A Red Guard prayer and an elegy for Osama bin Laden by a disciple of Rancière (2011)
These are two appendices in search of an essay.
There’s nothing here.
But I will try a brief introduction. Both texts written about a decade ago, shortly after the death of Osama bin Laden. Both were written by men that took part in years of political chaos in China: one was the original Red Guard and the other was a radical student in the late 1980s. Their backgrounds and their politics are different, but, for both of them, Osama bin Laden represented a radical and effective force against global capital.1 That was not a popular position in 2001 or 2011. Both writers are mourning an incarnation of radical politics.2 The death of Osama bin Laden is an emotional blow. He is an older brother or a father figure. Even though he was largely irrelevant to global politics by 2011,3 his organization destroyed, and his methods discredited, there was nobody to replace him.
Appendix 1
“A prayer for you" 献给你的都瓦,4 Zhang Chengzhi 张承志,5 July 26th, 201167
In that twilight. Time snapped. The Earth tumbled down a black hole. A new age began.
The powerless people of the world have always used erected heroes like stone stele to mark the passage of time. The last century ended with their quiet sacrifice.
Our era.8 An era of oppression and resistance, despair and dignity, sincerity and lies, surrender and struggle. In the deafening blast, against the propaganda of the big lie. Always pushing forward. And still facing it head-on.
I believe we need to be brave enough to speak love; and then in duʿāʾ to make peace with ourselves.9
We must make it known. We have joined the procession of the dignified billions that march to remember you.
To face it now. This struggle. From now on, the pen will be taken up in place of the rifle.
He.
In the glory days of an era that has now passed.
The century was glorious because of "him." The revolutionary hero with the beret balanced on his head.10
Capital in the throes of its own revolution had no time to blacken his name. And so the young people put his handsome face on their T-shirts. And his lonely story was told in every corner of the world. And he became a hero of the age.
Even if he did not leave behind a volume of posthumous writings, he left carved into history a guerrilla hero. Even if they did not understand the true meaning, the young people copied him because he was beautiful.
No, the conclusion cannot be guerrilla warfare.11 And it is not only because of his red beginnings—giving up on a future in the bureaucracy, the tide of alienation, a devotion international liberation that could not be shaken. He answered the historical challenge that came after the revolution succeeded. He challenged the corrupt bureaucracy and the new classes. He was the only one left to light the lamps of those seeking a revolutionary path. He is the only one that stayed true until death to the revolution and to its theories.
No matter how they attempt to tear out his essence, it can only be compromise and speculation. His story is the metaphor for a particular truth: the people abhor privilege and the world will no longer tolerate its existence.
He is satisfied.
Even if the demons have conspired again and again to tear him down, even if capital insists on projects to discredit him. He was a Party member that refused alienation, an internationalist that carried on an eternal fight, a legend of the age. This is common sense.
Let the Holy Alliance of capital witness his heroic sacrifice and say what they like. Among the flunkeys and minions are those that wear the red lapel on their breast—and let them croak, too! They will never know how many seeds were sewn on the boundless wilderness. They will never know how deep the roots are. They will never know what is growing beneath them, all tied together in a great web. They do not know the heat that is being stored up down below them, waiting to rush out from Hell's heart.
It is not only the revolutionary politicians that will mourn him.
He lives on in my heart. A beautiful face. A guerrilla hero.
He taught my yesterdays.
You.
In the dying days of an era that has now passed.
At the end of the century, justice remained in the world because of "you." The hero with the flowing beard and the scarf on his head.
Capital rides the west wind. The revolutionary tide ebbs. Capital keeps pursuing. Capital seeks out any disobedient soil or ideology and carpets them with bombs. Your name is forbidden. Your story is the century's greatest enigma. But there is a simple logic that cannot be denied by the average man. To give up wealth and luxury. To hold out. Against an enemy armed to the teeth.
It goes without saying that your thoughts, your musing in your poor mountain camp, every footprint you left behind in the dust, every word you wrote, every syllable you spoke has been pored over and then falsified. Capital's minions use their television sets to brainwash the people. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
A word that tells us nothing. A word pronounced "terrorist." A word that was coined by the people that have made the world a fearful place. They have crowned your stubborn head with this word.
The people are divided. Some of them have been brainwashed. Some of them are accustomed to repeating the lies they are told. The human heart has been reduced to rubble. Doubt itself has been cast into doubt. Nobody would have the strength to resist.
The union of global capital takes great pleasure in all of this. They looked forward for many years to being able to do whatever they wanted. The hunts of the European aristocracy have been reborn in a new form. Missiles tossed into sovereign states. Leaders taken down through covert action. They no longer need the smoke screen of virtue. Nothing is forbidden. In their hotels, they rape their former subjects. A woman worker with black skin.12
Since the revolutionary flame has dimmed, they want to make sure that it is extinguished forever. They want to wipe out all dissent. They want to tame the red. And why not the white, too.
But you.
They say that there is freedom of speech. But nobody dares speak of their love for you.
But you live on in the hearts and the minds of all those who refuse to be slaves. Those who need a stalwart symbol for their struggle.
You have inspired our tomorrows.
With your heroic and resolute sacrifice, you have inspired us to think about the direction of our jihād.13 Yes, the direction is internationalism.
It is not only the Muslims that will mourn you.
I heard in that twilight the entire ruthless world breathe a heavy sigh. I knew that everyone watching your humiliation on their television screens, every remnant of human feeling, felt a flash of anger.
Even if in their hearts they still held reservations. They wanted to rush to the spot where you fell. To build a sacred monument. Still wanted to speak with you. Maybe even debate with you.
You live on in the hearts of the people. A beautiful face. A hero for our century.
You tell us about the world's tomorrows.
I.
I despise the fake poets. I will roar the anger in my heart. I will make it known. From now on, all of my sentences will begin with an oath.
When I heard that you had fallen, on the night that your blood spilled and was soaked up by the barren soil of Asia, I finally understood the meaning of sacrifice. At shām14 I heard a voice in the sky:
"Think not of those who are slain in pursuit of the truth as dead. Nay, they live."15
At that moment, I understood the meaning.
In that dusk, we clasped our hands together, us insignificant guerrilla fighters, and prayed for your martyred soul to find peace. The color of dusk was like your dried blood. The darkness closed in around us in a circle.
The circle of darkness was imperfect, with a few seams of light. Literature is not created for capital. Literature is created for the restrictions placed on it. In this filthy age, even art must be guerrilla warfare.
Whether with pen or rifle, revolution and art fight in retreat. This is where we are.
When the age of criticism by firearm ended, the pen was taken up instead, carried to the front.
Yes, this is a despicable age. Struggle and criticism are under siege. But this is also why we can see the true mission of the pen. Now, we must reconsider the meaning of the qalam.16 As the Qur'an says: "The Most Compassionate taught the Qu'ran, created humanity, and taught them speech."17
We still dare to use our speech to resist the propaganda. For the first time, I felt the darkness had a flaw.
Twenty-four hours a day. Propaganda bombardment. It cannot begin to crush human dignity. Even if we are surrounded. Three hundred fifty-nine degrees. There is still a gap. There is still a path to victory.
The pen is like your rifle. It is with you, even if the front lines are assaulted and pushed back. Unyielding. Until the final moment.
Long and dark times. After shām has come and gone. We cannot see its end. From now on, bullets are loaded into the pen. These are words sharpened to a point. From now on, sharper than the rhetorical arts of the West. For vengeance. For you.
We can hold only one pen in our hand. But we believe in victory. Because the Almighty promised justice. We believe. Because we know the truth, that capital, technology, and killing machines do not have sovereignty over us. We are those who refuse to be slaves. We know that through struggle that we might be free.
The final struggle. In days before, we raised the pen like a flag. Today, we raise it like a rifle.
I raise my hands in the darkness. Facing you. I know that you are already in the loving embrace of boundless compassion. Your sleep is untroubled. So, I present my duʿā to you. My sheik,18 my teacher, my beloved hero.
Appendix 2
“Elegy for my Osama” 我的本拉登挽歌, Lu Xinghua 陆兴华,19 October 20th, 201120
I
At the moment bin Laden was shot, the scales of justice tilted. This is my simple calculation. X went to New York and killed three thousand people; Y went to Afghanistan and Iraq and killed thirty thousand people. Three million more died of hunger, even while sitting on top of a fortune in oil. Saddam got the blame, but it was that bloodsucker George W. Bush behind the whole thing. There was great pain and he savored the sweetness of it all.
You want to ask me what I think about September 11th now? Sorry. I’m afraid this might upset you. I saw how smug and self-satisfied Obama and the Americans were after killing bin Laden (this was only done for the election; if they were Christians, as they claimed, all this killing would give them pause, but it clearly doesn't; and I don't think they mind if everybody being able to watch this revolting spectacle), and, now, looking back, it seems the attacks of September 11th were justified. Obama and the people he represents justified what happened to them. They got what was coming to them: no more, no less. When I compare him to these ghouls, I can't help but feel sympathy for my Osama.21
In his famous interview about September 11th, Derrida said that international justice cannot be left up to Anglo-Americans or their institutions and proclamations, but will be imposed on us by the messianic power promised by the internet, the telephone, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plants, and the bin Ladens.22 It will be proclaimed and enforced by the spirits of those that have suffered injustice, by the refugees, by the migrant workers, by the Qian Yunhuis,23 and by the Zhang Miaos.24 We and the Americans cannot investigate, negotiate, and collaborate our way to international justice. We can only attempt to study that force. This means we have regressed to a point where it might be fatal to attempt to come to terms with it. But that is the only solution. It will start with rote learning. That is how we begin! Our justice is paralyzed because we are paralyzed. "We" are worried about mad cow disease. Maybe there is someone that can come and save us, but maybe there isn't.
In Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas,25 Derrida talks about the face of the Other, which appears similar to us but is also frightening, which confronts our "justice" because there is no way we can assimilate it into ourselves, and which pushes us to compassion and sympathy. He describes it as the gaze of a wounded animal, looking up at us. Did my Osama, shot through the chest, give that look? Derrida says that justice begins in this face-to-face, direct encounter with the Other. This is nothing like the strong and triumphal justice that the Americans might mete out through the United Nations. It has nothing to do with the justice upheld by these heretical Christians. Was it justice when the deadliest weapons and soldiers in the world were deployed to corner my Osama in his bedroom and shoot him through the chest? Was a bullet in the back of his head justice? Did the spectators in the White House see justice in this? Does this accord with the Christian values of that supposedly godly nation?
My Osama spent the last five years shuffling between two dark rooms (the only break from this was to sit in the backless chair between the rooms to take a shower). He did not live, but rather “existed," like a rat in the shadow of Chernobyl. The grave will be more free and spacious than what he enjoyed on Earth. When the SEAL team arrived to deliver death, it was as if they were delivering oxygen, like an expensive, high-tech gift bag. I do not know if my Osama was awoken from a dream or a nightmare. This encounter was even more frightening for its intimacy. But perhaps for his deadliest enemies to deliver death was a final pleasure for my Osama. I can feel glad for him. His final moments were more glorious than he could have expected. You were suddenly a flash of lighting, waking me up with a vicious start, disquieted. Your death has made it hard to live.
If the attacks of September 11th can be considered a work of art (authorship and copyright are still to be determined),26 then my Osama's death might be his magnum opus. This is a work of art that revealed the true nature of Obama, the United States, international law, and Habermas' concept of justice. What a pile of shit they all are, compared to my Osama. Hold your noses. Oughhh! Who is the fat rat locked up in a hole beside a nuclear reactor? It is definitely not my Osama!
II
Suddenly, there seemed to be a wave of sympathy among my friends for Osama. But they could not abandon their "terror" at terrorism. But we cannot can truly sympathize with terrorists, they concluded. Terrorists kill without discrimination, they said, so we should not discriminate when killing them, should we?
Benjamin said that behind every fascism is a failed revolution.27 Bourdieu said that every terrorist is a revolutionary that has given up hope.28 My Osama was probably once like me, disgusted by forced demolitions, government corruption, and American hegemony. Like me, he probably went to sit-ins and posted his essays online and got chased around the country.29 He went to fight against the reactionary rule of authoritarians, and then he realized that the strings were being pulled by Papa America and his system of monopoly capitalism and dollar hegemony. He probably reached a point where he wanted to start a communist party and expropriate the expropriators. He must have tried everything before he finally abandoned it and took up "terror."
Terror? We need to understand who is being terrorized! If you or I ran into Osama, would we be afraid? Does "terror" mean anything to us? When they speak of "terror," it is not our terror! For us, terror is the force that crushed Qian Yunhui. Only the mediocre and numb intellectuals and petty bourgeoisie care about "terror." They only want the kind of sweet, polite justice that they read about in their books. The mass media parrots their lines.
To be more specific, let me ask where Osama's "terror" came from. Bourdieu says that the father monopolizes pleasure, so the son must strike out with suicidal violence.30 Is it permissible to use "terror" against Obama and the evil empire that he represents? In the end, it is the only choice. This "terror" is all we have at our disposal! The depths of our "terror" and my Osama's "terror" is as profound as the pleasure of the Obamas. This is what is weighed on the scales of global justice. The balance is thrown off not only by terror but by our own pleasure. Robespierre's comrade-in-arms Saint-Just said that if virtue would not suffice that terror was all that remained!31 As for your virtue, go ahead and enjoy it, and try to use it... You will find it is useless. But still, you balk at terror. That is how you get the "corruption" that you detest. You deserve this outcome. There are two possibilities hanging over our heads. I don't think modern art, virtue, and fraternal love is one of them. I see George W. Bush and Obama, and the corruption of Gaddafi, Chen Liangyu,32 and Xu Zongheng.33
Pleasure, virtue, monopoly, corruption, and then there is intimacy. Terror used to be something that could only be inspired by people in their most intimate relationships. But in this corrupt world, my Osama had to come into contact with lowly buffoons like George W. Bush and Obama. Who has truly inspired terror? Please tell me! Who most resembles the terrorists that the movies made us believe in? Are not the hegemons shouting slogans to cover their appalling crimes terrorists? Can you se that the those that sit in the White House plotting murder between dinner parties are not terrorists? In China, they will receive the praise of our national hero Liu Xiaobo34 and all the students that run to study overseas. We are afraid that without the methods of terrorists—the genuine terrorists—the world will be even more unfair and China will be even darker.
III
The media weighed in, faking righteousness again. But they played up my Osama's final movements to juice their advertising numbers. Where is the philosophy? Was all our time spent reading theory only to help us savor my Osama's final moments?
The only way that I could face my peers with these pitiful thoughts was to make Osama “mine.” The situation was terrible. I had to do what it took to revive a philosophy that seemed to be breathing its final breaths.
When I read Deleuze, I could not help but replay in my head every five minutes or so the scene of the man falling from the building and tumbling through the air.35 I could not understand his death, so I cautioned myself not to believe myself capable of understanding his writing. Why do we have to describe it as a fall? Maybe it was a flight. His books seemed to suggest this: it was a flight, not a fall. We cannot die without independence and freedom, he says. He did not merely strike a pose and make a claim but acted on it. For Deleuze, death was his way of seeking initiative, seeking to be absorbed into the infinite...36 If I had fought alongside Deleuze in his lifetime, I would have a hard time figuring out the correct way to bury and mourn him. I would have a hard time understanding his death. He would not want me to understand his death. He would not want to be associated with me. He would not want my eulogy. Philosophy was the vessel on which he sailed toward death itself. And now that he is gone, philosophy is gone, too. Now, I am like Robinson Crusoe. I have to build my own raft. What a disaster!
The ancients said that the only reason to read philosophy is to prepare for death. This sounds too much like Stoicism, as if we should prepare for our death to be as elegant and highlight reel-ready as one of Empress Guo's dives.37 Let me modify the maxim slightly: the only reason to read philosophy is to increase the degree of difficulty in the final act. What about my Osama? He did his best to turn an unbelievable conclusion into a work of art. What degree of difficulty should the judges take into account before giving their score?
IV
What kind of death was he planning? He must have worked hard to ensure that it would be a grand gesture. How far short did he fall?
Once the blast of submachine gun fire from the SEALs died down, you might have heard tumbling from the nightstand bottles of cordyceps capsules, kidney tonic, and areca pills.38 One of the young warriors mistook this for a space weapon made specially for the Holy War, so he pumped a few more shots into him. In his final moments, my Osama did not reach out for his Soviet rifle, but subconsciously felt around for his medication.
This question troubled me: with all those supplements to keep him going, what kind of glorious finale was he planning? Did he want his death to be as precise and magnificent as the attacks on September 11th? That level of ambition was too much! It made me envious.
Like an artist at work, he allowed his admirers a quick peek of the work before it was revealed, and then he shut his studio door for a long time. My Osama did not want anybody to know what he was doing.
I cannot understand my Osama's death. He was cruel. I think he was trying to turn me into a reader. He did not want any type of obituary. That is how he tried to turn me into a reader. He wanted me to read him seriously. And now I know I should be busy preparing for my own death, just like the rich kid I graduated with, working hard to pay off the three hundred grand per square meter mortgage on his cemetery plot.
I would contrast this with the Taiwanese commentator, author, and politician Li Ao 李敖 proclaiming admiration for Osama bin Laden. You can watch the video of that here: “Li Ao Speaks! Episode 559, April 27, 2006. ‘I admire bin Laden’” 李敖有话说 第559集 2006 04 27 我佩服本拉登.
The New Left in Japan, other radical elements around the world, and politicians in China had taken the conflict between Palestine and Israel as a metaphor of Anglo-American domination of Asia, and decades on, the attacks of September 11th were seen by our two writers as a continuation of the struggle. In Japan, the New Left’s experimentation with terrorism had destroyed them; the radical students of 1968 disappeared and their children generally took up other concerns; and China stopped Third World radicals. China actually entered into a military alliance with the United States. That is what allowed the February 1979 invasion of Vietnam, I would argue. The support for the mujahidin in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion was part of this alliance, too. In fact, it wasn't the delivery of the Stinger that turned the tide for the mujahidin; it was the Type 69 RPG and the Type 56 AK variant, paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency, crated up and shipped through Pakistan. In the 1990s, China became a threat again, but collaboration on antiterrorism after the September 11th attacks helped to rebuild the alliance. China took this opportunity to begin shutting down radical and/or religious and separatist elements in Xinjiang. The Chinese New Left was not supportive of American adventures or Chinese collaboration after 2001, but they usually stopped short of praising Osama bin Laden.
In the months before he was shot by the SEALs, Osama bin Laden was watching the Arab Spring and trying to figure out how to get in on the action. The world had passed him by.
An unsatisfying translation. But he will use the Arabic term in the text and I will translate it there.
Zhang Chengzhi was born in 1948. We know the term “Red Guard” 红卫兵 only because Zhang signed that name on poster 大字报 in May of 1966. He and his classmates at Qinghua High School in Beijing were on the warpath against Deng Tuo 邓拓, a bureaucrat, literary theorist, and editor of Frontline 前线. In 1968, as the Party attempted to wind down youthful rebellion, Zhang signed up to go to Inner Mongolia. He stayed there until 1972, when he was selected to study in Beijing. His field work in Gansu put him in touch with Jahriyya, a Sufi order founded in the 1700s. In the literary fever of the 1980s, he became a star with a novel called with Black Steed 黑骏马. After a stint in Japan, he published a fictionalized Red Guard memoir called Golden Pasture 金牧场, followed by A History of the Soul 心灵史, a book about the Jahriyya order. Through the '90s, Zhang became increasingly interested in movements that had sprung up alongside the Red Guards or had been inspired by them, like the Japanese radical left, particularly the Japanese Red Army, who emphasized global revolution, particularly in the Middle East. Following September 11th, Zhang Chengzhi became increasingly interested in global Islam and traveled widely in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
I give the date that it appeared online, published on the website of Utopia 乌有之乡. It appeared in print a few weeks later in Zhang Chengzhi’s own magazine, which is called Guanzhu 关注.
This translation and the one that follows are my own original work, following my own rules. I don’t have an editor to read these things over, so forgive any errors or creative interpretations.
There is a lot of creative punctuation in this piece. I have stripped it out in favor of more full stops.
The Chinese transliteration is dūwǎ 都瓦. A prayer.
No names are given. But it seems obvious this first half is about Che Guevara. Shortly before writing this essay Zhang Chengzhi was in Cuba and wrote an essay about the “age of the guerrilla” and Che himself. It was carried in Southern Weekly 南方周末: 切·格瓦拉与游击时代.
The word used is yóujīzhōngxīnzhǔyì 游击中心主义. It has been translated as "guerrilla centralism." It's the Cultural Revolution-era translation of foquismo. We might call it Guevarism. The extensive use of political language is one of the reasons that these Zhang Chengzhi pieces are powerful in the original but don’t sound quite right in English.
Zhang Chengzhi was writing this a month after the head of the International Monetary Fund—Dominique Strauss-Kahn—was accused of sexually assaulting a maid—Nafissatou Diallo—at the Sofitel New York. She was an immigrant from Guinea.
The word is transliterated in English with the Chinese fèndòu 奋斗—struggle—offered as a gloss. The use of this word was controversial for obvious reasons.
The word he uses is shāmù 沙目, referring to the sunset prayer. The word is Arabic in origin but entered Chinese through Farsi, like a lot of religious language used by Hui Muslims.
This adapts lines from the Qur'an, 3:169-170: “Never think of those martyred in the cause of Allah as dead. In fact, they are alive with their Lord, well provided for—rejoicing in Allah’s bounties and being delighted for those yet to join them. There will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve.”
He transliterates it as galam. I can understand why. But I have made the change. It is the Arabic word for “pen.”
The Chinese translation is: 至仁主,曾教授《古兰经》,他创造了人,并教人修辞. That final word—xiūcí 修辞—does mean "speech," but is more specifically about a certain kind of rhetorical speech (at least it is not simply the more general yányǔ 言语 or yǔyán 语言), which makes Zhang Chengzhi’s point a bit more clearly. Using xiūcí in the next paragraph makes more sense, too.
Although Zhang Chengzhi never says who he is writing about, his use of the “sheik” was highlighted—along with the reference to jihād—by writers attacking him for his apparent loyalty to Osama bin Laden and sympathy for Islamic extremism. Again, Zhang Chengzhi uses an uncommon transliteration: shāhè 沙赫.
Lu Xinghua was born in 1964. He received a master's degree from Nanjing University in 1990. He writes about contemporary art and philosophy. He is currently a professor at Tongji University in Shanghai.
Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 2nd, 2011.
It is important it is “my Osama”—wǒde Wūsàmǎ 我的乌萨玛—not only because it suggests intimacy, but also because it is his Osama, rather than Osama—his own version of Osama, not necessarily the individual Osama bin Laden. The author explains his use of “my” in the third section.
Qian Yunhui 钱云会 was a local village head in Zhejiang, who protested against forced demolition. In December of 2010, he got dragged under a gravel truck by uniformed guards of a power plant. The truck was driven over his head by a man named Fei Liangyu 费良玉, who was the only person charged in the crime. Graphic photographs of the incident circulated on social media.
Zhang Miao 张妙 was a waitress stabbed to death by a concert pianist—Yao Jiaxin 药家鑫— that didn’t want her to memorize his license plate after he hit her with his Chevy Cruze. The incident happened in Xi'an in October of 2010. The investigation into the incident was botched by local police, who actually let him go free for a time. After he was arrested, social media commentary on the trial questioned whether or not he was given lighter treatment because of his social status. In the end, perhaps because of this reaction, Yao Jiaxin was sentenced to death. He was executed in June of 2011.
Now, I will note here that I don’t know what text Lu Xinghua is referring to. I mean, should I check his quotations against the Chinese translation, or was he reading it in French, or was it the English translation? All I can say is that I did my best. The English translation of Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas (Pascal-Ane Brault and Michael Nass are the translators) is available here.
The idea of the September 11th attacks as a work of art is one I most closely identify with Karlheinz Stockhausen. He called it “the greatest work of art that has ever existed.”
This is a line frequently attributed to Walter Benjamin. I don't know what the actual line is, but it seems to come from "Theories of German Fascism." This quote from Benjamin seems far less popular in Chinese than it is in English.
I don’t know Pierre Bourdieu well enough to figure out the source of this quote.
I have read that Lu Xinghua’s involvement in dissident political activity started with the 1988 Nanjing protests. I couldn’t say whether or not that’s true. The timeline is correct, however.
Again, I don’t have a source. I think I could use the Italicized jouissance for kuàigǎn 快感, if only to signal this is an idea from psychoanalysis. I think Lu Xinghua would approve. But I find it a bit embarrassing.
I’m not sure if there’s a specific line from Saint-Just being quoted. There are many similar lines on terror and virtue from both Saint-Just and Robespierre.
Chen Liangyu 陈良宇 rose to be in charge of Shanghai in the early 2000s. In 2006, he was expelled from the Party and charged with fraud over the Shanghai pension scandal.
Another big city mayor, Xu Zongheng 许宗衡 was kicked out of office and charged with bribery.
Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波—referred to in the text as Liu Dabo 刘大波—was the superstar dissident of the postsocialist era, responsible for Charter 08, among other things, and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize. He was a vocal supporter of American actions in the Middle East and Central Asia. He died of liver cancer in 2017.
Gilles Deleuze jumped out of his apartment window on November 4th, 1995. He was seventy years old.
This is one place where I have left out a few things. If you know a bit about Deleuze, you can figure out what he’s driving at, I hope.
This is a reference to Guo Jingjing 郭晶晶, holder of a record six Olympic medals. The rest of this paragraph connects to this, with the discussion of degree of difficulty. It connects back to Deleuze taking a dive from his apartment, too.
Listed here are common brands of Chinese medicine. After the American tossed the compound, they did find some herbal supplements, but I’m not sure exactly what Lu Xinghua is referring to here.