asked me to be a farmer, to be a tax farmer, I wouldn’t do it even at gunpoint”—even if he could travel back in time as a member of the vested-interest class, he still would not want to. “If being more truthful is the goal, I think this is at least more truthful.”

Deep dive

1. Two Books Span a Century: From Tax in Another Land to Red Shoe Town

• 李翔 opened by introducing 田毅’s new book, Red Shoe Town, which chronicles the tax system and the rise and fall of local elites in a town under Baotou City, Inner Mongolia, from 1906 to 1950. His earlier book, Tax in Another Land: Thirty Years in a Township, a Country’s Hidden Fiscal History, covered the fiscal history of the northern small town of Pingcheng from 1976 to 2006 and was published around 2008, just as the first 30 years of reform and opening came to a close.
• 田毅 said that the person sitting there “isn’t just me,” but also the hundreds of elderly residents he and his co-author interviewed—people whose families had lived in Red Shoe Town for generations. “The book is very thin… but at least for us, it carries a lot of weight.”
• The book took 14 years to complete. The project began in 2010; the interviews and archival work were largely finished in 2015-16; a 60,000-70,000-character first draft was written in less than 10 months in 2018; and the book was revised until its 2024 publication, reaching 120,000-130,000 characters, with more than 6,000 archival photographs requiring numbering and indexing. “Without that process of letting it settle… it might only have been 70% as good as it is now.” In the final 4 or 5 months, 田毅 brought 赵旭 to Beijing; after their families went to bed at 10 p.m., they sat across from each other and read through the manuscript, “one page from you, one page from me.”

2. Co-author 赵旭: Half the Time at Work, Half the Time Writing

• 赵旭 has “an exceptionally good mind.” He underperformed in the gaokao after a family crisis, then worked as a farmer, rural teacher, and small-business operator. He spent more than 1 year handling seafood at a supermarket, where water damaged his arm, and now works locally as a fire-safety security guard, pulling an overnight shift every 1 or 2 days. “Half my time goes to work, and the other half… to writing the book with them.”
• After resigning from a magazine in 2018, 田毅 likewise had no primary job: freelance editing that was “a bit like taking day labor,” looking after his family, and revising and writing. “That is more or less my life in 3 parts.” 李翔 recalled David Foster Wallace, who had also worked security; security was the only job that “let you ask anyone anything without having to give them a reason.” The details 赵旭 saw at the hotel were “completely beyond my imagination.”

3. Without Local Resident 赵旭, the Book Would Not Exist

• The collaboration began in 2003-04, when 赵旭 brought a story idea to Beijing to pitch to a newspaper. The idea went nowhere, but a conversation turned to the town’s finances. 田毅 had worked for 3 years in a fiscal agency and was “still somewhat sensitive to how government offices function and how public finance operates.” He then returned every 2 or 3 months, continuing the project for more than 20 years.
• When 李翔 asked whether 田毅 could have obtained the material without 赵旭, the answer was unequivocal: “Impossible.” Asking a grandson to reconstruct how his grandfather paid taxes in the 1940s is “a major test for anyone.” It requires trust, not technique. “I think I could have built some of that trust, but I could never have built it bit by bit on my own.”
• 李翔 offered a comparison from another nonfiction project co-written by a friend whose name is unclear in the recording and 杨樱. The friend admitted he could not interview people; in one phone call, he reduced the interviewee’s PR representative to tears. Good material depends on an interviewer who knows how to earn trust.

4. Archives Correct Memory; Long Time Horizons Correct Individual Blame

• In Tax in Another Land, the final explanation for why the town’s bus service could not stay afloat differed from every interviewee’s account. But once the explanation was given to them, “everyone said, ‘Oh, yes, that is how it was; I hadn’t thought of that before.’” Each person held only the fragment connected to his or her own experience.
• The methodological point is that over a short enough time horizon, “all events seem to converge on one person”—individual corruption or inaction becomes the explanation. Stretch the horizon to 10 or 30 years, and “you discover where each force actually acted… and in the end it may look completely different from the original hypothesis.” Archives supply the precision memory lacks. Once a signature appears on a document, “everything is suddenly different.”

5. Why Taxes: A Reimbursement Accountant’s Eyes Do Not Lie

• The most consequential judgment in the conversation was that “taxation has had an enormous impact on China’s overall changes over the past 100 years; I think it ranks either 1st or 2nd.”
• His instinct came from working inside government. The accountants who came each month to file expense reports had “a different look in their eyes” depending on the actual power of their bureau. A transport bureau chief naturally controlled more money, projects, and resources than an archives bureau chief. “It is like a family with 7 or 8 children: if one is the eldest and controls most of the family property, of course he is very important.”
• The main thread was not predetermined. 田毅 initially rejected the idea of writing a sequel simply for the sake of continuity—“prequels generally aren’t very good.” 赵旭 began by interviewing 30 or 40 elderly residents in 2010. 田毅 broke more than 40 years of change into piles—politics, culture, clans, war, money—and taxation emerged as the top theme after 70 or 80 interviews. Bandit raids were devastating but not daily; “over a longer period, taxation may have been the most important thing in their lives.”
• The entry point was the tax farmer. 孔飞力 wrote only 1 chapter on the subject, in greater detail for the Qing period; 杜赞奇 used North China county archives but offered only a static cross-section of the 1930s. “What I wanted to do was something dynamic, something historical—and that is extremely difficult.”

6. 李马驹’s Death: The Same 90-Mile Road

• After the 1911 Revolution, taxes “suddenly tripled.” Red Shoe Town formed a new peasant association, and the tax collector 李马驹 died in the county government jail, “probably beaten to death.” The book gives the episode only 1 or 2 lines: “When he collected taxes before, he took the money to the county government along this road, a 90-mile road. Now, in the opposite direction, along the same road… he died because of taxes.”
• The clue came from an old man who pointed to a grave outside the south gate. County archives later confirmed that the new peasant association wanted to pool the money, deal collectively with the various tax collectors, and use its position to bargain down the tax burden. The county government saw it as “obstructing the process” and viewed its authority as beyond question. 李马驹 became the sacrifice. “We were incredibly excited when we found the archives.”

7. 史立三’s Double Identity: The Tax Farmer Was an Underground Party Member

• After 3 days in the basement of the county archives, searching through unprocessed Republican-era records, they found a 1949 tax-farming contract—the 38th year of the Republic of China—that the county magistrate had issued to 史立三. The tax quota was about 100 yuan; anything left over was his. If he failed to collect it, “you had to cover the shortfall, borrow at usurious rates, and use whatever method you could.”
• A biographical sketch from the 1960s revealed his true identity. He was not only a tax farmer and a local official of the Nationalist government; “his real identity was an underground Communist Party member.” 田毅 marveled that he knew the village’s most hidden tax information—how much land each household had. “That is where the power was.”

8. Measuring Land Was a Millennia-Long Cat-and-Mouse Game—and the Government Itself Was the Obstacle

• In 1906, the Qing government’s attempt to measure land directly triggered tax resistance, and “the land was never measured.” When the Republic tried again in 1915-16, the figures were still recorded in “large mu”: people feared officials would measure more with a rope, while declaring the truth would inevitably mean understating the land. Fertile plots deposited by the Yellow River could be flooded 2 years later, and newly reclaimed land would appear in some remote corner. Agricultural taxes accounted for about 60% of revenue in the 1900s, and an even higher share in this small town, where industrial and commercial taxes were minimal. “Taxation was extremely important to governments at every level.”
• Land and acreage information lived in the minds of tax farmers and local gentry. 李翔 described it as something like “tacit knowledge”—it had never been converted into written records accessible to the central government.
• The counterintuitive conclusion is that when very little tax was collected, information was easier to obtain. After the 1911 Revolution, warlords and bandits imposed layer upon layer of levies, raising the actual burden by “at least 5 times,” even though output could not possibly have doubled. Tax farming “had aspects of high efficiency,” but once private skimming and ever-higher targets were layered on, “the system turned around and devoured itself.” The force that ultimately prevented the government from obtaining accurate data “was the government itself.”

9. Conscription and the Collapse of the Idea That One Could Escape

• The most brutal period was the forced conscription of 1948 and 1949. Ordinary people said, “The KMT is the same as the Japanese.” “Could a regime like that possibly be any good?” Professional conscripts were repeatedly seized and escaped back home. In one case, a man was being escorted by relatives when he faked his death, “collapsed, and died.” In a report dated January 1, 1949, the county magistrate approved the collection of his body, then added: “Could there be something else going on?” Suspicion remained, but there was no capacity to investigate. The man hid in the most remote natural village; people did not learn he was alive until the 1980s or 1990s.
• 李翔 invoked 徐浩峰’s idea of “life as escape”: when imperial authority could not manage people at the micro level, they could change identities and start over. 田毅’s correction was, “You could escape and you could not escape.” In one county in Shanxi during the Ming dynasty, half the population fled; those who stayed registered their land under the names of large households, while the fugitives disappeared one family at a time and lived on boats. “Trying to have no relationship with this system at all is incredibly difficult—especially now, when it is almost impossible.”

10. The Face of the Tax Farmer: Stopping the Cart Carrying a Wife to Be Sold

• This group “grew out of the land.” One opium-addicted farmer, crushed by his tax burden, sold his house and then his sons and daughters before finally deciding to sell his wife. A tax farmer encountered him on the road: “You can’t do this. You can’t sell her,” and “stopped the cart,” finding the woman a household where she could work and live. “That was everyday life… not an isolated case, not at all.”
• 田毅 was once advised to drop the project: “This topic is too obscure… will anyone buy or read your book?” He hesitated, but its importance lay in its meaning, its truth, and how widespread the reality was at the time—and nobody had written about it. “I like writing about things that look narrow but are actually rich, things no one else has mentioned or explained clearly.”

11. The Yongzheng Problem: 96 Counties Said It Could Not Be Abolished

• Exactly 300 years ago, around 1725, 雍正 banned private tax farming and imposed severe penalties. “After 2 or 3 years, it simply went nowhere.” The “Yongzheng problem” passed from the Qing into the Republic. After the 1911 Revolution, tax farming became an official system: county governments auctioned tax rights, though the bidding itself remained largely secret. The central government believed its tax authority had been hollowed out—“you can hide as much as you want”—and in 1932 宋子文 convened a national fiscal conference to abolish the system.
• The result: of more than 100 counties in Hebei, only 4 said abolition was possible; 96 said, “If we abolish it, we won’t be able to collect anything at all.” 宋子文 had substantial power in the early 1930s, “but he did not get it done.” Tax farmers had become an interest group of their own. “Every central government dislikes tax farmers and the tax-farming system, but… it is remarkably tenacious.”

12. Obtaining in 1 Year the Cadastral Map No One Had Obtained in Centuries

• Why did tax farming end only after 1949? “Our administrative and political power, and the power of our ideology, were unprecedentedly great—and behind that greatness was the expectation of industrialization.” The new regime mobilized militia members, Communist Youth League members, Party cadres, and model citizens, obtaining village-level cadastral maps in less than 1 year—the maps “that emperors and the Japanese had sought for hundreds and thousands of years.” It became the closing map of the book.
• 李翔’s summary was that the regime effectively disrupted and reorganized the entire old social structure, making it easier to obtain information about society and property. The Party succeeded in eliminating intermediaries from tax collection: “at least its tentacles were right beside you.”
• The counterexample appears in 蒋介石’s diary during the Fourth Encirclement Campaign. If the Nationalists had the Communist Party’s propaganda and organizational ability and could mobilize primary-school teachers in county seats and villages, “that would be incredibly powerful. He thought of it, but he did not have the power to do it.”

13. “Imperial Authority Did Not Reach the Countryside” Was an Illusion—At Least Tax Authority Did

• 田毅 used the archives to challenge the conventional claim. The town was founded only in the 2nd year of the Qianlong reign, but by the 15th year, tax collectors from above had already arrived to collect taxes on mule and horse transactions. He saw the relevant Mongolian-language archive. “Imperial authority was not far from you… especially when it came to collecting taxes. Its extractive capacity was always there, right beside you; it reached down.”
• Edicts might arrive slowly, and some people might never see one in their lifetimes, but the tax collector’s reach was never absent. That is 田毅’s basic conclusion about China’s long-running grassroots system.

14. Facing 3 or 4 Forces in a Single Night

• 斯诺 visited the county containing Red Shoe Town in the early 1930s and wrote that what he saw there marked a turning point in his life, turning him into a committed communist. “A lot of elites were drawn so strongly to communism for exactly this reason.” The Japanese occupation made the divisions even more acute: from roughly 1938 to 1945, the Japanese came by day to collect taxes and seize goods, while the Nationalists and bandits came at night. The Communists bought 500 pairs of military shoes on IOUs and asked tax farmers to issue good-citizen certificates to underground Party members. “The same group of tax farmers could face 3 or 4 completely different groups in a single night, and they could not be allowed to run into one another.”
• For ordinary people, night meant something else. Wealthy households, gentry, and tax farmers slept inside the town walls. Ordinary people led their camels and livestock—their “main assets”—into the open country and found a mound of earth or a hollow in an old riverbed to sleep in. “They did not sleep in the town or in their own homes… it was an extraordinary sight.”

15. The Nationalist Government’s Fiscal Lifeblood Was Severed by Tax Farmers

• After the war against Japan, the Nationalist government wanted to replace the entire layer of puppet baozhangs and jiazhang officials who had served the Japanese. Everyone agreed in principle, but when it came to implementation, “the actual tax base was still controlled by the same group of people, and they still had to be used.”
• Once taxes became heavier and forced conscription was added, the tax farmers themselves walked away. “The Nationalist government’s lifeblood—one of its most important lifelines, its fiscal lifeblood—was severed by these tax farmers.” Once food and military pay stopped, the regime lost its vitality. “If 70% of the tax farmers nationwide stopped working for you, or remitted only half the taxes… how do you think you could keep going?” 李翔 added that this was “a form of resistance by the powerless.”

16. The Tax Farmers: 侯大富, 高德云, and the Usurers

• The first group consisted of people like 侯大富: capable operators with family assets, land, businesses, and workshops. One historian, after reading the book, said his grandfather had been a village head and that “apart from tax farming, he contracted out everything—he could contract out anything.” The central government had effectively delegated total authority to him.
• The key figure in the second group, 高德云, was not wealthy and sometimes gambled, but he was extraordinarily deft at navigating relationships. The county government noticed him brokering deals at the mule and horse market; as he took on more tax contracts, he was promoted to deputy township head, simultaneously serving as intermediary, tax farmer, and official. The cost was severe: bandits cut off part of his ear, and later shot his wife. 田毅’s verdict was that 高德云 was “so clever and quick-witted, but if you look at his life as a whole, apart from collecting taxes for the government, he was hiding from bandits.”
• Another group emerged in the 1930s and 1940s as usury merged with taxation, producing “tax slaves and debt slaves.” Lenders did better business and became tax farmers themselves, because advancing tax payments required ready cash. Their power rested on 3 legs: local networks, government authorization, and finance.

17. Trust Was the Operating System of the Village—and Evidence That Explicit Rules Were Missing

• When tax farmers stopped working in the late 1940s, the county government sent its own officials down to collect taxes. “Everything was different then; people had no trust in them whatsoever.” None of the younger interviewees blamed the tax farmers. “Not one person said that. On the contrary, they all said the tax farmers had actually helped in many ways,” because the tax farmers were part of the village. Tax farmers and gentry overlapped only partly, but capable local figures were highly likely to be entrusted with tax collection.
• 李翔’s question is worth preserving: does such dependence on trust itself show that explicit rules and explicit contracts were inadequate? 田毅 agreed: “Certainly.” Under an extractive, coercive system, people could not fight back; they could only say, “I managed to reduce it a little bit.” Who could help reduce it by that little bit? “Perhaps these people—this intermediate layer—and no one else.”

18. He Would Not Go Back Even at Gunpoint: An Answer to the Romanticization of the Gentry

• 李翔 pointed to a once-popular tendency to romanticize local gentry as bearers of a form of soft governance supposedly destroyed by the contemporary system. 田毅 began from the opposite pole: in the late 1990s, before he wrote Tax in Another Land, public opinion held that “all the township officials… came to our house to drag away our pigs.” His point was that the evil was real, but rooted in the economic and fiscal system: “If you don’t solve that problem, it will keep existing.”
• His verdict on the Republic of China is that both romanticization and an account of pure evil are wrong. But if asked whether he wanted to return to that era—to be a farmer or a tax farmer—“I wouldn’t do it even at gunpoint.” Personal evil, organizational evil, institutional evil, and the evil of the economic system were “piled on top of one another” for decades. Placed inside an individual life, “that was the person’s entire lifetime; many people never even lived through it.”
• The reader comment that moved him said: “So the Republic of China wasn’t just spy dramas, romance, and sentiment; it also had something like Red Shoe Town.” That was essentially the life of their grandparents. “If the goal is greater truth, I think this is at least more truthful.”

19. The Missing Middle: The Command Economy of 1950-76 Is Already Being Researched

• 李翔 asked why the book skips the middle 25 or 26 years. 田毅 would “only reveal a little”: he is deeply interested in the period and considers it important, and has already interviewed many people, but has not settled on the entry point. In many places, “the word tax no longer existed”—it was called profit or public grain. Money and resources may not have sat with the production-team leader but higher up, where officials could allocate grain. “It was a command economy; it was not necessarily even a planned economy.”
• The method remains the same: do not begin with money as a premise; break change into its component forces and write about whichever mattered most. “If it was politics, we might mainly write about politics; if it was a movement, perhaps we would write about the movement.” 孔飞力 likewise treated tax farming as a thread in China’s modernization: how to build a relatively rational and fair distribution mechanism from top to bottom, and how that shaped the relationship, and the rights, between the state and ordinary people. The 1906-2006 span of exactly 100 years seems “almost fated”: anti-tax resistance in 1906, and the manuscript completed in 2006.

20. The 1976-2006 Main Line: Fiscal Near-Bankruptcy Forced Reform

• “One force behind reform and opening was that public finances at every level could no longer be sustained… in a sense, they were on the verge of bankruptcy.” That is the original wording. The policies of the 1980s—devolving power and profits, the profit-to-tax reform, and encouraging self-employed businesses—were fundamentally the state’s admission that it “could not carry so much anymore… you had to find your own way; we gave you freedom.” At the same time, it searched for new tax bases through commerce and real estate, linking that period directly to the present.
• The tax system is a political contract. Before the 94 tax-sharing reform, the system functioned roughly like a contract-farming arrangement and local governments had substantial fiscal resources. The central government took only 20-something% of total fiscal revenue, “less than a quarter,” making it difficult to implement any policy in practice. 朱镕基 negotiated province by province; talks with Shanghai were difficult, while Guangdong proved unexpectedly smooth. 田毅 confirmed that 朱镕基 “used many different methods and breathed a sigh of relief.” “In reality, it was a contract, something negotiated. Of course, the weights assigned to different rights were not equal.”

21. After Tax Sharing: Collection Is Only Half the Question; Spending Is Fairness and Justice

• The 94 tax-sharing reform had an “extremely, extremely large” impact on the grassroots: fiscal authority moved upward step by step while spending responsibilities moved downward. Transfer payments were earmarked and might not reach the local government in the first place. Townships in central and western China lacked meaningful township enterprises and remained stuck at “protecting wages, protecting livelihoods.” To provide genuine public services, “where was the money supposed to come from?” The contrast was enormous.
• The tax base itself was becoming richer. In the Republican-era town, nearly 90% of revenue came from agricultural taxes plus countless levies—“it was simply a form of devastation… no one cared about any of this; they only cared that the target was met.” After reform and opening came household land contracts, contracts for collective enterprises and supply-and-marketing cooperatives’ brickworks and coal mines, value-added taxes, and investment promotion. “Tax revenue generated through transactions kept increasing. This was the same across China.”
• 田毅 places greater weight on spending than on collection: “Collection is one part of it, but spending—especially public fiscal spending—is the other, more important part… it is indispensable to fairness and justice.” Where money is spent, and who decides—senior officials or a joint discussion among villagers and local cadres—“makes all the difference.” This is another negotiation: a negotiation over taxation and spending, a fiscal negotiation. “We are still living through that history.”

22. The Same Class Across a Century: People at the Regime’s Bottom Edge

• Why do both books focus on the same group? Tax farmers were outside the formal power structure, while township officials were inside it, but they formed the same class: “the group through which the regime came closest to ordinary people at the bottom,” whether its power was visible or hidden, formal or informal. A dozen or so people would line the corridor outside the county finance bureau chief’s office—township Party secretaries, township heads, and finance-office directors—there to negotiate money, projects, and investment promotion.
• This layer has continuity. A township official in Hunan had low pay, heavy workloads, and long distances to travel. Asked why he stayed, he said, “I can’t do anything else, because I grew up watching my father do this.” Long time horizons reveal the substance. “You won’t see much by reading the People’s Daily for 1 day. If you look at 10 years, or 60 years… you can certainly write something very good.”

23. Usury: A Thread That Reappears Across the Century

• Usury is a recurring term in both books. “When you truly have nowhere else to borrow, you think of it”—whether the borrower is a baojia head or an ordinary villager. What shocked 李翔 most was that village and township officials also borrowed at usurious rates to meet tax targets. With a single fiscal target pressing down and a budget that had to balance, “I could only borrow some tax revenue from another township.” “I think it isn’t just an individual problem; it is also a systemic one.”
• He tested the idea in Hunan by raising it with a finance-office director. “The look in their eyes changed completely… it was their most fundamental secret.” After the initial surprise, they agreed and began complaining.
• The riverbed metaphor condenses the book’s method. The way economic institutions shape people “is genuinely much more powerful than literary thinking about good and evil.” “We see the river flowing and the spray on the surface, but what is the riverbed like? Is it 10 meters wide or 50? I can’t just look at the speed of the water on the surface; I have to look at the bottom.”

24. The Nonfiction Writer’s Nightmare: Being Overturned by a Better Rewrite

• 李翔 relayed a nonfiction writer’s worst-case scenario: 20 years later, someone else obtains more material, rewrites the story, and does it far better. 田毅’s position is that if the material was confidential and simply unavailable to him, “I can live with that; I should congratulate him.” But if he had the ability to uncover it and failed to do so, only to be overturned by someone else, “that is what a nonfiction writer least wants to see.” “I hope to make even a small contribution; that is enough, because people are very small.”
• 李翔 recalled an Isaacson anecdote. After Isaacson wrote his biography of Kissinger, Kissinger’s camp pressured the publisher. An assistant demanded, “I want to know who authorized Mr. Isaacson to accurately record the facts he heard, saw, and learned in interviews with Mr. Kissinger.” After that, 李翔 said, he spent a long time not wanting to write about living people. On verification, 田毅 said an interviewee may be trying to deceive you, may be deceiving you unintentionally, or may be deceiving himself. The solution is cross-checking multiple sources against the archives; “you find that the essential core is the same.”

25. Benchmark: The Radiance of Dusk, Exhaustive Sources, and a Historian’s Ambition

• Compared with the presidential libraries documenting every US president, China’s records are sparse relative to the scale of its upheavals. 李翔’s explanation was that “perhaps history is simply too long… 100 years from now, we will still be able to return to 秦始皇.” 田毅 cited The Radiance of Dusk, the most academically rigorous of the biographies of 张居正, written by Professor 韦 of Renmin University. The author read every archive available, read the Ming Veritable Records in full, and reread it several years later. 黄仁宇 had also read it cover to cover, but “not with the same level of detail.”
• Its strength lies in its difference from the detached gaze of Western nonfiction. Professor 韦 brings the likes, dislikes, and ambitions of a traditional Chinese historian, uses “a great deal of fact—balanced fact,” and closes each chapter with an exclamation point: “Sima Qian says: he has risen.” The book also conveys an almost visceral identification with the 400 or 500 years from 张居正’s aftermath through the present. 田毅 said, “In 20, 30, or 50 years, perhaps there will be one—but I cannot imagine anyone being better than him.”

26. Magazine Prose Is Hard to Sustain; Nonfiction’s Roots Are in Books

• 李翔’s view is that nonfiction is fundamentally a magazine form: only magazines could afford long timelines, large budgets, and readers expecting polished prose. As the magazine model disappears, the form becomes difficult to sustain; “a whole generation of people may simply disappear.” 田毅 offered The New Yorker as a counterexample. The professional history he read said its early model was actually for writers to produce a book first, after which The New Yorker selected several chapters to publish—the order was reversed. Nonfiction’s roots, then, remain in books. Magazines may disappear, but he “cannot yet imagine” books disappearing. If you wanted to know how people in a small Republican-era town survived and changed, AI might not replace a work like this. “If such a book existed, you would certainly read it.”
• One thing 田毅 understood when he left the magazine world was that a long magazine feature “isn’t a product; it is just an article.” A book is the product, and “the user who pays gets to decide.” “If I still wanted to do this work… I had to turn it into a book and see whether the form worked. Of course, I didn’t expect it to take this long.”
• The book’s cover carries no celebrity endorsements and it does not even have a preface, deliberately so. “Let the people I wrote about appear on their own, step by step… there isn’t a single major contemporary figure in it.” Publication itself mattered: “Once it is published, it is as if I am telling the story in your town. Everyone in the town is standing around the edges and can hear it. In a sense, the fact that it came out is a victory for us.” The lack of institutional backing also meant freedom. 李翔 pointed out that with an employer, “you could never have written it.” 田毅’s closing line was: “Every form of protection comes with constraints.”

Verification Notes

• The name of the friend mentioned in the comparison about nonfiction interviewing was unclear and inconsistent in the original subtitles; no definitive spelling can be established from the source.