Summary

History is not driven by genius figures moving pieces on a chessboard, but by the combined force of countless constrained actions. 苗棣’s view is closer to Tolstoy’s: even an emperor is only one component of that force, while someone as intelligent as 杨继宗 can walk precisely onto a track laid by others—“your intelligence and talent are just fuel.” The investment takeaway is to put less faith in key-person narratives and track how institutions, incentives, and chance jointly reshape outcomes.
The Ming system concentrated power to an extreme, yet staked the entire quality of governance on a “perfect emperor” whom no institution could guarantee. Eunuchs appeared to wield unchecked power, but in reality they always “turned in the emperor’s palm”; the real system bug was the contradiction between “supreme imperial power and an emperor who was not supreme enough.” An agent’s lack of independent power does not make an organization safe when final decisions remain locked to a single point of failure.
More information does not automatically produce truth; it can instead push researchers into a Rashomon effect. The Ming left abundant records, yet conflicting interests make the more one reads, the less clear the picture becomes. Materials left by 康有为, 梁启超, and 李贤—the biggest beneficiary of the Coup of 1457—must all be repriced against their interests. 苗棣’s warning is highly relevant to due diligence: “Too much material is also a historian’s disaster.”
The differentiation of the “Tianshun Trilogy” lies not in imperial intrigue, but in making middle- and lower-ranking figures the protagonists of major events and the supporting characters of history. 苗棣 wrote from around 2017 through early 2025, completing more than 1M Chinese characters over 8 years, and used “Red Dragon,” “Black Fiend,” and “White Sail” to test single-perspective, shifting-perspective, and cross-temporal structures. Its content moat comes from the constraints of historical sources, period language, and details of social life—not from putting modern people in ancient costumes.
The Chongzhen case shows that diligence and a sense of responsibility, combined with suspicion and constant personnel changes, can instead accelerate an organization’s loss of coordination. He used about 50 grand secretaries over 17 years on the throne; by the middle of his reign, scholar-officials broadly felt that “this emperor is impossible to work with,” leading them to comply outwardly while avoiding responsibility in practice. 苗棣’s judgment is that had Chongzhen been less capable and less vigilant, the Ming might have lasted another 10 to 20 years.
Demand for historical content did not disappear with the media cycle; the real scarcity lies in matching the potential audience with the reached audience. More than 1,000 people were still reading “White Sail” through to the end of its Caixin serialization, and 苗棣 estimates that a print edition can accumulate about 10,000 readers over time. He says plainly that “the potential audience and the reached audience are two entirely different concepts.” This is a niche-content economy: absolute scale is limited, but the long tail, completion rate, and efficiency of audience matching may matter more than instantaneous traffic.
Television being “usurped” by the smartphone shows that media migration is ultimately determined by convenience and cost, not by whether the old platform can still produce content. 苗棣 dates the inflection point to around 2005 to 2007: the public’s demand for information and entertainment did not change, but the phone’s “convenience and low cost were unmatched,” and television could no longer reverse the shift. Platform investors should distinguish demand destruction from demand being captured by a lower-friction new vehicle.

Deep dive

1. The Evidentiary Gaps Around the Coup of 1457 Turned a History Book into a Million-Word Novel

The 1457 coup may have been, in 苗棣’s view, the only restoration in the history of Chinese imperial rule: 朱祁镇 was captured, released, made a retired emperor, and ultimately “was restored almost by accident” at the urging of several plotters.
After reclaiming the throne, 朱祁镇 had to rebuild his authority and inevitably had to fear the people who had proved they could install an emperor. 徐有贞 fell from power and was exiled a few months later; 石亨 and 曹吉祥 were executed with their clans about 2 years and 4 years later, respectively. The purge was inevitable; its precise path was contingent.
苗棣 initially wanted to write a conventional history that excavated the Coup of 1457 in detail, but the sources were not sufficient to establish the key links. Many inferences could go no further than “could it have happened this way?” He therefore rewrote it as a historical-legend narrative, writing from around 2017 to early 2025 and completing “Red Dragon,” “Black Fiend,” and “White Sail” over 8 years and more than 1M Chinese characters.

2. The Fictional Red Dragon Society Tests the Limits of Public Institutions

The Red Dragon Society has no basis in surviving historical records. It is 苗棣’s institutional thought experiment, reverse-engineered from the Jingnan campaign: might 朱棣 have worried that a future royal power struggle could recur, and therefore created a secret insurance policy alongside the public political structure?
In the novel, the organization recruits senior officials, princes, eunuchs, and people from the broader public, using commerce as cover for its funding and operations. Its sole mission is to preserve the 朱 family’s dynasty when imperial power falls into crisis. It once considered intervening when the Xuande emperor had just taken the throne and an uncle might launch a coup; after the Tumu Crisis, members including 于谦 helped stabilize the situation, but it failed during the Coup of 1457 for various reasons.
李翔 particularly likes the detail with its institutional irony: although the Red Dragon Society possesses 朱棣’s written instructions, the language is official, ornate, and ambiguous. If the instructions were submitted through the proper channels, the crisis would already be beyond saving. 苗棣 puts it more directly: “If you follow procedure, you simply won’t make it in time.”
苗棣 did not consciously copy the Freemasons, but acknowledges that the secret-society narratives of modern novels and films may well have been lodged in his subconscious. Chinese historical records contain no underground organization with enough power to determine the succession of imperial authority.

3. 于谦’s Inaction May Have Been an Attempt to Prevent a Civil War within the Imperial Family at the Cost of His Own Life

Historians have repeatedly asked why 于谦, who held enormous power and should have known that people were operating in secret, did nothing. 苗棣’s explanation is that he did not want to turn the conspiracy into an armed confrontation between 2 emperors—he would “rather go down himself.”
In the novel, 于谦 accepts a bow from a prince and ministers because he has already decided to sacrifice himself. Had he intended to continue governing, a minister ordinarily could not accept such a bow from a prince. 李翔 reads this as reflecting the Chinese moral ideal of the scholar-official; 苗棣 emphasizes that early Ming scholar-officials genuinely did sometimes give up their lives for Neo-Confucian principle, loyalty, and the moral order they believed in.
李翔 uses Hobsbawm to explain this kind of loyalty: even after confronting facts such as the Gulag, Hobsbawm still remembered that many Communists had sincerely fought for human ideals. 苗棣 agrees with the analogy. What matters is not what the organization later became, but that people once bore the full cost of their convictions with moral seriousness.

4. Smart People Are Often Not the Chess Players, but Merely More Useful Fuel

杨继宗 can analyze a case with complete clarity, yet has almost no influence on the direction of history. He may even have a negative impact by solving a case and thereby stepping precisely onto a track laid out by others. 苗棣’s unsparing summary is: “Your intelligence and talent are just fuel.”
A character in “White Sail” puts his position even lower: “We are not even the crickets being fought; we are the people who find the crickets.” Even major figures such as 石亨 are merely crickets for others to bet on. Small players can only provoke larger forces into colliding.
苗棣’s view of history is that “everyone’s actions eventually add up to form a history.” Even an emperor with supreme power is only one element in the combined force. Individuals can achieve their immediate objectives, but rarely control the chain reactions set off when those objectives enter history.
李翔 places this in the divide between the view that “great figures change history” and a Tolstoyan view of history as a combined force; 苗棣 clearly favors the latter. He retains the tension required by fiction: the purge of the restoration’s meritorious officials was inevitable, but who participated, how it was launched, and when the blade fell were all highly contingent.

5. Good Historical Fiction Makes Ordinary People the Protagonists of Events and the Supporting Cast of History

苗棣 divides historical fiction into 2 traditions. One, like “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” revolves around emperors, generals, ministers, and famous leaders—something close to a fictionalized “Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance.” The other, like “Water Margin,” brings to life middle- and lower-level figures who receive only 1 or 2 lines in the historical record, or none at all.
He chooses the latter. Ordinary people are drawn into major events without realizing it; they are protagonists in the story but remain insignificant supporting characters in real history. This is why 朱祁镇 and 朱祁钰 barely appear directly, 石亨 and 曹吉祥 receive little space, and only 徐有贞 gets a somewhat larger role.
Some characters, such as 杨继宗 and 徐三小姐, leave faint traces in the historical record; others are fictional. They are not there to complete a literary biography of an emperor, but to let readers enter the workings of power through individual circumstances.
Another task of the novels is to restore the texture of life in 15th-century Beijing: how people celebrated the New Year, how they spent the Lantern Festival, what the city looked like in spring and summer, and how the upper, middle, and lower classes lived together. 苗棣 wants the period to “feel roughly like that era,” not to let modern people travel back in time and remake the world.

6. Intrigue Has No China-Specific Version; Its Constant Is Human Nature

苗棣 believes the unlimited nature of imperial power has a distinctly Chinese institutional feature: once something ultimately drives the emperor, it can produce a decisive change. But identifying an enemy’s weakness and combining complex tactics to bring that enemy down are not uniquely Chinese.
His conclusion is categorical: “Human history has no real pattern, but it has one absolute rule: human nature.” Institutions change the leverage and boundaries of political intrigue; the desires, fears, and self-preservation instincts driving it remain stable over long periods.
李翔 asks why people do not change even though “Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance” has already laid human nature bare. 苗棣 answers that basic human nature has indeed not changed; institutions and civilization have simply added constraints, so politics is no longer routinely and openly as brutal as it is in the book.

7. “Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance” Is First and Foremost a Political Operations Manual

苗棣 spent several years reading “Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Governance” carefully from beginning to end once, and is skeptical of people who casually claim to have read it many times. The title itself explains its purpose: using history as a mirror, it primarily teaches emperors, aspiring officials, and serving officials how to participate in politics.
司马光 repeatedly judged what was good and evil, but readers were not obliged to use his examples ethically: “You say this was bad, but it looks pretty useful to me—I can use it too.” 李翔 calls it a handbook for political struggle; 苗棣 responds that “an encyclopedia of political conspiracies” would not be an unreasonable name either.
His deepest impression after finishing it was that “almost every page involves someone being killed.” The killings continue through the fall of the Tang dynasty. 李白 is mentioned only once, and 杜甫 not at all, because a chronological political history focuses on emperors, wars, and bureaucrats; it is not responsible for showing how literature and art formed a civilization.
李翔 worries that too much historical reading can lead to powerlessness and nihilism. 苗棣 acknowledges that the novels, particularly the third, carry a heavy sense of helplessness. But the long sweep of history also displays the breadth and splendor of civilization and the vivid diversity of ordinary life; moreover, the protagonists of all 3 novels ultimately achieve their immediate objectives.

8. The Ming Produced So Many Mysteries Not Only Because Its Institutions Were Strange, but Because Its Records Were So Abundant

苗棣 attributes the Ming’s unusual episodes, mysteries, and political bugs to 2 conditions operating together: a centralized system developed to its peak, and a succession of emperors after 朱元璋 and 朱棣 with unusually distinctive abilities and personalities. When a tightly engineered machine meets operators who do not fit it, political outcomes naturally become difficult to model.
Qing centralization was even stronger, but its emperors were generally more capable and people fit the system better, leaving bureaucrats and scholar-officials more thoroughly subdued. The Ming’s problem was not insufficiently strong rules; it was that the rules magnified the flaws of the supreme ruler.
The other reason is that the Ming left too many records. The same question can generate multiple accounts across books, collected works, notebooks, local gazetteers, and official materials. A new source often does not solve the mystery; it immediately makes the old explanation stop fitting. “The more material survives, the messier the problem actually becomes.”
李翔 compares this to Churchill’s joke about Americans: there is no need to keep anything secret—give the enemy all the newspapers and documents, and the contradictions will confuse them on their own. 苗棣 agrees with the mechanism: abundance does not equal clarity and instead creates a historical Rashomon effect.

9. Ming Eunuchs Wielded Enormous Power, but It Was Always Derivative of Imperial Authority

In the Han dynasty, maternal relatives could directly control or oppose imperial power; in the Tang, regional military governors eventually operated beyond the center’s control. The Ming largely achieved a system in which “there was no great power outside imperial authority.” When the emperor did not personally follow a matter, eunuchs became the most important executors.
This made Ming eunuchs look powerful, but their position differed from the great eunuchs of the Eastern Han and mid-to-late Tang, who could manipulate the emperor. 魏忠贤 collapsed immediately after the Tianqi emperor died; when 正德 began to suspect 刘瑾, he could confiscate his property and execute him by slow slicing without even conducting a detailed investigation. Once imperial backing disappeared, the power went to zero instantly.
王振 died in the Tumu Crisis, 汪直’s influence vanished after he lost favor, and 曹吉祥 could not escape the same logic. In “White Sail,” 刘马儿 appears to drive a series of events from behind the scenes, but 苗棣 deliberately avoids stating his motives outright, because readers eventually discover that “the emperor is behind it all.”

10. Centralization Can Eliminate External Power Centers, but It Cannot Produce a Perfect Emperor

苗棣 believes that, from the emperor’s perspective, the Ming system was indeed quite “advanced.” The one thing it failed to design was a way to guarantee that the emperor’s abilities and personality would both be adequate. Yet the entire effectiveness of supreme power depended on precisely that unguaranteed condition.
To prevent maternal relatives from gaining influence, Ming empresses and consorts were chosen from ordinary families; eunuchs came from poor rural backgrounds and had limited literacy before entering the palace. The court therefore developed a highly plebeian cultural atmosphere, with food, drink, and entertainment close to commoner life, while also raising the next generation of emperors in that same environment.
苗棣 uses this to explain why Ming emperors were not necessarily unintelligent yet often behaved incompetently, and why many displayed psychological problems such as depression and inferiority. Their supreme status was radically out of step with their cultural and personal preparation. The system required a sage ruler while simultaneously reducing the odds that one would emerge.
By contrast, Qing consorts came from Eight Banner aristocratic families and princes received strict education. After 雍正, the heir was not publicly designated, allowing multiple princes to compete continuously; 李翔 jokes that it was like “General Electric selecting a CEO.” The Western Han practice of killing the heir’s mother to prevent maternal relatives from gaining power is dismissed by both as “not actually very useful.”

11. Historical Facts Have 3 Layers, and Primary Sources Are Still Interested Testimony

苗棣 draws a boundary between history and fiction: serious history permits reasonable “fill-in-the-blank” inference, but not free invention; fiction can turn an unprovable possibility into a complete narrative. The former pursues truth, while the latter openly acknowledges its own imagination.
The difficulty of reconstructing the Hundred Days’ Reform is that most of the detailed material came from 康有为 and 梁启超 themselves. 苗棣 believes 袁世凯’s alleged line—“killing 荣禄 is like killing a pig”—was probably not actually 袁’s words, but a narrative written by 梁启超.
Important materials on the Coup of 1457 also came from 李贤, who rose from an ordinary official to chief grand secretary and remained unharmed after other plotters were destroyed, making him one of the coup’s biggest beneficiaries. His account of the era may contain blind spots created by his position, or deliberate narrative construction.
苗棣 divides history into 3 layers: “what happened at the time” is objective history; “what was recorded” is already subjective; and when modern historians organize it again, it becomes even more subjective. Both statements are true: only victors can write history, and only those who write history become victors, because the defeated can also leave words that change later judgments.

12. Reassessment Is Unavoidable, but Novelty Cannot Substitute for Source Criticism

苗棣 agrees with the idea that “all history is contemporary history”: researchers are formed by the present and cannot avoid viewing the past through modern eyes. History must therefore be rewritten again and again, or later historians would have no object of study.
He cites 曹操 and 王莽. 郭沫若 promoted a reassessment of 曹操 in the 50s of the 20th century, and after reform and opening, some began interpreting 王莽 as a “great reformer.” These shifts reflect contemporary questions, but some reassessments also contain a traffic-seeking impulse, because conclusions that reject tradition attract attention more easily.
Descendants of the Donglin faction carried their influence into the early Qing, shaping the writing of the “History of Ming” and many related works. The Donglin faction therefore acquired a highly positive image. 苗棣 acknowledges that some of its members sacrificed themselves for principle, but emphasizes that they also did many impractical and even absurd things.
Because 杨思昌 opposed the Donglin faction, he was long written as a villain. 苗棣 instead retains his ability, diligence, Chongzhen’s trust in him, and the constraints imposed from above and below. He does not view this as a deliberate revisionist reversal, but as a refusal to use “obviously fabricated” slanderous material and an attempt to return the figure to his actual constraints.

13. Chongzhen’s Diligence Did Not Save the System; It Accelerated the Collapse of Coordination

苗棣 does not consider Chongzhen particularly capable; among Ming emperors, he was merely “all right.” What was genuinely unusual was his sense of responsibility and willingness to work hard, along with his persistent desire to solve problems. Those strengths became a more dangerous governing style when combined with intense suspicion.
Chongzhen grew up amid continuous crisis: his father’s position was unstable, and 魏忠贤 dominated politics while his elder brother was emperor. He entered the palace and became emperor at 16 or 17, while his wife even warned him not to eat the palace food or drink the palace water in case he was poisoned. His suspicion did not emerge from nowhere.
Over 17 years on the throne, he employed about 50 grand secretaries, giving rise to the phrase “Chongzhen’s 50 chancellors,” and executed many senior officials. By around his tenth year, scholar-officials across the court broadly felt that “this emperor is impossible to work with”: good performance brought temporary praise, while even a minor failure could mean death.
The result was that core personnel agreed outwardly but avoided responsibility internally, and the state lost genuine coordination. 苗棣 holds a dual judgment: the Ming’s collapse was probably unavoidable, but had Chongzhen been less capable and less vigilant, it might have been delayed another 10 to 20 years.

14. Ming History Has the “Just Right” Amount of Source Material

苗棣 studied history as an undergraduate and initially focused on the Qing under 顺治 and 康熙. While tracing the origins of those questions, he kept moving back through 天启 and Chongzhen until deciding, “I can’t go back any further—if I do, I’ll end up at the Xia dynasty,” eventually writing “Governing a Country with Mediocrity: A Study of 魏忠贤’s Autocratic Power” and “A Biography of Chongzhen.”
Qing historical materials are so abundant that researchers must confront the mountains of archives at the First Historical Archives of China. Earlier dynasties may leave so little that further questions become impossible to pursue. The Ming is “neither too much nor too little—just right”: every question offers a source mine without making the project completely unmanageable.
The Ming publishing industry and economy were relatively developed. Officials often compiled and printed a collection of their works during their lifetimes, producing several hundred copies and wrapping them in handkerchiefs as gifts. Even if only 10% survived wars and book bans, the volume remained enormous; local gazetteers, private collections, and modern digitization have further lowered the cost of searching.
李翔 worries that future historians confronting Weibo, Twitter, video, and short video will never be able to read everything. 苗棣 agrees that “too much material is also a historian’s disaster.” The kind of historical reconstruction practiced by 毛海建 often begins with a seemingly simple question, only for the researcher to sift through more and more material and become less certain what actually happened.

15. Nonfiction Pursues Truth; Fiction Reconnects the Broken Links

The impact of “1587, A Year of No Significance” on Chinese historians in the early 80s of the 20th century initially came from its narrative form. Earlier works were organized into political, economic, and cultural sections, followed by figures, events, and historical lessons; 黄仁宇 showed that serious history could also be told as a fluent narrative.
苗棣 believes 黄仁宇’s influence on Chinese readers and Chinese historical writing was far greater than his influence within American historiography. Even though some later critics called his writing melodramatic, 苗棣 still considers him “pretty formidable.” His own principle is similarly to keep the materials rigorous, verify when necessary, and make the prose accessible enough for ordinary readers to enter.
In terms of difficulty, he clearly considers nonfiction harder, because the author can operate only within a framework believed to approximate historical reality. Spending several days clarifying a small question is “the pursuit of truth”; fiction’s pleasure lies in designing characters and plots and finding a way to make originally disconnected elements lock together plausibly.
The trilogy also represents 3 structural experiments: “Red Dragon” stays almost entirely within 杨继宗’s perspective, even having 徐有贞 take him to the restoration itself; “Black Fiend” centers on 徐三小姐 while repeatedly jumping out of and back into her viewpoint; “White Sail” uses different times and spaces to create a more modern large-scale structure.

16. Writing Stability Comes from Rhythm, Not Endless Revision

When he began “Red Dragon,” 苗棣 only intended to clarify the surface and underlying motive of the case in the first volume; he had no complete plan for the remaining 4 volumes. In the second chapter, he had to depict an ancient horse-racing performance while establishing the characters’ identities and personalities. After rereading the finished chapter and deciding it was “all right,” he knew he could handle long-form fiction.
Beginning with “Black Fiend,” he adopted a fixed discipline: on ordinary days, write 1,000 Chinese characters and stop. “Once I’ve written 1,000 characters, I don’t write anymore.” His speed did not materially increase, but the rhythm made the latter 2 books much easier. It also allowed him to stop deliberately when he already knew what he would write the next day.
He rarely makes major changes after completing an entire book. The real revisions happen while moving forward: if a new idea conflicts with earlier material, he immediately goes back and repairs the connection. After the final draft, he usually reads through it only once to fix typos, punctuation, and obvious problems.
冯骥 in “White Sail” was originally just a hanger-on. As he wrote, 苗棣 felt that making the character sleep with 石兰 solely because of lust would leave both the character and the novel too shallow, so he recast him as a secret agent. The pleasure of fiction lies in this constant recombination: adding characters, adding plot, changing identities, and continuing until dramatic force and plausibility coexist.

17. The Moat of Historical Fiction Is Period Authenticity Plus the Four Pillars of Fiction

苗棣 distinguishes alternate-history narratives, emperor-and-minister novels, and the middle- and lower-level route he chose. “The Longest Day in Chang’an” and “Nirvana in Fire” can be excellent, but their relationship with real history is relatively loose. Novels in the style of those about 张居正 or 曾国藩 turn “big history into literature” and mainly serve as popular entry points to history.
李翔 asks whether large amounts of dialogue are essentially the author speaking through the characters, even though readers often treat them as the historical figures’ real thoughts. 苗棣 acknowledges the risk, but believes such works can quickly tell people who do not read biographies or official histories what a figure broadly did. The 曹操, 刘备, and 关羽 created by “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” show how the literary version can overwrite the historical one.
A top-tier historical novel must first get “the major events right,” while the period’s mood, environment, and everyday life must also feel authentic. As a novel, it must contain all 4 pillars—characters, plot, themes, and language. Weak ideas, flat characters, dull plotting, or an inauthentic voice would strip historical research of its literary value.
苗棣 tries to avoid modern vocabulary and Japanese-style Chinese introduced from Japan after the May Fourth period. For example, he uses “商谈” rather than “谈判.” To find the everyday language and social texture of the Ming, he reread “The Golden Lotus” and “The Bonds of Matrimony.” Older expressions such as “the prime minister eats dumplings and knows what’s going on” create a more convincing period feel than piling up archaic diction.

18. Demand for Historical Content Remains; Books and Television Have Changed the Route to the Audience

苗棣 believes Chinese people have long favored historical narratives, from Song and Ming storytelling to today’s costume dramas, time travel, and alternate history. 李翔 cites a business-school classroom: students showed no reaction when the teacher discussed Nvidia, but became immediately engaged when he explained how 林彪 fought a war.
In evaluating works, 苗棣 regards “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” and “Water Margin” as top-tier historical fiction and also approves of the first 2 volumes of “Li Zicheng.” Among nonfiction, although “Jian Shang” contains substantial unverified and imaginative material, it uses archaeology and the “Book of Changes” to build a persuasive logic for the Shang and Zhou periods. Most historical television dramas still praise sage rulers; “Taiping Year” is more modern, but remains guided by its preset themes.
He dislikes academic papers because they cannot open out into detail. The 李福达 subject he is currently handling will probably require more than 300,000 Chinese characters, as he tries to clarify every person and every source and leave later researchers a point from which to continue. Research has no instrumental purpose: “Once the fun is over, you still have to leave something behind. There has to be a deliverable.” The book is the deliverable.
Books may be a declining medium, but their reach remains far above that of the Ming and Qing periods. More than 1,000 people were still reading “White Sail” to the end of its Caixin serialization, and 苗棣 estimates that roughly 10,000 people will eventually have read it. The issue is not a total absence of demand, but that “the potential audience and the reached audience are two entirely different concepts.”

19. Smartphones Usurped Television by Letting a Lower-Friction Medium Capture the Same Demand

苗棣’s view is that television rose from the 50s of the 20th century through around 2000, with reality television extending the peak for a while longer. Around 2005 to 2007, smartphones appeared and the structure became irreversible. The public still wanted information and entertainment; it was simply that “the convenience and low cost of smartphones were unmatched.”
Television abroad is “slightly better” than in China: the 3 major US broadcast networks, CNN, and others are still operating, while Chinese television is broadly running on empty. Douyin and Kuaishou also offer far more reality programming than traditional television. Television did not suddenly lose the ability to produce content; it was “usurped by a more modern medium.”
苗棣 himself remains decidedly old-school. He does not use Douyin, Kuaishou, or Xiaohongshu, watches a small amount of short video only through WeChat, and has never watched a full short drama. Television news and sports are his true relaxation because “you don’t have to choose—whatever they give you, you watch.” Even so, after seeing the opening of a short drama, he can already predict whether it will be about a civil servant, a rich heiress, or “a domineering CEO falling for a cleaning lady.”

20. 吴文清’s Most Valuable Historical Evidence Is That He Did Not Conceal His Weakness

苗棣 focuses on 吴文清 not only for his poetic talent, but because he concentrated the psychological fracture of intellectuals during the Ming-Qing transition: he wanted to become a morally elevated figure but resisted death and the temptations of office and material comfort; he failed to uphold his goal yet could not fully rationalize his surrender.
Some people of the same era preferred death to shaving their heads; others surrendered, listed several reasons, and comfortably declared that “the Qing is good.” 吴文清 occupied the middle ground: he could not withstand temptation, feared death, and at the same time despised himself for failing to withstand temptation. He lived with regret for the rest of his life.
李翔 calls this state “cognitive dissonance,” and 苗棣 agrees. 吴文清 also happened to be exceptionally talented, leaving behind enough poetry to expose his vulnerability and allow later generations to dissect it. By contrast, people in the late Qing and early Republic could use new ideas or foreign concessions to find an exit; during the Ming-Qing transition, there was almost nowhere to escape.

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