Akademik

[Reading]

Intellectual periodical

Since the first issue was published on 10 April 1979, Dushu (Reading) has gradually become the most important book review monthly in mainland China. It belongs to the United Publishing House (Sanlian shudian), which was established in 1948 by merging three magazines: Life (Shenghuo), Reading (Dushu) and Xinzhi (New Knowledge), and is now well known for publishing the works of Chinese intellectuals and translations of modern Western thinkers.

With a format of 32 mo and a publishing capacity of 160 pages for each issue, Dushu usually accepts reviews which are less than 8,000 Chinese characters. Flagged with the faith that ‘No Forbidden Zone in Reading’ (Dushu wu jinqu), the title of the first article of the first issue, Dushu gathered a large numbers of intellectual writers, critics and humanities scholars around it and thus, in the early 1980s, formed a distinguishing style: humanistic, rhetorically lively and politically critical when the government’s control temporarily loosened. In relevance with the feature, Dushu keeps a simple style of binding and layout designed by a famous painter Ding Cong (b. 1916).

From the later 1990s to now, Dushu, led by the two co-editors Wang Hui (b. 1959) and Huang Pin (b. 1958), who are both critical scholars, has evidently strengthened its theoretical colour while keeping the original features. Many books of social science, with more economic, social and even international affairs, were reviewed by the magazine. Now Dushu has an average impression of more than 100,000 copies, far more than other comparable magazines in China.