Taste: 'A Search for a National Spirit'

By PAUL MOONEY in Beijing

China's hip new publication has a lofty mission. Citymagazine aims to cover China's wrenching social problems in a fashionable way.

Articles on AIDS and photos of black-faced coal miners are sandwiched between stories about Cartier jewelry and photos of pouting Chinese models posing on the Great Wall in Dior outfits. The idea, it seems, is to seduce China's wealthy into becoming more compassionate people.

"We're not doing it for fun," says Shen Qing, the magazine's associate publisher. "We feel if we can make people read these articles, they will care."

The magazine, which has made a splash since hitting mainland newsstands in December, is unlike anything that's ever come out of mainland China. The coffee-table sized monthly -- which weighs in at around five pounds and costs $6.25, is clearly aimed at wealthier Chinese readers. Printed on glossy paper and featuring the work of China's most famous writers and artists, as well as stunning photography by some of the best photographers at home and abroad, the magazine created an immediate stir among the mainland's chattering classes.

Co-publisher Edmund Xu, one of some ten journalists who jumped ship from the respected Economic Observer newspaper to join the new publication, says that Citymagazine aims to provide a forum for exploring critical social issues facing China through writing, photography and art.

The magazine's masthead reads like a "Who's Who" of the Chinese arts world. Each issue includes a CD with the work of music editor Tan Dun, who won an Oscar for his score for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." Xu Bing, one of China's leading avant-garde artists, is the art editor. Each edition has a piece of Mr. Xu's calligraphic art on a loose sheet of simple paper.

Thomas Shao, the man behind Citymagazine, is the owner of several very successful publications in China, including Modern Weekly, which distributes about a half a million copies each week. A former small-town government official in Guangdong province, he eventually became the first mainlander to jump into Hong Kong publishing in the mid-1990s. He made news himself when he bought "Hao Wai" magazine in 2002, the first such move by a mainland media company.

Mr. Shao says that Citymagazine's target readers are wealthy entrepreneurs like himself, a group he concedes may not yet know it needs a magazine like this. Citymagazine also aims to address a moral and cultural vacuum in Communist China. While the West has religion and law to guide people in the right direction, Mr. Shao says neither is playing such a role in China.

"There are no binding factors in society," he says. "It's not that people don't want morality. They never learned about it." In an article titled "The World That Has Disappeared," one contributor laments the fact that Chinese no longer revere the Confucian term junzi, or gentleman, and he complains that China's traditional moral codes are regarded as "impractical nonsense." Chinese traditions, the article says, "are like exhibits in a museum."

Mr. Xu calls Citymagazine "a search for a national spirit." "For our generation, the traditions of China collapsed during the Cultural Revolution," he says. "We know nothing about our past, or how China became the country it is today."

The magazine is also very much about Chinese culture today -- or the lack of it. Regular section headers include concepts found in traditional Chinese thought: Heaven, Earth, Truth, Empathy and Etiquette. Recent issues have focused on lost Imperial City gates and the endangered Kunqu opera (one of the oldest opera forms in China).

Citymagazine has also had feature interviews with Chinese cultural icons such as Ang Lee, director of "Brokeback Mountain," Li Yang, the director of "Blind Shaft," a brutal film about coal miners that was banned in China, and Bei Dao, a famous contemporary poet. "We're trying to make a cult of Chinese culture," says Mr. Yu.

Cynics wonder, however, if China's new elite, caught up in amassing wealth, will take the time to slow down and think seriously about people who are not as well off -- or even poetry for that matter. The editors of Citymagazine are betting that China's elite has bought enough and is now ready to do good. All that's needed is a gentle nudge to convince them that caring is just as fashionable as a Prada bag.