Pan Xiao Open Letter Debate to Shekou Storm, 1980-1988, part one
what happened before all this // what will happen after // what is the meaning of life // (four appendices: pan xiao’s letter, hu qiaomu's response, zhao lin's letter, the people's daily response)
ONE
& & & context // introduction
History stopped in June of 1989,1 Michael Dutton claims. The “analytical diversity of Western historians, sociologists and cultural critics” ended, too.2 Nothing that occurred before could possibly matter,3 and nothing that occurred could be seen analyzed outside of the showdown between authoritarianism and people power.
In official Chinese historiography, that summer is a swamp. A fence has been erected around it. It is not worth trying to get to the other side.
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My own limited account of the Pan Xiao Open Letter Debate in 1980 and the Shekou Storm in 1988 are not meant to be substitute for any historical events. They do help to understand that moment in 1989 and the other moments that led up to it, I believe, but they are also helpful to understanding ongoing youth culture phenomena.
I don’t mean that the events of 1980 or 1988 are analogous to the present. But an understanding of these moments can be sketched onto the present. Some of the same political and material factors are at work.
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& & & sympathy
In the earliest incident, we are talking about young people that came of age with memories of what came before. Pan Xiao, the letter writer—or, to spoil the story, the literary creation of the editors of China Youth—was born in 1957. One of the most important responses to the letter comes from a man named Zhao Lin, who was a few years older than Pan Xiao and had vivid memories of youth political violence in the 1960s.
But by 1988, a college freshman would have been born in 1970 and would have grown basically only knowing China under Reform and Opening.
The older generations that these young people are demanding answers from had experienced something else. A man reaching retirement age in 1980 would have lived through foreign invasions, civil war, and political chaos. It’s likely that they experienced hunger and violence. They had a different way of looking at the world.
Let’s have sympathy for everyone involved.
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& & & incident one
In 1980, China Youth ran, as part of a new discussion column on the meaning of life,4 a letter addressed to the editor.5
It was not the first time that China Youth had hosted discussions of ethical or political dilemmas,6 but this time, it was particularly frank, and editors avoided the typical "editorial paternalism."7
The letter began:
I turned twenty-three this year. I suppose I'm just getting started living my life, but all of the mystery and charm seems to have already gone out of it, so it feels like I’ve already reached the end.
The letter (for a translation of the full text see appendix one) tells the story of a young woman named Pan Xiao that has lost her way. Her family has split up. She’s been unlucky in love. And she’s fallen afoul of the local Communist Youth League. In other words, she finds herself all alone in the world.
The high ideals that she was instructed in seem irrelevant to that way of life. If society has been completely atomized, what good is it to learn from the models of selfless devotion celebrated in propaganda.
Discarding the lessons she was taught from childhood, she embarks on a journey to find the meaning of life. She reads Lu Xun and Hegel. She surveys the people around her. And it is social Darwinism that provides the answer:
I realized that humans are nothing but humans! There are laws that govern us. When we are faced with choices that impact our own interests, instinct kicks in. Nobody acts according to what they preach. Everyone is selfish. Nobody lives according to their ideals. The propaganda was all completely false or a gross exaggeration.
We all need to embrace selfishness, she concluded. That is the way to make society better, in fact. The sun, she says, burns for itself, and warmth and light are cast only incidentally.
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The collectivist ethics of the revolutionary years had not made sense for a long time. Even before the official turn to marketization, state ideology was being constantly subverted. This was usually not undertaken with any formal ethical framework. The farmers that signed a secret contract to circumvent the commune system in Xiaogang in 1978 had no stated philosophical goals, or none independent of the existing framework, and we could say the same about the students at Baiyun Mountain in 1974,8 and maybe also about the authors of the Li Yizhe manifesto.9
When the Party officially shifted to Dengist economic and political principles, the ethical lessons did not change. The strivers and the powerful realized that it was better to move fast and grab as much as they could. Most people were left behind. Without any ethical guidance, the youth turned to bourgeois ideas.10
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The Pan Xiao letter said out loud what nobody seemed willing to say—that the correct ethical orientation was toward selfishness. It provided an ethical framework that made sense.
It was also a clear sign that dissatisfaction could be expressed in generally apolitical terms. Only a few months after the Democracy Wall had been shut down,11 this was a sign that certain speech would still be tolerated.
The magazine was flooded with tens of thousands of letters, with some young people saying that reading Pan Xiao's story felt like a bomb going off inside of them or an electric shock to the brain.12 China Youth would go on to publish around a hundred of them.
One of the most thoughtful came from a philosophy student from Wuhan named Zhao Lin.13 His erudite defense of individualism ran under the title, "Only the self is absolute" (this is partially translated in appendix three).
It details a similar process of disillusionment to that experienced by Pan Xiao. Zhao Lin was slightly older than Pan Xiao; he claimed to have been active in political violence during the Cultural Revolution, rather than simply observing it. Like Pan Xiao, he had begun to notice that things around him weren’t as they should be. A failed love affair drove him to books, too—“German philosophy, British economics, Continental literature.”
I began to excavate myself, using Sartre's existentialism and the Western surrealism. From Marx's early works, I figured out the Marxist attitude toward human nature. From social Darwinism, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, I came to understand the essence of human society. These revelations gave me a new view of life. My view would perhaps be considered heresy, but it is what I have learned through struggling against hardship.
Zhao came to the conclusion that selfishness was not only the correct ethical orientation but “a basic animal instinct” and the only force capable of driving forward individual lives and social reform. The letter waded back into the previous decade’s political chaos and concluded that it was the result of the denial of individual will.
The original letter and sympathetic responses appeared in other newspapers.14
This provoked a backlash from the same propagandists that Pan Xiao attacked. There were responses that attacked the idea of radical individualism,15 as well as more conservative ideological critiques that linked Pan Xiao's ideas to liberal factions within the Party. Around the country, several work units refused to distribute the magazine.16
But the leadership was tolerant.
Hu Qiaomu showed up at the offices of China Youth a month later and seemed to give tacit approval for the discussion to continue (the full response is in appendix two).17 He said that it was right for young people to be dejected. He said it was wrong for the older generation to tell them to be happy. But he cautioned against blaming the Party for all the ills of society, suggesting that there were still bad elements within the organization, perhaps even holdouts from the Gang of Four years.
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A week or so after Hu Qiaomu response, the People's Daily ran an editorial proclaiming that discussions of the meaning of life were valid (the editorial is partially translated in appendix four).
The editorial in People’s Daily was not particularly interested in the rightness or wrongness of selfishness. If young people wanted to talk like that, the commentator seemed to be saying, we should hear them out, but then throw ourselves into ideological work. Young people were crucial to the project of Reform and Opening; the elderly needed to understand their dissatisfaction and guide them back onto the correct path.
People’s Daily was answering other questions that the discussion had raised, which couldn’t be made more explicit: Why would a young person in 1980 be worse off than a young person in 1950 or 1960, both materially and spiritually? After thirty one years of socialist construction, why would a young person go hungry? Why would they lack community? Why would they be barred from Party organizations because of rumors? Their answer was predictable: it was Jiang Qing and Lin Biao’s doing, but we’re working on it.
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The discussion bounced around state media and was concluded by early 1981 with an editorial in China Youth.
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& & & who was pan xiao?
There was no Pan Xiao.
In March of 1980, the editorial lead at China Youth—Guo Nanning—assigned two of his editors—Ma Xiaodong and Ma Lizhen—to gather material for a “meaning of life” discussion column. The two editors wrote the Pan Xiao letter based on interviews and writing from a young man named Pan Yi, who was studying economics, and a young woman Huang Xiaoju, who worked at Beijing Fifth Sweater Factory.18 Their names were combined for a pseudonym.
This pseudonymous anonymity is more perfect. It doesn’t matter who she is. It doesn’t matter if she exists. There are tens of thousands of Pan Xiaos.
But it mattered to television producers.
When CCTV arrived and asked to be put in touch with Pan Xiao, Huang Xiaoju was chosen as her representative. She achieved no longterm celebrity. The pseudonym was retired.
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Huang Xiaoju went to Hainan to look for work, then returned to Beijing where she became a maid for a Japanese family. Later, she joined a friend in a clothing company and opened her own shop. She is now retired.19
Pan Yi was arrested in the 1983 strike hard campaign. When he was released from reform through labor in 1988, he briefly married and then divorced. It’s hard to say what he’s up to now.
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& & & and let’s pause here
And consider further what this all means in the next section.
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& appendix one: pan xiao’s letter
Dear Comrade Editor,20
I turned twenty-three this year. I suppose I'm just getting started living my life, but all of the mystery and charm seems to have already gone out of it, so it feels like I’ve already reached the end. Looking back at the road I have traveled, it has been a journey from crimson to gray, from hope to hopelessness, to despair. The river of my thoughts once flowed from a place of complete selflessness; but it has curved back around again, so that it arrives at myself.
There was a time when I had beautiful expectations and fantasies. When I was in elementary school, they told us about How the Steel Was Tempered and The Diary of Lei Feng.21 I didn't completely grasp everything, but I had sleepless nights, thinking about their heroic deeds. I even copied out Pavel's speech onto the first page of my diary: “A man must live so as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose…”22 When that diary was filled up, I started a new one, and copied the speech again. It gave me so much encouragement! Since my father, mother, and grandfather are all in the Party, and I believe in communism, too, I thought I would end up joining. I never had any doubt.
Later, I came across a booklet called Who Are You Really Living For? Lessons on Conduct.23 I read it over and over again, completely captivated. This is when I started to form my earliest and most perfect views on humanity: people should live their lives to improve the lives of others; people should live their lives according to a high ideal, which is, when the Party and the people need them, they should be willing to sacrifice everything to help them. I was intoxicated by this spirit of selflessness. I wrote line after line in my diary—words that seemed to glow with an internal radiance—and in my every word and deed tried to imitate the heroic models I had learned about.
But I felt a faint twinge of pain sometimes. The things I was seeing in the world didn't match up with the ideas in my head. It wasn't long after I entered elementary school that the first waves of the Cultural Revolution began to break on the shore. They quickly grew stronger. This is what I was seeing: people rushing into homes and confiscating property, violence, and human life treated as if it was nothing important. Everyone in my family had to be careful about what we said and did. My grandfather made ready to have the house inspected. Kids only a few years older than me spent their days spouting foul language, gambling, and smoking cigarettes. When my sister-in-law got sent down to the countryside, I remember everyone sobbing and pounding their chests. I felt confused. The world I was seeing around me was nowhere near as beautiful as the one described in my books.
I asked myself whether I should believe the books or my own eyes. Should I believe my teachers or myself? I was conflicted.
But I was still too young. I had no means of analyzing these social phenomena. Anyways, my education had given me some strange skills—I had learned to shut my eyes, to lie to myself, to quote the lines from the book, and to retreat into the world that I had created in my mind. But in the end, it wouldn't work anymore. Life pounced on me.
It was the year I finished junior middle school. My grandfather died. My family had always been warm and affectionate, but they turned cold. There were arguments over money. My mother left and went to work somewhere else. After one of the family's fights, she stopped sending money for me. That was when my education ended. Without school or a job, I was left to drift in the world. I felt as if I had been clubbed over the head. If this was how members of a family treated each other, what could I hope for from people that weren't related to me?
I got sick. After I recovered, I relied on the help of some of my former classmates. They wrote letters to the neighborhood Party committee office, who took pity on me and got me a job in a small factory that was under collective ownership. Finally, I could make a living for myself. Back then, I still yearned for the true, the good, and the beautiful. Perhaps, I thought, my misfortune at home had been an exceptional case. On my own, I felt like life was worth living again. She was beckoning to me.
But I was disappointed again.
I believed in the Party organization. But one of the leaders had taken it upon themselves to personally block my application to the Youth League.
I went to my friends for help. But someone I trusted to help me wrote down everything I said and reported it to the same leader.
I went looking for love. I got to know the son of a cadre. His father was being persecuted by the Gang of Four. They were having a tough time. I poured my love and sympathy on him. I used my battered heart to soothe his wounds. There's a saying that women will sacrifice everything to find love because they can't live without it. I think there is something to that idea. Whatever happened to me, I had love. That was all the comfort I needed. But once the Gang of Four was smashed, he changed. He didn't want to see me anymore.
It knocked me out. For two days and two nights, I couldn't eat or sleep. I was furious. I was irritated. I felt like I was about to explode. Life had shown its ugly and savage face. I wondered if that was the mystery that I had been trying to solve.
In search of the meaning of life, I started to survey the people around me. I asked the old men for their answers, and the young men, and the veteran laborers, and the commune farmers that woke up at the crack of dawn…—but none of their answers satisfied me.
If you say the meaning of life is revolution, I find that farfetched. And I don't want to hear more lectures. If you say the meaning of life is posterity, it's out of reach for most people. The people that leave a lasting reputation—good or bad—are very few. If you say we live for our fellow humans, I think you're out of touch. We would smash someone over the head for work points. If someone crossed us, we would stand in the street and curse their name. How can anyone say that we live for our fellow humans? If you say we live just to have a good time, everything seems so meaningless. We are born naked and go out of the world an empty vessel.
Many people told me to quit worrying about this stuff. They told me: "Life is for living. Pretty much nobody knows the reason. Why can't you just get on with your life?" But I couldn't accept that. "Life," "purpose"...—these words keep tumbling through my mind. I felt as if there was a noose tightening around my throat, forcing me to come up with an answer.
I went to the treasure-house of human knowledge. I threw myself into books. I wanted some comfort and some answers. I read Hegel, Darwin, Owen's writing on the social sciences, Balzac, Hugo, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Lu Xun, Cao Yu, Ba Jin...24
But reading did not provide any relief. The pens of the great masters carved away human nature, but all I could see was the ugliness of existence. Whether I was in the real world or immersed in books, I kept meeting Grandet and Nekhlyudov.25
I lay in my bed, tossing and turning, thinking and thinking, thinking until it made my head hurt.... After a while, I became calm. I became cold and detached.
I received profound enlightenment from my readings in social Darwinism. I realized that humans are nothing but humans! There are laws that govern us. When we are faced with choices that impact our own interests, instinct kicks in. Nobody acts according to what they preach. Everyone is selfish. Nobody lives according to their ideals. The propaganda was all completely false or a gross exaggeration.
If you asked the saints, the scholars, the teachers, and the propagandists, would they dare confront themselves? Could they free themselves from the iron law of selfishness? In the past, I fervently believed that people should live their lives to improve the lives of others. I had no doubt in the grand ideal of sacrificing one's own life for the people. When I think about it now, it seems laughable!
Now that I understand life, I feel like I have become a person with two selves inside of me. I hate vulgar reality but I am still swept along by its currents. Hegel said that the rational is real and the real is rational. This quote has provided me with some comfort. It almost soothes my wounds. I am human, too. I am not a saint. I am not a rational person, but neither is anybody else. I fight for a raise. I haggle over the year-end bonus. I have learned to flatter my superiors. I have learned how to lie. It hurts my heart, but then I remember Hegel's words and I am calm.
Of course, I am not content to merely muddle through life and idle away my time in pleasure-seeking. I have my own career. Since I was a kid, I have loved literature. Now that I have gone through some things, I have the urge to write down my own thoughts. Perhaps this is what I live for—for literature.
But it seems like nobody understand me. Most of my co-workers at the factory are young women, and all they seem to care about is starting a family. Their conversations are about perms and dresses. I have a hard time getting through to them. They say that I'm aloof. They call me eccentric. They ask me why I haven't gotten married yet. I don't care. They are vulgar. I don't fit in with them. Sometimes that makes me feel sad or lonely. It's a frightening feeling. I want to join in with their chit-chat. But when I try, I always get the urge to hide myself away again.
My writing is not intended to make any contribute to the people or for the Four Modernization or anything like that. I write for myself. I write because I know I must. I am not willing to be sorted by society into the category of unimportance. I write to let the world know that I exist. This is my only spiritual pillar and I cling to it desperately, like someone clinging to the mast of a sinking ship.
This is something I have learned from experience: no matter who you are, whether you are just existing or you are producing things, you practice subjectivity for yourself and objectivity for others. I would compare humans to the sun: the sun produces light and heat as part of the process required for its own continued existence, and the fact that it shines on everything else is merely incidental. So, I believe that the best way to speed the forward progress of human society is for every individual to work to improve their own lives. Basically, this is the law that governs humanity, and it’s also the law of biological evolution—a law that no sophistry can overcome or deny!
It's often said that if you have a career or a cause that you will feel enriched, happy, and strong. But that is not true for me. I am still suffering. I am still fighting. I am still torturing myself. I try to prove how strong I am, but I know that I am weak. I don't make much money, but I need to buy books and paper, so I have to count every jiao and fen... Sometimes, I ask myself whether it's really worth it to pursue these things. Is it worth it to endure all of this hardship? I am human, after all. I should have a warm and happy family. I should be a dutiful wife. I should be a loving mother. Anyways, what is all my writing going to amount to? Can a few scraps of literature stir up the world and change society? I truly don't believe in that.
There are people that say our society is progressing, but I can't feel it. Some people say that there is a grand cause worth pursuing, but I have not found it. The road of life... Why is it getting narrower and narrower? I am already so tired. It sometimes feels as if I am about to draw my final breath. I have gone in secret to watch a mass at the Catholic church. I have thought about shaving my head and entering a convent. I have even thought sometimes that it would be better not to live at all... I'm so mixed up. My mind is conflicted.
Comrade Editor, I am writing to you in a very troubled state. I am not sharing these things with you because I believe you can provide me with a panacea. If you dare to publish my letter, my hope is that young people all over the country will see it. I believe that the hearts of the young people are still open to each other. Perhaps they can help me.
Pan Xiao
May 1980
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& appendix two: hu qiaomu’s response
Comrade Hu Qiaomu, Secretary of the Party Central Committee read the fifth and sixth issues of China Youth and became concerned about the issues raised by Comrade Pan Xiao's letter and the resulting discussion of the meaning of life. Comrade Qiaomu came to the editorial offices of China Youth on the afternoon of June 18th to further the discussion. This is what Comrade Qiaomu had to say:
A great number of people have begun paying attention to this discussion, including me. I believe everyone concerned about the younger generation should pay attention to this meaningful discussion.
The young people are looking for the appropriate atmosphere to unburden their hearts, tell us about their experiences, their dark feelings, their disappointments, and their hopes, and they are looking for an answer to this question about the meaning of life. Is there anything wrong with young people talking about their feelings? Is there anybody out there that has not experienced depression or disappointment? The reason they are expressing themselves is because they still have trust in society. Although they haven't found an answer yet, they are still searching. If the young people reach out their hands to us, should we slap them away? Shouldn't we grip them tightly and offer encouragement, so that these young people can move forward with their heads held high?
The issues raised by Pan Xiao in her letter are common to many young people, so it is no wonder that it has spurred such wide-scale and passionate debate. We need to give her an answer, but dusty old rhetoric won't suffice. To provide an answer to her and to many other young people, you must first consider, sympathize with, and understand everything about their present situation, then find an appropriate way to speak, so that they will listen.
Our society has evil, but there is a force that can fight against it. This force of positive struggle has already gained the upper hand. The experience of the past four years shows that the tides of historical progress cannot be overcome. The people riding this tide are not a lonely minority and are united with the majority. Although there are many obstacles, this force cannot be overcome. The leaders of this force will not put down the torch they hold aloft. There are many types of people in various positions, and that includes, at the grassroots level, a number of bad people, doing bad things, but there are active elements striking back against them—good Party members and good leaders. Good people and good deeds are not, as some young people might say, always the minority. The light of their deeds is always spreading into the darkness. Of course, we will never live in a completely perfect paradise. If we rolled out a chart showing the history of human progress, we would see that the road forward is winding.
If we see people around us in gloomy situations, we have no right to demand that they press down their feelings and sing a happy song. If they sigh and complain about their lot in life, we should not get angry or try to ignore them. The way to approach this situation is to find out the reasons for their unhappiness and work seriously to help them believe in hope. Here, what we need most is for the older generation to remain passionate and patient.
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& appendix three: zhao lin’s letter26
Pan Xiao:
Me and you seem to have gone through many of the same things. Like you, I used to believe in communism. I believed that the purpose of life was sacrificing one's self for the great happiness of mankind. I cried for the Gadfly and I was even more moved by Pavel's deeds.27 I longed for the chance to sacrifice myself in the same way. The social education that I received since I was young rendered me color blind; everything around me took on a rose-colored hue.
When the "Cultural Revolution" began, I was as fanatical as all the other young people, and held in my heart something like religious devotion. I believed every word of those mad sermons. I was willing to die for a political ideal that was even more elusive than a utopia. I was only in middle school, but revolutionary asceticism and communist puritanism had given me a sense of self-alienation stronger than that possessed by the most tenacious Stoic. My classmates and I fought selfishness and criticized revisionism. I felt deep guilt whenever selfish thoughts flitted through my head.28 Whenever I saw Chairman Mao in the movies, I trembled and sobbed at the sight. If anybody asked me what I believed in, I would respond without hesitation: "Communism!" I became nothing but a tool for the cause, willing to become a stone to pave the path into the future.
But life soon showed me its true face. My grandfather passed away in 1974 and my parents, who were living far away at the time,29 were indifferent. When I was hungry and needed help, I went to my friends, but they were cold. Is there any suffering worse than hunger? The physical pain quickly swept over my final spiritual defenses. I suddenly realized how false and revolting the human world truly was. I was suffering and I had given up on hope, so I decided to seek comfort in love. But I was quickly tossed into another abyss. I was cast aside by love. That snobbish girl took all my passion and sincerity. It left a wound on my heart the size of a sesame seed.
The wound began to bleed. My heart was bleeding!
This led to a crisis in my view of the world. I appreciated again the truth of Hamlet's line: "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I discovered that lying, cheating, and flattery are man's universal traits and the essence of all individuals is selfishness. When I tried to approach people with an attitude of selflessness, they treated me as an idiot and took advantage of me. The world around me was populated by models of Grandet, Shylock, and Nekhlyudov. My view of the world changed completely. I went from loving the world to hating it. I was unwilling to drift with the tide and didn't want to get stuck down in the mud with mediocre people, so I decided to look for self-release in books. I read German philosophy, British economics, and Continental literature. The people I met in those books became my good friends. I spent my days with mystical thinkers and received spiritual sustenance from them. Later, I lucked into a job that involved traveling around the country,30 and I got an ever wider understanding of society. I began to come to a realization that my former beliefs and life were ridiculous. In 1978, I got into university and realized that everywhere is pretty much the same. Even in such a civilized place, individual abilities were still the ultimate measure.
Perhaps this might be called "subjective idealism," but I don't really care about labels. If it is practical, then it is rational (of course, Hegel's famous quote has another, negative layer of meaning, but I will set that aside for the moment).
I began to excavate myself, using Sartre's existentialism and the Western surrealism. From Marx's early works, I figured out the Marxist attitude toward human nature. From social Darwinism, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, I came to understand the essence of human society. These revelations gave me a new view of life. My view would perhaps be considered heresy, but it is what I have learned through struggling against hardship.
Below, I want to talk about several questions on human life:
1. My understanding of selfishness:
Selfishness is a broad philosophical concept and a basic animal instinct. In animals, it presents as self-preservation, and in humans it presents as selfishness. But what is selfishness? It is the force for social development. When Kant and Hegel pondered this, they concluded that history advances through evil.
Selfishness is a way to understand ourselves: the individual becomes conscious of their own self-worth and the significance of "I." The concept of all previous totalizing ideologies was the idea that the soul of the individual is distorted and alienated. During the Ten Year Calamity, there was a slogan that went, "Ferociously struggle against even fleeting selfish thoughts." An uncivilized slogan, but it was accepted by everyone. Looking back at history, all social reform started because of the individual's discovery of the self. The European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, romanticism—these all rest on the presupposition of self-consciousness. It is only when we completely recognize and raise our self-worth that society can progress. These periods of self-consciousness are lamentably short; ignorance is more durable. When a new form of self-consciousness negates ignorance, there is a new ignorance to replace it. Feuerbach's claim that human history is the history of religious change is not without validity. When it comes to our own country, the turmoil that began in the mid 1960s came out of a religious fanaticism. It was a religion that denied religion. It was the religion of "revolution." In that period, idolatry reached heights never seen before. Ignorance and a long period of exposure to political propaganda caused people to tacitly agree to this sort of alienated social phenomenon. There were many that were willing to dedicate themselves to this religion. This was intrinsic experience and the positive aspect. On the other side, the law was turned into a slut. She could be used by anyone that wished. The absolute sovereignty of the will to power turned the prisons into religious tribunals. The law—or perhaps we should say the will to power—was not used only to interfere in human activity and objective results, but extended to thoughts and subjective intentions. [...] What caused this movement to begin? Some people blame the will of a single individual. I believe it was the inevitable result of Chinese people imprisoning the self and social opinion suppressing self-consciousness. What people worshipped was not themselves but someone else. This alienation was created by stupidity and ignorance, which was also the reason for it in the first place. [...] They had a negative understanding of selfishness. There was nothing positive to be seen in it.
In traditional thought selfishness was set against the public good. The common good was in opposition to the interests of the individual and completely incompatible. This is a deep-rooted prejudice that still occupies people's thinking. [...] Last night, while eating my dinner, I heard a song about Lei Feng on the school PA system. It had four quotes from Lei Feng's diary, and one of them was this: "Sweep away individualism like the autumn winds blows away the fallen leaves." I couldn't help but feel shocked. Sweep away individualism? Deny the individual? What a sick joke! Without the individual, this world wouldn't last a day. The line reminded me of the slogan about struggling against even fleeting selfish thoughts. Honestly, I can't see much difference between them.
As for Pavel's line, I still have the same attitude but a new understanding. A person that uses their limited lifetime to come to an understanding of themselves is better off than someone that just muddles through. The pessimistic and exhausted man that labors without self-consciousness does nothing but idle away their time. Fanaticism comes from the abandonment of the self; for someone to lose hope, they must have a low estimation of their self-worth. [...] Go, discover yourself! Discover your individual capacity! Compared to your enlightened self, society will seem meager and pitiful!
[...]31
2. Attitude toward life:
From the discovery of selfishness and the self that I have detailed above, I have adapted a positive attitude toward life. I treat life as a struggle. It is not the kind of struggle that the fanatics used to talk about but a struggle between myself and my surroundings. Life is a record of this struggle. I can sum up my attitude in two points...
The first is: do not conform. Society is full of evil and fraud, and these forces are very powerful, but they cannot sweep away a person with self-consciousness. [...] Now that I am at university, I sometimes hear rumors and slanders against me, but I follow Dante's advice: "Follow your own path and let people talk!"32
You said in your letter that you fight for a raise and haggle over the year-end bonus. That is normal. It will make your life and your studies easier. But why do think it's good to lie or flatter your superiors? This might seem like it's realistic, but it eventually become impractical and irrational. Why do you want to chase after relative goals? You should work on excavating your selfhood. Only the self is absolute!
The second point: keep your drive. I have always been a person that takes initiative. Similar to you, I have tried my hand at writing. I am full of confidence and I know that I will succeed! I write fiction as a way to express myself, just like you, and also to uncover my individual values, learn about human nature, give vent to my emotions, and leave my mark on the world. I don't have any utilitarian ends but hope to satisfy the need to expand the self and express my individuality. I believe in my own ability, and I believe that the process of improving my self-worth and expressing myself will have objectively good effects on society as a whole. The self and society can both develop without any antagonism between them.
I can tell from your letter that you have an enterprising spirit, but I can tell you are pessimistic, too. You compare your writing to a ship, whose mast you are clinging to. This contradicts what you said earlier in your letter about writing to let the world know that you exist. You must constantly strive to improve. You must believe in your own strength. You need to learn to live with a calm mind. Once you bring all of the world into your mind, you will realize that you are not weak or powerless in the face of it. Focus on what motivates you. Don't chase after results. Whether or not your work takes form in the larger world, remember that the self is the self, and it always maintains a dynamic existence. I think it would be good for you to read some Rousseau and Kant. They can teach you how to look at life. It is true that there is "a grand cause worth pursuing," but it is something that you hold inside of your own mind. The reason why you are indecisive and depressed is because you have not discovered it yet. Once you do, your exhaustion will be gone, your thoughts of leaving this world will evaporate, and there will be no further consideration of hopelessness. You will finally feel that "our society is progressing." You will see that you can "stir up the world and change society." History is formed from human live, and human life is composed of individuals. Every person with self-consciousness can say with a clear conscience, "I am history."
+ + +
& appendix four: the people’s daily’s response33
The discussion of the meaning of life deserves attention
People's Daily commentator
Recently, some publications have carried out discussion on the correct view of life. Among them, China Youth's fifth issue carried a letter by a young worker named Pan Xiao, who spoke about her experience of the "Cultural Revolution" and her current dejection. The discussion hosted by the magazine about the meaning of life drew a powerful response (People's Daily covered this story on June 10th). Within a short period, the editorial department received more than thirty thousand letters and essays. This discussion reflects the current attitude of young people toward ideological issues and shows the problems that many of them face. For a time, there was much sharp censure of young people, but no effort expended on the work of going to young comrades to discuss and analyze problems. This discussion on the correct outlook on life is a revival of our Party's tradition of ideological work, and it must be taken seriously.
The youth problem has been debated frequently in recent years and the Party at all levels has paid close attention. When Lin Biao and Jiang Qing threw the nation into turmoil, the younger generation suffered gravely. Some young people were forced to undergo intense and complicated political struggle. Excellent young people, like Zhang Zhixin,34 Shi Yunfeng,35 and Yu Luoke,36 lost their lives. Many more young people were tempered by all manner of difficulties and hardships. They tied their lives to the Party and the people—in the shock of the "Four-Five" struggle, and on the new Long March,37 they made great contributions. These young people gained their experience and understanding not from books but through the lessons of life. They are not superstitious, not blind followers, and they dare to think for themselves and keep up the struggle. They seek out novelty, are not satisfied with the status quo, and demand reform. We need to see the advantages they have and guide their development. [...]
How should we treat young people that feel lost? Is it because they do not seek progress and want to wallow in the mud? No. When we think back to the 1950s and the early 1960s, the Motherland had stability and unity, the work of building socialism was flourishing. [...] But then, the "great revolution" came and ten years of turmoil along with it, causing the young people to lose all that was good. As monsters and men traded places, lies became the truth, the dregs of society gained the upper hand, the young people had their revolutionary outlook on life shaken. The heroic figures that they worshipped and hoped to mimic were treated as "cow demons and snake spirits." The ideals that they were prepared to devote their lives to were labeled "the road to becoming specialists without a socialist consciousness" and "revisionism."38 They were dejected. They were indecisive. But none of these mistakes can be pinned on them. Comrades of older generations, and especially members of the Party and Youth League, must, before they blame the young people, answer for their own actions and improve their own work. For too long, we have had a problem in our ideological work, which is that we do not proceed from actual facts and strenuously avoid speaking the truth. There is a lot of lecturing but not much teaching; there is no shortage of criticism but never enough guidance; and hollow principles take precedence over seeking truth from facts. One of the important features of this latest discussion is that young comrades are speaking their minds. They can tell the truth, air their own views, and share their experiences. There is no stick. There is no lecture. This is why young people have shown so much interest. They feel as if they "finally have a place to speak." This shows that an equal and practical discussion fits the needs of most young people. There is no doubt that correct handling of this discussion will play a role in improving the political awareness of many young people.
As a Marxist, maybe Dutton shouldn’t toss this out so freely. But he means it in a more limited sense, which is the production in the West of contemporary Chinese history. Earlier in the essay that opens the first section of Streetlife China, he perhaps contradicts himself: “He not only made history, but forced contemporary Chinese history into a single, solitary frame...” But I think we understand what he means.
I will reproduce the entire paragraph from Streetlife China:
History stopped at this point, and so too did the analytical diversity of Western historians, sociologists and cultural critics. From this time onward, most accounts of things Chinese would be retold through the lens of the man versus the tank. Representations of contemporary Chinese history that had been chronicling the fast-forward motion of economic reform up to this time would grind to a standstill. The buzzwords of the eighties—economic reform and opening up to the Western world—would be replaced by new words such as repression and totalitarianism. China, the land of the instant image, where portraits of Chairman Mao, the Great Wall or a panda bear once stood in place of understanding, now had a new and even more powerful iconic representation. It was on this that Western eyes and minds would fixate, and utilise to essentialise and totalise the lives of 1.2 billion people. The man and the tank would live on beyond the few tense moments of the encounter to become a permanent and universal symbol of resistance to terror. Everything the West had ever abhorred about the Chinese Communist state was now summarised in this single image.
For the true believer in communism and the hopeful anticommunist, 1978 does mark the end of it all. It seemed that it would only be a matter of time before the last vestiges were swept away. But the more cynical prevailed. The events of 1989 are proof that communist authoritarianism never ended. So, they render unimportant any contention between 1978 and 1989. Nothing that occurred before 1989 could possibly matter—at least until you hit 1978 again, when it starts mattering again. But I would argue that 1978-1988 is not a meaningless interregnum but—and this seems almost too obvious to type out, but I think it’s justified—far more important than a single summer.
By “discussion column,” I mean that they put out a call for letters on certain topics then published them together. There was a discussion column a short time before this one on the uses of science, to give you an idea of the usual content.
China Youth is a magazine published by the China Youth League (still the Socialist Youth League of China when the first issue was published in 1923). It was put on ice between 1966 and late 1979, when it re-launched with a new editorial team.
For more on the earlier discussions in China Youth, I would recommend “Growing Alienation among Chinese Youths,” a chapter by David Ownby in China's Establishment Intellectuals, edited by Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek. He details a correspondence between the magazine's editors and an urban youth named Han Yang, as well as a 1960 discussion column on the ideal revolutionary youth.
This is the term used by Ownby in “Growing Alienation among Chinese Youths.” He describes "strictness of editorial content," with no tolerance for dissenting views, as well as editors defending the correct line with "zealousness and heavy-handedness." The editors were not "fellow discussants with youths in these debates," but the final arbiters of ideological orthodoxy.
The Baiyun Mountain Incident is slightly obscure. On the date of the Double Ninth Festival in 1974, many educated youth that had returned from a stint in the countryside joined people making the traditional pilgrimage up the mountain north of Guangzhou. Rumors had circulated that someone was distributing maps of a secret route into Hong Kong. Whether or not anyone was actually distributing the maps, referred to as “chessboards”—qípán—the climb became a guerrilla political rally. Public Security officers scrambled to intercept the thousands of young people as they came down from the hill. Clashes between youth and the police resulted in arrested. An article by Li Gongming provides more background: 我的知青生活 ——广州美术学院教授李公明自述.
The authors of the "On Socialist Democracy and the Legal System"—the Li Yizhe group, or, once they were arrested, the Li Yizhe counter-revolutionary clique—were making criticisms of the Party from within the existing framework. They believed in the project of Chinese socialism more than the Party factions that they criticized (Lin Biao was the stated target, but he was already dead, so it was mostly targeting the Gang of Four but also Mao Zedong himself).
This is how it was phrased by Lin Ke (quoted and translated in “Opinions and Attitudes of Youth in the People's Republic of China”):
A section of youth, after abandoning the false Marxism of Lin Biao and the “Gang of Four,” turned to bourgeois literature and political theories to search for answers to practical problems. They accept some rotten bourgeois theories that had long been criticized in classical Marxist works as the latest truth.
After the fall of the Gang and the end of the Cultural Revolution, there was still constitutional freedom to put up big-character posters. Local regulations slowly cut down on the practice by restricting them to certain areas of cities. From late 1978, posters demanding political freedoms were being put up on a brick wall on Xidan Street in Beijing (there is a lot of footage of this, since all the foreign correspondents went to take a look). Several laws were passed in 1979 to further clamp down on the practice, including requiring the author's real name and address to be included on posters. The so-called Democracy Wall was shut down by local regulations in December of 1979. The constitutional right to posting big character posters was removed from the Constitution in September of 1980.
That is how it was remembered by one of the editors at the time: 1980年引发全国关注的“潘晓讨论”.
Zhao Lin was among the first group of students accepted to Wuhan University after the reinstatement of the college entrance examination (before then, political recommendations were how people got into school). He earned doctorates in history and philosophy, and joined the faculty as a professor. He has published numerous books on Western philosophy and religion.
Luo Xu's Searching for Life's Meaning: Changes and Tensions in the Worldviews of Chinese Youth in the 1980s lists Workers' Daily, Liaoning Daily, Shanxi Daily, Heilongjiang Youth, Shaanxi Youth, Xinjiang Youth as the papers that immediately jumped on the discussion. China Youth Daily, the other outlet of the Youth League was earlier, I imagine.
This deserves a more detailed explanation of the conception of individualism in contemporary Chinese thought, particularly those that came out of the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement and responses to Western philosophy and reactions to feudal customs. Individuality and individualism were revolutionary ideas; egoism and selfishness were negative traits. This positive conception of individuality isn’t completely negated after 1949, either. A call to individuality would not have been particularly interesting or controversial—and this is why I specify a “radical individualism” (the more common word for critics of the Pan Xiao letter might be “egoism”), which celebrates selfishness.
This was probably limited. It is mentioned in several accounts of that period (潘晓仰天长问:为什么人生的路越走越窄?), so I am sharing it with you.
Hu Qiaomu, like Qian Xuesen, deserves a complete, critical autobiography in English. Formerly working directly under the Chairman, he led Deng Xiaoping's Office of Political Research after 1974. That ended when the Gang of Four launched their final campaigns against Deng and Hu turned on him. But Deng was forgiving: he brought Hu back into the fold after 1976. He acted as conservative left counterweight to the rightist camp. His intervention in the Pan Xiao letter debate is interesting, since he was involved very soon in the fight over the concept of socialist alienation, as well as the campaigns against bourgeois liberalization and spiritual pollution. He let the Pan Xiao debate go forward, but he must have seen in the summer of 1980 the beginnings of something troubling.
Pan Yi had, I believe, written a letter to China Youth, while Huang Xiaoju was interviewed by the two editors at a study group at a workers' club (a probably defunct socialist institution, providing recreation and study opportunities for workers). The two joined an in-person discussion at the editorial offices.
There is an episode of Hunan TV's See You Again that reunites Huang Xiaoju with friends from earlier in her life. It’s moving.
As always, I beg your indulgence: the translations in these entries are looser than professional standards would dictate. I believe this is reasonably good. There are other translations. Mao's Harvest: Voices from China’s New Generation has one among its collection of early 1980s writing. The translator is not specified, but the editors of the book are Helen F. Siu and Zelda Stern.
Lei Feng was a People's Liberation Army soldier. He was killed in 1962. He jumped out of the cab of his truck to direct the driver as he backed up. The truck hit a power pole that came down on his head. His diary was published posthumously as part of a campaign to “learn from Lei Feng.” To this day, he remains an official model of selfless devotion to the people.
This is from the 1952 translation of How the Steel Was Tempered by R. Prokofieva for the Foreign Languages Publishing House:
Man's dearest possession is his life, and it is given to him to live but once. He must live so as to feel no torturing regrets for years without purpose, never know the burning shame of a mean and petty past; so live that, dying, he can say: all my life all my strength were given to the finest cause in all the world—the fight for the Liberation of Mankind. And one must make use of every moment of life, lest some sudden illness or tragic accident cut it short.
According to Miin-ling Yu ("A Soviet Hero, Pavel Korchagin, Comes to China"), who has written frequently on Chinese-Soviet exchanges, says that the Chinese translation that would have been read during this time was made from a different English translation, done by Alec Brown in 1937, and titled The Making of a Hero. I don’t have access to it.
This book might have been published at an earlier date, possibly as early as the 1960s (the author’s timeline suggests she read it in the mid 1960s), but it was republished by Tianjin People's Publishing House in 1979. Two subtitles—Learn from Lei Feng and Study and Training—suggest the contents.
I have rendered zuòrén as "conduct" and it could also be "correct behavior," but it means something beyond that—literally "being a human."
Most of these names will be familiar. Owen is Robert Owen. Cao Yu was a playwright, and a contemporary of Lu Xun and also Lao She, roughly, although a generation younger than them. Although he continued to publish work after 1949, there was no room for political agitation. He also adapted Ba Jin, the final writer mentioned.
Grandet is Eugénie Grandet from the novel of the same name by Honoré de Balzac. Nekhlyudov is Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov from Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection.
This is not a complete translation. It is too long.
The first reference here is to The Gadfly by Ethel Voynich; the second is to How the Steel Was Tempered. The Voynich book, published in 1897, tells the story of a Englishman that discovers leftist ideas while in Italy. “The Gadfly” is the pseudonym that he uses as a journalist and pamphleteer. It was immensely popular in the Soviet Union and China.
This also comes up in the Zhao Lin response letter. It refers to a slogan of the period, which was, "Ferociously struggle against even fleeting selfish thoughts"—hěndǒu sīzì yīshǎnniàn.
They were living in Beijing and he was seven hundred miles away in Wuhan.
He was a coal buyer for the Wuhan City Coal Corporation.
I have snipped out three paragraphs here, which deal with the practical application of this philosophy. Basically: life selfishly but don’t harm others.
This is a paraphrase of Dante by way of Marx. This is how he concludes the preface to the first German edition of Capital:
Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine:
“Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.”
This ran in the People’s Daily on July 29th, 1980. This is a partial translation. People’s Daily editorials are verbose. You get the idea quickly.
Zhang Zhixin was arrested in 1969 for criticizing Jiang Qing and Lin Biao. During her time in prison, she was hit with further counterrevolutionary charges and executed in 1975. She was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978 and cleared of all charges.
Shi Yunfeng was arrested in 1974 after mailing leaflets to Party offices that criticized the personality cult and the Gang of Four. He was executed in 1976, shortly before the Gang were themselves arrested.
Another martyr of the Cultural Revolution. In 1967, Yu Luoke published an article attacking the class genetic theory. This was the idea that children bear the stain of their parents' or grandparents' class background. Yu had himself been classed a bad element because his parents were labeled rightists. He was charged in 1968 with various counter-revolutionary crimes, and, at the height of mass trials during the One Strike Three Against Campaign in 1970, was sentenced to death and executed.
The Four-Five Struggle refers to the April 5th Tiananmen Incident and its aftermath (I believe it could also include other events that took place around this time, like the March 28-30 Nanjing protests), when many activists, intellectuals, and average citizens were persecuted for engaging in an unlawful rally to commemorate the death of Zhou Enlai.
The new Long March was slightly ambiguous, referring to the struggle toward reform.
The first criticism is “going on the white and expert road”—báizhuān dàolù. The correct orientation would be “red and expert”—yòuhońgyòuzhuān. The former has expertise but no political awareness; the latter is someone with expertise that upholds the correct ideological line.