Highbrow magazines hit a low

Highbrow magazines hit a low
By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-07-12 08:27

Views of the situation vary. Fans of the old magazines say it means the disappearance of serious reading. "Grown-ups don't read today," Chen Xiaoming, literature professor at Peking University, told Sina.com. "When they do, they only want light-hearted books and magazines. They would not choose thought-provoking ones."

Others suggest readers have changed. Perhaps, they say, a generation of young professionals has emerged, demanding a different kind of "intellectual magazine."

"Our cities have a new generation of well-educated people," said Zhu,
"They are different from the old-style intellectuals and have different lifestyles."
Intellectuals of the previous generation, he explained, were active in the 1980s and early '90s and came mainly from the universities and social science research bodies.

"They were small in number and meagre in economic resources," Zhu said, "but they managed to have cultural power because the wealthy people in China in those days were business people with little cultural background or education, much less anything that could be called culture."

Since the '90s, however, the young people who used to listen to and even adore the "cultural elite" have grown up. Professionals among them have become the mainstay of the nation's "middle class."

This generation is a much larger group of people, with great energy and potential.

Different from the old intellectuals, those young professionals are showing enormous upward social mobility while remaining culturally creative, Zhu said, "so editors must try to meet the demands of this larger group of new readers."

Readers of the new generation care more about what is happening now than what took place in the past, and they want to get better involved in the reforms and developments in society, he said.

They don't care for articles about life on the Bund in Shanghai in the 1930s, or about some famous courtesan's residence in Beijing's old courtyard neighbourhood, however rich with cultural and historical allusions they may be.

And they don't want just information. "They want new ideas, new lives and new pursuits that they can make for themselves," Zhu said. By contrast, Book Town and Panorama Monthly seem to be putting out a cultural facade without reflecting mainstream middle-class life. Eventually they marginalize themselves, and "that's why they are doomed to have an unhappy end," Zhu said.

To He Xiongfei, president of the Boai Tianshi Publishing Consultancy Co Ltd, who rose to success by publishing books on social criticism for young intellectuals in the '90s, the two old magazines are merely feeding the nostalgia of what he called an old "cultural elite."

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