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6 Chinese Review America The Dushu Magazine, 1979–1989 Dushu, or Reading, a book review monthly based in Beijing, came into being in 1979, when the wave of reform started to sweep across China. Riding the tide of the dramatic changes that followed, the journal soon achieved respect‑ ability and popularity among educated Chinese. The circulation numbers were never truly large, ranging from forty to one hundred thousand monthly copies. The relatively small circulation, however, does not tell the full story because among readers of Dushu were the best minds of China. In part, Dushu derived its success from a particular persona—it was scholarly but not overly academic. This special trait had an interesting effect on the journal’s fate. Generally, authorities in China kept a vigilant watch over standard academic publications because these journals enjoyed official or semiofficial status. The state was equally alert in regulating popular magazines in view of their large circulations and their massive following. In the 1980s, Dushu was one of the few periodicals that fell somewhere in between the two categories of periodicals mentioned above. More than most Chinese publica‑ tions in the 1980s, therefore, Dushu could speak its own mind. The greater freedom enjoyed by Dushu also came about as a matter of tradition. The journal was a publication of Beijing‑based Sanlian Shudian (Joint Publishing House), the origin of which can be traced back to Zou Taofen, the pro‑Communist journalist and publisher active in the 1930s and 1940s. Because of Zou’s progressive and revolutionary past, after the communist victory in 1949, the Chinese government allowed his publishing house to continue its operation, in a consolidated form. The press came to specialize in translated works and books on world affairs. This gave the Sanlian Press a special status and unique identity, which partly accounts for Dushu’s critical mind and its sense of independence. In some ways, one can compare Dushu to The New York Review of Books in the United States—it is respectable, liberal, and politically engaged. While Dushu covered books of all kinds, it was particularly strong in the introduction of Western works, which was much needed with the end 145 146 / China’s America of the Mao Era in China. Not surprisingly, works by American authors and books about America took up considerable space in the journal. Dushu thus served as a lively and important forum for Chinese intellectuals who were actively involved in a continuous discourse on the United States, an enter‑ prise intricately linked to the intellectual life and other larger events of China during the 1980s. I Dushu made its first appearance in April 1979, three months after Deng Xiaoping’s historic trip to the United States. Officially, a new era had dawned in China. In many ways, however, the Chinese continued to live in the long shadow of the Great Cultural Revolution. This was particularly true with regard to the United States, which for decades had been China’s archenemy, condemned as the very embodiment of evil. Yet, the impulse for change was strong, and so was Chinese intellectuals’ desire to learn about the mysterious land on the other side of the Pacific. As soon as it came into being, Dushu boldly took on what was formerly a taboo subject and set out to open a new vista upon America. Dushu made its mission clear with the very first article in its debut issue. In an essay entitled “There Should Be No Prohibition in Reading,” Li Hong‑ lin, a liberal party theorist who later would rise high in the reformist camp, blasted censorship and book burnings during the Great Cultural Revolution. Back then, Li wrote, of hundreds of thousand books, only a thousand or so were “kindly cleared and approved” by authorities as fit for public eyes. Decrying such horrors, Li called for “an emancipation of books, regardless of their origins—Chinese or foreign, ancient or modern.”1 Li’s article kindled a heated debate. “Just reading the title of the article makes me sick,” one reader thus began his tirade. Shouldn’t reactionary works be banned? Should pornography be allowed to flood the country? “With no prohibition whatsoever, our world would be a total mess!”2 No less furiously, another reader warned people about the importation of “spiritual opium”— particularly the Western variety, which was supposedly the most harmful.3 Yet another reader wrote in to express his surprise that the matter had even become an issue: “What of the capitalist...

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