For better government, read fewer books

Today is World Book and Copyright Day, and during the run-up to this solemn occasion, schools have been holding book fairs, major bookstores have been running discount promotions, and the Chinese press has been lamenting the decline in book reading among the general population. A survey published at the end of 2004 estimated that only 50% of people have at least one book-reading session per month, and that number has continued to fall. (In Beijing, incidentally, non-readership stood at 55% in that survey, while in Shanghai it was only 24%.)

Science fiction author and journalist Han Song writes that China’s governing class should actually be reading fewer books. Here’s a translation of a recent blog post:

On this World Book Day, according to newspaper reports, the book reading rate of China’s populace has declined for the last six years to below 50% for the first time. I think that this is a natural event, and no cause for surprise; we shouldn’t blame the people. This is just a result of those below following the behavior of those above.

I’ve interacted with a few leaders and officials, and I feel they have little learning. Maybe they’ve read a few books, but those books and the rest of the heritage of human civilization are really two different things. They’ve spoken with Russian visitors, saying how great How Steel is Tempered is, and how great The Story of Zoya and Shura is, and how they’ve read them both. But they don’t know about Tolstoy or Pushkin. This is a serious problem for a nation’s image.

But as leaders, they still do an outstanding job. So being a leader doesn’t require one to read those books that are commonly regarded as quality. Where is there time to read books along the road for leaders and officials from the very lowest levels on up? Where is there interest to read books? They have to read lots of documents, and in general the topic of a document isn’t remembered very clearly even as another document arrives with a new topic to memorize.

Leaders and officials have one other duty, which is to sit in their office and spend lots of time working on people. This is reality in China, since there are 1.3 billion people who need administration. In the past, Mao Zedong could talk philosophy with Americans and Japanese, and he could even talk about physics and cosmology. Today, officials are more adept at the administrative sciences, particularly the “Water Margin” and “Three Kingdoms” type of “administration.” In bookstores, the hottest-sellers are these types of “Mount Liang Politics – How to be a Leader” books.

So the result is that society sees one slogan after another talking about “enacting justice on behalf of heaven,” the result of not having read books yet wanting to display a grasp of theory. It was said in the past that with half of the Analects one could govern the earth, yet today I’d guess that there aren’t many leaders and officials who’ve read the Analects, even though they all trumpet things about reviving outstanding traditional culture. Not to mention the Marx and Lenin that they’ve canonized. I’ve long questioned the way we govern the country, because they truthfully have no learning – I’m not talking about schooling or knowledge. They have no big picture. Talking with them about somewhat complicated issues, you get a strange feeling that there is no possibility for dialogue.

But there’s a problem in using Peking University professors to govern today’s China – there’s no doubt that things would go wrong. People who read books actually have less of a grasp on things than those who don’t read. They always mess things up to the point of being unsalvageable. For this reason, in the end I still believe that for China to improve, it’s better to read fewer books, and it’s best to be like Putin and practice judo. But the problem is that today’s leaders and officials neither read books nor practice judo.