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and “living room quarterback.”

Most of these faded away,

however, when the NFL began

making inroads with the advent

of television in the 1950s. “Mon-

day morning quarterbacks” won

out, though “armchair quarter-

backs” also remained popular, in

the same family as “armchair

critics” and “armchair warriors.”

While the hypercritical yet in-

experienced “Monday morning

quarterback” has spread as a

put-down to other fields like the

military and politics, among

football commentators the label

has been embraced with a whiff

of self-deprecation. In 1997, Pe-

ter King started an online col-

umn for Sports Illustrated called

“Monday Morning Quarterback,”

which eventually transformed

into the magazine’s NFL-cen-

tered webpage, dubbed “The

MMQB” for short. (Last year,

Mr. King moved on to NBC

Sports, where he re-christened

his column “Football Morning in

America.”)

In the age of social media,

however, the idea of waiting un-

til Monday morning to analyze

Sunday’s games feels anachro-

nistic. Mr. Reitan suggests a

more instantaneous idiom: “the

Twitterback.” JAMES YANG

ILLUSTRATION BY GLUEKIT; PHOTOS: IMAGINECHINA/ASSOCIATED PRESS, GETTY IMAGES (2), EVERETT COLLECTION

T

en years ago, I joined a U.S. trade delegation

for the chance to visit, as a journalist, a remote

part of China that borders both North Korea

and Russia. As we traveled around, local Chi-

nese greeters proudly pointed out the con-

trasting vistas: rugged empty hills in North Korea and iso-

lated clusters of Soviet-era buildings in Russia, whereas in

China, commerce and construction abounded between

booming border towns. In one such town, Hunchun, popula-

tion 250,000, regional officials asked me if I planned to

write anything. Perhaps something cultural, I suggested. I

hoped for a window onto Chinese life in this far-flung zone.

The next night, they laid on a manifestly ready-made,

two-hour pageant of old Manchu ethnographic music and

dance, with fluttering feather fans and colorful costumes.

I explained to my conscientious hosts that I had hoped for

something more contemporary—perhaps portraying cur-

rent life on the frontier, something about real people and

ideas. My request engendered a lot of brow-furrowing dis-

comfort. I had asked for the one thing that their country’s

authoritarian system has found it almost impossible to de-

liver at any level: a vibrant popular culture.

China has become globally competitive in many fields

with blinding speed, from the economy and military to

science, medicine, sports and even in cultural areas such

as cuisine, classical music and contemporary art. But it

can’t seem to compete with the West in crucial main-

stream genres such as movies, popular music, fashion,

novels and the like. I say “crucial” because, without uni-

versalizing its culture at a popular level, China cannot ul-

timately sell a lifestyle for the world to emulate, a set of

aspirations that people elsewhere might embrace. Nor can

it make its engagement with other cultures more palat-

able, less like an intrusion by outsiders.

The country’s elites are focused on how China can im-

prove its image and cultural influence abroad, enhancing

its soft power and mitigating to some degree negative po-

litical news like the recent events in Hong Kong. At a 2014

party summit, Xi Jinping famously announced, “We

should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese

narrative and better communicate China’s messages to the

world.” And there’s the rub. Arguably, Mr. Xi’s approach

guarantees its own failure by assuming that cultural influ-

ence is something that can be instituted by directive, like

a Stalin-era five-year plan.

“The West was able to eclipse its darker history abroad

with its popular culture—a process that Chinese leaders

studied very deliberately in recent years,” says Jing Tsu,

BYMELIKKAYLAN

WORD ON

THE STREET

BEN

ZIMMER

An Expert

In the

Second-

Guessing

Game

THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL

League kicked off its 100th sea-

son on Thursday, beginning

months of celebrations com-

memorating the storied history

of professional football. While

the sport has evolved dramati-

cally over the decades, most

matchups are still played on

Sundays. And come Monday,

die-hard fans eagerly dissect ev-

ery play and on-field move.

For nearly the NFL’s entire

history there has been a name

for this sort of second-guesser: a

“Monday morning quarterback.”

Over the years, the phrase has

been extended to label anyone

who passes judgment on the ac-

tions of others with the benefit

of hindsight.

The position of “quarterback”

dates back to the British game of

rugby as played in the late 19th

century. It was then imported

into the rugby-like game that

Americans were developing at

Ivy League schools. Walter Camp

of Yale University enshrined the

position of quarterback as the

offensive play caller in rules

drafted for colleges in 1880.

It didn’t take long for a cer-

tain critical breed of fan to

emerge and question what

transpired on the field. In a

1927 column, New York Evening

Telegram sports editor Joe Wil-

liams recalled Percy Haughton,

head coach at Cornell, Harvard

and Columbia, observing that

“the stands surrounding the

football fields held several hun-

dred times as many quarter-

backs as ever got into uniform.”

Williams termed these fans

“grandstand quarterbacks.”

That same season, a colum-

nist for the Journal and Courier

of Lafayette, Ind., suggested an-

other name, observing that the

ranks of “Sunday morning quar-

terbacks” were swelling “with

every loss on the gridiron.” The

name made sense since college

football games were mostly

playedonSaturdays.Itevolved

into the “Monday morning” in-

carnation a few years later, but

still referred to fans of the col-

lege game; professional football

had not yet caught on beyond

the Midwest. Harvard quarter-

back Barry Wood used the ex-

pression in a widely reported

speech in 1931 where he faulted

“Monday morning quarterbacks”

in the stands with overinflating

the importance of the game.

Still more variations sprang

up in sports-

writing in the

1930s. Recently,

researcher Pe-

ter Reitan (who

blogs under the

name Peter

Jensen Brown) has documented

terms that reflected how games

were increasingly enjoyed on ra-

dio: “drugstore quarterback” (a

cousin of “drugstore cowboy”),

“armchair quarterback,” “easy

chair quarterback,” “radio quar-

terback,” “parlor quarterback”

[Monday Morning Quarterback]

a professor of modern Chinese studies at Yale University.

“But it’s not clear if they’re willing to risk it. That kind of

expression starts at home from the bottom up, and Chi-

nese history is full of cases where mass movements be-

come destabilizing.”

One could argue that Western influence became so

ubiquitous not just because of wealth and power but be-

cause of free expression among the populace, which al-

lowed the portrayal of characters with universal predica-

ments of the kind that leap cultural boundaries. The

absence of propagandistic intent made it more compelling

and authentic. Lives lived in freer conditions, depicted

with relative frankness, are simply more compelling, more

dramatically believable. A vibrant culture ultimately sells

itself. Even when the West was economically stagnant in

the 1970s, rock music conquered the world.

Ai Weiwei, the renowned dissident artist, says that

China “always had an elite culture, which never encour-

aged public involvement, just as you see in their politics.

In contrast, Hollywood and pop music are manifestations

of the middle class.” He argues that China’s one-party,

top-down approach means that it “will never export its

culture as a natural fruit of its society.”

“Natural” is a useful distinction here because West-

ern culture—especially American culture—celebrates

natural expression, being oneself, authentic feeling. That

ethos has set the tone for the world, but it is not a com-

fortable default mode for an authoritarian system. Cul-

tures dominated by central planning are inevitably un-

settled by mass entertainment whose DNA is furnished

Beijing is eager to exert cultural influence,

but only a free society, in open conversation

with itself, can create global aspirations.

China Has

A Soft-Power

Problem

by individualism and transparency.

China certainly has a vast entertain-

ment industry, albeit a constrained one

these days. Just 20 years ago, the coun-

try’s cinemas numbered in the hundreds;

today there are some 60,000—about

20,000 more than in the U.S. The top

box-office movie to date, 2017’s state-

funded blockbuster “Wolf Warrior 2,”

made $874 million domestically. Despite

being financed by the military, it is a

genuinely rip-roaring, nail-biting Chi-

nese Rambo story set in Africa—with an

American as the villain, of course.

When you have a domestic market

that size, with all the machinery and

talent in place, the foreign markets

should soon follow. But it hasn’t

worked out that way. The giant Dalian

Wanda Group built China’s biggest stu-

dios and looked set to create a domes-

tic industry to rival Hollywood while

also forming partnerships with Sony

and AMC cinemas stateside. It seemed

to be perfect positioning to export Chi-

nese soft power on a mass scale. But in

2017, Beijing called in Wanda’s loans

from state banks on suspicion that it

and other film companies had deliber-

ately overpaid for foreign properties as

a ruse to expatriate capital.

This year, authorities prevented

most Chinese movies from showing at

festivals abroad, because in 2018 at

Taiwan’s prestigious Golden Horse Film

Festival for Chinese-language produc-

tions, a documentary award winner ex-

tolled Taiwanese independence. Mainland luminaries in

attendance got texts ordering them to show no emotion,

avoid the parties and return home at once.

Though China allows a movie-star celebrity system to

exist with huge financial benefits, none of the talent live

flashy, extravagant public lives. Nose rings and tattoos

are frowned on. The state discourages the familiar re-

wards of stardom in the West, where fame and wealth

translate into more personal freedom and abundant op-

portunities to live large.

Who, continents away, is going to aspire to the life-

style of China’s quietly compliant celebrities? That’s espe-

cially true if the authorities can eclipse them at will, as

happened to Fan Bingbing, who was China’s top actress

until she disappeared last year for several months under

house arrest, accused of hiding her true income and fined

$70 million.

A cultural genre that the Chinese execute with great

success on the global stage is the grand music and dance

pageant. The productions are all about coordination, disci-

pline, unity and apolitical spectacle—perfectly capturing

China’s current national priorities. Jay Scheib, a successful

theater director whose rock opera “Bat Out of Hell” is cur-

rently running in New York, advised on a pageant in

Ningbo, China, with 50 cast members. He says that he

never heard artsy disputes over interpretation, truth-tell-

ing or artistic feeling: “They did exactly what you told

them but got expressive only over contract details.”

One definition of exporting real culture might be a

population talking fearlessly about itself to itself, and

letting others listen in. Clearly China is not

poised to take that route to soft power. But

maybe it doesn’t have to. Ai Weiwei believes that,

despite Beijing’s crackdown on investing in Holly-

wood, Chinese money will ultimately return. And

as he notes, “Every big Hollywood film’s ultimate

goal these days is to access China’s giant market.

So lots of [American] film studios are now alter-

ing their language and participating in self-cen-

sorship.”

Add to this influence the inroads that Beijing is

making into 5G and cellphone markets, and you

have a worrisome future where China’s soft power

resides not in creating its own exportable content but in

shaping ours—and in controlling the mediums by which

we convey culture to each other.

Mr. Kaylan, a journalist in New York, has written

about international politics and culture for The Wall

Street Journal, Newsweek and Forbes.

Lives lived

in freer

conditions

are simply

more

compelling.

REVIEW

Left to right: Ai Weiwei, Fan Bingbing

and ‘Wolf Warrior 2’ star Wu Jing,

pictured with a pageant in Beijing.

wsj_20190907_c003_p2jw250000_4_c00300_1________xa2019.crop.pdf 1 07-Sep-19 06:10:25