Aion comes out at a moment when no one reads slowly any more. That is precisely why it comes out.
We believe that there still exist, everywhere in the world, readers who want a page held together, an investigation conducted, a piece of criticism signed, a voice rather than a feed. We believe that between the institution which preserves and the market which speculates, there remains a space — the one the Respublica Literaria held for three centuries, and that no one, since, has been able to occupy.
Aion is not a news channel. Nor is it a scholarly review. It is a daily — in the etymological sense: that which returns every day — addressed to those for whom culture is a matter, and not a backdrop.
It is published by Aion Culture (珀思文化), a house founded in Shanghai, which has been working for five years between China and Europe. This journal is the public extension of that work: what we see, what we listen to, what we hold to be important.
It is written with the assistance of the most advanced language models available today. Such assistance is neither shameful nor miraculous: it belongs to our time. But here it is framed by a pact. That pact is set out in our AI Charter. Its first rule, and its only absolute rule, is that no statement attributed to anyone has been generated. What is said here has been said.
AION is published in French, English and Chinese. Not a market choice, not a concession to globalisation: a fidelity. The Republic of Letters has never spoken a single language. It spoke Latin, then French, then English; today it also speaks Mandarin. To give them all up is to surrender to the algorithm.
We translate with the tools of our time, but we re-read by hand. Each language keeps its idioms. None becomes the shadow of the other two.
The feed is not a format; it is a condition. It empties what it transmits. AION appears twice a day, at six in the morning and six in the evening, Paris and Shanghai time. That is little, and it is a lot. Enough to inform; sufficient to think.
We have no discovery algorithm. We have an editorial team. Its first competence is to have read what it offers.
Our newsroom holds two poles, Paris and Shanghai, which are not a duality but an articulation. Shanghai is neither a branch office nor an object of study; it is the place from which we think. The cultural question of the century is being played out there — in the encounter, the friction, the translation, sometimes the productive misunderstanding. The contemporary Republic of Letters must necessarily be Asian as well.
We do not write about China. We write from China, and towards it.
Marc Fumaroli recalled the tension between otium and negotium: to act in the world without losing oneself in it, to write in one's century without echoing its noise. That is our requirement. We work with institutions, we follow the market, we frequent the studios; we are the instrument of none.
When a subject overlaps with a field supported by one of our patrons, we note it in a footer line. When an article is commissioned, it carries the mark commissioned piece. Everything else is free.
We write with models. We declare it. They allow us what no editorial team of our size has ever been able to allow itself: covering three languages, two continents, seven sections, every day. They serve knowledge; they do not manufacture it.
Our absolute rule: no quotation is invented. No generated image may stand in for a document. No voice on the radio is synthetic. The signature remains human, and it binds. That is the condition for a journal to deserve the name.
AION is read by its subscribers, supported by its patrons, transparent about its sources. It has no advertisers and no native advertising. It is a modest press, but a free press — in the precise sense the seventeenth century gave the word: free of interests, not free of the world.
Our readers are not a target. They are interlocutors. We publish their letters, we accept their corrections, we document their disagreements. That is what we call making Republic.
We believe that current affairs are a point of entry, never an end. Behind every pavilion opening, every sale, every symposium, there are decades of work, kept fidelities, unresolved questions. That is what we wish to make heard: what the event conceals, as much as what it reveals.
And so this journal does not expire. Its archives are public. Its sources are cited. From the first issue, it is built to last.