Word: spirit
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...hundreds of thousands of readers - government officials and students, traditionalists and bohemians, workers and business types. Huge Chinese enterprises like Lenovo, Haier and Huawei bought copies for their employees, and the book quickly spawned a host of self-help and management texts that claimed to be imbued with its spirit - works with titles like The Wolf's Way, Wolf Soul, The Cool Wolves, Think Like a Wolf and Wolf Strategy. Illegal reproductions of Wolf Totem, of course, were rampant. No one knows the exact number of pirated copies sold but usual estimates are between five and 10 times the authorized...
...death, soil - to which the nation is no longer attuned. "The heat caused by Wolf Totem ... is a symptom of Chinese people's collective depletion of spiritual belief," wrote critic Zhang Hong in the highbrow Wenhui Readers' Weekly. "The book is like a stimulant injected into the decadent contemporary spirit that allows people to fantasize about becoming aggressive and successful." Fittingly, those are the very qualities demanded by the new society evolving from China's economic boom...
...Jiang is a pseudonym), the obligation to promote Wolf Totem means that these days Jiang will reveal previously guarded details of his life and the creation of his unlikely best seller - and they make it clear that behind the slightly donnish exterior, he has lived with the same willful spirit as the wolves he writes about. He has, for instance, been arrested five times for being a "counterrevolutionary," experiencing beatings and five years in prison (the last stint for leading a group of students to the protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989). "It is ironic...
...avoid decadence and decay, he argues, the Chinese must emulate the ferocious independence of the wolves and the nomadic Mongols who lived in harmony with them. And not just the Mongols but the Europeans also. "The stories of the wolves are Chinese stories but they manifest the Western [European] spirit. Nomadic people are prone to explore, fight, and develop commerce, like what has happened in the West," he explains. "While farmers have a narrow minded attitude that puts themselves in a cage. That's why, even if Chinese people were given democracy, they wouldn't want it. Chinese...
...book. The wolves - those symbols of perfect freedom - are exterminated by officials as part of a plan to turn the grasslands over to large-scale farming, and Chen Zhen, the protagonist, can find only hackneyed, metaphysical solace as he meditates upon a wolf-cub pelt, imagining the cub's spirit in "the place where all the souls of Mongolian wolves that had died in battles over the millennia congregated." One is left wondering if millions of Chinese readers also believe that freedom only waits in heaven, or if they feel it to be something worth striving for on earth...