The Morning Star of Lingao is China's cult industrial time-travel novel. Its main author has some thoughts on AGI, power, China's media landscape, and the end of most jobs
Afra: great piece, yet again! Much to digest. I had dealings with the “father” / namer of the Industrial Party, Wang Xiaodong 王小東, in the early 1990s when he and his comrades — funded by the PLA — were already busy envisioning a future of Chinese dominance. I wrote about my early encounters with Wang and his buddies in “To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic: China’s Avant-grade Nationalists” (1995). Geremie
Afra: he was bombastic and extremely self-important, very much in the manner of the 祖師爺 of the chauvinistic intelligentsia in the ‘90s: He Xin 何新. He Xin started out as a “liberal” in the early 1980s but turned patriotic conservative around 1984 when he started to enjoy the patronage of Hu Qiaomu 胡喬木, the ideologue-predecessor to Wang Huning.
As for Wang Xiaodong’s general demeanour, it brought to mind that famous line from Mao’s poem “Changsha”:
指點江山，激揚文字，糞土當年萬戶侯。
I was amused to note that Wang repeatedly denounced me as a US “cultural spy”, even as recently as the early 2000s. My work on his gang must have struck a nerve. I’ve long thought of him as being a Sino-fascist (a term others in China have also used for this school of 愛國賊, even though one might sympathise with aspects of their anti-American anti Western stance.)
Reading it, I think it’s relatively obvious that the interview was conducted in Mandarin, translated with the help of AI, and then smoothed out and corrected by the author. But afra can correct me if I’m wrong
This is a great article. Thank you for the interview with Ma Qianzu.
Regarding his personal thoughts, I think I can offer some information. Based on my years of understanding of Ma Qianzu (from his early articles in 西西河 and various forums to his bedtime news program to detailed articles about him), he's not the kind of person who experiences disillusionment. On the contrary, he possesses an almost inexplicable optimism; he believes that "humans will definitely grow wings a second before they fall off a cliff and die." Two years ago, a prominent KOL “章北海official”(also a fan of Ma) interviewed him and asked him about his future plans. Ma gave a similar answer, mentioning exercise and fitness, and confidently and naturally discussing what he would be doing when he's over a hundred years old (not making a prediction about how long he would live, but naturally discussing what he would be doing then).
"Ma Qianzu is highly confident, to the point of arrogance and near-awkwardness. He believes that only he and Hu Xijin (half a person) in the entire Chinese media industry raise issues, and he criticizes and questions everyone else for failing to do so, believing everyone has let down their nine years of compulsory education. As a ten-year viewer of Ma Qianzu, I want to help analyze the reasons for his confidence and how young viewers should respond to his expectations.
Although Ma Qianzu presents himself as an ordinary person both on the show and in life, believing that 2 million followers are no different from 2 fans, and that he is the worst off among his civil engineering classmates, his personality is not that of a typical ordinary person. He pursues the underlying principles of things to a fanatical degree, working almost year-round without significant economic gain, seemingly born for media. He worked tirelessly throughout the year at Guancha.cn, and hasn't fared much better now. He usually lives in his studio, rarely appearing at his Suzhou home unless he's currently banned from speaking out, and he wouldn't conduct interviews from home like this." He lived a life of asceticism, indulging in no particular expense, driving a car from over a decade ago. His younger subordinates and colleagues were often astonished by his lifestyle, with his mentor, Mr. Mu, even jokingly comparing it to that of Premier Zhou Enlai. In today's parlance, many of his viewers were like "fragile postmodern atomists" with obvious human flaws, while he himself resembled "PRC Superman."
The supervisor was not, in essence, a scholar. He didn't revere knowledge itself, nor did he enjoy empty theoretical discussions. Instead, he was extremely eager to find shortcuts to knowledge and the underlying principles, wary of any undefined statements, and disdainful of reading centuries-old social science texts to learn from the wisdom of predecessors. For him, Marxist political economy was unsuitable for modern people to build models; if a model could be quickly obtained through a search engine, he wouldn't waste time on original materials, systematically and mechanically transforming it into a formulaic approach for topic selection and media language.
He wrote an article on Guancha.cn titled "Reading is Good, But Understanding is Not Essential." He opposes ritualized reading, believing that modern society has too much and too complex knowledge, and that one cannot master even a small area in a lifetime. Therefore, one should choose to explore broadly and shallowly to truly understand the world. He further elaborated on this point and systematically demonstrated it in his latest paid course on how to be a media professional, while revealing that he himself relied on rudimentary speed-reading techniques to read one book a day in university, skipping classes for four years to study and barely graduating. Therefore, despite his vast reading, he refused to provide a reading list to his viewers during his live streams, believing that what one reads is unimportant; what matters is the act of reading.
At the same time, he is actually a very arrogant and conceited person, extremely confident in his theories, never admitting mistakes, but adept at subtle self-reflection and efficient self-correction, constantly changing his fundamental viewpoints and stances over the years—a rarity for someone over 30. During a live stream, when someone mentioned terms like "class stratification," he immediately said that the person hadn't even attended primary school. His evaluation of philosophy is "garbage" and "worse than garbage." "Class solidification" is a term that commands respect from even the most naive leftists and keyboard warriors. While it may not be taken seriously, the inexplicable hostility it evokes is intriguing. He fundamentally despises the flawed social models underlying this term, much like the currently popular online philosophical games.
His views have consistently shifted, accompanied by remarkably consistent online and offline action and self-justification. People only know him as a powerful figure online since the BBS era, but few know that he participated in gang fights among children of miners in his childhood, saw many firearms, and participated in local ethnic conflicts in his youth. When he first entered university, he was a staunch supporter of the pro-independence movement. During the year the US bombed the embassy, he was in university, and he stood in front of a crowd in Shanghai, saying it might have been an accident, that the US had no reason to do it deliberately, and that everyone should remain calm. He was nearly attacked as a result. Later, his views continued to shift, moving towards becoming a national advisor and a member of the communist left, including participating in many dangerous offline activities during the 2008 Tiananmen Square protests and the Great Goal period. After 2018, he underwent another shift in views, accompanied by fervent media production—the person we now know as Ma Dugong.
Simonian normative claims with Marxist modals..? Wonder if there's perchance any lines, parallel or orthogonal, to be drawn between the rationalist movement's birthing station of intellectual strains and the Industrialists. Besides the obvious points, and lucking itself into 'sponsorship' via the deputy editor at Qidian aside.
Oh, the internet crucibles of the late 90s and 2000s.
Thanks Afra, again your feel for journalism is outstanding. A double coda!! (your Wired piece was the coda to a fascinating issue)
This is not "performative encouragement"
"You’re thinking ...Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, aren’t you?"
No.
Sounds like Atlas Shrugged, but I think Ma is making clear in the interview that while that industrialist pride was what brought the original forum together, the thinking is more liberal minded.
I'd argue that the Neo-cons in US misinterpreteted Atlas Shrugged when they started to site it as their manifesto, confusing John Galt's conept of virtue with baseness.
"... people who actually held advanced productive capacity."
Galt's gulch indeed.
But, what makes the double coda even more interesting is your allusion to precisionist artwork (I guess it just coincidence that industrial looking piece with smoke stacks and stuff was chosen.)
The Precisionist Art of Charles Sheeler
Makes one think, what if everything should be created with some elegant mathematical formula in mind?
There have actually been attempts around the world to design buildings according to the golden mean. Some have been catastrophic, the conclusion being a willing to compromise; The nautalis shell is not EXACTLY the golden mean, but the concept can be seen in it's natural-history-museum-geometry.
Ma mentions, "In the relatively open era of Chinese internet discourse — roughly before 2011 — whatever the nominal topic, politics was always the silent subtext. It ran beneath every thread."
I like the word Feuilleton, but now google thinks it just means "soap opera." I suppose that underscores another theme here, "The question is whether anyone administers anesthesia intelligently."
Media as Rational Actor
"...several million media workers collectively add up to zero..."
He's got a point. Look at the sycophants that are working as techs for broadcast industry for example. They just do what the boss tells them.
"A machine with no manual can’t be repaired.“natives have no rights” — stated plainly ...If you’re confident in your system, you describe it clearly; if you’re not, you veil it in mystification."
Point taken, but such a policy should be considered with the John Rawls philosophy of a "veil of ignorance."
What if Ma was the native? Would he still stand by his logical argument? Presumably he would argue that if he were "native" he would be too stupid to even discuss it.... I see what you mean by inhumane sentiment in the preface:
"Wenzhou was a moment of seizing media oxygen... good media knows how to hack the emotions"
I wonder if he does this on purpose to seem more honest. Sounds like he'd ace an interview with Rupert Murdoch.
"If tomorrow the majority falls into an industrial fetishism that treats investment as inherently virtuous regardless of returns or human welfare, I’ll argue the other way. "
That happened yesterday! read: Hedgefund-Private-Equity-Real-Estate.
populism vs. democracy - Standing with the majority
"But more fundamentally: 'standing with the majority' and 'facing reality' are inseparable"
This is like conformity.
Bifurcation
"...in 2010 ...the majority of people would still be rendered economically redundant"
"...The jobs being eliminated were already structurally unnecessary..."
But, a company is not a company unless it has a bunch of people who agree to be part of it. Whether they do anything useful or not is besides the point.
This has been the case long before 2010, just that in 2010 the financial crisis (Lehman Bros.) showed what an socio-economic dystopian society might look like.
Great interview! As a fan of him many years, It's thrilled for me that someone is willing to share him and his thoughts about world to the western.
Thank you so much, Hao.
Excellent work, Afra. I wished more people in Europe read it. The Sentimental Party here reign here is absolute.
thank you so much! I am working on a piece for Le Grand Continental for Lingao & industrial party! stay tuned :3
This guy is insanely politically conscious. Really a pleasant surprise to discover a voice like his.
Apologies if you answered this but is the book available in translation? You make it sound fascinating!
yes! here is the link: https://illuminelingao.com/
Afra: great piece, yet again! Much to digest. I had dealings with the “father” / namer of the Industrial Party, Wang Xiaodong 王小東, in the early 1990s when he and his comrades — funded by the PLA — were already busy envisioning a future of Chinese dominance. I wrote about my early encounters with Wang and his buddies in “To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic: China’s Avant-grade Nationalists” (1995). Geremie
so epic! what was he like in the 90s? i only started hearing about him after he published 中国不高兴
Afra: he was bombastic and extremely self-important, very much in the manner of the 祖師爺 of the chauvinistic intelligentsia in the ‘90s: He Xin 何新. He Xin started out as a “liberal” in the early 1980s but turned patriotic conservative around 1984 when he started to enjoy the patronage of Hu Qiaomu 胡喬木, the ideologue-predecessor to Wang Huning.
As for Wang Xiaodong’s general demeanour, it brought to mind that famous line from Mao’s poem “Changsha”:
指點江山，激揚文字，糞土當年萬戶侯。
I was amused to note that Wang repeatedly denounced me as a US “cultural spy”, even as recently as the early 2000s. My work on his gang must have struck a nerve. I’ve long thought of him as being a Sino-fascist (a term others in China have also used for this school of 愛國賊, even though one might sympathise with aspects of their anti-American anti Western stance.)
Geremie
Out of curiosity, was this interview carried out in English or translated by the author? If so, from which language?
Reading it, I think it’s relatively obvious that the interview was conducted in Mandarin, translated with the help of AI, and then smoothed out and corrected by the author. But afra can correct me if I’m wrong
yes it’s originally conducted in chinese and translated to english with assistance of AI
Thanks afra, also really enjoyed the piece, looking forward to reading more!
This is a great article. Thank you for the interview with Ma Qianzu.
Regarding his personal thoughts, I think I can offer some information. Based on my years of understanding of Ma Qianzu (from his early articles in 西西河 and various forums to his bedtime news program to detailed articles about him), he's not the kind of person who experiences disillusionment. On the contrary, he possesses an almost inexplicable optimism; he believes that "humans will definitely grow wings a second before they fall off a cliff and die." Two years ago, a prominent KOL “章北海official”(also a fan of Ma) interviewed him and asked him about his future plans. Ma gave a similar answer, mentioning exercise and fitness, and confidently and naturally discussing what he would be doing when he's over a hundred years old (not making a prediction about how long he would live, but naturally discussing what he would be doing then).
A comment on Zhihu about Ma Qianzu:
"Ma Qianzu is highly confident, to the point of arrogance and near-awkwardness. He believes that only he and Hu Xijin (half a person) in the entire Chinese media industry raise issues, and he criticizes and questions everyone else for failing to do so, believing everyone has let down their nine years of compulsory education. As a ten-year viewer of Ma Qianzu, I want to help analyze the reasons for his confidence and how young viewers should respond to his expectations.
Although Ma Qianzu presents himself as an ordinary person both on the show and in life, believing that 2 million followers are no different from 2 fans, and that he is the worst off among his civil engineering classmates, his personality is not that of a typical ordinary person. He pursues the underlying principles of things to a fanatical degree, working almost year-round without significant economic gain, seemingly born for media. He worked tirelessly throughout the year at Guancha.cn, and hasn't fared much better now. He usually lives in his studio, rarely appearing at his Suzhou home unless he's currently banned from speaking out, and he wouldn't conduct interviews from home like this." He lived a life of asceticism, indulging in no particular expense, driving a car from over a decade ago. His younger subordinates and colleagues were often astonished by his lifestyle, with his mentor, Mr. Mu, even jokingly comparing it to that of Premier Zhou Enlai. In today's parlance, many of his viewers were like "fragile postmodern atomists" with obvious human flaws, while he himself resembled "PRC Superman."
The supervisor was not, in essence, a scholar. He didn't revere knowledge itself, nor did he enjoy empty theoretical discussions. Instead, he was extremely eager to find shortcuts to knowledge and the underlying principles, wary of any undefined statements, and disdainful of reading centuries-old social science texts to learn from the wisdom of predecessors. For him, Marxist political economy was unsuitable for modern people to build models; if a model could be quickly obtained through a search engine, he wouldn't waste time on original materials, systematically and mechanically transforming it into a formulaic approach for topic selection and media language.
He wrote an article on Guancha.cn titled "Reading is Good, But Understanding is Not Essential." He opposes ritualized reading, believing that modern society has too much and too complex knowledge, and that one cannot master even a small area in a lifetime. Therefore, one should choose to explore broadly and shallowly to truly understand the world. He further elaborated on this point and systematically demonstrated it in his latest paid course on how to be a media professional, while revealing that he himself relied on rudimentary speed-reading techniques to read one book a day in university, skipping classes for four years to study and barely graduating. Therefore, despite his vast reading, he refused to provide a reading list to his viewers during his live streams, believing that what one reads is unimportant; what matters is the act of reading.
At the same time, he is actually a very arrogant and conceited person, extremely confident in his theories, never admitting mistakes, but adept at subtle self-reflection and efficient self-correction, constantly changing his fundamental viewpoints and stances over the years—a rarity for someone over 30. During a live stream, when someone mentioned terms like "class stratification," he immediately said that the person hadn't even attended primary school. His evaluation of philosophy is "garbage" and "worse than garbage." "Class solidification" is a term that commands respect from even the most naive leftists and keyboard warriors. While it may not be taken seriously, the inexplicable hostility it evokes is intriguing. He fundamentally despises the flawed social models underlying this term, much like the currently popular online philosophical games.
His views have consistently shifted, accompanied by remarkably consistent online and offline action and self-justification. People only know him as a powerful figure online since the BBS era, but few know that he participated in gang fights among children of miners in his childhood, saw many firearms, and participated in local ethnic conflicts in his youth. When he first entered university, he was a staunch supporter of the pro-independence movement. During the year the US bombed the embassy, he was in university, and he stood in front of a crowd in Shanghai, saying it might have been an accident, that the US had no reason to do it deliberately, and that everyone should remain calm. He was nearly attacked as a result. Later, his views continued to shift, moving towards becoming a national advisor and a member of the communist left, including participating in many dangerous offline activities during the 2008 Tiananmen Square protests and the Great Goal period. After 2018, he underwent another shift in views, accompanied by fervent media production—the person we now know as Ma Dugong.
Simonian normative claims with Marxist modals..? Wonder if there's perchance any lines, parallel or orthogonal, to be drawn between the rationalist movement's birthing station of intellectual strains and the Industrialists. Besides the obvious points, and lucking itself into 'sponsorship' via the deputy editor at Qidian aside.
Oh, the internet crucibles of the late 90s and 2000s.
Thanks Afra, again your feel for journalism is outstanding. A double coda!! (your Wired piece was the coda to a fascinating issue)
This is not "performative encouragement"
"You’re thinking ...Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, aren’t you?"
No.
Sounds like Atlas Shrugged, but I think Ma is making clear in the interview that while that industrialist pride was what brought the original forum together, the thinking is more liberal minded.
I'd argue that the Neo-cons in US misinterpreteted Atlas Shrugged when they started to site it as their manifesto, confusing John Galt's conept of virtue with baseness.
"... people who actually held advanced productive capacity."
Galt's gulch indeed.
But, what makes the double coda even more interesting is your allusion to precisionist artwork (I guess it just coincidence that industrial looking piece with smoke stacks and stuff was chosen.)
The Precisionist Art of Charles Sheeler
Makes one think, what if everything should be created with some elegant mathematical formula in mind?
There have actually been attempts around the world to design buildings according to the golden mean. Some have been catastrophic, the conclusion being a willing to compromise; The nautalis shell is not EXACTLY the golden mean, but the concept can be seen in it's natural-history-museum-geometry.
Ma mentions, "In the relatively open era of Chinese internet discourse — roughly before 2011 — whatever the nominal topic, politics was always the silent subtext. It ran beneath every thread."
I like the word Feuilleton, but now google thinks it just means "soap opera." I suppose that underscores another theme here, "The question is whether anyone administers anesthesia intelligently."
Media as Rational Actor
"...several million media workers collectively add up to zero..."
He's got a point. Look at the sycophants that are working as techs for broadcast industry for example. They just do what the boss tells them.
"A machine with no manual can’t be repaired.“natives have no rights” — stated plainly ...If you’re confident in your system, you describe it clearly; if you’re not, you veil it in mystification."
Point taken, but such a policy should be considered with the John Rawls philosophy of a "veil of ignorance."
What if Ma was the native? Would he still stand by his logical argument? Presumably he would argue that if he were "native" he would be too stupid to even discuss it.... I see what you mean by inhumane sentiment in the preface:
"Wenzhou was a moment of seizing media oxygen... good media knows how to hack the emotions"
I wonder if he does this on purpose to seem more honest. Sounds like he'd ace an interview with Rupert Murdoch.
"If tomorrow the majority falls into an industrial fetishism that treats investment as inherently virtuous regardless of returns or human welfare, I’ll argue the other way. "
That happened yesterday! read: Hedgefund-Private-Equity-Real-Estate.
populism vs. democracy - Standing with the majority
"But more fundamentally: 'standing with the majority' and 'facing reality' are inseparable"
This is like conformity.
Bifurcation
"...in 2010 ...the majority of people would still be rendered economically redundant"
"...The jobs being eliminated were already structurally unnecessary..."
But, a company is not a company unless it has a bunch of people who agree to be part of it. Whether they do anything useful or not is besides the point.
This has been the case long before 2010, just that in 2010 the financial crisis (Lehman Bros.) showed what an socio-economic dystopian society might look like.
This is a great piece, Afra. Thank you!