I went to college in 1987. Until then I’d been reading the classics of world literature, and contemporary Chinese fiction. But then at Sichuan University (in Chengdu) I read a series of books called Moving Toward the Future (走向未来丛书). It was an edited series introducing the great thinkers in other fields. This was a start for me and afterwards I read a lot of western literature, philosophy, and history. The series was really influential in the 1980s and if you look at the editorial staff, they all suffered after June 4 (the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre). I guess from today’s point of view you’d say they had intellectual property rights problems—they just translated or cribbed from foreign publications. But for us it opened a world of psychology, sociology, and literature. One book I have to mention is A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We’d just read these books so fast and share them. Everyone was fascinated by Western philosophy especially. It didn’t matter what your major was, you were interested in Western philosophy, like Heidegger or Sartre.

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